Note to Correspondents

JAPAN TO DONATE MORE THAN 30,000 DIGITIZED DOCUMENTS TO UNITED NATIONS

 

FOR INCLUSION IN OFFICIAL DOCUMENT SYSTEM

 

At a special hand-over ceremony on 13 July, Japan will donate more that 30,000 digitized documents to the United Nations.  These documents represent a significant contribution to the United Nations Department of Public Information’s efforts to make all official United Nations documents available on-line through the Official Document System (ODS), the United Nations’ full-text web-based database.

At the hand-over ceremony, which will be held at the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Japan’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Shinichi Kitaoka, will present the digitized documents on CDs to Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information. 

The documents, some of which date from as early as 1962, predate the use of computers at the United Nations, and are not currently available except in paper form.  They include material from the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council. 

United Nations staff of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library have been laboriously converting paper documents into digital material that can be posted on the web, a process that this generous donation will clearly speed up.  Some processing will still be required by those staff before the documents can be uploaded, but the most significant material should be fully accessible by the end of 2006.

For further information, please contact: Junko Sato, +1 (212) 963-7431, or e-mail:  satoj@un.org

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