Introduction

Documents, as carriers of information, play a central role in the information disciplines and professions, and the documentation movement of the first half of the 20th century was one of the predecessors of information science. However, although documents carry information and data, they are not synonymous with either. The complex relation between these concepts, and the significance of that relation for the information disciplines, has been discussed for many years, gaining new impetus in recent years. For diverse and detailed perspectives on the concept of document, and its relationship to information and data, see Hjørland (2000), Ørom (2007), Kosciejew and Richard (2015), Furner (2016) and Schöpfel et al. (2020).

We will look first at the document theory, introduced by the first documentation movement, and further developed by the neo-documentalists from around 1990, and then consider some current and future issues relating to document categorisation and organisation. Finally, we will examine the changing nature of collections of documents.

Document theory

The English word ‘document’ comes from the Latin docere, to teach or to inform, with ‘-ment’ implying the means. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a document as ‘something written, inscribed, etc., which furnishes evidence or information upon any subject’, and this is how documents are generally understood.

It might therefore be thought that the meaning of ‘document’ is straightforward and that the only issues that can arise relate to the differences between printed and electronic documents. This is far from the case. It can be argued that if a ‘document’ is some physical thing which records thoughts or ideas – information – then we should include paintings, sculpture, and perhaps even any artefact, as documents.