Brazilian National Archives

The Public Archives of the Brazilian Empire

The regulation No. 2, of January 2, 1838, created the Public Archives of the Brazilian Empire, as provided for in the Constitution of 1824, provisionally established in the Secretariat of State for the Business of the Empire. The creation of the National Archives, together with the Brazilian Historic and Geographic Institute, which added to the Imperial Academy of the Arts, joined the regency effort of Pedro de Araújo Lima, future Viscount and Marqués de Olinda, for the construction of an imperial State.

The Public Archives of the Empire was intended to safeguard public documents and was organized into three sections: Administrative, responsible for the documents of the Executive and Moderator powers; Legislative, in charge of the custody of the documents produced by the Legislative Power and the Historical Section, responsible for the most important documents for the history of Brazil. Its first headquarters was located in the building of the Ministry of the Empire, in the street of the Guarda Velha Street, current Treze de Maio Avenue. In 1844, the Public Archives of the Empire came to stay in Praça do Comércio, on Direita Street, today Primeiro de Março Avenue, Rio de Janeiro.

Initially the organ functioned as a distribution attached to the Secretariat of State for the Business of the Empire, becoming autonomous in 1840. However, it occupied the secretarial building until 1854, when it was transferred to the upper floor of the Convent of Santo Antônio. In 1860, decree n. 2,541 reformed the institution, maintaining the same division of the sections, however, detailing a little more the attributions of each one.

From the decade of 1870, a greater structuring of the organ is observed. In the year 1870, the archive came to occupy the old building of the Recolhimento do Parto dos Terceiros da Ordem do Carmo. In 1873, Joaquim Pires Machado Portella became director of the institution, and in the following year the archive was opened for public consultation. A new regulation was adopted, approved by Decree n. 6.164, of March 24, 1876, determining various transformations and establishing more detailed work procedures. With the Republic, in 1911, the organ had its name altered for National Public Archives, like many other institutions that possessed the term "Imperial" in their names.

The Reformation of José Honório Rodrigues

For José Honório Rodrigues, director from 1958 to 1964, the National Archives "was stagnant, impervious to initiative, as a model of archaic institution, a ghost of other times". In order to change that situation, as director of the National Archives, José Honório Rodrigues himself achieved the approval of a new Regulation by Decree No. 44,862, of November 21, 1958, which defines the Archive as a national distribution, establishes the archives policy, its attributions and objectives, defends and extends the collection selected throughout the national territory and in all sources of federal documentation; it extends to the defense by the preservation of documents in films, discs, photographs; it creates research and historical information services, relating them to equal services in the Armed Forces and in other public and private institutions". Thus, "with this proposal of a centralizing body for the regulation of archival procedures, it is reaffirmed the idea of Archives as a space of Power". During José Honório Rodrigues' period, one can also observe the development of various courses related to the training of professionals able to work in archives. Such courses, in 1977, gave rise to the first course of graduation in Archival science, at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro.

The institutional modernization of the 1980s

With the approval in 1975 of a new regulation an important step was taken, when the idea of document management was incorporated, through the Pre-Archive Division, which was installed itself in Brasilia the following year, demonstrating the Archives concern with its actions before the public administration in the capital. The preservation of documents of the public power as a purpose of the National Archives System (SINAR) was one of the conquests of the late 1970s. With the National Archives as the central organ, the system was composed of the bodies of the direct and indirect federal administration that had intermediate and permanent archiving activities.

Following the suggestion of UNESCO, at the request of the general director of the National Archives, Celina Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, of a "pilot project of modernization of traditional type within an archives institution" and to guarantee a radical change, it was necessary to translation to a new headquarters; the identification of all the documents kept in the National Archives; the census of the fonds not collected and the training of the workers of the institution. These were the conditions required for the preparation of federal legislation and a new structure for the National Archives. The result of an agreement between the Ministry of Justice and the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV), the Administrative Institutional Modernization Project of the National Archive was signed in 1981, as the subsequent passage of the Archives to the autonomous body of the direct administration in the structure of the Ministry and the transfer to the building attached to the old Casa da Moeda, in January 1985, the interest of international organizations in that decade was awakened.

Thus, on January 3, 1985, the National Archives os Brazil moved to its current headquarters, which occupies one of the buildings of the old Casa da Moeda (1868–1983), one of the most beautiful buildings built in the nineteenth century style in the Praça da República. After an award-winning restoration process, in 2004, it occupies the historical part of that architectural ensemble. In Brasilia, while it does not havea specific building, the AN uses since 1988 part of the facilities of the National Press (Imprensa Nacional), having 18 thousand meters of shelves for guard of documents in its regional coordination – at the moment, the only one outside Rio de Janeiro.