Document theory

Abstract

The chapter gives a general overview of the historical development of theoretical reflection on documents and the formulation of document theories. The Latin documentum and the use of the concept of documents in European state bureaucracy from the seventeenth century onwards is taken as a starting point for the chapter. The first interest in document theory was a professional one and can be observed at the beginning of the twentieth century. After World War II the notion of document and documentation was replaced by the notion of information, at least in the anglophone community. Since the 1990s, there has again been a growing interest in the notion of documents and documentation inside library and information science, together with a growing interest in digital documents.