Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture launches national plan to preserve cultural heritage assets

The Ministry of Culture launched the national plan project to collect, document, archive, and manage assets and elements of cultural heritage, as a national initiative within the Saudi Cultural Memory Center. It aims to preserve the rich fabric of cultural heritage in the Kingdom from the standpoint of building a memory of Saudi culture, including a comprehensive survey of the tangible and intangible cultural treasures that form the basis of the national identity.

Through this project, the center is working to prepare a national plan. It aims to formulate a road map to define, document, archive, preserve, and disseminate the origins and elements of cultural heritage in the Kingdom by inventorying the current efforts to introduce them.

In this project, the ministry works side by side with stakeholders from the cultural system as well as those outside it, and various cultural aspects, all the way to individuals, in order to identify the elements and origins of cultural heritage. This is through holding multiple workshops with stakeholders and the local communities from various regions of the Kingdom through which the community is invited to join hands in this cooperative initiative. This collaborative effort is a pillar upon which a strong baseline for the Kingdom’s cultural heritage is built.

It is noteworthy that the Ministry of Culture had established the Saudi Cultural Memory Center in February 2021 to streamline efforts to preserve, archive, and manage cultural heritage in the Kingdom, and its scope includes designing strategies and policies for archiving cultural heritage, managing digital archives, and empowering the cultural heritage sector in the Kingdom.

The launch of this project comes within the framework of the ministry’s endeavor to build digital cultural content and a reliable source of knowledge to care for Saudi cultural heritage, so that these endeavors lay the foundation for a future in which cultural heritage is not only remembered, but continues to flourish.