The UAE government has announced plans to set up a new storage and restoration facility for manuscripts and historical documents in capital Abu Dhabi, said a report.

To be opened next year, the 40,000-sq-m unit will initially house 20 million boxes of documents, reported the Gulf News, citing a top official.

The upcoming facility in Mafraq area of Abu Dhabi will have a capacity for 100 million boxes of manuscripts stored in microfilm format, revealed Dr Abdullah Al Raisi, director-general of the UAE National Archives and chairman of the Unesco Memory of the World Programme.

"We have already begun collecting microfilm copies of historical documents from the international archives of states that have had relationships with the UAE’s communities, like Britain, Portugal, Germany and France," stated Dr Al Raisi.

He was speaking on the sidelines of the Safeguarding Endangered Cultural Heritage Conference, which kicked off in Abu Dhabi on Friday.

The meet is seeing contributions from international cultural experts in a bid to devise strategies for the preservation of items that are records of cultural traditions and legacies.

According to him, nearly 3.5 million documents, dating from 1507 to 1991, have already been copied by the UAE’s National Archives from international records.

These are now being translated so that the contents can be used and disseminated, he added.