UNESCO Archives

Digitizing Our Shared UNESCO History

Preserving UNESCO's heritage for future generations

UNESCO’s archives contain countless treasures and evidence of ideas and actions for peace, international understanding, and multilateral cooperation. They reflect UNESCO’s wide-ranging work and mission from its earliest years, including the archives of its predecessor, the League of Nations’ International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, part of the UNESCO Memory of the World register since 2017.

Established in 1947, UNESCO Archives contain records in all formats, and include contributions from figures such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Thomas Mann, Gabriela Mistral, Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso, Nelson Mandela, Gabriel García Márquez, and more.

Digitizing Our Shared UNESCO History

From 2017 to 2019, thanks to the generous support of the People of Japan, UNESCO launched a project to digitize a portion of the Organization's archives. The project is an important step in preserving the record of our actions and stories and making UNESCO's archives accessible to the public.

Access the digitized collections:

Help UNESCO Archives digitize and safeguard our heritage

There is so much more waiting to be discovered. While the scale of past digitization was ambitious, it represents just a small portion of UNESCO’s archives and audiovisual collections. 95% of UNESCO Archives are still undigitized, which makes them largely inaccessible for researchers, scholars, and the general public outside of Paris.