A indexação para a organização de acervos permanentes

Abstract

Permanent collections are spaces of memory, have a social function in the space they occupy, constituting an inexhaustible source for research, whether academic and scientific or not. The relevance of indexing with regard to the organization of permanent files is very important, as it is used with an action to describe, identify and retrieve a certain document, with the intention of achieving excellence in information retrieval. Many professionals organize archives according to empirical non­archival criteria, creating a problem of inconsistency between custody and access to stored documents, precisely because the collections do not meet archival standards, premises and foundations. The objective of this research is to diagnose the indexing processes of permanent collections in five public agencies. Specifically, it is intended to: contextualize the specialized literature on the theoretical and methodological framework of the Knowledge Organization, in terms of: the archival representation, the rules for archival description and indexing in permanent collections and the analyze how the process of indexing permanent collections in public agencies occurs. The methodology consisted of a set of procedures, including research steps, questionnaire application, structured in the form of open, closed and multiple choice questions, sent by e­mail to five professionals/archivists, whose subjects in this study are representatives of the archives of the Federal University of Pará; of the Public Archive of the State of Pará; of the Federal University of Minas Gerais; of the Federal University of Bahia and from the Federal University of Paraná. The results showed that the indexing procedures that are being used in the permanent archives of the researched institutions are characterized by the lack of pre­defined guidelines for indexing; absence of elaboration of a manual to index; little use of Software to index and the field to include terms; as they also use few cross­references; indexing time is not evaluated; little use of catalogs and/or databases; the number of assigned terms is not measured; do not have a degree of specificity; uses little controlled language; professionals/archivists have no knowledge of indexing instruments and have little automatic help in the process of permanent collections. Those indications allow us to conclude that: The investigated public institutions do not adopt indexing procedures, as they are limited in this process, the most evident cause of which is the absence of a policy focused on that activity, which ultimately results in little use and lack knowledge of archival tools. It was also found that these same institutions use forms of information representation for their search and retrieval, having as methodological­theoretical parameter to assist the archivist two pertinent tools: (a) the fundamentals of Information Science, and (b) NOBRADE, based on the premises of international norms, to describe the documentals in the researched collections.