Acervo documental da paróquia São Pedro e São Paulo em Santa Rita/PB: contributo para sua organização a partir da teoria arquivística

Abstract

The Roman Catholic Church, as a Christian religious institution, the most ancient of all (since the 1st century) has shown a greater interest to preserve and conserve their archives, once this legacy has contributed a lot with the History of the country and the society. The ecclesiastical archives, as a whole, are an immensurable source of riches because they tell the experience of people who struggle and persist. In this focus, parish archives are evidenced, which in many times do not receive a deserved treatment in the hierarchy of archives, and the documents are kept in inappropriate places. This way, the objective of this paper is to analyze, under the view of Archival Science, the document collection of the parish of St Peter and St Paul, situated in Tibiri II neighborhood in Santa Rita, Paraíba State, contributing to its organization from the archival theory. Then, it was elaborated a proposal of an organization chart of the parish, by taking notice about the main document typologies which compose the parish archive and by tracing some important strategies for the organization of parish collection. In relation to the methodology, the techniques and instruments for this research are aimed at the production in the investigation, with reference to the documents and collections ever existent, but also by using techniques of information search by means of interviews with some people with knowledge about the theme. This research is classified as a case study and it is an exploratory one. Also, interviews were done for the data collection. From these data, based on methods an organization chart was elaborated and it was developed a survey of the parish history. It is an applied work with qualitative approach. Based on the above, it is concluded that it is needed to make a diagnosis of the accumulated documentation, in order to plan the due collection organization and provide the necessary archival treatment. In this purpose, organizing the archive will facilitate the access of users to the documentation (current records) of the institution and will promote interchange with the archdiocesan archive.