Hosted by the Newport World Heritage Committe
US Senator Lincoln Chafee, Honorary Chair

with local support from

BankNewport
Crystal Spring Water
Newport Restoration Foundation
Newport Vineyards
Preservation Society of Newport County
Prince Charitable Trusts
Roger Williams University
National Trust for Historic Preservation
Salve Regina University
Fleming Family Charitable Trust

The long conversation between the American preservation experience and international programs has had a huge influence on the protective and management standards established in the World Heritage Operational Guidelines, something that continues to this day. In the international back-and-forth exchange of ideas contributions are adapted and transformed in ways that often improve them beyond recognition. When these return to our shores, along with fresh innovations from abroad, they find new applications as entirely new solutions to our own domestic challenges.

It is in this spirit of learning from each other that the 9^th US/ICOMOS International Symposium will convene on 20 to 22 April, 2006, in historic Newport, Rhode Island, to look once again at the World Heritage Convention and its List as a rich source of models to improve the protection and management of the vast heritage of the United States, as well as to share with others some of our more recent national, state and local initiatives and approaches that may be applicable to World Heritage sites, with a particular focus on World Heritage cities, but not to the exclusion of other categories of sites.

The World Heritage Convention is not just about the World Heritage List, but about every country’s “duty of ensuring the identification, protection, conservation, presentation and transmission to future generations of the cultural and natural heritage…situated on its territory” (Art 4 of the Convention).

While the World Heritage List may seem like a tool for international cooperation exclusively for the sites inscribed in it, it really accomplishes more than that. By establishing minimum standards for significance, authenticity and management for all sites inscribed, the List also helps each country in developing the know-how needed to protect the full range of its cultural and natural resources, and in setting up paradigms that have broad national applicability.

The 9^th Symposium will also look at the participation of the United States in the World Heritage Convention in relation to other countries to identify ways in which US/ICOMOS and other US heritage organizations can support our official agencies in fulfilling our international cultural commitments to both the Convention and to UNESCO.