In November 2007, a sub-regional workshop was held in St. Lucia to assist a number of countries in the Commonwealth Caribbean with their formulation of nominations for the International Register of the Memory of the World (MoW) programme.
Five nominations were submitted as a result of work done prior to, during and subsequent to this workshop. In addition, with assistance from the facilitators of this workshop, three other countries (The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic and St. Croix) also submitted nominations to the register. The second part of the last session of the workshop was spent on brainstorming about potential nominations from the region.
CLR James, MoW Inscriptee
While most were individual nominations, those from St. Kitts and Dominica were joined ultimately leading to a regional nomination including Jamaica, Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Kitts and the United Kingdom. The breadth of this nomination clearly indicates that critical aspects of the region's documentary heritage reside not only within the region but also in internationally-based institutions.
The formula used for participation in the St. Lucia workshop was that nominators on behalf of their countries/institutions submitted, to the facilitators, a description of the item/s they wished to nominate. Feedback was provided by the facilitators and continuous work was done on the draft nomination until the St. Lucia activity. Once in St. Lucia, the requirements of the form were explored in depth, persons spoke about their nomination and intensive one-on-one sessions were conducted with the nominators. After St. Lucia, the nominations underwent additional refinement prior to their being submitted to Paris by the March 2008 deadline.
This strategy—work prior to the workshop, the workshop and post workshop refinement—has proven to be very successful as virtually all of the nominations which were submitted have been recommended for favourable consideration by the International Advisory Committee (IAC) of MoW. In addition, a number of MoW committees have adopted this model as a means of strengthening the work of the programme in their countries/regions.