The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive

The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive exists because Palestinian paper is not safe. Its own statement of purpose is blunt about the reason for the project: it collects identity papers, official records, letters, diaries, manuscripts, maps, photographs, films and audio recordings “that were under threat of loss, damage, or confiscation,” digitises them, and puts them online for users inside Palestine and abroad. The archive launched in February 2018, entered a second phase in March 2021, and is now in a third. Browse the objects today and the counter reads a little under 150,000 items.

The organising principle is the collection, and the collections are named for the people who gave them. That is the archive’s argument as well as its filing system. The Palestine Red Crescent Society collection runs to more than five thousand items spanning 1884 to 2019; the Sameeh Hammoudeh collection to over two thousand, from 1912 to 2014; there are collections for the General Union of Palestinian Women, for the lawyer Hanna Nakkara, for the al-Fajr newspaper of the late 1970s, for the Ramallah Friends School, for the photographer Joss Dray, for individual families whose surviving papers amount to a few dozen scans. Alongside collections you can enter by topic — culture and arts, resistance and struggle, displacement and diaspora, everyday life, education, women — which is the more useful door for a researcher who does not yet know whose family holds what they need.

For research use, three things matter. First, the material is overwhelmingly Arabic; the interface is bilingual but the documents are not translated, and item descriptions are the practical limit of what an English-only reader will get. Second, the archive is a digitisation programme, not a repository: the physical originals stay with the families and institutions that hold them, and the Museum has built its partnership network around that fact, which is why the same portal will point you to other archives rather than absorbing them. Third, the archive actively solicits deposits — there is a “Submit your archive” route — so a collection that is not there this year may be there next.

Use it early rather than late. Because the arrangement is by donor rather than by subject, the fastest way in is usually a keyword search followed by a jump into whichever named collection the hit belongs to; the surrounding items in that collection are frequently more valuable than the one you were looking for. For high-resolution files, and for questions about reuse, the Museum asks that you write to them directly.

Sources

• About the Archive — The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive
• Search the Archive (item count) — The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive
• Browse Collections — The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive