UNESCO

In December last year I was privileged to attend and facilitate sessions on #digitaltransformation and #dataprotection #Culturalheritage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. What was unique about this conference that it wasn't held in a hotel, but rather was hosted at the The Ethiopian National Archives and Library Agency https://nationalreadingcampaign.org/nala/. A very special thanks must be given to the Ministry of Innovation and Technology and especially Yikunoamlak Mezgebu who really went out of their way to support the event.

But this post goes beyond that. In the reading library where the event was held, built by Emperor Haile Selassie, and where he used to read, the Archives presented a number of astounding manuscripts which are recognised by UNESCO as World Cultural heritage. Here are the key learnings for me of a deeply profound experience:

1. Firstly, these manuscripts are absolutely beautiful. Many were made from sheep skin, others from parchment, but all are magnificent pieces of art and heritage. This introduces its own challenges. They are fragile, and need to be preserved, as valuable museum pieces, as heritage artifacts of great beauty and historical value. The National Archives is doing this, and they are wonderfully preserved, even though they carry the natural damage expected after many hundreds of years.
2. The next one is more challenging. In addition to the heritage value, the content itself has value, and needs to be made available. The physical originals are clearly too valuable to be made available to researchers, but the content needs to be, and thus has been digitised.
3. This brings me to the most important point. Whilst I am a strong advocate of digitising, there will always remain the fact that some objects have more than one value. Historical, cultural, research, business or legal value. So even when digitising, part of the project, especially for archives, is to ensure that the originals (where they have historical or cultural value in their own right), must always be preserved, even if the content is digitised and made available for researchers and others.

View the full content and images of some of the artefacts at: UNESCO Cultural Heritage objects at National Archives and Libraries of Ethiopia (corconcepts.co.za)