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With over 218,000 diverse items, the King Abdulaziz Public Library preserves heritage and renews the national memory.

With over 218,000 diverse items, the King Abdulaziz Public Library preserves heritage and renews the national memory.
9-Muharram-1448 - 24-June-2026

With over 218,000 diverse items, the King Abdulaziz Public Library preserves heritage and renews the national memory.

Preserving the national heritage is one of the strategic objectives of the King Abdulaziz Public Library. Through this objective, the library pursues a comprehensive set of goals, including enhancing inclusive access to knowledge, enriching cultural and civilizational content, generating, managing, organizing, and publishing knowledge content, developing, preserving, and disseminating heritage content, and advancing technological development and the digitization of content.

The King Abdulaziz Public Library has equipped its knowledge archive with the latest advanced technologies to accommodate its rich cultural collections, particularly those related to national memory, creativity, history, and the Arab and Islamic heritage. The library has embraced digital transformations and major advances in information preservation, while acquiring diverse materials, including books, documents, rare photographs, maps, coins, rare currency, and other valuable resources accessed by researchers, scholars, historians, and students for academic study and research.

In this context, a number of diverse digital projects have been implemented, collectively contributing to an increase in the number of digital channels, while applying digital service quality standards and automating procedures that enhance archival practices through various scholarly methods. The number of the library's cultural heritage holdings that have been digitized has reached 63,476 items.

The library's heritage collections represent its most important cultural icon, as they constitute a knowledge system through which the ancient and contemporary civilizational and historical dimensions can be explored at various levels, preserving the Kingdom's diverse heritage. The library holds approximately 218,576 items across multiple collections, distributed as follows: 128,904 documents, 7,645 manuscripts, 6,318 rare coins and numismatic items, 7,811 photographs, and 617 maps. The library also holds 34,235 rare books. Meanwhile, the Center for Equestrian Studies contains 4,696 diverse materials, including books, studies, and photographs, while the library's database dedicated to King Abdulaziz contains 28,350 archival and documentary materials, books, rare items, manuscripts, and photographs.

The library has also published extensive collections of specialized books on the history of the Kingdom and the Arab and Islamic worlds, highlighting distinctive aspects of Arab-Islamic civilization. It continues to develop and activate its knowledge system in alignment with the objectives of Saudi Vision 2030.

Official and unofficial documents constitute essential scholarly sources for writing history. Nations place great importance on collecting, preserving, and making their documents accessible to those wishing to study history. Accordingly, the library has been committed to acquiring documents and rare books, particularly those relating to the history of King Abdulaziz Al Saud and the history of the Kingdom. It has dedicated a special section to these materials, with the number of national historical documents reaching approximately 123,680.

The King Abdulaziz Public Library's National Historical Archive contains a collection of rare documents, including the private collection of George Rentz, in English, French, and Arabic, covering the period from 1930 to 1960. The collection includes a vast array of personal and official documents, studies and research papers, articles and newspaper clippings, memoirs, and reports, most of which are closely connected to the history of the Kingdom.

Another important collection is the Abdulrahman Azzam Pasha Documents Collection, in Arabic and English, covering the period from 1925 to 1960. Among these documents are records of King Abdulaziz's meeting with Abdulrahman Azzam, as well as discussions and dialogue concerning the formulation of the protocol for the establishment of the League of Arab States and efforts to unify the Arab ranks.

The collection also includes records of the conversations that took place between King Abdulaziz and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 14, 1945, concerning the Palestinian issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The document takes the form of a notebook recording those conversations.

The library also houses a collection of British documents relating to King Abdulaziz Al Saud, may he rest in peace, in English, covering the period from 1901 to 1953. These are reproductions of the original documents and constitute one of the most important sources for the history of the Arabian Peninsula due to the valuable historical material they contain. The documents cover the period of King Abdulaziz's rule, from his recovery of the city of Riyadh until his death, and include a vast collection of reports from British embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions.

The Khair al-Din Al-Zirikli Documents Collection, in Arabic, covers the period from 1920 to 1975. It contains a large number of documents in the form of images of local telegrams and memoranda from the reign of King Abdulaziz and the subsequent reigns of Kings Saud and Faisal. It also includes royal decrees, proposals and opinions, and reports based on newspaper reviews.

In addition to these documents, the library holds several collections of private and public sources containing documents concerning King Abdulaziz, the Palestinian issue in English and Arabic, the Saudi Army's camel corps, and manuscripts dating from the seventeenth and twelfth centuries CE.

These rare documents form part of the Kingdom's historical and heritage memory, which the library works to preserve, archive, and digitize. In doing so, the library has evolved into an integrated cultural institution dedicated to enriching knowledge content in all its forms and formats. It harnesses the latest technological systems and diverse information resources to serve as an effective link that facilitates researchers' and intellectuals' access to the treasures of Arab and global knowledge. It continues its mission of safeguarding and preserving the national heritage so that it remains a valuable memory for generations to come.

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