The head of the United Nations agency tasked with preserving the world’s cultural heritage endorsed recommendations to inscribe 45 new documents and documentary collections – ranging from Leo Tolstoy’s personal manuscripts to the collections of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to several treasures from Latin America.
The Memory of the World Register covers all types of materials, including stone, celluloid, parchment, audio recordings, among others. Eleven countries have items entered in the register for the first time – Bulgaria, Fiji, Guyana, Ireland, Japan, Mongolia, Morocco, Panama, Suriname, Switzerland and Tunisia. UNESCO launched the Memory of the World Program in 1992 to guard against collective amnesia by through the preservation of the valuable archive holdings and library collections all over the world and ensuring their wide dissemination.
New items from Latin America and the Americas include:
# Barbados, Jamaica, Panama, Saint Lucia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America
Silver Men: West Indian Labourers at the Panama Canal# Bolivia: Documentary Fonds of Royal Audiencia Court of La Plata (RALP)
# Brazil: Fonds of the Network of information and counter information of the military regime in Brazil
# Mexico: Sixteenth to eighteenth century pictographs from the record group “Maps, drawings and illustrations
