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TEMPORALITY AND THE ARCHIVE DOCUMENT:
INVESTIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CONTEXTS OF GENERATION,
TREATMENT AND USE OF DOCUMENTS1
Eliezer Pires da Silva
Brazilian National Archive
[email protected]
Geni Chaves Fernandes
Univ. Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro - UNIRIO
[email protected]
ABSTRACT:
The history of archival knowledge consists of three main viewpoints, in which the concepts of
document and information vie for the position of center of attention and object of study of
Archivology. Within this dispute we find different views of what constitutes information. First is
the concept of the document, in its contexts of compilation, maintenance and use. Based on
Heidegger’s concept of temporality, as it is used by Ricoeur for the epistemology of history, an
arrangement is formulated in which temporality is seen as a component of the archive
document. A second support is found in the works of Buckland and Frohmann, in which
Buckland reexamines the concept of the document in Otlet and Briet, and sees, in the act of
constituting an archive, the action that causes something to become a document. For the
concept of information, we based our understanding on the ideas of Frohmann who, examining
the institutional foundations that determine the construction of information, points to the strength
of the past in the present as a factor which stabilizes the meanings of the information, affirming
the material nature of the documentary practices that comprise it, and the effects they produce.
The concept of materiality of the document, and the supposed immateriality of information
emerge, based on this schematic model and counterpoints, as the results of a tension, in the
present articulation between the preservation of the past and the predicted and feared future.
Hence the tensions of the present goals to maintain and predict what constitutes documents,
and information.
Key words: document, information, materiality
1. THREE PERSPECTIVES OF THE ARCHIVIST
The opposition between the concepts of document and information in archive science is based
on views of archival knowledge that have been formulated since the 19th Century. The model of
archival institution, typical of this century, is one that concentrates documents which have been
removed from the location in which they were administratively accumulated, to occupy space in
a central repository that favors the patrimonial dimension of collections kept to serve
historiographic production. The modern notion of archive, while still serving as an institution of
memory, goes back to the French experiment of creating historical national archives, and the
technical principles published in the Dutch Manual of 18982.
This perspective, here termed the historical perspective, sees this manual as a kind of
“landmark”; a cornerstone of archive science, which formulates principles for the technical
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processing of sets of documents collected for safekeeping in public archives, for use as primary
sources by researchers.
The Manual instituted a kind of sacredness to the order imposed on the administrative gathering
of documents, whereby “The archive is an organic whole, created during a certain period in
time and not something created later, on a certain, and fixed date,” (Dutch Association of
Archivists, 1973, p. 117). The understanding of naturality generating archive documents was
established with the idea that the order in which the documents are created contends with
thematic arrangements.
The situation of the first half of the 20th Century forms the background for the emergence of an
administrative perspective of archives. The relationships between archives and administration
have, to a certain extent, been neglected in the context of the formation of the nation-states.
Prior to that time, archives were seen as institutions for maintaining national identities and
historical knowledge. A demand emerged for greater efficiency of the state in dealing with the
problems of “document explosion” which occurred in the period between the wars. Also, the
environment of diffusion of ideas on scientific administration would foreshadow the emergence
of the concept and practices of document management, rationalizing its use and implementing
tables of temporality3. For Evans (1994), Document Management establishes the foundations
for a global emphasis on archive and document administration. For Indolfo (2008), control over
the selection of documents to be preserved, and the process of reducing the mass of
documents to manageable proportions, seeking to permanently preserve that with future cultural
value without devaluing the substantive integrity of the mass of documents for the purposes of
research, would configure an epistemological renewal in the universe of archive science,
signaled by the adoption of the concept of document management.
Since the mid-1990’s we have seen the inclusion of archival techniques in organizational tactics
of knowledge management, bringing what we shall call an informational perspective of
archives. For Rodrigues (2006), the institutional actions of Unesco since the 1980s have
involved studies on the impact of information and communication technologies on the area of
culture and on the technical parameters of documentary intervention, in which information is
seen as a strategic resource.
Practices for describing archives have been developed, with the goal of creating interoperable
information systems and aligning them with the bibliography concept of standardizing fields of
descriptive representation.
Consequently, we can define three archival perspectives established since the 19th Century,
which today constitute the field and its practices: the historical perspective, the
administrative perspective, and the informational perspective. In the competition between
these perspectives and their proposals for the object of study of the field, elements of the
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controversy observed are: document vs. information and materiality vs. immateriality4.
2. WHAT IS MEANT TO DAY BY ARCHIVE
The understanding and definition of what constitutes an archive are closely related to the
archival perspectives that outline and are maintained within this field. The concept of archive
has represented both the location where inscriptions of historical, managerial and informational
importance are preserved, and the records themselves preserved under such conditions of
stewardship.
Archives are groups of documents marked by the actions that caused them to exist as
instruments of administrative acts, maintained in the present by the intention of preserving and
testifying to the past, in terms of foreseen usage.
The formation of an archive is founded on its contribution to governance. It must also enable a
group of representative inscriptions to be preserved as documentation, and which might one
day comprise the records of the cultural inheritance. Finally, projected situations should include
making the documents available for subsequent use, attributing them a certain value (as proof,
evidence, information etc).
The concept of archive as a location which preserves and the records that are preserved
includes the following notions: sets of documents that are “raised”, in the present, to the status
of cultural patrimony, and which are preserved due to their value, fundamentally anchored in the
historical perspective; a technical service within organizations, which includes the places where
documents are controlled in their administrative use, basically indicating a management
perspective of the archives and their right to be preserves; and systems of information recovery,
understood as models for representation of reality in its processes of communication, describing
how parts of a group, coordinated for a purpose, interact, giving them the capacity to
accomplish the desired goals.
3. TEMPORALITY AND THE ORGANIZATION OF EXPERIENCES
Although archival documents may be understood from various different angles, to deal with the
aspect of tension between the concepts of document and information, we have opted to
examine them from a perspective of temporality.
Unlike time, temporality relates to the way in which man organizes his experiences, and
necessarily precedes any notion of external time. Man organizes his present experiences – both
those which are recorded and those which are constructed with the imagination - as past,
present, and future, sequencing them according to before and after. So we can say that A and B
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are past experiences and that A occurred before B.
Heidegger, one of the most prominent thinkers on temporality, indicates that it is now, in the
present, that the experiences which we organize as past and future exist.
In this sequence of experiences, all that is “actually” “real” is the
experience simply given “in each now.” Past and future experiences are
no longer or are not yet “real”. The dasein [man] crosses the space of time
that is granted to him between the two limits [birth and death], so that only
each now is “real,” whereas it leaps above each now of his “time". And
because of this it is said that the dasein is “temporal.” In this continual
exchange of experiences, the self is maintained in a certain coincidence
of identity (HEIDEGGER, 1997, p. 178, free translation from the
Portuguese edition into English).
Thus, the now, or the present5 is not only a time, but an articulation that brings past experiences
and future expectations into the present, dimensions that are offered together to our thought
when we deal with daily issues. Without temporality, we would not be able to place our
experiences within the time of the calendar, stars or clocks, in short, a social time that we share
with others. It is in this social time that we can understand, embracing the past and
understanding it together with others. It is here that historical events are anchored in sequential
dates. Questions such as “when?”, “after how long?” etc. belong to the declarative memory of
the witness that is anchored to a date in chronological time or on a calendar (RICOEUR, 2000,
p. 192).
For Paul Ricoeur, historians make use of what he calls instruments of thought that “[...] play the
role of connectors between the time lived and universal time [...and] work towards a solution to
the aporia6 of time". They are “[...] the calendar, the idea of generational sequence, the
connected idea of triple reign - of contemporaries, of predecessors, and of successors, and
lastly but most importantly, by recourse to archives, documents, trails, and remnants.”
(RICOEUR, 1997, p. 170, free translation from the Portuguese edition into English).
The first, calendar time - from the zero mark -, is the invention of a third time, which involves all
of reality, organizing the ordinary time of each life. Its counting enables events to be organized
according to their distance from the zero mark, and from there to the present, situating the
experiences of our own lives (RICOEUR, 1997, p. 180-186).
The sequence of generations biologically triggers the historical agents, where the living occupy
the place of the dead and allow us to associate notions of change and continuity. (RICOEUR,
1997, p. 187-191). Its correlation is the triple reign, the third instrument. “The idea of the ‘reign
of contemporaries’, of predecessors and of successors, as introduced by Alfred Schultz,
constitutes [...] the sociological complement to the idea of generational sequence.” The
contemporaries, in their simultaneity, complete an extension, an undefined continuity, because
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together they last for several temporal flows (children, young people, adults and the elderly).
This simultaneity “[...] extends far beyond the field of interpersonal relationships, but mediates
both private time and public time [...]” (p. 192-193).
The present articulates time; both past and future exist in it. The present defines the past,
making it present, interpreting it and placing it within a chain of meanings. But the present
actions of circumscription and interpretation can only be accomplished once the present has
inherited the past. The term inheritance is used by Heidegger and revived by Ricoeur, to mean
a portion of offered potentialities that are not overbearing. Instead, they are transmitted from
one side, and supposedly embraced from the other. However, the concept of inheritance is not
placed primarily in the past. It refers to a group of possibilities that can only be embraced in the
present, opening its possibilities through the circumscription and interpretation of this past.
It is for the benefit of the future that our inheritance chest is constantly shifting in the present
because it is to the future that we are always being launched. Ricoeur (1997, p. 327-375; 2000.
p. 380) adopts Koselleck’s ideas7 when talking about the situation of the contemporaries of as
being, at the same time, the "space of experience" and the "horizon of expectation". The future
of the present, as the "horizon of expectation", is a notion that allows us to include not only our
desires, but also our fears, due to their relative indeterminate nature. Its reach (from the future)
is in the present action that seeks to accomplish what seems desirable at a given moment,
based on the inherited possibilities, or to preserve rights and customs that we suspect to be at
risk. Each shift of the chest, in light of the future, “[...] reopens the unperceived, aborted or
repressed possibilities of the past. It reopens the past in the direction of what is to come.”
(RICOEUR, 1997, p. 128, free translation from the Portuguese edition into English).
The fourth instrument of thought, and the focus of our interest here, is the use of archives,
documents, trails and remnants. With historiography, the document both aids and competes
with the memory. It is impossible to perceive something as a potential document without the
past, inherited as memory, pointing out this potential in a remnant. In Ricoeur's terms (1996, p.
382, free translation from the Portuguese edition into English), “Tradition preserves (bewhart)
the possibility of hearing the voices of the past.” In contrast, History, based on documents,
seeks to correct and criticize memory.
The past, as that which has already occurred, leaves remnants, tracks, traces, and remains;
and it is on the trail of these tracks and instructed by memory that the possibility of something
being perceived as a potential document is opened up. The document is treated as evidence of
an event, or the report of a sequence of events. Its conceptual extension is only extended into
the modern age when it comes to include not only writings, but a variety of inscriptions, from
intentionally left testimonies to those left unintentionally,8 from artifacts to natural objects.
On one hand, the past instructs us through the memory and tradition, enabling us to look for its
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tracks. On the other are the contemporaries that set out to follow these tracks and order them in
a sequence. In the present, we comprise and/or preserve, as a document, what was only a track
or remnants of the past.
Like any testimony, the document is, by our tradition, interrogated and confronted with other
testimonies, which gives it the solidity of “belief,” in the sense of being credible. (RICOEUR,
2000, p. 204, and 215-217). The confrontation of documents, like the confrontation of
testimonies, is only possible if they form the archive, because it is in the supposed organicity
that presides over documentary relationships, that the document can be held up to interrogation.
4. THE DOCUMENT AND INFORMATION IN INFORMATION SCIENCE
In the field of Information Science, one can see a persistent resistance among major authors, to
the use of the term information as a substitute for the term document. This has led to different
positions among authors (CAPURRO; HJORLAND, 200; 2003; FROMANN, 2001; 2004; VAN
RJISBERGEN, 1979; 1986; BROOKES, 1986; LANCASTER, 1968). In general, the opposition
emerges from conceptual differences in which the document is a support that contains current
or potential information.
Thus, the concept of information, as opposed to that of the document, almost always involves in
two types of conception. One is that of the autonomy of the content in relation to the form, such
that the information is understood as the content, or parts of the content of a document, which
can be transported, without damage, from one form to another. According to this view,
information is not seen as material, even though it can only be found in a support. The second
views information as the meaning produced for someone; it does not exist by itself, but only for
someone – the subject – who constructs knowledge, by means of his interpretation. Both admit
the materiality of the document and the immateriality of information, seen as the mental product
of a subject: in the first case the origin of the mental product is the source, and in the second,
someone's interpretation.
Frohmann (2001, p.6) points out the necessary materiality (and not physicality) of information,
stating that it “[...] only emerges in the world as an effect of institutionally validated material
practices [...] and endures over time as resources for a wide range of social practices [...].”
Materiality remains, for Frohmann, not only in the evident dependence of the material practices
that comprise it and give it stability, including the archive and the document, but from the
concrete effects that these practices produce9.
For the author these conceptions fail to consider the conditions that led to the appearance of the
information as “a content in itself, which remains” or as “someone’s interpretation”. Thus, these
modes of appearance of information – by itself or for someone – are largely the effects of
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documentary practices10. Almost everything that is spoken, shown, and written about
information, as a set of statements, makes it more or less stable in time, lending it durability and
expanding its breadth in social practices (FROHMANN, 2001).
Thus, we can extend the Frohmann's reflections and understand that whether something is
informative “by itself” or “for someone” depends largely on documentary practices of production,
selection and circulation, submitted to certain institutions - in a wider sense: language, rules,
traditions - which in the last instance, guarantee recognition and validation.
Both the apparent permanence of the information content, and the apparently unique
individual meaning, depends on institutionally inscribed documentary practices.
5. THE DOCUMET AND INFORMATION IN ARCHIVE SCIENCE
Although the document is the central concept of the field of archive science, information
appears as its competitor. The idea of the document is a synthesis between information and
support. Lopez (2000) understands that in the space of the archive, the informative content of
the document cannot be extracted by isolating or fragmenting the documents of the archive. The
documentary collection comprises a materiality (power of effects) that sustains the production of
meaning of the contents in a certain direction. “The informative content of the document cannot
be analyzed in isolation, i.e., as though it did not have a materiality guaranteeing the
establishment of this information [...].” (LOPEZ, 2000, p.81)
Thus, there is a context of generation of documents in the past, as a product of social
relationships that are objects of interpretation in the present - in the environment of the
accumulation and organization of the archive which, at the same time, considers the projected
use of the documents as vectors of new relationships in the future.
Thus, we have concrete actions on material collections. First, there was the act of archiving, i.e.
whoever produced the inscription needed to have it preserved, in the past (primary selection);
second, there is the act of accumulating the collection, while an action in the present of storing it
(secondary selection and accumulation); third, there is an action of organizing the archive to
support possible productions of meaning in the future, and foreseen in the present. These
actions are, according to Frohmann, institutionalized practices of selection and validation.
For Monção (2006), archival documents and archival information represent two opposing
concepts in Archive Science.
The archival document conclusively remains an object of archival study,
although discussions are advancing with intensity in regard to the change
of the object of study, whereas archival information is becoming
prominent. This change still finds much resistance from the scientific
community and the professional field. [...] Based on revised literature, one
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may say that archival information poses a great challenge to the area, due
to the absence of concepts about it and to the responsibility of becoming
an object of study of Archive Science. (MONÇÃO, 2006, p. 27).
Internationally recognized authors of Archive Science, such as Heredia Herrera (1983) and
Duranti (1994), consider archival knowledge as being essentially structured around documents.
The information contained in the document is not what is of interest, and
archive science is not an “information science” (as is quite often said), or
only an “information science”, unless it has a much broader content; what
is of interest is the full meaning of each document, which is only apparent
through its connection with all the other documents of the same archive;
what is of interest is understanding how this document was produced,
through which administrative procedure and with what juridicaladministrative validity it was produced. (LODOLINI, 1988, p. 11, free
translation into Portuguese and then into English).
This is a view of an archive as a technical structure that participates simultaneously in the
recording of an event, and in it’s the production of it, which configures "[...] our political
experience of the means of information" (DERRIDA, p.29).
[...] the archival document emerges as a result of the completion of an
activity and is maintained as proof of it. And also, with the objective of
deciding, acting and controlling the decisions and actions performed, and
also to perform retrospective research that puts decisions or past actions
into evidence. (SOUSA, 2004, p.120, 122).
Archive Science is understood as a cultural technology that is incorporated into social practices,
enabling a pawning instrument of the future, based on the past, through the technique of
archiving. It points to the legitimacy and rationality sought through archival work, in the present,
of a control that would guarantee the coherence and validation of what was stored.
The reality of the archive suggests a work of continued connection between the past and the
future from the present. It guarantees the validity of an image of the past with weight of
evidence, considering a utility on the uses of the collection. In this sense, archival work consists
of the construction of a dimension that acquires functions of validating evidences of events. To
document is to make a selective accumulation of constituent records of the memory of
transactions work, on a horizon of legitimacy of life in society.
Based on this theoretical contribution, we have three contexts for examining the document: the
context of its generation in the past, the context of it organization and maintenance in the
present, and the context of its uses in the future.
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6. WHAT IS A DOCUMENT? A RECURING QUESTION
The concept of document associated with rights, goes back a long way, but new dimensions
would be included with modern history, with the demands of administrative rationality, and with
the recent informational demands. For Le Goff (1996, p. 86 and 118-119), the Renaissance was
a great period of global historical mentality. In his preface to the work of Couture and Rousseau,
Frank B. Evans (1998, p. 17), describes a movement of functional removal of the archives in the
heart of social change; there was"[...] the development of history as a discipline [...] in which
original sources are used as support materials for investigation, the deposits of the archive,
once considered first and foremost as 'arsenals of laws', are now transformed into 'arsenals of
history'.”
The document must also be evidence of past events. For this, the documents must examined to
verify their authenticity and representational character. Two elements that interest us enter into
the examination. The first is the support that the document finds in other documents, namely
other testimonies that corroborate that of the document, i.e. the constitution of a document
collection. The second is the presence of a stewarding entity that sustains the authenticity of the
documents, as well as its examination by an authority capable of interrogating them and
interpreting their answers, in order to establish the relationships between them. And as such
relationships are based on the hypotheses proposed by this specialist, they pass the test of
authenticity and representational character when these hypotheses are confirmed (Ricoeur,
2000, p.224-230). It is interesting to observe that something is a historical document when it is
perceived and treated as such.
Between the 18th and 19th Centuries, the understanding of history as a narrative of the progress
of humanity began to involve a cumulative history. The Museums and Archives, now public,
gained new responsibilities as institutions of memory (national identity), guarantors of citizens’
rights and the stewards of proofs of progress. To cumulative history corresponds the
accumulation and organization of collections that give material visibility - or documentary
evidence - to the ordering proposed by history11.
Since the document is recognized by an institution (Museum, Library, Science, the State, a
company’s executive leadership) and therefore has authority, demands of a representational
nature are placed upon this institution, from a range of groups and individuals: their struggles,
discoveries, ways of life, in the history of humanity, of the country, of the city, of the company,
etc. These demands seek to repair intentional or unintentional gaps and omissions, whether
intentional or otherwise, involving a new past, in a new narrative of the past, and consequently,
a new projection for the future.
In the field of historiography, the words of Le Goff (1996, p. 109, free translation from the
Portuguese edition into English) are indicative:
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[...] historical reflection is applied today to the absence of documents
[...] To speak of the silences of traditional historiography is not enough; I
believe it is necessary to go further: to question historical
documentation about the gaps, to interrogate it about the forgotten
aspects, about the hiatuses, and blank spaces of history. We should
take inventory of the archive of silence, and make history from the
documents and the absence of documents.
In the field of Information Science, the works of Paul Otlet (early 20th Century), Suzanne Briet
(mid-20th Century) and Michael Buckland (late-20th Century) represent landmarks in the search
to define the document.
Otlet is the first to leap from an extension of the document as the typical material of library
archives, which was charged practically with the care of books alone, to another that extends to
the actions of storing, treating and recovering a series of new objects, which warrants a new
name: documentation. In his Treatise of 1934, the typology of the objects of the documentation
was subdivided into Books and Bibliographic Documents, and the latter into Graphic Documents
and book Substitutes (OTLET, 1996, p. 124-246).
For Rayward (1994), Buckland (1997), Day (2001) and Frohmann (2001) the description of the
objects of documentation, in terms of their physical characteristics, is not a point of support for
Otlet in the characterization of what constitutes a document, but cognitive aspects are. The
understanding that “Books are at the same time the receptacle and means of transporting
ideas,” (Otlet, 1996, p. 43) is what would be used to extend the status of the document to other
types of support. The term used by these authors to define this type of concept is mentalism.
This mentalist perception is similar to the current concept that information does not have a
material nation, but one of substance produced by thought and placed within a support.
Buckland (1997) highlights the definition of the document by Donker Duyvis, who succeeded
Otlet in the International Federation for Documentation, as a repository of expressive (objective)
thought, so that its content is spiritual in nature. He also notes the definition given by Walter
Schurmeyer (1935), whereby the document would be any material base to expand our
knowledge, and which is available for study or comparison. Buckland reiterates the aspect of
intellectual, mentalist, and immaterial substance, as criteria for what constitutes a document is
for the documentalists of the early 20th Century.
Suzanne Briet, in her 1951 work “What is documentation?”, reiterates the question by promoting
a new expansion of its scope – which could even include an antelope –, understanding the
document as the support or proof of a fact, embracing every concrete or symbolic sign that has
been conserved or recorded, with the purpose of representing, reconstructing or proving a
physical or intellectual phenomenon. Consequently, what counts for something to be considered
a document is that it must constitute evidence.
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From Briet’s point of view, documents cannot be defined based on their form or content. For
example, a stone in a river is not a document, yet a stone in a museum is. A stone in a museum
is not a support of intellectual substance. But this evidence is found in a museum under certain
hypotheses and among a group of other evidences (documents). Archives and documents
come into existence together, although Briet does not arrive at this conclusion.
Buckland (1997, p. 6), based on Briet, presents a definition of a document which has with four
main characteristics: (i) There is materiality; (ii) There is intentionality: the object needs to be
treated as evidence; (iii) The object must have been processed: included in a collection. In other
words, there is no document outside the archive; (iv) There is a phenomenological position: the
object needs to be perceived as a document.
Buckland’s notions corroborate with the schematic model of three contexts for contemplating the
document: it is in the present that the archive/document is compiled for an intention or a reason.
His concluding phrase is that something is a document when it is treated like a document.
In the field of Archive Science there is a necessary connection between the document and the
archive.
Records are the carriers, products and documentation of transactions.
Not all data is a record because not all data completely represents the
transaction in which it was engaged. In fact, most information created by
and managed in information systems, is not a record and lacks the
properties of evidence. Records will only be evidence if the content,
structure and context information required to satisfy the functional
requirements for recordkeeping is captured, maintained and usable.
(BEARMAN, 1996).
7. THE DOCUMENT IN THE SCHEMATIC MODEL OF TEMPORALITY
In general, those who use the term “archivistic information” consider the arrangement that
contextualized the inscriptions only in their original environment as insufficient. There seems to
be an implicit fear as to the actual permanence of the archive, in that its maintenance cannot
ignore a present and/or future use. Now, a treatment that also considers usage would demand a
group of instruments that allow for thematic representation. The notion of information would be
especially connected with this perspective of the future.
Inscriptions are elevated to the status of document: document and archive are the same. This
collection of records is related to the administrative processes of organization, but it is in the
articulation of an inherited past, and foreseen usages that the archives are technically
processed.
Forming an Archive
Although Archive Science has traditionally elected actual maintenance of the past as the
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reason for constituting an archive, in documentary form and available to retrospective
examinations, the selection of criteria for the maintenance and elimination of documents in time
are current, and are established for a reason.
An archive in an organization is constituted by a set of motives, generally considered practical in
nature, which obey broader institutional parameters, offering documentary practices. This action
seeks to consign past acts due to precaution (fear), maintenance of rights,12 and informative
sources for management.
Maintaining the Archive
At each moment it is necessary to have reasons to maintain the archive. When the reasons
from the sphere of organization that constitutes it cease to exist, the maintenance of the archive,
or part of it, will depend on whether or not new reasons13 can be found for its maintenance. The
social dynamics demand a change of reasons that guarantee not only the maintenance of the
archive as part of the physical collection, but also its informative effectiveness.
Demands of social memory on the historiography, based on representation, inclusion, and
recognition, can modify the criteria for the selection and organization of the historical archives.
The historian, armed with criteria and methods, seeks to correct the memory, but cannot escape
from the world views of his time, nor can he be deaf to the claims of his contemporaries. If this
were not so, once history had been written, from one period or event, it would never be
modified, rectified, expanded or reinterpreted.
If the description of the funds demands faithfulness to the past, the “research instrument,” as the
final product of the archival work, could give more, or less descriptive details of the fund including generating several research instruments.
The Brazilian archival fund “Casa dos Contos” illustrates the impact of historiography on the
agenda of the Brazilian National Archive. The interest of historians in documentation, for the
historical study of mining in the state of Minas Gerais, led to a project to form a collection,
financed by a Brazilian government agency. This gave prominence and visibility to the fund that
it had not previously possessed.
When we think of the articulation between social dynamics, information needs, documents, and
archives, an evident tension appears, in which archives are spaces in constant construction.
The demands are not uniform or unequivocal. Before, and almost always, they constitute
struggles, disputes or conflicts between tradition and renovation that knock on the doors of the
archives to pass through them. And these, whether in service of the organization or in service of
the nation, will have to review their practices, re-elaborate instruments of care of the collection,
accept funds never before conceived, and in particular, reveal funds and documents that
previously had no visibility.
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In Buckland’s view (1997, p.807), accepting Briet’s notion of the document, the idea of evidence
can be understood as starting with an action performed by someone responsible for organizing
the objects within a collection. When this person considers that some of these objects can
express something to someone about the world that produced it; then this is because that
person has developed a theory as to its meaning. Based on this theory or premise, the object is
placed in evidence, i.e. it is offered as evidence, through the way which it is arranged, indexed
or presented. It is in the present context that the contemporaries will or will not give evidence.
Consequently, archives which are organized for administrative reasons, guided in the archival
institution through historiography, are, contrary to what might be expected, dynamic institutions
with diverse interests, which are being modified over the time.
It is in the tension between inherited motives - and the demand for faithfulness to the
past - on one hand, and commitment to the future, on the other, that social dynamics
influence the archives and create opposition between the document and information.
The document is linked to the notion of a natural order of its production, which must be
respected by faithfulness to the past, while the information responds to the unexpected
demands for new evidence, adopting a new arrangement that gives evidence.
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NOTAS
1
This work is the result of productive meetings in the Research Group “Information, Memory and Discourse” and we thank the
following members: Lídia de Silva Freitas, Laffayete Álvares Júnior and Márcia Heloísa Tavares de Figueiredo Lima for the
opportunities for debate and sharing of information.
2
In the context of the French Revolution, the archives were collected at the National Archive. “This was not about the
absorption or transfer of archives by another service – a practice which became popular after the 16th Century – but, effectively,
a breaking up of the structural unity of the archives. Beyond the nationalization and forced change of the documents, it is
important to emphasize the fact that for the first time in the history of archives, there was a defense against the methodical
disarticulation of the original collections, all in the name of strange values to the criteria that presided over its concentration by
the entities that produced them. It is the collapse of the systemic structure originally conceived– and which had always been
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practiced – by professionals and those responsible for the archive. It was, therefore, striking a blow on a millennial scale, of
which the raison d’etre was based on respect for the network of connections between the documents that were part of the same
system of information.” (SILVA et. al., 1999, p.101, our notes). The new proposal was that: “The general classification by
grounds is the only one truly capable of assuring the ready compliance of a regular and uniform order [...] If, in place of this
method, based, so to speak, on the nature of things, it proposes a theoretical ordering [...], the archives will fall into a disorder
that is difficult to remedy [...] In any other kind of classification that is not based on grounds, one runs the great risk of not
knowing where to find a document,” (WALLY, 1890 apud DUCHEIN, 1983, p.16). In this experience they would have
formulated the essential guidelines of the concept of archive. From that point there would be an objective understanding of this
logical unity, shaped by the group of accumulated documents in the exercise of an activity, bearing in mind it functions of
testifying to the past.
3
The table of temporality is the evaluation in terms of an indication of the length of time the documents should be stored, and
their final destination, in view of the impossibility of storing everything. It distinguishes values that mark the documents: primary
and secondary values. The documents emerge in the fulfilment of the activities performed by the producing entity of the archive,
with administrative, fiscal, legal and executive implications – primary value. The secondary values are identified in a portion of
documents that will serve, in the future, as testimony to the existence of and activities performed.
4
The perspectives, in a way, correspond to three situations and locations of archiving that have been questioned over time: the
first is the National Archives, the second is the archives maintained in public institutions, and the third is the archives maintained
in public and private organizations. Each represents a different location, situation and purpose of the archive. Nevertheless, the
emergence of each of these situations/perspectives affects the previously existing ones.
5
The present is understood as the totality of our experiences, which are present in us, whether they have occurred in the past or
are imagined events of the future. Thus, the term as it used here denotes when this totality is present. Meanwhile, to avoid
difficulties over extreme terminological precision, we will adopt the term “present” term to refer to experiences that we consider,
almost always, as not belonging to the past or to the future. Thus, what took place yesterday, or last week, we tend not to think of
as being something from the past, but what took place in the 18th Century we consider as the past.
6
Aporia is a difficulty of a relational order, apparently without solution. (FERREIRA, 2000).
7
For Koselleck the present is both the space of experience, where experience recalls the past, and the horizon of expectancy,
which looks to the future.
8 Bloch emphasizes the new approach of the history of testimonies against the will which, until then, had been relegated to
forgetfulness by the historians, by an inheritance of medieval history. “All that man says or writes, everything he manufactures,
and all that he touches can and must give information about him.” (BLOCH, /s.d./, p.61). Against document exclusion, Bloch
recognizes the validity even of false documents, since “[...] a lie, as such, is a testimony in its own right,” (Ibid, p.85).
9
Frohmann examines the practices of scientific documentation in the passage from knowledge constructed by experience
(common, collective) to the knowledge constructed by experiments (unique). The documentary practices for the description of
the experiment are developed and transmitted in pairs, so that the unique and artificial experiment gains the same status as that of
a common experiment had. The reports must place the reader as a witness to the fact. Thus, the acceptance of the research report
as valid and informative depends on a set of rules and documentary practices (social discipline), without which its informative
character would not exist (Frohmann, 2004).
10
Documentary practices need to be examined in relation to the notion or contemporary conception of institution.
11
Certain locations and disciplines are constituted or become transformed as a result of the ordering given by history, as is the
case with the Museums, Archives, Archeology, Geology, etc. The exhibitions of the Museum collections of the 19th Century
moved the visitor through an itinerary that revealed, step by step, the historical evolution of the world (BENNETT, 1996, p. 3943). According to Martín-Pozuelo Campillos, (1998, p.155) “the object of study of Archive Science is archives.” Archive Science
– institutionalized instance in a historical process, and therefore “invention,” narrative – also has its emergence carved out in
historiography. “During the 19th Century the consolidation of revolutionary ideals proclaimed at the end of the previous century
and the consolidation of a positivist perspective of History contributed to increasing the opening, albeit gradual, of the collections
of public records. The idea that the archives constituted a basis for research expanded and became widespread, and as a result, the
states had the obligation to keep them accessible” (FONSECA, 1998, p. 39).
12
Precaution, whether the loss of rights or whether for the compliance to obligations, they are inscribed in a large number of
legal institutions that regulate agreements of social relationships. To maintain a document of cogent evidence of title to a deed
only makes precautionary sense in a broad context of rights and recognition of this condition of proof. Therefore, documentary
practices, which Frohmann speaks of, are recognized in Archive Science as typology of documents.
13
A good example of this was the recall to the National Archive (NA) of the documentation of the Departamento de Polícia
Marítima e de Fronteira (the Brazilian Maritime and Border Police Department), with forms for the entry of foreigners to Brazil
in the early decades of the 20th Century. These documents were produced for the purposes of immigration control. Once the
motive for their maintenance by the department had ceased, they were preserved by being recalled to the NA, where they were
attributed new motives: historical research and the guarantee of rights of the descendants, for future claims of dual citizenship.
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