Paper Published! Documentary Heritage Definitions: a Southern African perspective
23 April 2025
IFLA’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Heritage (CCH) has identified a need for more inclusive dialogue on defining documentary heritage.
In February 2025, Members of the CCH joined colleagues from across the southern African region in Cape Town, South Africa to investigate a more inclusive definition of documentary heritage. Following a robust discussion, participants co-authored a position paper.
Library, archive and information professionals from around the world are invited to use this position paper as a starting point for furthering this discussion and adding your own perspective.
Download the Position Paper from our Repository here:
Documentary Heritage and the Role of Libraries: A Southern African perspective
This document is the result of the workshop ‘Towards a Common Understanding of Documentary Heritage’, a collaboration between University of Cape Town Library and IFLA’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Heritage, 11-12 February 2025. The workshop formed part of the CCH project to review documenta...
The Participants
This workshop encouraged a range of perspectives, nationalities, areas of expertise, and types of institutions. The groups make-up included:
- Participants and committee members from South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, and Lesotho
- Committee members from the United Kingdom and Poland, and an IFLA HQ liaison
- Library, rare book, archive and audiovisual professionals, senior library managers, and representatives of library associations
- Colleagues from national and university libraries and local archives
The Workshop
As the CCH’s goal is to centre perspectives of the global south in elaborating these discussion, the workshop prioritised participation.
IFLA was excited to be able to sponsor the participation of a keynote speaker, Dr Buhle Mbambo-Thata, University Librarian at the National University of Lesotho and member of IFLA’s South Saharan Africa Regional Division Committee.
Dr Mbambo-Thata spoke to current definitions of documentary heritage and highlighted what important aspects are potentially being left out. She highlighted that current definitions, such as that of UNESCO, excludes oral tradition, intangible cultural heritage, festivals, and celebration, noting that in Africa, this is the core of culture. Already, knowledge is being excluded.
Additional speakers set the scene by sharing insight into nuances of cultural heritage and decolonisation from an African context, as well as a look at how documentary heritage is treated by South African legislation.
Following a discussion on defining documentary heritage, the group had focused conversations on the role of libraries and archives in preserving and providing access to this knowledge.
With this work, the committee hopes to encourage an understanding of knowledge in a broad sense, which should enable new uses of recorded memory, building on collective knowledge, contextualising, preserving tradition and meaning, and contributing to undoing harm.