ITU digitises historical archives

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced on February 11 that they have launched the History of ITU portal.

This project - the digitising of the ITU's archive of historical documents - aims to improve access to information on the ITU and chart its evolution since its establishment in 1865, while ensuring the long-term preservation of historic documents. The archives will be freely accessible.

ITU's historical documents digitisation programme is an ongoing project to catalogue and scan key ITU documents and outcomes of major conferences and make them available on the Web. The documents are fully searchable thanks to optical character recognition.

Documents generated from ITU Plenipotentiary Conferences as well as those from early radio, telegraph and telephone conferences are now available on the portal. It provides background information, key data and links to the documents and other materials for each conference.

The digitisation programme will continue to make available documents of historic significance, including those related to Radio communication Conferences since 1903.