When Chinua Achebe applied for a UNESCO Fellowship for creative artists in 1962, he had already written Things Fall Apart and was Director of External Broadcasting at the newly created Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. In his application, he wrote: “A change will only come as we get more confident in ourselves, and especially in our past.”

The Archives’ Reading Room will be moving in May 2013 to an area in the UNESCO Library. This will make it easier for users to find! However, new procedures will be in place. Notably, material will only be retrieved two times a day.

As part of the ongoing project to migrate our legal instruments database, descriptions of the legal instruments signed between UNESCO and the Special Fund/UNDP have been published along with a description of UNDP. Please see:

• Subseries A/293 Fonds spécial pour le développement économique (Nations Unies)
• EFTA, Special Fund and UNDP authority records

Work in AtoM has been principally focused on the migration of data from our legacy legal instruments database, however, the records of former Deputy Director-General M.S. Adiseshiah have also been added. Please see :

• Legal instruments up to code A/113
• DDG 1 - Records of Deputy Director-General M.S. Adiseshiah

UNESCO Archives has begun migrating data on the legal instruments in its holdings from an older database to the ICA AtoM catalogue where it will be publicly available. This will be the fourth generation of database - not including the index cards and registers!

On 15th December 2011, UNESCO celebrated the 50th anniversary of the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld (Sweden), Secretary-General of the United Nations. On this occasion, The Courier and the UNESCO Archives pay tribute to this great visionary and intellectual in action.
Speech by Mr Gunnar Lund
Speech by Mr Alain Dejammet
Speech by Mr Hans Corell
Speech by Ms D. Houphouët-Boigny
Speech by Kaj Falkman

This interview with the former Director-General of UNESCO (1974-1987) was conducted by Ms Françoise Rivière, former Assistant Director-General for Culture, and Mr Doudou Diène, former Director of intercultural projects, during three morning sessions, on 21, 22 and 23 December 2009 in the framework of Oral Archives initiative. A personal account of UNESCO from 1950s to today