Abstract/Résumé/Resumen
The paper aims to analyze the accumulation process of documents produced either by the Observatory, or linked to it, in the period dating from the structural construction of the institution and the effective beginning of its document production in 1846, until the final installation of the institution in São Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro, in 1922. Initially, the intention of this paper is to relate the changes in property and custody of the documents, the technical interventions, the diversions and accidents that happened throughout the time to the institution in question, identifying them with the partial loss of the institution’s memory in its period of organization. In order to make it possible, we turn to ‘the memory of the loss’ – stories, researches and reflections upon the same process. We will mainly use the institutional documentation of the National Observatory dated from that period that was preserved and which is currently under the care of the Astronomy and Related Sciences Museum (MAST), being organized by the authors of this paper. This body of documents presents gaps in certain time periods and in order to understand them, when filling them in is possible, besides the stories and reflections previously mentioned, we opted for the search of the Observatory’s information and documents related to that time period, which are now dispersed among different archives and institutions, with which the Observatory was institutionally connected, and places where the governmental memory is kept, such as the National Archive and the National Library. With that in mind, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how this diverse information external to the Observatory’s archives have been used in order to comprehend its composition, and especially the gaps, making that information instrumental to the comprehension of the institution’s history.
