Memória esquecida: uma análise da organização e representação da informação étnico-racial no OPAC da Biblioteca Central da Universidade Federal da Paraíba

Abstract

Libraries are places for organizing information in order to not only disseminate information that favors a particular social group, but also to serve as places for the preservation of history, memory and culture related to invisible groups, especially those under the category of social groups ethnically vulnerable, including African and Afro-descendants , whose participation and contribution to the formation of Brazilian society is still denied. This research aims to analyze how the process of organizing the ethnic and racial information occurs at Central Library of the UFPB. Its focus of analysis is on the OPAC, contextualizing university libraries, describing the terms concerning matters related to ethnic and racial information in all areas of knowledge, surveying how they are classified and how they were treated within these libraries and thus identifying the importance of ethnic and racial information for preservation of theAfrican/Afro-descendant memory for access and use purposes by researchers, students, representatives of social and black movements. Accordingly,we used the descriptive and exploratory research as well as the qualitative and quantitative approaches for both of them fit well together and are essential in regard to clarity and reliability of the results. The terms founds during search, seem inconsistent, representing only 0,165% of the total of titles that make up the archive of this library demonstrating deficiency of these institutions and the lack of information with the ethnic and racial theme being necessary to adopt an indexing policy with use of the terms that can provide visibility for these data.