Speaker
Gislene Rodrigues da Silva (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Abstract
One of the duties of the Postgraduate Library of the Department of Physics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais has been to collect, identify, preserve, and display the scientific instruments of the physics department capable of forming a collection. Thus, the library has a collection of historical, scientific objects that represent institutional memory and present the evolution of the department’s research and teaching over the 60 years. Furthermore, these instruments reflect essential moments in the history of science, presenting advances in the fields of astronomy, optics, and other branches of physics. Thus, based on other national and international initiatives that represent and make their collection available online, the library also has the initiative to describe these cultural artifacts to make them available on the Internet. Given this scenario, as it is a collection of three-dimensional objects of historical value, the challenge is to adequately represent them, as the Information Science literature has few studies that deal with the subject. Based on this, the library is preparing a personalized description sheet for these instruments, based on the VRA Core, which is a data standard for the description of works of visual culture, and also based on the description of scientific objects carried out by the University of Havard and which is available online. Therefore, the proposal’s objective is to present this description sheet prepared by the library to help other initiatives and libraries use it. Discussion on the topic is also considered necessary, as libraries increasingly incorporate different types of information resources into their collection. The preservation and research of science and technology heritage is a significant challenge that institutions face in Brazil; in this sense, it is essential to make public and preserve institutional memory, and representation is one of the ways to achieve this preservation of ensuring that posterity has access to this collection.