Document - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Document

An often-cited article concludes that "the evolving notion of " among Jonathan Priest,
Paul Otlet, Briet, Walter 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. David M.
Levy has said that an emphasis on the technology of digital documents has impeded our
understanding of digital documents as documents.[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 to serve as evidence. The classic example provided by 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][4] This opinion has been interpreted as an early expression of actor–
network theory.

Kinds

A document can be structured, like tabular documents, lists, forms, or scientific charts, semi-
structured like a book or a newspaper article, or unstructured like a handwritten note. Documents
are sometimes classified as secret, private, or public. They may also be described as drafts or
proofs. When a document is copied, the source is denominated the "original".

Documents are used in numerous fields, e.g.:

• Academia:
◦ manuscript,

◦ thesis,

◦ paper,

◦ journal,

◦ chart,

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◦ and technical drawing

• Media:
◦ mock-up,

◦ script,

◦ image,

◦ photography,

◦ and newspaper article

• Administration, law, and politics:

◦ application,

◦ brief,

◦ certificate,

◦ commission,

◦ constitutional document,

◦ form,

◦ gazette,

◦ identity document,

◦ license,

◦ manifesto,

◦ summons,

◦ census,

◦ and white paper

• Business:
◦ invoice,

◦ request for proposal,

◦ proposal,

◦ contract,

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◦ packing slip,

◦ manifest,

◦ report (detailed and summary),

◦ spreadsheet,

◦ material safety data sheet,

◦ waybill,

◦ bill of lading,

◦ financial statement,

◦ nondisclosure agreement (NDA),

◦ mutual nondisclosure agreement,

◦ and user guide

• Geography and planning:

◦ topographic map,

◦ cadastre,

◦ legend,

◦ and architectural plan

Such standard documents can be drafted based on a template.

Drafting

The page layout of a document is how information is graphically arranged in the space of the
document, e.g., on a page. If the appearance of the document is of concern, the 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.

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Media

A page of a birth register for Jews

from 1859

Traditionally, the medium of a document was paper and the information was applied to it in ink,
either by handwriting (to make a manuscript) or by a mechanical process (e.g., a printing press or
laser printer). Today, some short documents also may consist of sheets of paper stapled
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; optionally with a printer to produce a hard copy;

• Personal digital assistant;

• Dedicated e-book device;

• Electronic paper, typically, using the Portable Document Format (PDF);

• Information appliance;

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• Digital audio player; and

• Radio and television service provider.

Digital documents usually require a specific file format 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. To catalog and manage 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

• Documentality

• Documentation

• History of the book

• Identity document

• Letterhead

• Realia (library science)

• Travel document

References

1. Briet, S. (1951). "Qu'est-ce que la documentation?".

. Quoted in Buckland, Michael (1991). "Information as Thing" (https://people.is
chool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/thing.html) . . Retrieved
2023-10-18.

2. Levy, David M., (https://web.archive.org/

web/20130606180031/http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.119.88

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13&rep=rep1&type=pdf) , CiteSeerX 10.1.1.119.8813 (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewd

oc/summary?doi=10.1.1.119.8813) , archived from the original (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.e
du/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.119.8813&rep=rep1&type=pdf) on 2013-06-06,
retrieved 2023-10-18

3. Buckland, M. "What Is a Digital Document?" 1998. In Paris. 2(2). [1]

(http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/digdoc.html) Archived (https://web.archi
ve.org/web/20111002042527/http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/digdoc.html)
2011-10-02 at the Wayback Machine.

4. Buckland, Michael (2018). "Document theory" (https://web.archive.org/web/20220506030

602/https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/0943-7444-2018-5-425.pdf) (PDF).
. (5): 425–436. doi:10.5771/0943-7444-2018-5-425 (https://do
i.org/10.5771%2F0943-7444-2018-5-425) . Archived from the original on 2022-05-06.
Retrieved 2023-10-18.

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

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the American Society for Information Science, 47, 669–671.

• Signer, Beat:
(https://www.academia.edu/241739/What_is_Wrong_
with_Digital_Documents_A_Conceptual_Model_for_Structural_Cross-Media_Content_Compo
sition_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 (https://web.archive.org/web/2013080507

3310/http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/HowToDoThingsWithDocuments.pdf) ",
, 50 (2012), 179–198.

• Smith, Barry. "Document Acts (https://web.archive.org/web/20131101121830/http://ontolog

y.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/document-acts.pdf) ", in Anita Konzelmann-Ziv, Hans Bernhard
Schmid (eds.), 2013.
(Philosophical Studies Series), Dordrecht: Springer

• Ørom, A. (2007). The concept of information versus the concept of a document. I: Document
(re)turn. Contributions from a research field in transition. Ed. By Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld
Lund & Andreas Vårheim. Frankfurt is Main: Peter Lang. (pp. 53–72).

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