Here are a few resources and essays I have come across, I thought they may be of interest out there to people.

I know Els already has kindly listed links to other information and resources, I thought this may be a good place to start of a kind of 'resource library'. If there are any other resource out there I would be interested to have a look.


The Politics of World Heritage: Negotiating Tourism and Conservation
By David Harrison, Michael Hitchcock, 2005
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xPcaVQzso58C
This collection of papers focuses on the contested nature of World Heritage at sites as diverse as The Netherlands, Ellis Island (USA), post-colonial Mesoamerica, Cambodia, Fiji, Kyrgyzstan, and Vietnam. In addition, eight research notes explore heritage interpretation in the USA, Lebanon, Peru, Indonesia, Singapore, Tasmania and India.

Preserving the heritage of humanity? Obtaining world heritage status and the impacts of listing.
Aa, Bart J.M. van der 2005
http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/rw/2005/b.j.m.van.der.aa/
The 1972 UNESCO world heritage convention was established to better preserve the world's 'most outstanding' natural and cultural world heritage sites. This research tries to answer the question of whether or not the convention has been an effective tool to better preserve these heritage sites. Does the world heritage list include all the 'best' heritage sites? And does inscription raise the level of preservation? Or does tourism endanger the site after its selection on the list?

World Heritage as NIMBY? The Case of the Dutch part of the Wadden Sea
Bart J.M. van der Aa, Peter D. Groote and Paulus P.P. Huigen, 2002?
http://www.multilingual-matters.net/cit/007/0291/cit0070291.pdf
Acquiring the world heritage label, a reward for establishing and preserving an outstanding environment, is often assumed to be an honour for the local population and a useful leverage for the tourist and environmental organisations. However, the case of the Wadden Sea, a trilateral nomination by Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands, makes clear that this is not always true, and public consultation in The Netherlands has revealed that these local stakeholders do not support such a nomination. I seems they epitomise a 'Not in my back yard' (NIMBY) approach to World Heritage listing. This discussion paper examines the factors that complicate the nomination process. Contrary to common expectation, why do critical stakeholders, like the tourism industry, local inhabitants and environmental organisations become opponents? What are the interests at stake that subvert the balance of benefits and costs of the world heritage status to the extent that nomination is suspended? Is this phenomenon an exception, or an indication that obtaining the accolade is increasingly assessed from a rational rather than an emotional viewpoint, and that 30 years after the convention which created it the world heritage stamp has lost its uniqueness?

A year or so back I put together a spreadsheet which was pretty comprehensive to the date of doing it of all books published worldwide (in English) about "UNESCO World Heritage" showing ISBN numbers etc. I got the information from extensive (!!) searches of ABEBooks, Alibris, Amazon and ISBN itself -a number of these books are usually available from such sites 2nd hand. I don't know the best way of registering that info - Any ideas Els???

We could do 2 things in my opinion:
- Make this topic 'sticky' so it will always be prominent and people can add new resources they've discovered and like to share.
- Transform the current weblinks page on the website into a real Resource Library (I like that title!). I can put the list of books by Solivagant into the database and display them (and the other resources like those from Meltwaterfalls) on a webpage with a new design. Would look really professional and valuable I think.

Or even better, combine these two: a topic on the forum to dump ideas for new resources, and a permanent base on the website.

What do you think?

yep I think the combination of the two sounds like a good idea.

it is easy for us to update, but can also be made to look professional on the website proper.

I've implemented it. I also plan to add a possibility to download the items into an Excel spreadsheet (if I can get that working).