Estudo do usuário do Arquivo Histórico Municipal de Santa Maria: um caminho indicativo para a proposição de ações de difusão arquivística

Abstract

The present study was carried out during the Graduation Course – lato sensu – of Records Management from the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. This research aimed at investigating the profile of Santa Maria’s Municipal Historical Archive users focusing the implementation of archivistic diffusion actions. The Historical Archive, as a municipal public office, has a function that goes beyond the gathering, treatment and preservation of documental sources and, to make them available to who may need to access them. In this way, we have room to propose diffusion actions that will make the Archive an open space for educative and cultural practices and, to memory rescue, functioning as an active subject in the community where it is inserted. However, there is a necessity to know who the AHMSM users are, to propose activities that are adequate to their profile and, that also focus on the approximation of new publics to the information unit. The research carried out is descriptive with a qualitative and quantitative approach. The study is based on a documental research and on the existing bibliography about this topic. To profile the user, seven characteristics were taken into account: sex, research frequency, city where the user live, profession, research source, purpose and theme. With the analysis of the collected data it was possible to infer that most of the Historical Archive users are male, university students, use the information unit from March to December, live in Santa Maria/RS and, use mainly newspapers as research source to comply with binding activities at their under-graduation and graduation courses, researching topics related with the city. In this way, based on the users profiling some archivistic diffusion actions were indicated aiming improvement of the quality in the services offered and with the intention of attracting and loyalty new users.