Safeguarding RIWAQ's archive

Palestine

RIWAQ – Centre for Architectural Conservation has documented Palestinian heritage since 1991. Its archive holds some 93,000 items: photographs taken by Palestinian and foreign photographers and by RIWAQ's own staff, records of three decades of restoration work, images of the Palestinian landscape, and plans and maps of heritage sites. It also contains the RIWAQ Registry of Historic Buildings in Palestine, with 50,320 entries.

The full-scale invasion of Gaza and escalating settler violence across the West Bank put the archive at risk. Much of it existed only in physical form, as printed photographs, drafts, and paper records. As buildings across Palestine are destroyed, this documentation becomes the only surviving record of what stood and how it was built. Its loss would be irreversible.

With €48,840 in support from CER, alongside €33,796 from the British Council's Cultural Protection Fund, RIWAQ secured the collection with technical support from the Palestinian Museum. A specialist from the Museum designed a plan for sorting, protecting, and digitising the holdings. The physical space housing the archive was secured with a new security system, and archival stationery and furniture procured to store the material properly.

Digital storage was installed on-site and in the cloud, backed up both inside and outside Palestine so that no single point of failure could destroy the record. Three people were trained and paid over four months in archiving and digitisation, building skills that stay with the organisation beyond the project.