The United Nations Security Council adopted its first resolution, , on 25 January 1946 – long before the current modes of online distribution of documents.
As of 30 November 2024, the Council has adopted 2,760 resolutions in pursuit of its duty to uphold international peace and security. These resolutions are adopted in open formal meetings, and the voting information is recorded in the respective meeting records.
The UN Dag Hammarskj?ld Library digitized the historic collection of Security Council resolutions over two decades ago. However, due to limitations in technology at that time, the files did not allow for full-text searching.
To improve access and discovery, the Library launched a project to add text-searchable features to resolutions published before UN documents became fully digital in 1993. Using an optical character recognition (OCR) tool, we converted over 900 Security Council resolutions and related documents from images into searchable text – that meant processing more than 6,000 files in all official languages. These are now accessible and fully searchable in the .
The Library’s ongoing digitalization initiative prioritizes the scanning of important documents issued by the Security Council, General Assembly and Economic and Social Council in the public domain since the Organization’s founding.
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