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What is a digital document

reprint of article published in Document Numérique Paris no - It may di ?er in small ways from the published version This is a shortened version with a little more attention to digital documents of What is a 'document' Journal of the American Society for Information Science no Sept - reprinted in Hahn T B M Buckland eds Historical Studies in Information Science Medford NJ Information Today pp - What is a digital document Michael Buckland School of Information Management and Systems University of California Berkeley CA USA - buckland sims berkeley edu Abstract The question What is a digital document is seen as a special case of the question What is a document Ordinarily the word document denotes a textual record Early this century attempts to provide access to the rapidly growing quantity of available documents raised questions about which should be considered a document Paul Otlet and others developed a functional view of document and discussed whether for example sculpture museum objects and live animals could be considered to be documents Suzanne Briet equated document with organized physical evidence These ideas resemble notions of material culture in cultural anthropology and object-as-sign in semiotics Others especially in the USA e g Jesse Shera and Louis Shores took a narrower view Old confusions between medium message and meaning are renewed with digital technology because technological de ?nitions of document become even less realistic when everything is in bits Introduction When we refer to a paper document a papyrus document or a micro ?lmed document the meaning is clear However the idea of a digital document is more di ?cult We can recognize e-mail and a technical report generated by a wordprocessor as digital documents but beyond these simple examples the concept of a document becomes less clear Is a software program a document It has lines of language- like text Is an operating system a document One can enumerate di ?erent types of digital documents and this is necessary because of the need to specify standards in order to achieve e ?ciency and interoperability But if one seeks completeness the process becomes arbitrary and intellectually unsatisfying because it is not clear where the frontier between documents and non-documents should be A paper document is distinguished in part by the fact that it is on paper But that aspect the technological medium is less helpful with digital documents An e-mail message and a technical report exist physically in a digital environment as a string of bits but so does everything else in a physical environment Multimedia which used to denote multiple physically-di ?erent media is now of renewed interest because ironically the multiple media can be reduced to the mono-medium of electronically stored bits For practical purposes people develop pragmatic de ?nitions such as anything that can be given a ?le name and stored on electronic media or a collection of data plus properties of that data that a user chooses to refer to as a logical unit And as so