Science Archives: memory and history of the organization of science in Portugal

The Arquivo de Ciencia e Tecnologia da Fundacao para a Ciancia e a Tecnologia (Ministry of Education and Science) and the Arquivo Camoes -Instituto da Cooperacao e da Lingua (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Portugal), contain in the set of document collections they have at their guard a core part of the history of the organization of science and also of the constitution of the scientific system in Portugal from a period dating back to its beginning in the early twentieth century, including in particular: the processes of thousands of scientists who were a part of it; the institutional and scientific memory of research spaces; the proposals and projects of scientific ideas; discussions and reflections on the scientific guidelines and policies of the central government and their materialization; the expression of scientific external relations. This article characterizes the current document collections of both archives for the relevance they hold not just for the institutional history of science but for the whole field of history of science and science policy in Portugal in the modern period; it does so by describing and contextualizing the history of the constitution of the Portuguese scientific system that gave origin to this invaluable documentary legacy. Both archives have been the subject of a successful preservation and organization effort, combined with a strategy to promote their heritage and related history, benefiting from inter-institutional collaboration, particularly between the entities responsible for keeping the collections and the scientific community.