Personal archives and the boundaries of the archival science

Abstract

The article discusses some particularities of personal archives, focusing archival science principles as a whole. Personal archives, due to the fact of being more susceptible to have their custody interrupted by the heirs and due to being constituted by materials related to personal interests of their owners, which mean that they cannot be generalized, require the adequacy of the archival science theoretical principles. The loss of contextual data of the record production could compromise the extraction of meaning from the documents. The general issue is illustrated with some detached examples.

Keywords

• arquivos pessoais, documentos de arquivo, princípios arquivísticos.