Importance of documentary genesis for the identification of photographic collections

Abstract

The fragility of the support and the high interest in images that photographic collections arouse often entail large losses at the time of identifying and organizing the material. Thus, the concern with the rescue, preservation and dissemination of the historical and academic memory of a university located in a countryside city in the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil, through photographic images, is present in the project “Photographic Memorial of FFC”, that emphasizes the important events of the academic trajectory which covers the period from 1959 to 1999 through the scanning of the most important photographs as well as their descriptive representation. In order to organize and transfer such material to the Central Archive of the University, we tried to keep the origin of those documents not to lose their historicity and formation. From that moment, the project was divided into two research fronts: the first one involved with the discussions of terms and methods of descriptive representation and scanning photos; and the other one was related to identify the documentary genesis through historical and legislation surveys, and the collection of testimonies of the professionals who worked with the documents. As a result, 2220 photographs distributed on 57 documentary series were scanned and described.