A document is a written, drawn, presented or recorded representation of thoughts.

Originating from
the Latin Documentum meaning lesson - the verb doce means to teach, and is pronounced
similarly, in the past it was usually used as a term for a written proof used as evidence. In
the computer age, a document is usually used to describe a primarily textual file, along with its
structure and design, such as fonts, colors and additional images.
The modern term 'document' can no longer be defined by its transmission medium (such as paper),
following the existence ofelectronic documents. 'Documentation' has more meanings than a written
or drawn presentation of thoughts.
The formal term 'document' is defined in Library and information science and in documentation
science, as 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 actornetwork theory).
Contents
[hide]

1 The document concept

1.1 Examples

2 Types of documents

3 Developing documents

4 History

5 In law

6 See also

7 References

8 Further reading

The document concept[edit]

The concept of "document" has been defined[by whom?] 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, Schrmeyer, and the
otherdocumentalists 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. Levys 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[by whom?] into a document. It has become physical evidence by
those who study it.

Examples[edit]
The value of document research exemplified:

Aviation to many seems an esoteric subject. It covers an intricate combination of people,

machines and environment. Because of the technological faade that predominates aviation,
people are almost unaware of its aesthetic make-up - particularly that of flight. This has serious
implications for aviation education. Even the professionals handling the safety of flights and
passengers are sort of[clarification needed] realization of literary values of aviation that basically deals with
flights. Scholarly intervention for educating youths and aviation professionals on matters of
safety, too, is rare. The object of research may be the aviation documents dedicated to the
safety of flights and of the human beings who travel by air, which contains a plethora of concrete
and symbolic indications of physical and mental phenomena that it[clarification needed] has recorded.
These indications have not been addressed in a manner that could contribute to peoples'
arousal, awareness and interest towards aviation. The study may be designed to claim that the
deep structure of aviation-safety documents posit philosophical and literary features of high
aesthetic and educational values, which the study seeks to explore. These ontological and
literary values can be elaborated in a way that facilitates creating rich aviation literature having
implications for disciplinary education of the aviation professionals at work for safety. The
implications of study for research intervention at tertiary university level may also be discussed. [by
whom?]

A qualitative researcher may undertake to analyse the text inductively as well as deductively

within a post-structural critical perspective utilizing interpretive auto-ethnographic strategy.

(Baral, Saurabh R., 2014. Aviation English: A study of the ontological and literary dimensions of
aviation safety documents and their implications for aviation education. A concept proposal for
PhD in English. Self)[page needed]

Types of documents[edit]
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 theoriginal.
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[edit]
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[edit]

A birth certificate from 1859.

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 or carved on stone using a sharp apparatus (such as the Tablets
of Stone described in the bible); 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 ascroll 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:

desktop computer and monitor (or laptop, tablet PC, etc.); optionally with a printer to obtain
a hard copy

Personal digital assistant (PDA)

dedicated e-book device

electronic paper, typically, using the Portable Document Format PDF

information appliances

digital audio players

radio and television service provider

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[edit]
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 ofquestioned
document examination. For the purpose of cataloging and managing the large number of documents
that may be produced in the course of a lawsuit, Bates numbering is often applied to all documents
so that each document has a unique, aribitrary identifying number.

See also[edit]

Realia (library science)

Subject (documents)

Commission (document)

Form (document)

Constitutional documents

Identity document

Identity document forgery

References[edit]
1.

Jump up^ Buckland, M. (1998). What is a digital document? In: Document Numrique (Paris)
2(2), http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/digdoc.html

2.

Jump up^ Levy, D. M. (1994) . Fixed or fluid? Document stability and new media. In
European Conference on Hypertext Technology 1994 Proceedings, (pp. 2431) . New York:
Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 2011-10-18
from: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.119.8813&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Further reading[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has

media related
to Documents.

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, 399432.

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

rom, 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
Vrheim. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. (pp. 5372).