Ms. Elizabeth Watson, a Memory of the World (MOW) Consultant visited St. Maarten on Jan. 19-21, 2015. Her objectives for the visit were to:

1. Identify national documentary heritage/s nomintable to any of the three registers (National, Regional, International).
2. Build national capacities to complete nomination forms.
3. Revise/edit current nominations that may need such work.
4. Create national MoW Committees.
5. Sensitize individuals and communities about the MoW programme and its value to countries and the region.

About the programme

Ms. Watson shared that the MoW programme seeks to preserve the world’s endangered documentary heritage.  Heritage has a very broad definition for this programme. It can be a single document e. g. the Farquharson Journal or a fonds. In broad terms a fonds is the aggregation of documents that originate from the same source e.g. The Nita Barrow Collection or the Construction of the Panama Canal. A range of formats are embraced under the rubric “documentary heritage” such as paper, music, videos, scrolls, art, stone and fabric e.g. the Bayeux Tapestry.

She indicated that entire libraries/archives/museums cannot be nominated only individual collections or items within such collections. The items can publicly or privately owned.  A nominator is not required to have physical possession of the document being nominated—however clearly it must have some significance to your country.  In that case it would be a joint nomination from more than one country e.g. the Slave Registers or the Jijki Bible. Information about the programme is available at http://www.unesco.org/webworld/mdm/en/index_mdm.html