Selaković: We are working with the National Library of Serbia on the preservation and protection of extremely valuable archival material

25. Oct 2021.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, Nikola Selaković, and Acting Director of the National Library of Serbia, Vladimir Pištalo, signed an Agreement on Cooperation today, which will enable the conservation, archiving and digitization of 25 international agreements stored in the Collection of international agreements of the MFA, so this group of agreements will be permanently protected.

After signing the agreement, Minister Selaković said that the very good practice of cooperation between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Library of Serbia, which has been established so far, continues, in terms of preservation and protection of extremely valuable archives.

The head of Serbian diplomacy said that the Collection of international bilateral and multilateral agreements of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs contains more than 11,000 copies of such agreements, which represent a kind of memory of Serbian diplomacy, but also the actions of the state of Serbia in the entire modern period of its foreign policy.

"What is also a good side of the agreement is that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will be able to continuously submit copies of these agreements to the National Library of Serbia. We are proud of our cooperation, and it is certainly our wish and intention to raise that cooperation to a higher level in the future", stated Minister Selaković.

In addition to cooperation in the field of conservation, archiving, protection and digitalization of this valuable Collection of the state of Serbia, Minister Selaković said that the cooperation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which includes the Directorate for Diaspora and Serbs in the region, will be supported by the National Library of Serbia in terms of promoting Serbian culture and Serbian literature in an effort to organize quality teaching of the Serbian language for the children of our emigrants in as many places in the world as possible.

Acting Director of the National Library of Serbia, Vladimir Pištalo, expressed great satisfaction with the signing of the agreement with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and said that they were working on the same task.

"The wealth of the people is their culture and the promotion of that culture, and that is what we are working on together", said Pištalo.

As he stated, the National Library is working on bringing a good number of digitized books that we do not have from the libraries that have them, such as the libraries in Budapest and Vienna.

"We talked with the ambassadors of those countries to transfer them to us. In addition, we will send a significant number of books to Serbs in the diaspora and we are working to double our capacity to take care of old books not only in Serbia, but in all areas where Serbian culture has left its mark", Pištalo said.