In a world bent on destruction, preservationists have fought to save everything from the wilderness and natural resources to linguistic and cultural heritages.

Artistically, the "early music" movement for historically informed performance of works from the Medieval, Rennaisance and Baroque periods is probably the best-known example of the preservationist ethic. It also has a counterpart in the theater: The British troupe Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, which is about to launch a 5-city, U.S. tour of "Twelfth Night (or What You Will)," explores "original practices" from the early 1600s: an all-male, cross-dressing cast, handmade Elizabethan clothes, music performed on period instruments, and faithful recreations of Elizabethan props.

But no organization, perhaps not even the World Wildlife Fund , is as devoted to preservation as UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme. Its stated intention — "to guard against collective amnesia" — has to be the hippest official mandate of any world body. By seeking out and registering archival holdings of historic documents and library collections, the program (and the broader idea of documentary heritage itself) "is the mirror of the world and its memory."

So what kind of stuff has made it into the Memory of the World Register? Stuff like this:

The original manuscript of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; 1,300 works on astronomy (in Turkish, Persian and Arabic) held in the Library of Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute at Bogazici University in Istanbul; an inventory of postcards from Africa covering the years 1890-1930; archives of the Warsaw Ghetto; a Uzbekistan collection of Oriental miniatures of the Middle East from the 14th to 17th centuries; a Colombian exhibition of "100 years of photography"; Copernicus' masterpiece "De revolutionibus libri sex."

Here are some previously nominated items from China, from Finland, and from the United States. As of this month, UNESCO is planning to add 23 more documentary collections from 20 countries, among nthem:

From France: The original Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789-1791. It's preserved at National Historical Archives Centre in Paris. There are actually six versions. The one included in the Register is the first, dated Nov. 3, 1789, along with a signed note and letters patent by King Louis XVI approving the text of the Declaration and various decrees adopted by the National Assembly between August and November of that year.

From Barbados: The Documentary Heritage of Enslaved Peoples of the Caribbean. This is a unique body of evidence, including legal documents, plantation ledgers, estate and shipping inventories, rare books, original prints and paintings, relating to the lives of enslaved Caribbean people through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, preserved by the Barbados Museum & Historical Society.

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