A "homecoming" exhibition of early UN publications, part of the collection of China's Chongqing Library, was launched at the UN headquarters in New York Thursday.

As one of UN's depository libraries, the Chongqing Library, located in Southwest China's Chongqing municipality, "brought home" these literatures, either physically or through pictures, which date back as early as to the period of the League of Nations in the 1920s.

At the exhibition entitled "Visiting Home, UN Depository Collections" are reports and resolutions of the world body and its main organs. Among them is the "Documents of the UN Conference on International Organization, San Francisco 1945," which recorded the process of discussing and adopting the Charter of the United Nations by 50 founding member states.

UN depository libraries collect UN documents and publications through a special arrangement with the United Nations. The Chongqing Library is one of the 20 such libraries in China, out of some 350 around the world.

"In the early years of the United Nations, depository libraries played a very important role in informing the world of the new organization that was created after the Second World War," said Maher Nasser, director of the Outreach Division of the UN Department of Global Communications.

At the opening ceremony of the exhibition, he said before the age of the internet, "you had to physically have the book, the publication shipped to those countries, so that they can see what had been signed at the United Nations."

Though this is no longer the practice due to budget cuts and the advent of the Internet, readers now can access these documents online, noted the UN official.

Ren Jing, director of the Chongqing Library, said for his part that the exhibition is a tribute to the United Nations for its efforts in sustaining peace and security as well as promoting international cooperation for over seven decades.

In 1947, the National Roosevelt Library -- the predecessor of the Chongqing Library -- was established in honor of former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his contribution to China's resistance against the Japanese aggression and to the anti-Fascist victory in the Second World War.

In the same year, the library was designated as a UN Documentary Depository, one of the first two libraries in China that were entrusted with such mandate.

The ongoing exhibition is a collaborative event between the Chongqing Library and the Dag Hammarskjold Library of the United Nations. The literatures are shown from April 25 to May 9 at a reading room of the Dag Hammarskjold Library.