A document is a written or drawn 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 of
electronic documents.
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
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 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 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. 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
into a document. It has become physical evidence by those who
study it.
Value of document research exemplified: Aviation to many is an
esoteric subject. It is an intricate combination of men, 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 safety of flights and
passengers are sort of 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 ones research may be the aviation documents dedicated to
safety of flights and human beings that travel by air which contains
plethora of concrete and symbolic indications of physical and mental
phenomena that it 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. A qualitative researcher may undertake to analyse the text
inductively as well as deductively within 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)
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 the original.
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]
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 a scroll 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
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 of questioned 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, 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
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).