Document

Related Topics:
Documentary :: Document :: Document_Imaging :: Document_Management :: Documentation :: Document_Archives :: Documentation_and_FAQs :: Document_Types :: Document_Shredding :: Documentation_and_Cataloguing

For the R.E.M. album, see: Document (album)

For the Surrealist journal, see: Documents (journal)

A document contains information. It often refers to an actual products of writing and is usually intended to communicate or store collections of data. Documents are often the focus and concern of Administration.

Documents could be seen to include any discrete representation of meaning, but usually it refers to something like a physical book, printed page(s) or a virtual document in electronic/digital format.

For a recent in-depth and multiapproach study, see the collective text Document: Form, Sign and Medium, As Reformulated for Electronic Documents, written under pseudo Roger T. Pédauque (French version or English version).

Types of Documents

Documents are often classified, e.g. Secret/Private/Confidential/Draft/Original/Proof. There are accepted standards for certain applications such as:

Business and Accounting : Invoice, Quotation, RFP, Proposal, Contract ...
Legal and Political : Summons, Certificate, License, Gazette ...
Academic and Scientific : Thesis, Paper, Journal ...
Technical and Trade Specific: White Paper, ...
Media and Marketing : Brief, Mock-up, Script, ...

Such standard documents can be created based on-, or by modifying templates.

Visual design of

How information is graphically organised is called Layout and the study and manipulation of the letterforms and their relationships to each other and other design ellements is called Typography in the dissipline of Graphic Design. Information design focuses on especially the efficiency of industrial documents and signs.

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 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 baked to make clay tablets (e.g. in Sumerian and other Mesopotamian civilisations). Paper, papyrus or parchment might be rolled up as scrolls or cut into sheets and bound into books. Stacks of clay tablets might also be thought of as books. Small documents might also be stapled.

Today, electronic means for storing and displaying documents are also popular; a variety of computers and displays can be used, for example:

Digital documents usually have to adhere to the specifications of format in order to be useful.

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.

Author Michael Buckland has discussed the document in terms of Librarianship in depth, here ^*.

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Types of Documents

Visual design of

History

In Law

See also