The Foundation

Casa de Mateus Information System (SICM) is based on an organic-functional system that represents the successive chain of Casa de Mateus administrators.

Casa de Mateus Information System (SICM) is divided into 13 chronological sections, based on this, which represents the chain of successive administrators of the Casa until the constitution of the Casa de Mateus Foundation in 1970, which became the administering entity of the Casa de Mateus by determination of its Institutor. Numerous collections were added to this column, particularly that of the Melo family (which entered the ninth section of the SICM with the marriage of the Count of Vila Real to the Countess of Melo) and that of the Mangualde family, in section 10 (the result of the marriage of the Countess of Vila Real and Melo to the Count of Mangualde).

The archival collection of this House goes beyond the family context and is now a regional and national heritage to be shared, initially due to its evidential dimension and, consequently, its undeniable importance for the management of the vast accumulated heritage.

As an example, we have the effort to organise and describe documents carried out by D. Luís António de Sousa Botelho Mourão, the sixth manor, based on the rationalist principles so in vogue at the time, which gave the House's registry office a thematic-functional structure in order to speed up the retrieval of information.

The principle of order for good use was maintained by subsequent generations, so that the work carried out by D. Luís António has remained unchanged to this day.

The principle of order for good use was maintained by subsequent generations, so that the work carried out by Dom Luís António has remained unchanged to this day.

Then, in a second phase, the documents in the Registry Office gradually took on their role as the "Memory" of the Family and the House, in the regional and national contexts.

In view of this specificity, at the end of the 1950s, D. Francisco de Albuquerque, imbued with the reformist spirit he applied to the entire House, invited researcher and librarian-archivist Luís de Bívar Guerra to reclassify the archival documentation.

More recently, in 2001, thanks to the support of ERDF funds, managed by the Operational Programme for Culture, under the tutelage of the Ministry of Culture, as well as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Casa de Mateus Foundation began the large-scale treatment of the Archive, focusing on its classification, digitisation and restoration, under the scientific coordination of Armando Malheiro da Silva.

As part of this, more than 800,000 documents (digitised images) were recovered and processed, 6,087 bibliographic files were computerised and around 1,400 items from the Foundation's museum collections were inventoried. In this way, digital databases were created for the documents, books and collections. Parchment and paper documents, books, furniture and art objects were restored. Spaces were created for processing the Archive, the Inventory and the Reserves.

The inductive analysis of the information produced since the end of the 16th century enabled the structuring of an Information System, based on organic-functional criteria, which was built on the evolutionary line of the Family, establishing the natural succession of administrators of the Casa de Mateus, and in which various subsystems of information of a familial nature - from marriage alliances, donations, among others - and of an institutional nature - arising from the professional activities of various members of the Family - are integrated and diluted.

The SICM (Casa de Mateus Information System) emerges as the representation of a polychromatic picture made up of information produced in the most diverse quarters.

However, the predominance of documentation from the administration of properties located mainly in the Vila Real region is undeniable.

This work led to the publication of the "Catalogue of the Casa de Mateus Archive" in 2005 and the CD-Rom in 2006.

The Casa de Mateus Foundation is currently working on the definitive organisation of the Information System and the construction of the Digital Archive.

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