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Recently, reading some manifests that emerged in the history of art encouraged me to think about a political attitude about the memories of the north region of Brazil. A manifest, a public declaration about specialized knowledge and the availability of information from the perspective of our university libraries. To get started, we could think that it´s good, very good, that there are digital collections such as Recordança, Klauss Vianna, or the Rumos Dança of Itaú Cultural database. Even better, in 2007-2008 questions about memory and history have been the subject of events like I Encontro de Pesquisa sobre Memória da Dança Brasileira em Minas Gerais (1st Meeting of Research about Memory of the Brazilian Dance in Minas Gerais) and publications like Seminários de Dança – História em Movimento: biografias e registros em dança (Dance Seminars – Moving History: biographies and dance records), which enabled some very fruitful encounters between professionals of the dance field. But what are the role and the situation of our university libraries within this complex cultural construction?

Just a reminder, in the 1970’s, institutional mechanisms were created in commitment to the preservation of the Brazilian document heritage. The dominant view searched for the identification and valorization of regional peculiarities. The Culture and Education Ministry itself stimulated and financed this kind of initiative recommending the creation of those centers, defining the preservation and the organization of the Brazilian document collections as role of the universities. Thus, the memory and documentation centers became characteristic of the higher education institutions, preserving the archive patrimony, assuming an essential role in the creation of conditions for the practice and exercise of research, making possible the growth of intellectual production with the reunion of researchers around their specialty subjects and democratizing the access both for internal users and for outside researchers, even those who are not affiliated to the academic community.

In the north region, however, it only takes a quick search in the university library websites to realize that only the bibliographic patrimony is currently maintained as a main activity. The situation is worse when we talk about the acquisition of titles about art and even worse when dance is the subject. Considering that dance documents are not usually part of the historical collections of local or regional newspapers or even iconographic collections and specially media libraries, which could be an object of concern for those units. The reality is not so different from that of other regions in Brazil. Therefore, it is important to think about the collection lines of our libraries, their status as university units and the financial resources that are destined to them, which guarantee the physical supports of installations and maintenance, the hiring of specialized human resources, the reproduction of original research sources and, mainly, the planning and production of publicizing programs and the exhibition of the collections. Items that are essential for guaranteeing excellence in the good use of their potential.

We live with diverse situations in the amazonian region, between times and spaces that include the speed of the internet in the capitals, but without counting, or counting precariously in the most distant cities, on the technological tools or even on more solid educational activities, as we are immersed in authoritarian political situations, corruption and negligence, a situation that is far from being resolved. In this political and social context, the production of knowledge becomes an indispensable condition for autonomy, in order to avoid the intellectual appeasement that, according to sociologist Boaventura Santos, leads us to conformism and passivity. Therefore, we are talking about cognitive emancipation, in which it is possible to observe that our capacity for self-management and the production of quality of life for our cities is at stake. In this way, the implementation of higher education courses in the artistic field and the optimization of their libraries become extremely relevant factors for the cultural development of the region.

The creation of a dance graduate course in 2001, at Escola Superior de Artes e Turismo da Universidade do Estado do Amazonas (UEA) is an example. In Manaus since the first years, the academic environment have been exposing the frailty and the scarcity of documents related to dance, making evident absences that directly affect the foundations of the academic work. Problems in production and circulation that obviously would not be solved just through the service offered by the central library, since a closer examination of their activities enabled the observation a ‘water bath’ policy, with minimal resources for infrastructure and acquisition of new material, resulting in an insufficient number of workers to meet the regular demand of cataloguing and making the collection available and even smaller to engage in creative enterprises for partnership with the university research programs.

In spite of this situation, it was possible the creation of projects like “Fique em Cartaz”, intended to foment the donation of advertising material of local shows and the production of an exhibition of specifically material related to dance, with the purpose of stimulating public consultation of the collection. These activities were complemented by scientific initiation projects, such as “Cidade, memória e processos evolutivos da dança”, which seeked to map records about dance in the newspapers from Manaus in the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century. Theses initiatives in some ways proved the efficiency of choosing a work strategy of partnerships, as well as the need to insist in actions to fight institutional inertia, which of course does not mean the current situation is satisfactory.

So, coming back to the idea of a manifest, the university library is already an established institutional mechanism and what we need is to externalize our discontentment and expectations though appropriate media, directed to decision-making entities. We must gather strength with the different hierarchical layers, making clear the need for the creation of spaces adequate to our knowledge goal and that make possible the existence of environments for exhibitions and performances that render the most diverse movements parallelly to the rescue and the traditional document organization. And we should not forget to frequently request – with vehemence – the creation of media libraries. By the way, the item should become constant in the dance academic centers platforms. All this constitutes a strong ally when it is time to convince managers of the importance of the academic centers for the documentation and to draw attention to the fact that the past is not merely a ‘before’ in relation to an ‘after’, but a way to make our present alive and open perspectives for the future. Our memory would be grateful … and just out of curiosity: what is the situation of the library in your university?