THE CONTRIBUTION OF PROVENANCE MARKS TO THE RE-SIGNIFICATION OF BIBLIOGRAPHICAL COLLECTIONS

A STUDY OF THE VITAL BRAZIL COLLECTION OF THE INSTITUTO BUTANTAN LIBRARY

Abstract

The objective of this article is to identify the provenance marks in the books of the Vital Brazil Collection of the Instituto Butantan. It was found that the copies that make up the collection present a diverse range of provenance marks, including bookstore labels; stamps of the extinct sector of Printing and Binding of the institution, allowing the retrieval of traces that relate the Library to other sectors, favoring the preservation of the memory of an area that worked directly with the collection; and inscriptions still under analysis, as numerical markings that may refer to temporal and organizational indications of the works in which they are present, which favors multiple possibilities of research, configuring themselves as an object of studies from different perspectives. We identified 22 copies dedicated to Vital Brazil, among which 10 were written by the authors of the publications themselves. We conclude that the marks of provenance, in our view, have a double informative function: in the administrative perspective, they evidence the process of institutionalization to which the book was submitted, insofar as they define property and attribute to the work the sense of belonging to the collection; and in the historical - temporal perspective, they make it possible to evidence the multiple interactions over time, therefore contextualized, between the book, the authors, the owners (individual or institutional) and the readers, and, with this, they confer other meanings to the work, which enables the construction of a narrative beyond merely administrative criteria of collection development and defines its potential to contribute to the re-signification of the collections.