Through this grant they will improve the maintenance of the archive through the construction of appropriate storage within the Meryem Ana Church. Most importantly they will mitigate the lack of local expertise within the community in Mardin by training the archive caretakers of the different institutions in the appropriate methodology for caring for their collections. Included in this training will also be data management sessions and the demonstration of efficient inventorying methods. The collection at the Syriac Catholic Foundation will be fully inventoried to record also the metadata. The caretakers will also receive training in proper scanning of their own collections, and will be taught preservation of digital collections. Through consultation with the foundations’ boards, the materials they allow will be publicly shared through KMKD’s website. A team of conservators will come and perform a condition assessment of the archive content and then a selection of the most important and most damaged collection items will be sent to the İstanbul laboratory and will be restored there. The reason for this is that the Mardin Museum has communicated to the applicant’s paper conservator that they do not have enough capacity to undertake a scientific restoration of paper materials. After the restoration, the items will return to Mardin to be taken care in their new storage.

Image copyright: Conservartecuador