Document From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For the R.E.M. album, see Document (album).

For the similarly named surrealist j ournal, see Documents (magazine). Ambox question.svg This article or section lacks a single coherent topic. Please help improve this article by rewording sentences, removing irrelevant information, or splitting th e article into multiple articles. Specific concerns may appear on the talk page. (June 2013) document, written document, papers (writing that provides information (especiall y information of an official nature)) document (anything serving as a representation of a person's thinking by means o f 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 preserv ed 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 t he plains of Africa should not be considered a document, she rules. But if it we re 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 i t. Indeed, scholarly articles written about the antelope are secondary documents , since the antelope itself is the primary document." (Quoted from Buckland, 199 8 [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. Contents [hide] 1 What is a document? 2 Types of documents 3 Developing documents 4 History 5 In law 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading What is a document?[edit source | editbeta] The concept of document has been defined as any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether p hysical or mental" (Briet, 1951, 7; here quoted from Buckland, 1991). A much cited article asked "what is a document" and concluded this way: The evolv ing notion of document among (Jonathan Priest). Otlet, Briet, Schrmeyer, and the othe r documentalists increasingly emphasized whatever functioned as a document rathe r than traditional physical forms of documents. The shift to digital technology would seem to make this distinction even more important. Levy s thoughtful analyse s 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 co nventional document, such as a mail message or a technical report, exists physic ally in digital technology as a string of bits, as does everything else in a dig ital environment. As an object of study, it has been made into a document. It ha s become physical evidence by those who study it. Types of documents[edit source | editbeta] Documents are sometimes classified as secret, private or public. They may also b e described as a draft or proof. When a document is copied, the source is referr ed to as the original. There are accepted standards for specific applications in various fields, such a

s: 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 source | editbeta] 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 docum ent is of concern, page layout is generally the responsibility of a graphic desi gner. Typography deals with the design of letter and symbol forms, as well as th eir physical arrangement in the document (see typesetting). Information design f ocuses on the effective communication of information, especially in industrial d ocuments 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 visu al design for the initial fields, but not to fill out the forms. History[edit source | editbeta] Traditionally, the medium of a document was paper and the information was applie d to it as ink, either by hand (to make a hand-written document) or by a mechani cal 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 Sum erian and other Mesopotamian civilisations). The paper, papyrus or parchment mig ht be rolled up as a scroll or cut into sheets and bound into a book. Today shor t 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 pri nter to obtain a hard copy Personal digital assistant (PDA) dedicated e-book device electronic paper information appliances digital audio players radio and television service provider Digital documents usually have to adhere to a specific file format in order to b e useful. That documents cannot be defined by their transmission medium In law[edit source | editbeta] 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 mana ging the large number of documents that may be produced in the course of a law s uit, Bates numbering is often applied to all documents so that each document has a unique, aribitrary identifying number. See also[edit source | editbeta] Related concepts: Data storage device: to store documents. Document automation Document collaboration Document-centric collaboration Document file format: a standard used for represent the document into a storage

device. Media type: document parts (text block, illustration, audio sample, etc.) can us e different media types to store and "display" it. Internet of Things Realia (library science) Subject (documents) Other related articles: Historical document Desktop publishing Word processor Documentary film Documentation science All pages with titles containing "Document" References[edit source | editbeta] ^ Buckland, M. (1998). What is a digital document? In: Document Numrique (Paris) 2(2), http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/digdoc.html ^ Levy, D. M. (1994) . Fixed or fluid? Document stability and new media. In Euro pean Conference on Hypertext Technology 1994 Proceedings, (pp. 24 31) . 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 source | editbeta] Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Documents Briet, S. (1951). Qu'est-ce que la documentation? Paris: Documentaires Industrie lles et Techniques. Buckland, M. (1991). Information and information systems. New York: Greenwood Pr ess. Frohmann, Bernd (2009). Revisiting "what is a document?", Journal of Documentati on, 65(2), 291-303. Hjerppe, R. (1994). A framework for the description of generalized documents. Ad vances in Knowledge Organization, 4, 173-180. Houser, L. (1986). Documents: The domain of library and information science. Lib rary and Information Science Research, 8, 163-188. Larsen, P.S. (1999). Books and bytes: Preserving documents for posterity. Journa l of the American Society for Information Science, 50(11), 1020-1027. Lund, N. W. (2008). Document theory. Annual Review of Information Science and Te chnology, 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 Struc tural Cross-Media Content Composition and Reuse, In Proceedings of the 29th Inte rnational Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2010), Vancouver, Canada, Novemb er 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: Doc ument (re)turn. Contributions from a research field in transition. Ed. By Roswit ha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund & Andreas Vrheim. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. (p p. 53 72).