Archives “of” museum, Archives “in” museum: reflexions about National Historic Museum (Brazil)

Abstract

The National Historical Museum (NHM), in Brazil, a secular institution, has a large collection relating to Brazilian historical processes, with a special focus on the II Reign (1840-1889). It has sections such as Numismatics, Library, Historical Archive, in addition to its Technical Reserve to organize and process your documents. In the field of Archive Science, since its revitalization process (1984-1989), the museum adopted principles of records management, in addition to implementing what was called an institutional archive – a work unit responsible for managing the set of records produced or received by the institution, in its business transactions, regardless of the nature of its supports. Thus, the article aims is to understand the specificities of archives in museum institutions, using as a laboratory the National Historical National. To reach this goal, in addition to the study in the empirical laboratory, we will compare it with a broad literature review about archives, documents, museums, collections and museum collections. Our objective is to understand whether there are differences in the treatment of documents produced by museum institutions and those held by them. Our main hypothesis is that we can differentiate such treatments in archives “of” museums and archives “in” museums. The first ones are closer to the established concept of archive for literature in the area. The second would be collections named as archives.