Most Notable Documents in United Nations History

The Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the United Nations headquarters in New York recently held a contest asking visitors to its website to vote for the most important United Nations documents since the founding of the international organization 70 years ago.

One document was chosen for each decade:

• 1946 - 1955: Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
• 1956 - 1965: Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959)
• 1966 - 1975: Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1968)
• 1976 - 1985: Security Council resolutions on establishment of UNIFIL (1978)
• 1986 - 1995: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change established (1988)
• 1996 - 2005: UN Millennium Declaration (2000)
• 2006 - 2015: Adoption of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015)

There have been other library-sponsored contests of a similar nature in the past.

GODORT, the Government Documents Roundtable of the American Library Association, used to organize an annual contest asking people to nominate government documents for consideration for an annual review article in Library Journal. Government documents could be American or international (so this includes Canadian material).

One Canadian government document recognized by GODORT was Learning from SARS: Renewal of Public Health in Canada; A Report of the National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health (Health Canada, 2003)

The GODORT contest ran from 1983 to 2006.