RIYADH, 20 November 2003 — Riyadh Governor Prince Salman, who is also the supervisor general of King Fahd National Library, has signed a contract to build a new multimillion-riyal complex for the library.
On completion of the project, the KFNL will become the biggest library in the Middle East with an expanded facility to stack an additional 3.3 million books, periodicals and manuscripts.
“The project will be completed in 20 months,” said Abdullah Ali Al-Nuaim, chairman of the KFNL’s board of trustees, here yesterday. Al-Nuaim said the new building, on a plot of 100,000 square meters, will have a high-tech facility to store and preserve new books, periodicals and rare manuscripts besides the existing collection.
He said a Saudi company and a German firm were building part of the library following an agreement signed by Prince Salman.
The KFNL needed to be relocated to a bigger site because the old library can no longer accommodate the fast-growing collection. The library houses more than 800,000 books, 100,000 stamps, 24,000 coins, 25,000 audio-visual discs and 15,000 microfilms.
In fact, the patronage of Prince Salman has led to the enrichment of the library’s collection through the years. Prince Salman has donated several rare manuscripts, books and photos to the library. The library has also introduced a fully automated online search and retrieval system with a local area network linking it with King Saud University and King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).
The library has also a large number of rare Islamic manuscripts, which date back to early Islamic era. The KFNL has been receiving an average of 4,000 new books every year besides the existing stacks of 160,000 foreign periodicals in English, French, Turkish and Persian.
A major source of the library’s collection is the Kingdom’s Depository Law, which stipulates that two copies of any book published in Saudi Arabia must be deposited at KFNL.
The library has also started to publish and collect major titles of national and regional interest. It has recently published a 30-volume “Saudi National Bibliography,” which contains a classified list of national publishing output.
