Representação da informação nas cartas do Fundo Arquivístico Antônio Martins Filho na Universidade Federal do Ceará

Abstract

This work addresses issues relative to the representation of information and has as its general goal to analyze the criteria to be adopted for the construction of the indexical representation of letters of a personal archive from the archival science’s perspective. The object of analysis is a series of correspondences which integrate the personal archive of Antônio Martins Filho, one of the founders and first president of the Federal University of Ceará. It is an exploratory research having as locus the UFC’s Memorial (Department of Archives), the entity with the custody of the abovementioned president’s personal archive. The research corpora were constituted by means of a sample of 200 letters received between 1935 and 2001. These documents were analyzed through the archival science’s point of view, observing the criteria of documental identification in letters of personal archives so that, afterwards, the indexical representation is constructed with views of recovering the information. The terms and subjects which originated the letters have been mapped and, next, two models of conceptual maps have been constructed. One of them concerning the subjects of the personal letters received by Antônio Martins Filho and another evidencing the fields of Information Science and Archival Science. Moreover, an archivistic repertoire has been structured for the identification of subjects related to the context of production of these documents. The information produced has been categorized, enabling the indexation and, henceforward, the elaboration of more detailed research instruments. The results evidence twenty-five (25) terms related to the heading metadata of the map and a hundred and six (106) subjects (subcategories) of each letter. Therefore, we drew the conclusion that, in the letters which were object of analysis, personal and institutional aspects were mixed, as well as historical and memory aspects, which constitutes a hard task to define points of access that can ben utilized for its indexical representation. Therefore, it is evident that, although there already are archival criteria structured for letters in general, when it comes of the peculiarity of these documents, new possibilities of criteria are necessary.