Macau’s Catholic archives go digital

The archives of Macau’s Roman Catholic Diocese from the 16th to 19th centuries were inscribed Tuesday in the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme for the Asia-Pacific region.
The next step is to work on its digitalisation, so everyone can have access to the historical documents, the director of the Macau Documentation and Information Society, Helen Ieong Hoi Keng told the Macau Daily Times yesterday.
“The UNESCO suggested to start the preservation works and keep them in good condition. The secretary for Cultural and Social Affairs and the Macau Foundation promised to give total support to that,” Helen Keng pointed out.
Without disclosing a schedule, the researcher said the archives will all be digitalised. Currently, only some documents are available in digital files. “It is not a work schedule to decide in two days,” she added.
The decision to list the archives was made during the two-day 4th General Meeting of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme Regional Committee for Asia and the Pacific (MOWCAP) held in Macau and attended by representatives of 16 countries and regions including South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Pakistan and Tajikistan and co-hosted by the UNESCO, the Macau Foundation and the Macau Documentation and Information Society.
The archives are the first inscription from a Chinese territory outside the mainland and comprises official records, personal correspondence, training materials, books, journals, as well as records of baptisms, marriages and burials.
“The archives are truly evidence of Macau as a meeting point of East and West. It is a resource to understand the development of Catholicism in the Far East and how its activities also have influenced the economics and culture in Macau. In other words, it reflects the earliest education and culture not only in Macau, but in China and Europe as well,” Helen Ieong stressed.
The archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese are mostly recorded in Portuguese and are kept at both St. Joseph’s Seminary and the Diocesan Chancery. Roman Catholicism reached Macau after the mid-16th century.
Launched by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1992, the Memory of the World Programme is an international initiative established to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climatic conditions, as well as willful and deliberate destruction.