Spring and summer are usually the busiest times in the Archives and Records Management Section’s (ARMS) public research facility, also known as a reading room.
ARMS, in the Department of Operational Support (DOS), supports researchers from all over the world who come to New York to pour over documents chronicling 75 years of UN history, including its many peacekeeping and political missions.
Like many other in-person public services, the global COVID-19 pandemic forced ARMS to close its reading room doors to researchers in March 2020. To ensure business continuity, ARMS embarked on a concerted effort to provide online services to UN staff as well as the worldwide research community.
New processes and workflows to publish digitized files were ramped up during the lockdown. From mid-March, when we began working from home, until today, ARMS has published over 1,000,000 pages of previously unavailable archival documents in our online catalogue.
These include a wide variety of registry files dealing with topics such as:
- construction of the permanent UNHQ and its decoration;
- Trusteeship and Non-Self-Governing Territories;
- large batches of papers of the Secretaries-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, Kurt Waldheim, and U Thant;
- records from the 1945 San Francisco Conference;
- records relating to the UN’s 1964 investigation of the death of Dag Hammarskjold;
- and even musical scores, as well as many other topics.
In addition to providing new content, our clients (who are both UN staff and external researchers) will also encounter a brand-new website that was designed, planned and tested by ARMS staff while working from home.
The revamped site will give you a better idea of who we are, what we do, and the services we provide. It also showcases:
- exhibitions we have designed
- articles we have published
- projects we have collaborated on
- a new e-learning programme on information management
- relevant guidance documents
- an area dedicated to the management of records and information in field operations
Visit our website at www.archives.un.org and our catalogue at https://search.archives.un.org/.
Read about DOS on our website and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!
