The Arab Development Society was founded in 1945 after Musa al-Alami received approval to start a project to provide agricultural extension services for Palestinian villages, educate the villagers about the Zionist settler colonial attack on their lands and the need to protect them. The Society established a vocational education school to train the Palestinian students who were forcibly displaced from their homes. It built its headquarters, school and farms on lands it rented in the Jordan Valley area near Jericho. It is worth noting that before the 1948 Nakba, the Society owned two plots of land in the Jenin district and another in Wadi al-Fara'a in the Nablus district. In 1952, it was registered again in accordance with the Jordanian Law on Societies.

The collection consists of documents and photographs of the activities of the Arab Development Society, which was established with the aim of offering agricultural extension and was later concerned with training refugee and impoverished students who used to live in the Society. The Society has acquired agricultural lands for production, and among the items of the collection are some of the ownership documents of these plots of land. The collection also includes a set of invoices, bank documents, bank statements and chequebooks since the onset of the Society's establishment.

The second part of the collection is concerned with the person of Musa al-Alami, and includes family photographs of the al-Alami family and their trips outside Palestine, documents related to his ownership of plots of land in Jerusalem and the village of al-Malha, papers proving his ownership of shares in the Jerusalem District Electricity Company, and documents related to the establishment of Sharafat School near Jerusalem. The collection also contains many letters, greeting cards, and telegrams, in both Arabic and English, that were addressed to Musa al-Alami at different periods from Palestine, the Arab states and the world, in addition to pamphlets featuring summaries handwritten by him during his studies, and his business cards.