O descarte de documentos públicos em papel face à sua digitalização: o que se perde?

Abstract

Documents are the records of a large part of humanity's activities, so they are created continuously. In order for these records to fulfil their primary purpose, they need specific care and proper treatment. Some of these records are kept for centuries because of their cultural and historical value, whether in terms of physical material, information or both. On the other hand, there are financial costs involved in keeping and maintaining these documents. This work therefore studied the possibility of disposing of permanent documents in physical format after their digitisation process, covering both legal and economic aspects. An analysis was carried out considering legal and economic aspects with regard to the destruction of physical permanent public archives that have been digitised. The results show that in some countries there is the possibility of re-evaluating permanent archive documents after they have been digitised, discarding them if this is deemed worthwhile. However, this possibility does not exist in Brazilian legislation, implying duplicate management of physical permanent public archive documents that have been digitised. Hypothetical causes that could contribute to the aforementioned duplicate document management have been raised, for which possible solutions are discussed. In economic terms, the estimated monthly cost of the area occupied by the digitised permanent archives of 47% of Brazilian courts participating in this research, alone is close to R$ 0.5 million.