Tweet
FIRST BYURAKAN SURVEY FROM ARMENIA IS ONE OF SEVEN ADDITIONS TO THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD REGISTER
Noyan Tapan
www.nt.am
07.10.2011
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, UN News Centre informs.
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 Francois
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.
Noyan Tapan
www.nt.am
07.10.2011
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, UN News Centre informs.
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 Francois
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.