Document

A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of

thought. The word originates from the Latin documentum, which denotes a
"teaching" or "lesson": the verb doceō denotes "to teach". In the past, the word was
usually used to denote a written proof useful as evidence of a truth or fact. In the
computer age, "document" usually denotes a primarily textual computer file,
including its structure and format, e.g. fonts, colors, and images. Contemporarily,
"document" is not defined by its transmission medium, e.g., paper, given the
existence of electronic documents. "Documentation" is distinct because it has more
denotations than "document". Documents are also distinguished from "realia", which
are three-dimensional objects that would otherwise satisfy the definition of
"document" because they memorialize or represent thought; documents are
considered more as 2 dimensional representations.

Contents
Abstract definitions
Kinds
Drafting Several common types of
History documents: a birth certificate, a legal
In law document (a restraining order), and
See also a bank statement
References
Further reading

Abstract definitions
The concept of "document" has been definedas "any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for
[1]
proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental."

An often cited article concludes that "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.

"Document" is defined in library and information science and documentation science as a fundamental, abstract idea: the word
denotes everything that may be represented or memorialized in order to serve as evidence. The classic 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."[3] This opinion has been interpreted as an early expression ofactor–network theory.

Kinds
Documents are sometimes classified assecret, private, or public. They may also be described as drafts or proofs. When a document is
copied, the source is denominated the "original".

Standards are accepted for specific applications in various fields, e.g.:

Academia: manuscript, thesis, paper, and journal

Business: invoice, quote, RFP, proposal, contract, packing slip, manifest, report (detailed and summary),spread
sheet, MSDS, waybill, bill of lading (BOL), financial statement, nondisclosure agreement(NDA), mutual
nondisclosure agreement (MNDA), and user guide
Government, law, and politics: application, brief, certificate, commission, constitutional document, form, gazette,
identity document, license, summons, and white paper
Media: mock-up and script
Such standard documents can be drafted based on atemplate.

Drafting
The page layout of a document is the manner in which information is graphically arranged in the space of the document, 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
concerns the design of letter and symbol forms and their physical arrangement in the document (see typesetting). Information design
concerns the effective communication of information, especially in industrial documents and public signs. Simple textual documents
may not require visual design and may be drafted only by an author, clerk, or transcriber. Forms may require a visual design for their
initial fields, but not to complete the forms.

History
Traditionally, the medium of a document was paper and the information was applied
to it in ink, either by hand writing (to make a manuscript) or by mechanical process
(e.g., a printing press or laser printer). Today, some short documents also may
consist of sheets of paperstapled together.

Historically, documents were inscribed with ink on papyrus (starting in ancient

Egypt) or parchment; scratched as runes or carved on stone using a sharp tool, e.g.,
the Tablets of Stone described in the Bible; stamped or incised in clay and then
baked to make clay tablets, e.g., in the Sumerian and other Mesopotamian
civilizations. The papyrus or parchment was often rolled into a scroll or cut into
sheets and bound into a codex (book).

Contemporary electronic means of memorializing and displaying documents

include:

Monitor of a desktop computer, laptop, tablet PC, et cetera; optionally

with a printer to produce a hard copy;
Personal digital assistant(PDA);
Dedicated e-book device; A birth certificate from 1859
Electronic paper, typically, using the Portable Document Format(PDF);
Information appliance;
Digital audio player; and
Radio and television service provider.
Digital documents usually require a specificfile format in order to be presentable in a specific medium.

In law
Documents in all forms frequently serve as material evidence in criminal and civil proceedings. The forensic analysis of such a
document is within the scope of questioned document examination. For the purpose of cataloging and managing the large number of
documents that may be produced during litigation, Bates numbering is often applied to all documents in the lawsuit so that each
document has a unique, arbitrary, identification number.

See also
Archive
Book
Documentation
History of the book
Realia (library science)

References
1. Briet. 1951. 7. Quoted in Buckland, 1991.
2. Levy, D. M. "Fixed or Fluid? Document Stability and New Media." 1994. InEuropean Conference on Hypertext
Technology 1994 Proceedings, pp. 24–31. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 18 October
2011 from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.119.8813&rep=rep1&type=pdf
3. Buckland, M. "What Is a Digital Document?" 1998. InDocument Numérique Paris. 2(2). [1] (http://people.ischool.berk
eley.edu/~buckland/digdoc.html).

Further reading
Briet, S. (1951). Qu'est-ce que la documentation? Paris: Documentaires Industrielles etechniques.
T
Buckland, M. (1991). Information and information systems. New ork:
Y 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 e
Tchnology, 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.
Signer, Beat: What is Wrong with Digital Documents? A Conceptual Model for Structural Cross-Media Content
Composition and Reuse, In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2010),
Vancouver, Canada, November 2010.
Smith, Barry. “How to Do Things with Documents”, Rivista di Estetica, 50 (2012), 179-198.
Smith, Barry. “Document Acts”,in Anita Konzelmann-Ziv, Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), 2013. Institutions, Emotions,
and Group Agents.Contributions to Social Ontology(Philosophical Studies Series), Dordrecht: Springer
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).
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