Documentary Heritage Network 

The ACHS Documentary Heritage Network brings together scholars and practitioners of diverse disciplines, regions and levels of experience working with or interested in documents as heritage.

Whether carved in stone, printed on paper, or inscribed to a hard drive, documents have long been valued as significant carriers of information. They connect people with one another and with places, and sustain these relationships through shared knowledge that travels through time and space. UNESCO established the Memory of the World (MoW) Programme in 1992 to encourage preservation, access and awareness of such ‘documentary heritage’, encompassing all media forms. However, in comparison to other UNESCO instruments, this programme’s terminology and conceptual framework remain underrepresented in heritage research and practice.

The network aims to strengthen the visibility, legitimacy and critical examination of documentary heritage and MoW, particularly regarding:

The politics of documentary heritage: exposing state authority, institutional bias, knowledge regimes and politics of visibility and erasure; connecting documentary heritage to broader debates about epistemic justice, indigenous knowledge systems, cultural survival, politicisation, commercialisation, and tensions within global heritage governance.

Contemporary challenges: responding to decolonisation, sustainability, information disorders and digital transformation; mapping intersections between documentary heritage and questions of truth, surveillance and data sovereignty; addressing climate related threats to physical collections.

Relations between disciplines, theory and practice: bridging scholarly knowledge from critical heritage studies and fields concerned with documents like archival sciences, librarianship, and media and communication studies; facilitating collaboration between scholarship and professional associations and integrating practical expertise and critical frameworks.

Our activities include information-sharing through our quarterly newsletter, biannual online meetings and webinars, the development of thematic working groups, and collaborative scholarship and practice.

The Documentary Heritage Network was initiated by Anca Claudia Prodan of the Institute Heritage Studies, and developed jointly with Dominique van de Klundert, Junsu Seo, Tamara Đokić, and Dagnija Baltina.

If you wish to join the network, please select ‘Documentary Heritage’ under ‘Chapters and Networks’ in your Member Profile in the ACHS Member Directory.

For more information, please contact the network coordinators Anca Claudia Prodan (anca.prodan@b-tu.de) and Dominique van de Klundert (dklundert@uniri.hr).