Secretaries-General of International Organizations: Information Sources in Libraries and Archives

This paper discusses the use of primary and secondary sources on international organizations (IOs) and their executive heads from the perspective of a university teacher and researcher. When asked to teach a course on IOs in the early 1990s, I focused on three research topics: decision-making within the organizations (or: what’s going on within?), the history of IOs (how did they come into being and how did they evolve?) and the careers of the executive heads (which roles do individuals play?). My research has resulted in books such as Decision Making within International Organizations (2004, edited with Bertjan Verbeek) and Routledge History of International Organizations: From 1815 to the Present Day (2009), as well as the Biographical Dictionary of Secretaries-General of International Organizations or IO BIO Project (together with Kent Kille and Jaci Eisenberg, www.ru.nl/fm/iobio). The paper addresses, in that order, my own awareness of the availability of official documents, my training of students to use primary sources on IOs, the writing of a comprehensive history of IOs as a tool for students, the promotion of using international information and data sets, and the search for information on the careers of executive heads of IOs, in particular Secretaries-General.