GLAM/Newsletter/October 2025/Contents/Memory of the World report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue X, October 2025

Memory of the World report

International outreach

Publicity

Martin spoke at two events near the end of October to publicise the Khalili Foundation/ UNESCO Memory of the World project. A joint UNESCO/ International Council of Archives event in Barcelona was attended by the President of the ICA and by young archivists from many countries. As well as showing what the Khalili Foundation partnership had achieved, I talked about the Wikimedia platforms in terms of their roles in the long-term preservation of vulnerable documentary heritage. Dian and Fackson (of the Memory of the World team) and I took the opportunity to meet and discuss the partnership afterwards.

At the three-day GLAM-Wiki conference in Lisbon, I presented in the Heritage at Risk panel, describing how we have made it easy for volunteers to create and find articles relevant to the International Register across multiple languages. The audience included cultural professionals, Wikimedia volunteers, and Wikimedians In Residence; I showed how they, in their respective language communities, can help raise awareness of the international register.

Clara published an article on the UNESCO website for the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage on 27 October, highlighting notable inscriptions from the Memory of the World Register that have made significant contributions. One relevant example is Humanity’s First Recordings of Its Own Voice: The Phonautograms of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (c.1853–1860), created when he envisioned “photographing sound.” Besides, Clara is co-editing a colouring book for children featuring all 29 African inscriptions in the Memory of the World Register and has developed a summary of key Memory of the World publications for presentation at UNESCO's General Conference.

Progress on data

Clara completed the upload of the 2025 Memory of the World inscriptions and compiled the French and English links to the new registrations, while she and Martin have both worked on adding the 2025 International Register additions to Wikidata; this final stage of the bulk data upload is nearly ready. In addition, Clara continued resolving issues in existing Committee and inscription entries (for example, missing countries in nominator lists).

Wiki challenge

Prizes are being sent out for the winners of September's wiki challenge, both from the Khalili Foundation and UNESCO.

New articles

Tamil: Memory of the World Programme
German: Final document of the Congress of Vienna
Indonesian: Shoah
Urdu: Dīwān ul-Lughat al-Turk
Slovene: Biblioteca Palafoxiana
Azerbaijani: Treaty of Tordesillas

Grokipedia

As part of his comparison of Grokipedia and English Wikipedia articles (see the UK report), Martin looked at coverage of the Memory of the World International Register. Grok does not have list articles listing inscriptions on the register, but it does have an overview article about the Memory of the World Programme. This seems to have been generated directly by AI rather than copied from Wikipedia. It is longer than English Wikipedia's article and covers more aspects, seeming to be broadly correct. It might be useful inspiration for improving Wikipedia's article, at least in terms of structure.

Page and image views

Total views for images related to the Memory of the World International Register are at a similar level to the previous month: the GLAMorgan stats tool reports 150 million, which is likely an overestimate.

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