How to find: UN documents

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Anyone who deals with the UN and its documents from time to time has surely noticed that a little background knowledge would be helpful. Here are some research tips on the UN Digital Library.

Which UN documents are available online?

To briefly illustrate how complex the UN is and what kind of data volume and diversity we are dealing with, a quick look at its organization chart will help.

Since 2017, the UN has made various documents available online in the United Nations Digital Library (https://digitallibrary.un.org/). It is the result of a collaboration between the Dag Hammarskjöd Library and the United Nations Office at the Geneva Library. Its goal is not only to make documents available, but also to serve as the UN’s institutional memory.

The United Nations Digital Library (UNDL) includes:

• the UNBISnet (The UN Bibliographic Information System > http://unbisnet.un.org/), the catalog of the UN Library in New York. Here you will find:
  

1. all resolutions of the UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council and ECOSOC since 1946.
2. the voting results of all resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly (since 1983) and the UN Security Council.
3. all speeches made in the UN General Assembly (since 1983), the UN Security Council (since 1983), ECOSOC (since 1983) and the Trusteeship Council (since 1982).
   

• the ODS (Official Document System of the UN > https://documents.un.org/prod/ods.nsf/home.xsp), which currently contains more than one million documents. If you know the document number, this is the fastest way to find the desired UN document.

Depending on your research, you can also use the following websites:

• Decisions of the International Court of Justice: icj-cij.org
• press releases of UN bodies and the Secretary-General: un.org/news (UN News Centre)
• UN Yearbooks for activities of the UN in a given year: https://www.un.org/en/yearbook
  
  

Paul Bissig, Acquisition & Cataloging, Tanja Baschong