The Institutionalization of Archival Science in Brazil and the Administrative Reforms during Vargas’s First Government (1935-1945) ¹

ABSTRACT

This paper adopts a historical perspective to analyze the activities of the Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público (Civil Service Administration Bureau, DASP), created during the Brazilian Estado Novo (New State) regime in 1938. DASP was responsible for implementing an innovative project, separating administration and politics, during a period when power became concentrated on the Brazilian presidency. It argues that the bureau was a disseminator of actions that gave birth to the modern phase of archival knowledge, translated into the techniques, methods and practices applied by archival science, and designed to find its own place in the reformed public administration. It presents the institutionalizing phase of archival science within the context of the administrative reforms of the Getúlio Vargas government. This phase can only be understood by investigating its relations to the emerging fields of librarianship and documentation, both also part of DASP’s innovative project. The paper aims to identify the institutionality of archives and archival science achieved at the end of the period under study. This aim in mind, it uses the documents in DASP’s archives held at the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro as the main source of research.

Keywords:
Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público, Brazil (DASP); Archival history; Getúlio Vargas government (1930-1945); administrative reform

RESUMO

Este artigo aborda, em perspectiva histórica, a atuação do Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público (Dasp), criado em 1938, durante o Estado Novo, com a tarefa de empreender um projeto modernizador capaz de viabilizar a separação entre política e administração no contexto de forte centralização do poder na Presidência da República. Considera que o Departamento foi agente promotor de ações que configuram a gênese da fase moderna do conhecimento arquivístico, traduzido em técnicas, métodos e práticas da arquivologia e destinado a encontrar lugar na administração pública reformada. Apresenta, no contexto da reforma administrativa do governo Getúlio Vargas, essa fase de institucionalização da arquivologia que só se pode compreender se forem analisadas suas relações com as áreas emergentes da biblioteconomia e documentação contempladas no projeto modernizador do novo órgão. O artigo se propõe a apontar a institucionalidade dos arquivos e da arquivologia alcançada ao fim do período estudado. Para tanto, utiliza como principal fonte de pesquisa os documentos do fundo Dasp depositado no Arquivo Nacional, no Rio de Janeiro.

Palavras-chave:
Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público; História da arquivologia; governo Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945); reforma administrativa

The history of archives and archival science²⁶ in twentieth-century Brazil has been a topic of growing interest among scholars. In this work, I analyze the processes involved in the institutionalization of archival science in Brazil, seeking to understand its historical trajectory during the first Vargas government, taking as temporal landmarks the creation of the Joint Commission for Economic-Financial Reform in 1935 and, in 1945, the end of the New State and the departure of Luiz Simões Lopes from the presidency of the Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público (Civil Service Administration Bureau, DASP).

Created in 1938 during the New State with the remit of implementing a modernizing project capable of separating politics and administration in a context in which power had become strongly centralized on the Presidency of the Republic, DASP can be seen as an agent promoting actions that shaped the birth of the modern phase of the archival knowledge, translated into the techniques, methods and practices of archival science and destined to find a place in the reformed public administration. At the same time, I shall argue that this phase in the institutionalization of archival science can only be understood by analyzing its relations with the emergent areas of librarianship and documentation, both part of the new bureau’s modernizing project. This aim in mind, I turn to documents contained in the DASP archive deposited at the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro as my main research source. Identifying the institutionality of archives and archival science achieved at the end of the period forms the focal point of this text.

Since the mid-2000s, a series of works (Crivelli; Bizello, 2012; Fonseca, 2005; 2006; Gomes, 2011; Marques, 2007; 2013; Melo; Silva; Dorneles, 2017; Rodrigues, 2006; Santos, 2010; Silva, M., 2010; Silva, 2013) have focused their analysis on the historical trajectory of archival science in Brazil with the aim of comprehending the process of institutionalization in its different dimensions and aspects, and its relation to the scientific status that the discipline sought to acquire. In my view, there is no way to dissociate the application of the historically constructed theoretical principles, methods, techniques and practices of archival sciences from the actions and strategies of the main social actors involved, whether institutions, associations, groups or individuals.

Adopting a historical perspective, therefore, the article’s seeks to analyze the administrative reforms implemented during the first Vargas government, spanning from 1935 to 1945, and the role of DASP in the constitution of a State bureaucratic workforce, including archivists, librarians and documentalists, many of whom undertook courses and internships in the United States. In the same context of the 1930s and 1940s, documentation emerged as an area distinct from archival science and librarianship, but with each area establishing strong relations with the other two. In this political-institutional, social and cultural environment, archivists and librarians who would come to play a prominent role from the 1950s on were then just starting their professional careers. Accompanying some of these trajectories and the institutional loci where they developed is one of the study’s main objectives. At the same time, it offers an analysis of the origins and the relations, dialogues and tensions existing between archival science, librarianship and documentation in Brazil.

STATE, ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM, AND THE ‘POLITICAL GRAMMAR’ OF THE VARGAS ERA

Brought to power in October 1930 by a self-proclaimed revolutionary movement, Getúlio Vargas assumed the Presidency of the Republic and went on to head a decisive stage in the process of constituting the Brazilian State as a national, capitalist and bourgeois entity - a State committed to a project that favored the advance of capitalism and created mechanisms to control the working class. The breakup of autonomous state structures and the support for regionalized traditional oligarchies resulted in an increased centralization of power, intended to give the federal executive command over economic and social politics. The State that emerged in 1930 was born from the crisis among the ruling oligarchies of the Old Republic, and the groups that took over command of the country began to lay the foundations for a strong and centralizing State, whose intervention in the economy would increase. The country’s population grew and a more diversified society emerged, more industrial than agrarian. It was in this new era, the “womb of Modern Brazil,” as Francisco Iglésias (2014) puts it, that “models of production and administration were imposed that were then being developed in countries with advanced economies and societies founded on administrative rationality.”²⁷

Organizing the national State on new bases and ensuring the necessary legal stipulations, required the expansion of civil service institutions and staff. In fact, between 1920 and 1940, the number of civil servants per thousand inhabitants in the Southeast and South regions doubled from 7 to 14. The rapid expansion of state functions was the main reason for this growth.²⁸ In November 1930, after the establishment of the Provisional Government, two new ministries were created: the Ministry of Education and Public Health and the Ministry of Labor, Industry and Trade (Santos, 2010). By the end of the year Vargas’s main concerns in relation to the administrative reform planned for the first years of his government had already been delineated: on one hand, strengthen the federal administrative organization, taking the labor and health sectors as a baseline; on the other, introduce measures for administrative streamlining, looking to increase savings and efficiency.

The initial step in this administrative reform process was taken in March 1935 with the creation of the Joint Commission for Economic-Financial Reform, whose subcommission for readjustment of civil service personnel undertook a detailed study of the civil service’s dimensions. In the following year, the Joint Commission took over from the Readjustment Commission. Appointed by Getúlio Vargas to head the commission, the agricultural engineer Luiz Simões Lopes²⁹ elaborated the first plan for classifying federal government posts based on a merit system. This work assumed the form of a law bill and, in October 1936, resulted in the creation³⁰ of the Conselho Federal de Serviço Público Civil (Federal Civil Service Council, CFSPC) (Silva, 2006, p. 85), which aimed to rebuild the public administration framework on new and solid bases, endowing it with a rational structure and secure operational regulations. For Simões Lopes, the main goals were: full implementation of the job classification plan; introduction of a merit system through the creation of civil service entrance exams; institution of rules for promotion; and the founding of the Instituto de Previdência e Assistência dos Servidores (Civil Servant Welfare and Support Institute, IPASE) (Lopes, 2003).

Over the next two years, the CFSPC assumed the lead role in coordinating administrative reform in the country, while simultaneously preparing the way for installation of DASP, created by Decree-Law no. 579, on June 30^th 1938, in compliance with Article 67 of the 1937 Constitution, which inaugurated the New State. Subordinate to the President of the Republic with responsibility for the areas of organization, methods and budget execution, its initial objectives were, however, broadened to include the administration of staff and material. This amplification of its objects, which led it to absorb both the CFSPC and the Standardization Permanent Commission, made DASP more wide-ranging than its original model, the United States Budget Bureau, making it more like the General Administration Department (Wahrlich, 1983).³¹

According to Edson de Oliveira Nunes (2010), during the first Vargas government (1930-1945), the recently created agencies and regulations experienced “three new grammars” articulating the relations between State and society: corporative legislation was implemented and corporative institutions were created; bureaucratic insulation was tested by means of new state agencies and companies; and finally an attempt was made to establish universal procedures, principally through civil service reform and the implantation of a merit system (Nunes, 2010, p. 73). In Nunes’s assessment, DASP, created in 1938, was the most important example of bureaucratic insulation at the time and symbolized the search for rationalization that characterized the period. Also in the author’s view, as a correlate to ‘rationalization,’ DASP’s biggest objectives were centralization, standardization and coordination (Nunes, 2010, p. 81). For Carlos Henrique Paiva, the administrative reform of the Vargas Era laid the foundations for the construction of an opposition, according to which the technical field possesses a beneficial neutrality and also a kind of constant distortion, real or potential, in the field of politics (Paiva, 2009, p. 787). Paiva turns to other authors to reinforce his line of analysis and critique of this “neutrality of technique,” or the “absolute divorce between patrimonialist and bureaucratic practices,” by emphasizing the low impact, limits, interactions or accommodations that took place as part of the institutional and administrative reform led by DASP.

Under Luiz Simões Lopes’s direction and with the unconditional support of Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian government, the department centralized the administrative reform of the civil service, introducing modern recruitment and promotion criteria that elected merit as the basic qualification. It performed a set of regulative, control and operative functions in the administration of staff, highlighting the activities of civil servant selection and advanced training. In this way, a process of staff professionalization was initiated with the selection of civil servants via exams and advanced training offered to them through courses, lectures and foreign study scholarships (Silva, 2006, p. 87). In a statement to CPDOC/FGV, Simões Lopes highlighted the law obtained from the head of the Executive Power, authorizing the bureau to run an annual program that sent civil servants for training overseas, each permanently accompanied by a DASP ‘deputy’ also living in the foreign country. In the positive vision of Simões Lopes, the administration thereby began to acquire a large number of ‘highly qualified’ employees who would later occupy prominent positions in the government itself or in international bodies like the United Nations (UN) (Silva, 2006, p. 105).

As the predecessor to DASP, CFSPC even proposed to the President of the Republic the approval of general regulations for a program of specialization and advanced training of civil servants overseas. After their absorption by the new body, these regulations were approved by Decree-Law no. 776, on October 7^th 1938, which remained in force until 1945 (Wahrlich, 1983, p. 155). In this context, the primary destination for federal civil servants sent for training overseas was the United States.³² From the start of 1938, an intense exchange of information took place between Brazilian government agencies and the country’s embassy in the United States, the latter responsible for identifying possibilities for studies in diverse areas of administration, including library science and public archives.³³

One of the main strands of DASP’s activities was the constitution of a professional bureaucratic State workforce. The core element of the support offered by the department to Brazil’s public administration was the entry into public service of a group of professionals qualified in diverse careers, and their later advanced training. In my own research (Santos, 2010; 2014), I ascertained that library, documentation and archive activities were equally covered, like the areas of administration, economics and engineering. The regulation of specific courses, the holding of entrance exams and the dispatching of professionals to study overseas were some of the measures implemented.

DASP: BETWEEN DOCUMENTATION AND LIBRARY

The adoption of librarianship practices and methods in Brazil was accompanied from the beginning of the twentieth century by the institutionalization of teaching, marked by the creation of a ‘Librarianship’ course at the National Library in 1911. However, the course activities were only begun in 1915 and lasted until 1923 when a ‘Technical Course’ was established at the National History Museum, aimed at training librarians, paleographers, archivists and archaeologists. The National History Museum project failed to take off and the National Library would only revive its course in 1931, by when a second course had already been created in 1929 at the Instituto Mackenzie in São Paulo, strongly influenced by US techniques. In the 1940s, more precisely in 1944, the National Library course underwent widespread reform during the administration of Rodolfo Garcia. Projected and executed by a team from the institution, the reform represented especially the replacement of the emphasis on humanist preparation by the emphasis on technical preparation, reflecting a new positioning of Brazilian librarians (Castro, 2000, p. 81).

Rio de Janeiro, the federal capital at the time, and São Paulo constituted teaching spaces that, in the view of César Castro (2000), fulfilled an important role at the beginning of librarianship as a discipline in Brazil. In São Paulo, at the initiative of Rubens Borba de Moraes, a librarianship course was created in 1936 at the City Council’s Department of Culture, transferred four years later to the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política (ELSP). It subsequently received subsidies from the Rockefeller Foundation, allowing it to widen its activities and provide study grants to applicants from other states. Alongside the National Library course, it was aimed more at meeting the internal needs of these institutions, resolving budgetary questions, rather than training professionals to work in any library. The 1940s in Brazil would mark the beginning of the development of modern librarianship techniques, a process to which a number of factors contributed, including DASP’s activities via its specialized entrance exams and staff training abroad.

The modernization of Brazilian libraries under the influx of American pragmatism occurred in the country’s two main political and cultural centers. Created in 1938, the first head of the DASP Library was Sylvia de Queiroz Grillo, appointed to the post after returning from the United States, where she had been sent the previous year with a Brazilian government scholarship in order to conclude the librarianship course at Columbia University (Oddone, 2013, pp. 78-79). Her sister, Lydia Sambaquy, who had taken part in training courses run by the DASP Library, completed the librarianship course at the National Library in 1941, a period during which she worked regularly at the library, first as a technical assistant and later as an administrative technician. After the departure of her sister, Lydia Sambaquy³⁴ took over its direction and under her leadership the library affirmed itself as an institutional space and began to differentiate itself technically from the reality of Brazilian libraries of the first half of the twentieth century. For Nanci Oddone, the DASP Library comprised an “obligatory transitional point” in the process of constituting librarianship as a professional field of work in Brazil. Moreover, this “laboratory of practices” for aspiring librarians was, in the author’s view, a true ‘center of calculation’³⁵ capable of producing cycles of accumulation of inscriptions and specialized knowledge (Oddone, 2013, p. 84).

Alongside DASP’s work, reform of the National Library, the advanced training of Brazilian technicians in American universities and the creation of the national cooperative cataloging service were factors that contributed to the development of librarianship from the 1940s. The Serviço de Intercâmbio e Catalogação (Exchange and Cataloging Service, SIC), implanted from 1942, represented a powerful mechanism of integration and capacity building for a vast network of cooperating libraries located in the country. According to guidance issued by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), this was an instrument indispensable to the organization of the national information systems that it aimed to implant (Silva, 2006).

If the DASP Library was turned into a ‘center of calculation,’ as Oddone (2013) proposes, we can consider the Revista do Serviço Público, published by the department, as an instrument for mobilizing the area’s ‘network of actors.’ It was in this same journal that Lydia Sambaquy published the essay “O que é a biblioteca moderna” (What the modern library is) in 1939 and, the following year, the article “A classificação decimal de Melvil Dewey e a classificação decimal de Bruxelas” (Melvil Dewey’s decimal classification and the decimal classification of Brussels). At the same time, other texts published in the periodical formed part of a series on ‘Librarianship,’ intended to reach a community of professionals from federal and state public libraries. In Oddone’s view (2013), the aim was to “gain adherence and visibility to what was specific about librarianship amid the increasing complexity of the knowledge and discourses that gained space in the journal’s pages” (Oddone, 2013, p. 84). The author adds that the “attribution of authority” was both necessary and opportune, since it provided leadership indispensable at that time towards strengthening the area.

As an instrument for disseminating DASP’s doctrine and as the official repository of the administrative reform then under way, the Revista do Serviço Público was a vehicle for the ‘DASPian’ ideas relating to administrative and library documentation. In 1943, Luiz Simões Lopes himself published the text “Administrative documentation” in which he outlined the ‘Brazilian concept’ conceived by DASP and anchored on the triple foundation constituted by the Revista, the Library and the Documentation Service. The significant effort made by the department to promote the theme via the Revista do Serviço Público or separate publications between the 1930s and 1950s was identified by Edson Nery da Fonseca (Fonseca, 1973). Fonseca argued that the Documentation Service, founded in 1942, did not implement documentation techniques and methods, but sought rather to promote debate through specialized courses, as well as editorials and articles in the Revista do Serviço Público (Santos, 2014, pp. 23-24). In 1940, the Revista published “Documents and documentation” by the Belgian Paul Otlet, a talk given at the World Congress of Universal Documentation held in Paris in 1937.³⁶

At that time, the concepts of documentation and administrative documentation related to collections that would, or should, be under the custody and technical responsibility of archivists, archiveologists and librarians, in institutional spaces defined as libraries, public archives or the communications services of public bodies. Concerned with ascertaining DASP’s real influence on the management of archives and archival knowledge in the country, Vitor Manoel Marques da Fonseca and Darlene Alves Bezerra (Fonseca; Bezerra, 2017) undertake a thought-provoking inquiry into the texts published in the Revista do Serviço Público between 1938 and 1945, premised on the idea that proposals for changes in the cycle of administration of the archives would have been presented in the journal and discussed with the civil service community. At the end of the article, the authors corroborate the presence of the theme of archives in the journal’s pages, verify the predominance of materials and texts addressing the theoretical and practical aspects of current archives, identify the difficulty of measuring the department’s unprovable influence on archival institutions and, finally, recognizing that the increasing concern with current archives was closely connected to DASP’s characteristics, observed the “growing attention to the idea of documentation that relates not only to Paul Otlet’s proposals, but also to the transformation process through which Brazilian libraries themselves were going, led by the DASP Library” (Fonseca; Bezerra, 2017, p. 20).

In the 1930s and 1940s, DASP incorporated the documentation services and libraries into its pioneering and innovative action. The administrative documentation and library activities, originally linked to auxiliary or general administration services, acquired a broader sense, becoming “central elements of a new ‘system’ destined to have a profound and long-lasting influence” (Wahrlich, 1983, p. 425). In that context, it seems, archives began to form part of the agenda of administration, especially through the (re)structuring of careers.

WHAT WAS THE PLACE OF ARCHIVES?

The central question of this section is: what was the place of archives in the agenda for administrative reform implemented by DASP during the Vargas government? My objective is to answer this question based on the research on the documents produced by the bureau, particularly those referring to internal organization, the specialization of civil servants abroad and the civil service exams at the beginning of 1940. Beatriz Wahrlich’s view (1983) of the place that libraries and documentation services began to occupy as key elements of a new ‘system’ needs to be relativized if we focus our examination on the documents produced by DASP itself. In terms of archives, in particular, we can observe that they lacked the same degree of ‘visibility,’ the same institutionality, achieved by libraries, even though in some contexts they appeared side-by-side, as we shall see below.

In the 1940s, more precisely in 1943, ‘archive organization and administration’ and ‘librarianship’ appeared alongside ‘office organization and administration,’ the three understood as ‘auxiliary administration activities.’ In an Explanatory Memorandum sent to the President of the Republic on March 3^rd 1943, DASP’s President, Luiz Simões Lopes, requested the inclusion of auxiliary administration activities in the “Instructions for the execution, in 1943, of Decree-Law no. 776 issued on October 7^th 1938, which regulates the specialization and advanced training of federal civil servants abroad on courses and internships.” Appended to the Explanatory Memorandum³⁷ approved by Getúlio Vargas on 21 April, the ‘Instruction’ details the rigorous selection and intern monitoring process undertaken in the United States of America. In addition to archives and libraries remaining under the rubric of ‘auxiliary activities,’ it is worth highlighting that the request made by DASP’s directors stemmed from their proposal to include the civil service’s “large class of supernumerary employees”³⁸ in the advanced training program and maintain these auxiliary activities, including the ‘office organization and administration’ missing from the ‘Instructions’ published the previous year.

As an auxiliary activity, ‘archive organization and administration’ seem to have found a place in the Communications and Documentation services. With some small structural and procedural modifications over the period of the New State, we can perceive an ambiguity when we turn to the responsibilities defined in the legal documents. DASP’s first report, issued in 1938, notifies that on August 5^th, Maria de Lourdes da Costa e Souza was appointed head of the Communications Section, which, subordinate to the Auxiliary Services, was responsible for “receiving, registering, distributing, numbering, expediting and storing the official correspondence and papers relating to DASP’s activities” and answering public requests for information, as well as issuing certificates. It amounted, therefore, in my view, a “archive and protocol service” that from 1940 began to coexist with the Documentation Service, the result of the transformation of the Publicity Service.

Tasked with responsibility for the Library, the Revista do Serviço Público, other publications and statistical studies, one of the new Service’s functions was to “collate, order, classify, store, conserve and publish the documentary texts, statistical elements and classificatory data relating to the Bureau’s activities.” In the examination of the Documentation Service Report for 1940-1941 we find a reference to a Historical Archive Section that controlled the distribution of DASP’s publications and produced works like the “Index of CFSPC’s Resolutions.” In the same report, we find mentioned the change in the service’s leadership and the restructuring of its work, which precipitated the alteration of the name of the Seção de Arquivo Histórico para Pesquisas e Arquivo (Historical Archive Section to Research and Archives).³⁹ In my view, the legal, normative and procedural frameworks, central to comprehending administrative reform, should be compared with archive documental research and the analysis of other sources like the Revista do Serviço Público.

When it comes to the theme of archives, or what DASP itself defined as an activity of ‘archive organization and administration,’ an invisibility becomes evident, resulting largely from the fragmentation and absence of theoretical and methodological references of an archival kind. This observation appears confirmed in the section of the report produced by the Head of the Communications Section, Maria de Lourdes da Costa e Souza, in 1943, where she insists on the “urgent need for the definitive elaboration of a Decimal Classification Code for the archiving of DASP’s documents.” A member of the group of 12 civil servants selected for advanced training in the United States in 1941, Lourdes da Costa e Souza undertook internships in the area of current archives and resumed her activities at the bureau two years later. It was one of DASP’s most high-profile professional cadres and in the post-war period formed part of the foreign staff of the recently founded United Nations (UN), along with other Brazilian civil servants. The recommendation to adopt the so-called ‘Dewey Code’ with its structure by classes of subjects reveals to us the limitations and fragilities of archive knowledge in that context.

At the start of the 1940s, DASP began the studies needed to develop entrance exams for the careers of archivist and archiveologist. In 1941, the archivist career, included as a civil service position by Law no. 284 of 1936, was divided into: a) archiveologist, responsible for the functions of planning, organization and orientation; and b) archivist, who would work as an assistant to the former (Marques, 2013). In the administration’s view, the archiveologist embodied a new career, recently created in the civil service with the aim of attracting better applicants to the professional workforce of the State.

Circular n. 231, issued April 28^th 1941 by the DASP Selection Division, informed ministers of the publication of a notice for candidates to apply to fill junior positions of archivist in any ministry. Some months later, in July, through Decree-Law no. 3422, the career of archiveologist was created in the Permanent Staff of the Ministry of Education and Health.⁴⁰ In January of the following year, the DASP sent the directors of the personnel divisions of the ministries an official letter with a questionnaire to be completed by active professionals with the aim of contributing to the preliminary studies of the archiveologist entrance exam then being prepared.

DASP’s firm action in implementing the reform of State careers met with challenges and obstacles in diverse areas. In the process of establishing the new career of archiveologist, the bureau encountered resistance from the National Archives, which, according to the latter’s director, Eugênio Vilhena de Moraes, was the ‘only division’ for which the post of archiveologist should be created, given that it was the only one, ‘according to law,’ responsible for archiving official and original documents, “monuments of the legislation and administration” (Santos, 2014, pp. 24-25). The director of the National Archives at the time sought to justify the entity’s omission and argued that the 90-day deadline was insufficient time for the candidates to familiarize themselves with the contents, which included new material, and in some cases the requirement to undertake practical exams.⁴¹ Although the arguments of the director of Brazil’s leading archival institution were plausible, it is worth emphasizing the distinct visions that surfaced in the clash. While the National Archives sought to assert itself as the ‘only division’ designed to employ archiveologists, and thus solely responsible for the task of centralizing and implementing the technical decision-making processes relating to the management of archives, DASP, by holding entrance exams for the career in different ministries, seemed to be giving priority to a ‘systemic’ structure that encompassed public administration as a whole. The polemic identified over the course of a lengthy administrative process, including a wealth of correspondence, reveals the political and technical power accumulated by DASP and the vulnerability and resistance of some State institutions to the changes taking place.

In 1942, aiming to make the defined changes a reality, DASP published a set of Instructions⁴² regulating the entrance exams for recruitment to the position of archivist among the Permanent Staff of the Bureau itself. Along the same lines, in 1944 DASP’s Selection Division presented Instructions⁴³ regulating the entrance exam to fill junior archiveologist positions for the federal civil service.⁴⁴ In this document, item ‘b’ concerns the “Written archive techniques test,” including objective questions on topics of the program, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1
Content of the Archive techniques test (Instructions regulating the entrance exam for the position of archiveologist)

1. Origin and evolution of document storage and conservation processes. Basic archiving systems: indirect, semi-indirect and direct. Advantages and disadvantages of each. Choice of suitable archiving method. Filing. Archival science.

2. Special archiving systems or methods. Alphabetic, numeric and alphanumeric systems. Main bibliographic rules. Geographic and automatic systems. Preference conditions.

3. Archiving by subject. Variety. Advantages. The decimal classification system. The Dewey method, its adaptation. Catalogues and codes.

4. Equipment. Main archive types; vertical archives, horizontal archives, rotating archives, pigeonhole archives and bellow archives. Preference conditions.

5. Card indexes, types of card index. Utility. Card entry processes.

6. Archives in relation to time. (Moving or living archives; static, dead or historical archives. Archive transfers, their utility. Criteria. Clearance or annulation of transfers.)

7. Material. Permanent material and consumables. Cabinets and shelves. Folders or covers, guides and cards. Varieties and purposes.

8. Personnel. Recruitment processes. Director, archiveologist, archivist, auxiliary staff. Functions and requirements of each. Preference conditions in terms of sex and age.

9. Conservation, disinfection, restoration and reproduction of documents. Ancient and modern processes.

10. Transmission of documents in the public divisions. Communication Services, their utility. Centralization and decentralization of communications services. Manual, mechanical and electrical transmission. Information on the progress of documents. Protocols and record cards.

11. Transmission of documents within archives. Reference to documents in the archives. Reference to earlier documents. General characteristics. Attachment of antecedents or precedents. Indications or conventional signs for archiving. Searches.

• Source: Fundo DASP, Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Also found in the DASP Archive is a document from 1945 with a proposal for Instructions for Ordinance, intended to regulate a new entrance exam for junior archiveologist posts of the federal public service. The content of the written ‘archival science’ exam is detailed below in Table 2.

Table 2
Content of the written archival science exam (Instructions regulating the exam for the position of archiveologist)

1. Archival science; concepts and evolution.

2. Archival science in classical antiquity.

3. Principal modern European works. The circulation of ideas through translations of the most widely disseminated works; the Italian influence; the Spanish influence; the French influence and the English influence.

4. Archives: conceptualization and internal organization. Archives in relation to time: moving archives, static archives and historical archives. Main archives of the Americas and Europe.

5. Component elements of books and documents; physical, graphic, linguistic and intellectual elements.

6. Documents: analysis, classification, selection, conservation, restoration, reproduction, disinfection and elimination. Ancient and modern processes.

7. Portuguese documentation.

8. General notions of chronology; [...] calendars.

9. Auxiliary signs and materials used in writing. Writings from Portugal and Brazil.

10. Kinds of manuscripts. Ancient and modern bindings.

11. Rational organization of documents; general principles. General archiving systems: direct, semidirect and indirect. Filing.

12. Archiving method: alphabetic, alphanumeric and numeric. Archiving by subject; varieties and advantages. Catalogues and codes.

13. Transmission of documents in archives. Reference to documents in the archives. Reference to previous documents. Transference between archives: its utility and criteria.

14. Transmission of documents between public divisions. Communications Services, their utility. Manual, mechanical and electrical transmission. Information on the progress of documents.

• Source: Fundo DASP, Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

In these Instructions for the archiveologist entrance exam, it is worth highlighting the presence of a practical test on “Notions of Document Science, Paleography and Notary,” as well as other exams and their respective weightings in terms of the final score.⁴⁵

The contents of these entrance exams held at the start of the 1940s allows us to analyze the stage of development of archival knowledge in the context of the federal public administration, more precisely in the bureau responsible for carrying out reform of the State. They can be treated, therefore, as one of the indicators allowing us to trace the institutionalization off the theme of archives and professionals in the area during the period. An examination of these contents reveals conceptions, influences and changes that express the existence of a particular technical-scientific knowledge located in DASP - or mobilized by the bureau - and sustained within its professional cadre, dedicated to the theme and invested with power.

It is worth highlighting some characteristics of the contents presented in the instructions for the 1942 and 1944 entrance exams for the positions of archivist and archiveologist, respectively: these include the influence of librarianship methods, techniques and terminology, especially the ‘Decimal Classification (Dewey System),’ the concern with material and physical aspects of activities in the archives, and the presence of knowledge in document conservation and restoration. In the case of archiveologists, we can note some significant changes when we compare the 1944 Instruction with the 1945 proposal. The latter alters the name of the exam from ‘archive techniques’ to ‘archival science,’ including the term identifying the discipline. At the same time, it presents a more ‘erudite’ and programmatic content, aimed at the knowledge of historical aspects, works and ideas generated in the different European schools of archival science, as well as the main institutions of Europe and America. However, some earlier components remain such as the emphasis on classification methods and on ‘archiving by subject.’ There is a clear emphasis on methods and techniques, in detriment to conceptual components.

The principles instituted by the bureau were to be expanded to all the ministries that, at that time, were subordinate to it (Rabelo, 2012, p. 80). It becomes possible to comprehend, therefore, the tension with the National Archives when the first entrance exams were held at the start of the 1940s. DASP’s technical elite initiated a process of strong centralization of the state bureaucratic machine, supported by unification, its own identity and the execution of reforms that, in large part, encountered resistances among the civil service accustomed to the old habits still present among Brazil’s public administration (Rabelo, 2012).

The research by Angélica Marques (2007; 2013) sketches a broad panorama of the origins and training of archivists in Brazil over the course of the twentieth century.⁴⁶ The concerns of the National Archives with the specialized training of its employees since the 1910s serve as a basis for recounting a trajectory that failed to accompany the progress obtained by the courses run at the National Library and the National History Museum for librarians and museologists, respectively (Marques, 2007). Without ignoring the course taken by the theme in the first decades of the twentieth century, we can identify the creation of DASP at the end of the 1930s as a landmark in the conception of a career dedicated to the treatment of archives in the public administration and, above all, in the emergence of a technical elite that would perform a central role in the directions taken by Brazil’s archival science over the following decades.⁴⁷ However, the structuring of the career, methods and techniques was not accompanied by an institutionality configured in a particular ‘space,’ a place of knowledge, recognized and aspired to by professionals recruited to the administration.

The administrative reform initiated during this period marked the constitution of the modern State in Brazil, accompanied by the idea of modernization as a process combating the patrimonialism that had dominated until then. With the creation of DASP, the government aimed to stimulate, develop and coordinate efforts to rationalize and enhance the State’s action in the context of general administration. Based on the principle of impersonality and an emphasis on control, the attempt was made to inaugurate a national version of Weberian bureaucracy,⁴⁸ in a context of nationalism and State interventionism as a catalyst of the industrialization process. As the organization of the developmentalist State began to first take shape, at the height of the Estado Novo (New State), DASP operated as an entity focused on analyzing the possibilities for development of a predominantly rural country with little interaction between the economic poles.

Still head of DASP, Luiz Simões Lopes conceived the idea of creating an institution dedicated to the study and teaching of administration. Sent to President Getúlio Vargas, this suggestion was approved, and a decree, promulgated on July 14^th 1944, authorized DASP to take the measures needed to put it into practice. On December 20^th the same year the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) was created, an institution with the status of a private legal entity and the primary objective of conducting research in the field of public and private administration, as well as training staff to perform these activities (Santos, 2014, pp. 30-31). In order to fulfil this task, the Escola Brasileira de Administração Pública (EBAP) was created in 1952. His years of experience as head of DASP provided backing to Luiz Simões Lopes’s vision of the FGV and its mission to form ‘high level’ personnel in the areas of administration and economics to work in State agencies and contribute to the country’s development. On leaving the bureau in 1945 to become president of the FGV, Simões Lopes took his collaborative principals to the recently created institution (Lopes, 2003). Consequently, the early period of structuring of the Foundation is closely associated with the most significant traits of the ‘DASPian’ professional culture developed during the first phase of its history.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

From 1942, the cooperation policy between the governments of Brazil and the United States stemmed from the new position adopted by the former, which abandoned the ambiguous stance maintained by Getúlio Vargas and his government in order to align with the fight against Nazi fascism. In the context of the Second World War, DASP’s actions, through its program of advanced training overseas, brought the country into closer contact with American theoretical principles, concepts, methods and practices in relation to the administration of archives and libraries. The methodological and technical bases that were absorbed came from the close connections developed with the knowledge produced in the United States especially. In terms of archives, we can also observe, as part of this process, a combination of influences on Brazilian professionals, with the prevalence of an Anglo-Saxon approach on particular agents (individuals and institutions) leading the processes involved in the discipline’s institutionalization, leaving an indelible mark on the management of institutional archives still held in the administrative sphere. The North American influence was notably expressed through use of the book Modern Archives by T. Schellenberg, widely disseminated from the 1960s on. In the 1950s, the task of modernizing the State bureaucracy continued. The librarian and archivist Nilza Teixeira Soares, who, like so many other professionals hired by DASP, had frequented the courses in the American University, is an example of the policy for training technical staff abroad (Santos, 2016).

The process of institutionalizing archival science from the 1940s on reveals common elements in terms of laying the foundations for a discipline associated with ‘State knowledge,’ but without a more precise characterization capable of differentiating the area from librarianship and documentation. The thematics and place of archives in the ‘DASPian reform’ present a fragmented picture with a low conceptual consistency in terms of archive administration, which may appear paradoxical when we recall the investments in the training of its professionals abroad.

In distinct administrative structures, archives coexist with documentation, publication of official documents, statistics, the elaboration of reports and other closely associated activities, such as the protocoling and control of processes and documents. The first phase of DASP’s activities, under the leadership of Luiz Simões Lopes, partly substantiates this claim, insofar as the attempt was made to establish the mainstays of a technical knowledge capable of guiding the themes of documentation, libraries and archives. An analysis of the format of the entrance exams and the archival content of the tests, for their part, reveals the changes that took place from the 1940s on. Yet these changes still seem to reflect the need to assimilate a broader, specialized literature in order to obtain more secure technical bases to guide the treatment of archives - or, in sum, bases more informed by archival science. The distance of the National Archives in relation to DASP’s modernizing project, motivated by centralizing ambitions on both sides, can help us understand how the low institutionality of archives persisted during the period.

The recently created FGV inherited the knowledge accumulated by DASP and performed a key role in the training of professional workforces, especially for State agencies. Even in a context still marked by disputes and the definition of librarianship, documentation and archival science as separate fields, its archive system “shaped the desire” and projects of the different institutions, especially those in public administration. Following the structuring of a Sistema de Arquivos (Archive System) from the 1950s, FGV might have become a ‘center of calculation’ in a Latourian sense, mobilizing different networked actors (Latour, 2004). Under the leadership of Marilena Leite Paes, the Arquivo Central da Fundação⁴⁹ did not achieve this function, but it is safe to assert that subsequent experiences sought to take inspiration from the knowledge produced by the DASP-FGV connection, forged under the inspiration of principles that recognized and valorized the administration of archives and documents in the management of institutions. Between the end of the 1950 and the beginning of the 1960s, with the running of the Permanent Archive Course (CPA) set up by the National Archives during the administration of historian José Honório Rodrigues, a seminal stage took shape in the history of archival training through which innumerable professionals passed. The existence of a training project in the context of an archival - rather than university - institution still remains to be explored in terms of its meaning for the history of the discipline in Brazil.

FONTES PRIMÁRIAS

• ARQUIVO NACIONAL (Brasil). Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público: Inventário. Rio de Janeiro, 1985, 73p. dat. (AN/SCO/SDE 14)
• SANTOS, Paulo Roberto Elian dos. Entrevista com Marilena Leite Paes. (Acervo pessoal de Paulo Roberto Elian dos Santos, Rio de Janeiro). 15 ago. 2006; 23 jan. 2007.

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• 1
  This text was written as part of the research project “Institucionalização da arquivologia no Brasil, as décadas de 1940 a 1970” (Institutionalization of Archival Sciences in Brazil, from the 1940’s to the 1970’s) developed at the Departamento de Arquivo e Documentação, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz.

• 26
  Over the course of the article I shall refer to the ‘history of archival science,’ which from a historical perspective encompasses the theoretical principles, methods, techniques and practices, the processes involved in research, teaching and knowledge generation, the trajectory of the archive institutions, centers and services, as well as the professionals working in the area.

• 27
  The excerpt from the historian Francisco Iglésias (1923-1999) is taken from the foreword to the first edition of the book Obra autobiográfica by Celso Furtado (FURTADO, 2014), which collects his works A fantasia organizada, A fantasia desfeita and Os ares do mundo. Furtado published articles in the Revista do Serviço Público while he worked as administrative assistant and later technician at DASP between 1943 and 1948. See SILVA, R., 2010.

• 28
  The federal government created and strengthened its own decision-making agencies. This led to the proliferation of institutes, independent authorities and councils focused on the control of economic activities at three levels: formulation of national-level policies; regulation and support of diverse branches of production; and consultative or normative entities responsible for large areas of the national economy such as foreign trade, oil production and manufacturing industry (MENDONÇA, 1990, p. 259).

• 29
  A gaúcho from Pelotas, graduating in Agricultural Engineering from the Minas School of Agricultural and Veterinary Science of Belo Horizonte (1924), Simões Lopes worked in the Ministry of Agriculture and came to occupy, still in the 1920s, the post of officer to the cabinet of Minister Miguel Calmon. In November 1930, Simões Lopes was appointed cabinet officer to the Office of the President of the Republic, a post that he would occupy until March 1937. From 1935 he began to collaborate actively in the administrative reform undertaken by the federal government, which culminated in the creation of DASP in 1938 (SILVA, 2006).

• 30
  Law 284, known as the Readjustment Law. For WAHRLICH (1983, p. 127), Law n. 284/1936 marked the beginning of the federal administrative reform, directed, on one hand, towards the organization of public services and their improvement and, on the other, to the management of administrative human resources under the aegis of the merit system and the institutionalization of public civil service entrance exams.

• 31
  In an article dedicated to analyzing the first publications of the economist Celso Furtado, who joined DASP in the 1940s and wrote works for the Revista do Serviço Público, SILVA, R. (2010) emphasizes DASP’s administrative structure, anchored in the theoretical framework of Willoughby. In his work Principles of Public Administration (1927), the latter had developed his General Administration Department (GAD) Theory, seeking a clear separation between politics and administration, defining the role of a general administration department (SILVA, R., 2010, p. 93).

• 32
  In the opinion of Simões Lopes, the United States had the “most modern administration” (LOPES, 2003, p. 22). The preference for North America can also be explained by the political context in Europe, which from 1939, following invasion of Poland by German troops, had become embroiled in the Second World War.

• 33
  Correspondence of the Brazilian Embassy in the United States, n.111/542.63, 25 February 1938, and n. 242/542.63, 7 June 1938, the latter sent to the Foreign Affairs Minister, Oswaldo Aranha. DASP 665, DASP Archive, National Archives.

• 34
  Lydia Sambaquy was DASP’s librarian in the 1930s and 40s. Persuaded by her sister, who worked at the DASP Library, she enrolled on the Librarianship course at the National Library. When she received her diploma in January 1941, she was already working regularly at the DASP Library, whose direction she took over in 1939. During the period when she worked at the Bureau, she witnessed and promoted diverse changes, among them the creation of a preparation course for librarians in 1940, and the Serviço de Intercâmbio de Catalogação (SIC), inspired by her visit to the United States Library of Congress. In 1945 she began work as professor of Cataloguing and Classification on the National Library courses, where she continued until 1954. That year she became president of the recently created Instituto Brasileiro de Bibliografia e Documentação (IBBD), today the Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (IBICT), where she remained for 11 years. She was elected vice-president of the International Federation for Documentation between 1959 and 1962. In 1965, she became professor of the Escola de Biblioteconomia e Documentação da Federação das Escolas Federais Isoladas do Estado da Guanabara (Fefieg), today the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UniRio). See BRASIL, 1971; FONSECA, 1973; ODDONE, 2004; 2006.

• 35
  An ample literature has been produced on the concept of a center of calculation, introduced by Bruno Latour, since the 1980s. Here I cite from one of the author’s works: “In this chapter, I intend to follow not the path that leads from one text to another within a library, but the path that leads from the world to inscription, upstream and downstream of what I shall call a ‘center of calculation.’ Instead of considering the library as an isolated fortress or a paper tiger, I intend to depict it as the knot of a vast network in which circulate not signs or materials but a material-becoming-signs. The library is not built like the palace of winds, isolated in a real landscape, which would serve as its frame. It curves space and time around it, and serves as a provisional container, a dispatcher, a transformer and a pointer to concrete flows that it moves continuously” (LATOUR, 2004).

• 36
  Seven years later, the same text was published separately (OTLET, 1947).

• 37
  See Fundo DASP, DASP 670 (Especialização no Exterior – 1943), Arquivo Nacional.

• 38
  Supernumerary employees did not belong to the Permanent Staff (comprising commissioned appointments, isolated posts and careers, permanent public employees, and remunerated activities) but to the Supplementary Staff, in accordance with the terminology used at the time.

• 39
  See DASP 43 (Relatório do Serviço de Documentação – 1940-41), fundo DASP, Arquivo Nacional.

• 40
  See DASP 1157, fundo DASP, Arquivo Nacional.

• 41
  According to the director, there were “new materials, strictly indispensable, some involving practical tests, like Notions of Notary, Graphotechnics, Notions of Paleography applied to Brazilian archival science, etc. whose sources for study should be indicated with the necessary advance notice.” Process 41091/43 DASP; DASP 1157, fundo DASP, Arquivo Nacional.

• 42
  Portaria n. 2370 issued 30 Dec. 1942, DASP 1157, fundo DASP, Arquivo Nacional.

• 43
  Portaria n. 576 issued Feb. 1944, DASP 1157, fundo DASP, Arquivo Nacional.

• 44
  Candidates for the position of archiveologist had to take the following additional tests: writing in Portuguese; notions of paleography and notary in practice; and knowledge in general and Brazilian history, general and Brazilian geography, foreign language and notions of administrative law. The tests had the following weightings: Archival Techniques (4), Portuguese (3), Paleography and Notary (3), History (2), Geography (2), foreign language (1) and Notions of administrative law (1). DASP 1157, fundo DASP, Arquivo Nacional.

• 45
  The tests had the following weightings: Archival Science (4), Portuguese (3), Notions of diplomacy, paleography and notary (3), General and Brazilian History (2), Brazilian Administrative Organization (1), and foreign language (1). DASP 1157, fundo DASP, Arquivo Nacional.

• 46
  VENANCIO (2012), in a study on university archives in Brazil, produces an original research on the origin and historical trajectory of the ‘services’ and the administrative positions dedicated to the treatment of these archives.

• 47
  We can mention, in addition to Maria de Lourdes da Costa e Souza, Nilza Teixeira Soares and Helena Corrêa Machado, whose trajectories began with the entrance exams held by DASP. See SANTOS, 2010; 2016.

• 48
  The Weberian model of ‘bureaucracy’ is summarized by WAHRLICH, 1983, chapter 9.

• 49
  For an analysis of the trajectory of the FGV’s Central Archive and Marilena Leite Paes, see SILVA, M., 2010.

• 51
  English version: David Rogers

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  26 July 2018
• Date of issue
  May-Aug 2018

History

• Received
  19 Feb 2018
• Accepted
  17 Apr 2018