The Welfare Association's Palestinian Museum and the British Library announce their first collaboration, in a new project 'Conservation for Digitisation', to conserve endangered collections relating to Palestinian history and cultural heritage. The project will be implemented between April and December 2019 and focuses on the preservation and treatment of 3,000 damaged paper-based items from public and private collections, such as letters, maps, diaries and photographs, to prepare them for digitisation.

The Conservation for Digitisation project is funded by the British Council’s Cultural Protection Fund, in partnership with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, with a grant of £152,209 made to the Welfare Association-UK.

The project begins with the establishment of the first paper-based conservation studio in the West Bank, at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, guided by British Library conservation experts. In parallel, two conservators from the Palestinian Museum will travel to the British Library Centre for Conservation in London for specialised conservation training this spring. Two British Library conservation experts will travel to Palestine to help their colleagues at the Palestinian Museum develop their capacity to enable large-scale conservation and digitisation of heritage collections, with the ultimate aim of making them available online and accessible for researchers globally.

As part of this project the Palestinian Museum has designed an education programme for its visitors, to raise awareness of cultural heritage protection needs and practices. It includes a series of specialised workshops, lectures, tours and an open day.