Few people know what is the destiny of the enormous documentation produced and rubber stamped annually by public administration – even the workers and managers are not aware of the norms for the storage and elimination of papers, certificates, documents or any other type of official record. In São Paulo, the command all of the process is at the hands of the Office of the State Archives. The current legislation was defined through the Decree 22,789 of the 10th of October 1984. “It was a large step for democracy, exactly during the year of political opening, which guaranteed to all citizens access to public documents and to their contents”, explains Ana Maria de Almeida Camargo, a professor at the History Department of the Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences School of USP. However, the laws have not been complied with adequately.
Thus, Ana Maria is coordinating a project on documental administration, with the support of FAPESP and in partnership with the Office of the State Archives, which intends to develop homogeneous standards for the recording of administrative acts. The State Archive – which has existed since colonial times – should and must know where and how each document produced by public organizations is being archived, “in such a way as to guarantee access of everyone to this material, which is an important instrument for the elaboration of public policies”, emphasizes Ana Maria.
Nevertheless, “this job remained obscure for a long time, as the State secretaries quit sending their documents to the archive many years ago” states Ieda Pimenta Bernardes, the coordinator of the Archives System of the State of São Paulo. “Innumerable documents, that are public patrimony, were even destroyed without the knowledge of the institution, and this cannot occur under any circumstances.”
One of the goals is to define the preservation time for each type of document, either in the State Archive or in the archives that each public organization can maintain (assuming it is open to the public). “The main vocation of the State Archive is to be an organ that creates norms and inspects, rather than merely a deposit for papers. For this reason, the decentralization of the archives is one of our goals”, says Ieda. Another point is the standardization of nomenclature of the documents; without which it will not be possible to transpose the records into electronic means – which will only occur, anyhow, when the authenticity of the electronic documents can be guaranteed and when the Brazilian archives receive modern equipment to substitute their obsolete computers.
The project, which began to get under way in November of 1999, should be concluded by December of 2002. As soon as it is completed, the government has made committed to enacting a law which will establish new rules for the Documental Management Program of São Paulo, to be adopted by all of the state towns. “In the Information Technology Era this project is provoking a true silent revolution, being an essential step for the modernization of the State” says the researcher Ana Maria.
Until then, however, large hurdles will have to be confronted. “The culture of public institutions will have to be changed, according to which archives serve only as a paper depository”, she recognizes. “There is no point in investing millions in information technology without having the content available to feed the network.”
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