Documentary heritage

Documentary heritage is a field of tangible and movable cultural heritage focused on the conservation and communication of documents of heritage interest such as bound volumes, works on paper, iconographic documents of varying media such as lithographs, engravings, and etchings, cartographic documents, and manuscripts, ephemera, and other unica. These documents and works can be of interest for display, scholarly research, and preservation for future generations, and can be preserved through preventative and interventionist conservation measures. The character of these documents can be of interest to the collective memory of a limited audience, such as a map of a 17th or 18th century region or city, or can be testamentary to a level of human creative genius with outstanding universal value, such as a collection of literature which exemplifies the humanist spirit of the European renaissance or the architectural drawings of a structure which influenced the spatial arrangements of buildings across multiple cultures and time periods.