Centros de documentação e memória universitários: histórico e características de atuação no cenário nacional

Abstract

A Documentation and Memory center is a relatively recent category of heritage protection unit. Compared to its better-known “brothers” (museums, archives and libraries), the documentation center still has little reach and recognition not only in academy but in brazilian society as a whole. Despite that, it is possible to recognize the existence of several of these documentation centers spread across public and private institutions in the country, with their recent but fruitful spread beginning around the 1970s. Their names may vary from institution to institution: we found also “Memory Center”, “Documentation and Research Center” and “Documentation Center” as some examples of names used to designate instances that are the same or very similar to each other. The discussions that involve the use of this concept, its characteristics and contradictions will be addressed in this work, as well as the discussion of some of the intricacies that enabled the creation of documentation and memory centers in the Brazilian university context at the end of the last century, pointing out possible causes that contributed to their spread throughout national universities. Finally, we seek to investigate some of their forms of action, pointing out common characteristics found in the actions of some of them, using for that the direct investigation of four of these centers, forming an approximate picture of the performance of a documentation center nationally.