The term document has multiple meanings in ordinary language and in scholarship. WordNet 3.1. lists four meanings (October 2011):
- document, written document, papers (writing that provides information (especially information of an official nature))
- document (anything serving as a representation of a person's thinking by means of symbolic marks)
- document (a written account of ownership or obligation)
- text file, document ((computer science) a computer file that contains text (and possibly formatting instructions) using seven-bit ASCII characters).
In Library and information science and in documentation science, a "document" is considered a basic theoretical construct. It is everything which may be preserved or represented in order to serve as evidence for some purpose. The classical example provided by Suzanne Briet is an antelope: "An antelope running wild on the plains of Africa should not be considered a document, she rules. But if it were to be captured, taken to a zoo and made an object of study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence being used by those who study it. Indeed, scholarly articles written about the antelope are secondary documents, since the antelope itself is the primary document." (Quoted from Buckland, 1998 [1]). (This view has been seen as an early expression of what now is known as actor–network theory).
That documents cannot be defined by their transmission medium (such as paper) is evident because of the existence of electronic documents.
What is a document?
The concept of document has been defined as “any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental" (Briet, 1951, 7; here quoted from Buckland, 1991).
A much cited article asked "what is a document" and concluded this way: “The evolving notion of ‘‘document’’ among (Jonathan Priest). Otlet, Briet, Schürmeyer, and the other documentalists increasingly emphasized whatever functioned as a document rather than traditional physical forms of documents. The shift to digital technology would seem to make this distinction even more important. Levy’s thoughtful analyses have shown that an emphasis on the technology of digital documents has impeded our understanding of digital documents as documents (e.g., Levy, 1994[2]). A conventional document, such as a mail message or a technical report, exists physically in digital technology as a string of bits, as does everything else in a digital environment. As an object of study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence by those who study it.
Types of documents
Documents are sometimes classified as secret, private or public. They may also be described as a draft or proof. When a document is copied, the source is referred to as the original.
There are accepted standards for specific applications in various fields, such as:
- Academic: thesis, paper, journal
- Business and accounting: Invoice, quote, RFP, Proposal, Contract, Packing slip, Manifest, Report detailed & summary, Spread sheet, MSDS, Waybill, Bill of Lading (BOL), Financial statement, Nondisclosure agreement (NDA) or sometimes referred to as; Mutual nondisclosure agreement (MNDA)
- Law and politics: summons, certificate, license, gazette
- Government and industry: white paper, application forms, user-guide
- Media and marketing: brief, mock-up, script
Such standard documents can be created based on a template.
Developing documents
The page layout of a document is the manner in which information is graphically arranged in the document space (e.g., on a page). If the appearance of the document is of concern, page layout is generally the responsibility of a graphic designer. Typography deals with the design of letter and symbol forms, as well as their physical arrangement in the document (see typesetting). Information design focuses on the effective communication of information, especially in industrial documents and public signs. Simple text documents may not require a visual design and may be handled by an author, clerk or transcriber. Forms may require a visual design for the initial fields, but not to fill out the forms.
History
Traditionally, the medium of a document was paper and the information was applied to it as ink, either by hand (to make a hand-written document) or by a mechanical process (such as a printing press or, more recently, a laser printer).
Through time, documents have also been written with ink on papyrus (starting in ancient Egypt) or parchment; scratched as runes on stone using a sharp apparatus; stamped or cut into clay and then baked to make clay tablets (e.g., in the Sumerian and other Mesopotamian civilisations). The paper, papyrus or parchment might be rolled up as a scroll or cut into sheets and bound into a book. Today short documents might also consist of sheets of paper stapled together.
Modern electronic means of storing and displaying documents include:
Digital documents usually have to adhere to a specific file format in order to be useful.
That documents cannot be defined by their transmission medium
In law
Documents in all forms are frequently found to be material evidence in criminal and civil proceedings. The forensic analysis of such a document falls under the scope of questioned document examination. For the purpose of cataloging and managing the large number of documents that may be produced in the course of a law suit, Bates numbering is often applied to all documents so that each document has a unique, aribitrary identifying number.
See also
Related concepts:
Other related articles:
References
Further reading
- Briet, S. (1951). Qu'est-ce que la documentation? Paris: Documentaires Industrielles et Techniques.
- Buckland, M. (1991). Information and information systems. New York: Greenwood Press.
- Frohmann, Bernd (2009). Revisiting "what is a document?", Journal of Documentation, 65(2), 291-303.
- Hjerppe, R. (1994). A framework for the description of generalized documents. Advances in Knowledge Organization, 4, 173-180.
- Houser, L. (1986). Documents: The domain of library and information science. Library and Information Science Research, 8, 163-188.
- Larsen, P.S. (1999). Books and bytes: Preserving documents for posterity. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(11), 1020-1027.
- Lund, N. W. (2008). Document theory. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43, 399-432.
- Riles, A. (Ed.) (2006). Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
- Schamber, L. (1996). What is a document? Rethinking the concept in uneasy times. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47, 669-671.
- Ørom, A. (2007). The concept of information versus the concept of document. I: Document (re)turn. Contributions from a research field in transition. Ed. By Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund & Andreas Vårheim. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. (pp. 53–72).
