Archives are places of memories, essential to the knowledge and understanding of a country, which are configured in documents of different formats, supports and codes, produced over time by different techniques and technologies, which the man always had the notion that he needed to preserve to ensure rights, duties or just remember, because “remembering is not only living, it is living well” (Paulo Bertolucci).

The preservation of memory is thus one of the corollaries of archival management, and due to the large and somewhat uncontrolled document production of recent decades, it requires rigorous evaluation, selection, and elimination processes to identify the relevant contents to be described and preserved.

Preservation in turn requires great efforts from the institutions, relying on the diversity and complexity of equipment needed for the different areas, specialized and updated human resources in addition to management policies that allow the preservation of different contents, both analog and digital, in the long term.

Another of the corollaries of the Archives is the diffusion, because in the era of globalization it is essential to affirm the identity of a people. Spreading the archival heritage, archive by archive, contributing to an integrating and global network, is the best way to enrich a country and to accentuate its difference, thus giving its democratic contribution to a globalizing History.

This session will have the participation of Inês Correia (DGLAB/ANTT), Anabela Ribeiro (DGLAB/ANTT), Luís Pereira (restorer conservative) and will be moderated by Maria de Lurdes Rosa (IEM-FCSH/NOVA).

Organization: IEM-FCSH/NOVA; CHAM-FCSH/NOVA, UAc; IHC-FCSH/NOVA; Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas