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Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum today chaired the first board meeting of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (MBR) Library Foundation.

During the meeting, he directed the board members to work on attracting the "best minds", books, intellects and linguists.

"We want the library to be a house of wisdom where researchers gather, youth innovate and knowledge gets drafted," His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid said. "We don’t want the library to be a place for books; we want it to be a place to attract youth and enhance their cultural and knowledge soul.

"The library is part of our continuous effort to cement reading in the society and making books ‘part of life’," he said.

"You are a team of the biggest cultural project during the Year of Reading; we want it to be the largest knowledge project in the Arab world. We allocated huge budget and great minds," he told the board members.

The meeting was attended by H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council; Mohammed Ahmed Al Murr, Chairman of MBR Library Foundation, and Mohammed Abdullah Al Gergawi, Secretary-General of The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives.

Overlooking Dubai Creek in the Al Jaddaf area, the book-shaped library will cover more than 92,000 sq. m., will be a seven-storey facility, and will have a children’s section besides Arabic, international, business and media sections, to make reading accessible to all.

It will include a centre for conservation and restoration of historical manuscripts, and a museum displaying rare artefacts from the Maktoum family collection.

The library will be able to accommodate more than 42 million visitors a year and will host over 100 cultural and intellectual events every year in its seminar and conference rooms.