Arquivística: novos reptos para o futuro

Abstract

Born as an empirical practice, as old as the earliest civilizations, Archivistics had a natural evolution, shaped by the development of document-producing organizations / institutions, and, until the French Revolution, it followed a way for the service of power and the dominant classes, the only who knew the writing, dictated the laws and documented the actions they were carrying out, for legal and administrative purposes or simply for future memory. From the nineteenth century onwards, Archivistics entered a new phase, affirming itself as an auxiliary discipline of History, within the framework of positivism and the development of science and, at the turn of the century, the technicist side and the relationship with the administration gave it a new outfit, freeing it progressively from the tutelage of history. The historicist and custodial paradigm, which was consolidated during the century of eight hundred, began to show signs of crisis, which were accentuated from the second half of the twentieth century due to the technological revolution, which began after the Second World War. In the last four decades, a new paradigm began to be established, positioning Archivistics in the field of information and giving it a status of applied scientific discipline. In the midst of the digital and in a network era, the challenges posed to this discipline can not fail to require a scientific positioning, with a solid epistemological, theoretical and methodological foundation, to sustain it and make it operative in the most varied contexts in which organic information, socially produced, is generated and managed. The definitive transition to this new paradigm is a fundamental condition for the survival of Archivistics, a structuring discipline in the preservation of individual and collective memory, as an identity factor for peoples and nations that will last in the future.