King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Center for Historical Materials Conservation

The King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Center for Historical Materials Conservation (Tarmeem) is one of the centers of the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives (Darah), founded in 2005 as a result of Darah’s expanding engagement in the restoration and conservation of its acquisitions. Tarmeem specializes in preserving historical materials in manuscript, audio, and visual form by sterilizing, processing, restoring, and bookbinding these materials, as well as producing microfilm and making digital copies of them. Tarmeem offers its services to Darah, the public, and public and private libraries.

The King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Center for Historical Materials Conservation provides its services to historical sources and preserves them via various paths, including: periodic maintenance of Darah’s contents; sterilization, restoration, and binding of historical sources received from governmental and private institutions and from individual researchers and owners of private libraries, according to service contracts; providing training and consulting services to similar centers; and detecting forgery in historical sources.

The center has six sections for restoration services, made available to the public via the center’s digital platform, as follows: Sterilization Section, which provides a sterilization service for documents and volumes against insects and fungi; Chemical Processing Section, for cleaning materials from dust and dirt; Partial or Total Restoration Section, for damaged documents and manuscripts; Digital Imaging Section, which converts microfilm into digital copy and saves the content on CD-ROM; and a Color Imaging Section for copying documents and manuscripts and saving them on CD-ROM.

The Binding Section is responsible for the rebinding of historical documents and acquisitions, using either natural or industrial leather, and producing crates and containers for their preservation, whereas the Microfilm Section provides miniature film and digital imaging services. In 2019, the center received the ISO 9001 Quality Management Certification.

The center contributed to the preservation of important historical assets in the Kingdom, such as the first issues of Umm al-Qura Newspaper, Sharia deeds, and awqaf (endowments) documents. The center offers a mobile sterilization service through specialized vehicles equipped with ozone sterilizers that travel to the locations of historical sources anywhere across the Kingdom. In its media campaign, the center relies on the slogan of sustainable legacy.