Abstract/Résumé/Resumen
Over the past decades, the activities carried out in research institutes have produced a number of documents which presents as an important scientific source to be preserved as an institutional memory, to be explored, especially in the field of history of science studies. That is the case of the documents held in various media types preserved by the Time Service Division (DSHO) of to the National Observatory (ON), organized through the project: “Analytical Inventory of Brazilian Legal Hour,” which relies on the advices of the History of Science coordination of Astronomical Museum (AHC / MAST). The main challenge was to develop an archival arrangement that would allow access to both institutional information on academic research. Despite that it was a sectorial archival of collection of the National Observatory, the documents show quite a different feature, compared to the main ensemble. The DSHO archives the file lack internal parameters such as an organization chart, for example, which allows the development of sets and subsets of documents, based on activities of the sector. On the other hand, to make intelligible the whole collection consisting of letters, studies, books of observations, internal bulletins, maps, guides of nineteenth century instruments and measurement records, related to the activities developed by the sector and mainly about the capture and dissemination of the Brazilian Legal Time, it was decided to prepare a logical arrangement to organize the documents by theme emphasizing their subjects individually. The objective of this paper is to present and discuss the parameters that theoretically guided the choices in the preparation of the arrangement of the Archival Collection of the Brazilian Legal Time (FHLB), to facilitate access to this important source of scientific research on the history of Brazilian science.
