The process of reconstituting access to documentation in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's Charity Service Archive

Abstract

For Eric Ketelaar, research on archives allows - through the study of their context, purpose of creation, users and holders, as builders of memory over time and space - to question why. In addition to questioning being fundamental for a posteriori investigation in the archive — starting from the study of the archive and its structure to later explore its contents — it is an instrument of experimentation and change necessary to “save the profession” (1999, p. 4).

Starting from the study of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Charity Service archive, the aim was to question its context of production and referencing. The Charity Service, as one of the four founding services, was responsible for managing subsidies granted to institutions named by Calouste Gulbenkian in his will, coordinating new requests for subsidies, as well as responding to unexpected situations that caused weaknesses in a given community in a national and international territory (for example: the Lisbon floods of 1967, the returnees from Angola in 1975, the earthquake in the Azores in 1980, etc.). The archive of this organic unit, in custody of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Archive, allows not only the monitoring of the myriad of individual and collective subsidy processes, which over the several decades of activities benefited various initiatives but also changes in direction and designation over time^[1]. In terms of size, the Service Archive is made up of 1047 storage units, making up approximately 105 linear meters of documentation that accompany the temporal arch between 1953 to mid-2013 — in 2001, in the “Diagnosis of the Archival System”, an internal publication, it was estimated that the Gulbenkian Archive would comprise around 4,000 meters of documentation, with the archive of this organic unit accounting for around 2.6%.

In the January 2008 internal newsletter of the FCG, João Vieira points out that one of the great challenges in describing the institution’s Archives is “the fact that the archive is extensive, that some sectors are in a foreign language (including Armenian) and that some subjects or themes are particular and complex for us archivists, especially those related to the financial and oil areas”. These challenges and the constraints related to the services referral systems (which were unique in each organic unit) made the investigation and description process difficult.

Beyond striving to describe the process of reconstituting access to documentation, this work seeks to peer into and decipher the logic, at first sight paradoxical, of the codes used by that organic unit. In this sense, it became clear that the opportunity to get in touch with the producers, managers and collectors of a given archive should not, under any circumstances, be wasted.

Finally, it is dedicated to reflecting on the gap between administrative and archival culture, which can lead to significant knowledge losses, thus forecasting mitigation strategies.

^[1] In 1971 the Charity Service was renamed to Health and Social Protection Service, and from 2001 to 2013, it was called Health and Human Development Service.