Items from the heavens to the seas admitted to UN world memory register

Georgian manuscripts from the 5th century AD, a French royal decree from 1537, and a 20th-century astronomical study of the nearby parts of the universe are among seven new entries to a United Nations world heritage register.

The new admissions bring to 245 the total number of items on Memory of the World Register, launched by the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1992 to preserve valuable archives and library collections all over the world and ensure their wide dissemination. It includes all types of material, including stone, celluloid, parchment and audio recordings.

The new entries are:

First Byurakan Survey from Armenia, with the records of a unique astronomical survey carried out by the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory (BAO) from 1965-1980, involving the largest ever astronomical study of the nearby universe and considered one of the most important achievements of 20th-century astrophysics;

Bannière Register at Chatelet, Paris, during the reign of King François I, covering registration and publication of legislative texts, among them the 1537 decree by the king, for the first time requiring printers and booksellers to deposit a copy of each publication in the king’s library. The model spread in the 17th century, supporting the growth of national libraries;

Georgian Byzantine manuscripts consisting of 1,000 works, some dating to the 5th century AD, covering different fields but especially ecclesiastic works, kept at the National Centre of Manuscripts in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital;

Aral Sea Archival Fund in Kazakhstan, consisting of files from 1965 to 1990 that record the ecological tragedy of the Aral Sea, which has shrunk to 10 per cent of its size in the 1960s, and the attempts to counter it;

Records of the first flight across the South Atlantic Ocean in 1922 from Portugal, containing early reports of Captains Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral’s 1922 flight across the South Atlantic Ocean by floatplane, a milestone in aeronautical history marking the first use of the sextant in air navigation;

Arquivos dos Dembos/Ndembu Archives from Angola and Portugal, comprising some 1,160 manuscripts from the late 17th century to the early 20th century that are uniquely valuable to scholarship in history, anthropology and linguistics, attesting to the transformation of essentially oral Southern African culture through the assimilation of Portuguese and its repercussions on both Portugal and Brazil;

Landsat Program records/Multispectral Scanner Sensor from the United States, a unique body of images at a scale that allows observation of the Earth’s land surfaces, coastlines, and reefs and the natural and human-induced changes over nearly 40 years, obtained and continuously updated by sensors onboard a series of land-imaging satellites that began in 1972.

These collections were approved provisionally by the International Advisory Committee of the Memory of the World Programme in May 2011 subject to the provision of minor modifications or clarifications for full inscription to proceed. These clarifications have now been endorsed and UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova has approved the inscription of the new items.