Information and memory in the dictatorial documents availability interface

Abstract

With the premise of access to information as a public right, and considering the social role of remembering the traumatic historical events that were the Latin American dictatorships, this research aims to analyze, from the perspective of Information Science, the availability of digital collections of truth commissions in southern Brazil. The methodological approach was a qualitative research related to the selection and study of these collections, descriptive in the analysis of their availability and access, and exploratory through data collection. Based on a theoretical contribution around the binomial information and memory, aspects such as forgetting and memory virtualization were explored. In the applied bias, the stage in which these collections are organized and their actual availability to the public were investigated. As a result, the research exposes two cases of effective systems for making information available in cyberspace, however, it also points out situations of restriction or difficulty in accessing the other collections analyzed. It is concluded that there is a deficiency in making most of these files available to the public, demonstrating the need to make their contents accessible, especially in digital format, in order to preserve the memory and enable the proper problematization of these historical sources.