TIME IN THE REPRESENTATION OF INFORMATION IN ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES

BETWEEN THE INSTANT AND THE CONTINUUM

Abstract

Considering the conceptions of time notably in Henri Bergson – the continuum – and in Gaston Bachelard – the instant – this paper discusses, from a theoretical-critical perspective, how this time is evidenced in the processes, instruments, and products of information representation in archives and libraries, as information institutions, especially considering their mediating role between produced information and access to it for the purpose of constructing new information, in a continuous helical movement. To this end, it starts from the distinct conceptions of information institutions – collectors of culture, places of memory, spaces of monumentalization, promoters of institutional management of knowledge – to analyze the mediating nature of the information representation that develops within them as a subsidy to the promotion of a communicational process and, in this context, how time manifests itself in a plural way and constitutes a characterizing and determining element, affecting this representation in different ways, based on the premise that archives and libraries, as information institutions, move, especially in their procedures, between the past, the present, and the future.