{"id":275565,"date":"2019-05-31T17:55:37","date_gmt":"2019-05-31T20:55:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=275565"},"modified":"2020-02-18T18:27:43","modified_gmt":"2020-02-18T21:27:43","slug":"in-memoriam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/in-memoriam\/","title":{"rendered":"In memoriam<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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National Museum Archives<\/span><\/a> A page of Empress Leopoldina\u2019s workbook, with annotations in Gothic GermanNational Museum Archives<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The National Museum\u2019s (physical) archives were entirely destroyed by the fire that ravaged the palace building. Since the museum\u2019s founding, its political, economic, and organizational affairs have been meticulously documented in records that also provide insight into its interactions with peer institutions in Brazil and worldwide. The institution’s record-keeping legacy is almost as old as the museum itself. Its very first bylaws, drafted in 1842, expressly required that \u201crecords be kept of board resolutions, correspondence with foreign museums, and the arrangement, storage, and preparation of the archives and library.\u201d So precious was this chronicle of the history of one of the country’s first scientific institutions, its operation, and developments in the field on the international scene, that none of these documents were allowed to be borrowed or to leave the institution’s Archives and Records Section (SEMEAR). However, being located on the third floor of the palace, it is unlikely that any items of the Historical Archives\u2014as they were called before 2002\u2014have survived the flames.<\/p>\n

Aside from the museum\u2019s bylaws and the decree by which it was founded\u2014signed by Dom Jo\u00e3o VI in 1818\u2014the archives contained inventories of the building\u2019s equipment and instruments, and journals containing records relating to controls and audits, visitor statistics, and photographic records. A perusal of the National Museum Journal of Incoming Items<\/em>\u2014better known as the \u201cDoorkeeper\u2019s Journal\u201d\u2014which was used between 1876 and 1892, would reveal, for example, that the zoology section received a collection of birds and mammals from the Jardin des Plantes Natural History Museum in Paris, and that in 1882 the French engineer and landscape designer Auguste Glaziou (1828\u20131906) sent the museum a collection of Brazilian plants that was a duplicate of another collection at a herbarium in Uppsala, Sweden.<\/p>\n

In all, there were about 500 linear meters of text documents and approximately 15,000 graphical documents in the archives, including the fonds of pioneers such as physician Adolfo Lutz (1855\u20131940), botanist Alberto Jos\u00e9 de Sampaio (1881\u20131946), and entomologist Johann Becker (1932\u20132004). The archives of the Geological Commission of the Empire, the Film Censorship Commission, the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG), and the Society of Friends of the National Museum, were also kept at SEMEAR.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I saw the flames, I went into shock,\u201d says Maria das Gra\u00e7as Freitas Souza Filho, who heads SEMEAR with a master\u2019s degree in information science. \u201cI pictured all the documents being burned, and I wept for Bertha Lutz [1894\u20131976].\u201d The eminent biologist, the daughter of Adolfo Lutz, successfully applied for tenure as a professor and researcher at the museum in 1919. An advocate of universal suffrage, she also made history as one of the leading proponents of the inclusion of gender equality in the Charter of the United Nations in 1945.<\/p>\n

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Wikimedia Commons<\/span><\/a> Bertha Lutz and the plane from which women\u2019s suffrage pamphlets were dropped over Rio in 1927Wikimedia Commons<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIn addition to her research papers, we kept her personal documents\u2014such as her correspondence with prominent feminists\u2014her typewriter, and her tape recorder.\u201d After the initial shock, Souza Filho took comfort in knowing that some of Lutz\u2019s objects and documents are stored in the National Archives and at the Federal Senate, and that a partial video record of the museum\u2019s collection had been made by Elise Dietrichson and Fatima Sator, two scholars of the University of London, who earlier this year did research at the institution on the life of Bertha Lutz.<\/p>\n

It was also thanks to technology that digital versions of 2 of Empress Leopoldina\u2019s (1797\u20131826) 31 workbooks\u2014with hand annotations in Gothic German about astronomy, botany, and mineralogy\u2014survived the fire. \u201cOn the Friday before the fire I decided to take the hard drive containing this part of the empress\u2019s fonds to a meeting at the National Archives. So it was safe at my house on Sunday, and spared from the fire,\u201d recalls Souza Filho. Shortly after the fire, she began receiving messages and phone calls from scientists from around the world, such as ethnographer Elena Soboleva of the Russian Academy of Sciences, offering to send digitized copies of documents from the archives compiled during research done at the institution.<\/p>\n

Information system<\/strong>
\nTo handle and store these materials, SEMEAR has been supported since mid-September by a task force organized by the Research, Education, and Science Outreach Council at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, which has been tasked with managing the dedicated email account set up for this correspondence (museunacionalresgate@gmail.com<\/a>). The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation is also part of a working group\u2014along with the Brazilian College of Higher Learning (CBAE), the Archives of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the National Archives, and the Brazilian Institute for Science and Technology, among other institutions\u2014that will oversee the reorganization of the museum\u2019s historical archives. On the group\u2019s agenda is the development of a prospective new research information system for SEMEAR, called Colheita.<\/p>\n

Working alongside Souza Filho at the archive department are four staff members: an archivist, a historian, and two assistants. Seven high school students from Col\u00e9gio Pedro II were doing research at the archives as part of the museum\u2019s scientific initiation program (PIC Jr) when the building was destroyed. \u201cI had heard the name of Bertha Lutz in a rap song, but I had no idea who she was. I also knew nothing about archives or fonds,\u201d says one of the students, Joseane Amorim, aged 16. \u201cAt the museum I learned, among other things, that it was thanks to Lutz that I now have the right to vote,\u201d says Sofia Pugliese, 18, another student in the program. Twenty days after the tragedy, the group met for the first time in a room provided by the CBAE to plan the next steps in their research\u2014part of SEMEAR\u2019s mission is precisely to support research on the history of the museum and the palace building and, above all, the institutionalization of science in Brazil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The National Museum’s Historical Archives, which were consumed by the fire, will be reconstituted based on records made over the years on a variety of media ","protected":false},"author":522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1319],"class_list":["post-275565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","keywords-national-museum"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275565"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289108,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275565\/revisions\/289108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275565"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=275565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}