Document

From Encyclopedia Jr, free information reference for Kids

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 product of writing and is usually intended to communicate or store collections of data. Documents are often the focus and concern of administration.

The term document may be applied to any discrete representation of meaning, but usually it refers to something physical like one or more printed pages, or to a "virtual" document in electronic (digital) format.

For a recent in-depth and multidisciplinary study, see the collective text Document: Form, Sign and Medium, As Reformulated for Electronic Documents, published under the pseudonym Roger T. Pédauque.

[edit] Types of documents

Documents are sometimes classified as secret, private or confidential. 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:

• Academia: thesis, dissertation, paper, journal
• Business and accounting: invoice, quote, RFP, proposal, contract
• Law and politics: summons, certificate, license, gazette
• Government and industry: white paper
• Media and marketing: brief, mock-up, script

Such standard documents can be created based on a template.

[edit] Visual design

The page layout of a document is the manner in which information is graphically arranged in the document space (e.g., on a page); it 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.

[edit] 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, 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 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

Digital documents usually have to adhere to a specific file format in order to be useful.

[edit] 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 [1].

[edit] See also

• Document file format
• Desktop publishing
• Historical document
• Word processor