Abstract/Résumé/Resumen
Over their functional lives at the University of São Paulo, professors and researchers keep in their offices and laboratories vast sets of documents composed by items that reflect wide ranges of activities performed by them in the fields of teaching and scientific research, as well as events in the sphere of private life. As repositories of records that testify a significant part of Brazilian scientific environment, such archives have been on the margins of records preservation programs over the eighty years of the university’s existence, and, for this reason, they have been almost fully ignored by great part of academic community. In this paper, we aim to present the results of two different, but interrelated research projects developed from 2012 to 2014, with the objective of mapping the existence of faculty personal archives in 49 colleges and institutes of the University of São Paulo, in order to diagnose the terms of transfer and acquisition, archival processing, and diffusion of such archives. The initiative led to the creation of Docere database, sponsored by the USP General Archives, gathering information about the 280 faculty personal archives identified during the development of both projects. Based on this diagnosis, we intend to discuss practical and theoretical challenges around the need of creation of a memorial policy to the university, which addresses the preservation of faculty personal archives as one of its main purposes, taking into account sensitive issues as the tenuous, and often undefined boundaries between documents’ personal or institutional character; the misunderstanding, by the university’s officials, of the concept of archives, in general, and, particularly, of the concept of personal archives; the management of physical space for storage (or, in most of the cases, the lack of it), and the responsibility for the custody of such archives, all these factors exacerbated by the complexity of an institution with the dimensions of the University of São Paulo, where different local (and peculiar) administrative cultures coexist and vary from college to college, which don’t allow us much room for maneuver.
