'''เอกสาร''' คือ กระดาษ หรือวัตถุใด ๆ ที่ได้ถูกบันทึก หรือทำให้ปรากฏด้วยการเขียน พิมพ์ ถ่ายรูป บันทึก หรือวิธีอื่นใด ให้ปรากฏเป็นข้อมูล ข่าวสาร ตัวเลข แบบ แผนผัง หรือสัญลักษณ์ อย่างใดอย่างหนึ่ง ซึ่งทำให้เกิดความหมายเพื่อการสื่อสารเกิดความเข้าใจได้

ในสมัยโบราณ เอกสารจะปรากฏเป็นข้อความที่บันทึกลงในแผ่นหนัง ผ้า ใบลานหรือวัสดุที่คาดว่าจะมีความคงทน และหาได้ในขณะนั้น ต่อมาเมื่อมีกระดาษ ข้อมูล ข่าวสารต่าง ๆ จึงถูกบันทึกในกระดาษ เกิดเป็นคัมภีร์ หนังสือ และเอกสารต่าง ๆ 

ในยุคปัจจุบัน จะมีการบันทึกข้อมูล ข่าวสาร ด้วยระบบทางอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ ลงในฮาร์ดดิสก์ หรือ จานบันทึกแบบแข็ง ฟลอปปี้ดิสก์ (จานบันทึกแบบอ่อน) คอมแพคดิสค์ (Compact Disc) หรือซีดี หรือแผ่นดีวีดีเกิดเป็นเอกสารที่เรียกว่า เอกสารอิเล็กทรอนิกส์

== ประเภทของเอกสาร ==
การแบ่งประเภทของเอกสารสามารถแบ่งได้หลายแบบ ตัวอย่างเช่น
* เอกสารส่วนตัว/เอกสารทั่วไป
* เอกสารทั่วไป/เอกสารลับ
* เอกสารฉบับร่าง/เอกสารฉบับสมบูรณ์
* เอกสารต้นฉบับ/เอกสารสำเนา
* ในระบบคุณภาพ จะแบ่งเป็น เอกสารควบคุม/เอกสารไม่ควบคุม
* ฯลฯ

อย่างไรก็ตาม เอกสารสามารถจำแนกเป็นประเภทใหญ่ ๆ ได้ ดังนี้
* เอกสารทางด้านการศึกษา เช่น วิทยานิพนธ์ งานวิจัย ฯลฯ
* เอกสารทางธุรกิจและบัญชี เช่น สัญญา ข้อเสนอ งบการเงิน เอกสารประกวดราคา ฯลฯ
* เอกสารทางกฎหมายและการเมือง
* เอกสารทางราชการ
* เอกสารสื่อสิ่งพิมพ์ ต่าง ๆ เช่นหนังสือพิมพ์ หนังสือ แผ่นพับ แผ่นปลิว ต่าง ๆ ฯลฯ
* ฯลฯ

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A '''document''' (noun) is a bounded physical representation of body of information designed with the capacity (and usually intent) to communicate. A document may manifest symbolic, diagrammatic or sensory-representational information. To ''document'' (verb) is to produce a document artifact by collecting and representing information. In prototypical usage, a ''document'' is understood as a paper artifact, containing information in the form of ink marks. Increasingly, documents are also understood as digital artifacts.

Colloquial usage is revealed by the connotations and denotations that appear in a [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GFRD,GFRD:2007-13,GFRD:en&defl=en&q=define:document&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title Web search for document]. From these usages, one can infer the following typical connotations:
* Writing that provides information (especially information of an official nature)
* Anything serving as a representation of a person's thinking by means of symbolic marks
* A written account of ownership or obligation
* To record in detail; "The parents documented every step of their child's development"
* A digital file in a particular format
* To support or supply with references; "Can you document your claims?"
* An artifact that meets a legal notion of document for purposes of discovery in litigation

The variety of usage reveals that the notion of document has rich social and cultural aspects besides the physical, functional and operational aspects.

==Conceptualization in analytical philosophy==
The notion of document admits both an empirical (in terms of a fuzzy set of real-world instances) and analytical characterization. The analytical characterization hinges on the ''semantic'' character of the word document, as well as the use of a primitive notion of ''document'' in accounts of larger communication constructs such as discourses, or related constructs such as language games.

The nominal 'document', like other nominals, exhibits familiar patterns of polysemy (a kind of ambiguity). For example, "document" might be used on an occasion to denote a certain body of information independently of how that information is physically rendered (as in 'the Bible is my favorite document.'; 'Have you finished reading all the documents for Monday's class yet?'), or it might be used to denote a particular physical instantiation of a body of information (as in 'that document is worn and needs to be re-bound.'; 'Return the documents you borrowed to the reference desk.'). This kind of polysemy bears some similarity to what Nunberg, 1979 termed "container/contents polysemy" (as in 'Mary broke the bottle' versus 'the baby finished the bottle'). These patterns of polysemy exhibited by 'document' matter for the following reason. A certain document qua body of information (e.g. the Bible, not a particular bound copy thereof) will have different properties than a document qua physical rendering of a body of information (e.g. a particular bound copy of the Bible). Importantly, the latter would have the property of being a static, physically bounded thing. The former would have the properties of being able to evolve over time, being susceptible of certain changes to information content, and being capable of supporting multiple physical instantiations that have allowable differences in information content. This distinction is relevant to the discussion of aspects and history of documents below.

==Empirical characterization==
In light of the polysemy of the core concept of document, it is useful to note a number of examples ranging from instances commonly understood as prototypical documents, to instances that are understood as documents only in specialized or rare situations.
* ''Prototypical Documents:'' Letters, memos, legal forms, Instruction manual
* ''Documents of Record:'' Newspapers and magazines
* ''Books:'' Text book, Novels, Recipe books, Encyclopedia, Comic books
* ''Canonical Documents:'' The Bible,Iliad and Odyssey,Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Quran, Code of Hammurabi,Tao Te Ching
* ''Transactional Documents:'' Cheque, Contracts, Prescription, Receipt, Form (document), Postage Stamp
* ''Functional Documents:'' PDF files, PostScript files, XML files, Email
* ''Non-Prototypical Documents:'' Post-it notes, Fortune cookie strips, Maps, Paintings, milk cartons, cereal boxes
* ''Non-Classical Digital Documents:'' Web Page, Weblog, Wiki
* ''Boundary Examples:'' The plaque on the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, designed by astronomer Carl Sagan, and using information assumed to be universal is an extreme example of a document that is intended to communicate with aliens. Conversely, the recorded and printed signals of the SETI project would constitute documents if they were discovered to contain alien communication.

==Social aspects of documents==
Documents play a key role in the construction of social reality (Searle, 1996) and therefore play a part in accounts of every important aspect of human society and culture. An example of this type of account is in the seminal account of the role of print in political evolution, ''Imagined Communities,'' (Anderson, B., 2006). More direct examples include the works of Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan, 1964 and 1969). Many key social aspects of documents arise from their historically ''unchanging'' character. This aspect leads to a definition of a document as a ''talking thing'' (Levy, D., 2003), whose strengths and weaknesses both arise from its relative (historical) immutability with respect to oral forms of communication. The relative immutability of documents has thus historically been important for establishing a record of transient events, or for preserving information whose precise linguistic form is of ritual or practical importance (such as religious texts or legal documents). Note though, that historically many societies have accorded greater authority to disciplined oral traditions as more reliable than parallel written ones. With this caveat in mind, the following social aspects of information may be noted.
* '''Social Value''': The information in documents as well as documents themselves are often valuable; the information because of the influence represented, and the document itself when it is believed to be a rare or unique and authentic representation of the information it contains.
* '''Manifestation of authority''': Documents are often produced to provide a record that will be considered authoritative in the future, particularly with respect to government. Consider receipts, titles, and deeds as examples of proof of ownership, and passports or driver's licenses as proof of identity.
* '''Conventional''': Documents inherit a key feature of language-based communication in general: they are denoted as documents by convention (Lewis, 2002). Virtually any medium can constitute a document provided the people involved can agree on the meaning represented. Hence cave drawings, hieroglyphics, scrolls of sheepskin, sheets of papyrus, ink on paper, magnetic tape and electronic files are all documents under certain accounts.
* '''Manifestation of economic labor''': Historically, the effort required to produce a document has been significant, so only the most important documents were created. The Illuminated manuscript of the pre-Gutenberg era demonstrates the cost (and associated imputed value) of documents. Historically, the cost of producing documents has declined, while their functional characteristics ("affordances" in the sense of Sellen and Harper, 2001) have become richer.
* '''Manifestation of business processes''': Documents play many roles in the internal management of a business as well in the interfaces between businesses and their suppliers, employees, and customers. Current trends toward longer value chains and increased regulation increase the number of documents that must be generated and processed.
* '''Instruments of Governance and Law''': The unchanging aspect of documents is crucial to the consistent communication of policy and administration of law to citizens. Documents that play such roles include constitutions, corporate annual reports and religious texts.
* '''Analytical philosophical character''': The notion of document plays a role in political philosophy (example, the notion of social contract as a primitive construct), as well as in the philosophy of law
* '''Role in Religion''': Documents play a key role in religion, and constitute canonical content. Document-related terms such as ''dogma'' and ''doctrine'' have today acquired pejorative connotations primarily due to historical events associated with religious documents.
* '''Cultural Significance''': Documents play a central role in art of all varieties. In the movie ''printer.
* '''Metaphoric Significance''': Metaphors based on documents permeate our thinking, ranging from the obvious ("let's start with a clean sheet for this design", "this is a new chapter in my life" and "she wrote the book on that") to the highly allegorical ("All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"&nbsp;&nbsp;— John Donne).

==Functional characteristics==
Documents also manifest several, more localized characteristics that determine how we use them in everyday life:
* '''Manifest nature''': Information is physical, i.e. it always must exist in a tangible form, even when digital. IBM computer scientist Rolf Landauer is credited with this observation and working out its implications. By virtue of being realizations of chunks of information, documents are necessarily physical in all their forms.
* '''Contextuality and Situatedness''': All communication takes place in a context, which includes at least the shared understanding of the parties communicating (Lewis, 2002). Explicit and implicit references to the context can convey a large amount of meaning by building on the shared understanding, but that meaning is lost to another party that does not share that context. For example, Shakespeare in the original would be incomprehensible to modern readers simply because of the evolution of language and spelling since the seventeenth century, and modern readers (besides Shakespeare scholars) normally read modernized versions. Similarly, hypertext documents exist in a context which is lost if printed, leading to a different offline reading context.
* '''Evolvability''': When we think of a document as a definitive source containing the best known information about a topic there is need to change that information as more is learned. This is frequently done by revising the document into a new version or edition. Typically, older versions are archived to facilitate understanding how the document has changed. In modern contexts, when technologies such as wikis or software source code are under discussion, this evolvability can require very sophisticated version control technologies.
* '''Renderability''': Every abstract entity that is understood to be a document in some context can be rendered, often in more than one way. A rendition of a document refers to a particular physical or electronic representation of the information from the document. For example, a portable document format (pdf) representation and a web page may contain the same information but have substantially different properties and appearances. We think of them as different renditions (or renderings) of the same document. We might similarly consider different translations of a document to be the same document although differences in language context and structure may make it impossible to express precisely the same meaning in both languages.
* '''Affordances:''' Documents in digital and physical forms manifest various "affordances" (Sellen and Harper, 2001, Gladwell, 2002)). The affordances of a particular rendition of a document determine its uses. For example, paper has the affordances of allowing flipping and easy tactile manipulation, while digital forms are easier to edit.

==Classical roles and workflows in document production==
There are a number of roles in which people are involved in the creation and distribution of traditional paper documents (Romano, 1989); some, but not all documents are processed by people acting in each role, each of which may be performed by an individual or a group. Books are a well known example of documents that require an extensive publication process, but many other documents undergo similar processes to at least some of those from book publication. Each of these roles is considered to improve or add value to a document. These roles are generally understood as being clustered in various phases in the production of a classical document, including authorship, editing and prepress. Roles and workflows in the production of modern digital documents are more variable and are discussed in the section on future documents.
* An '''author''' selects the content to be communicated and performs the initial organization and recording of the content. A document in this state is often called a manuscript.
* A '''reviewer''' reads the content and evaluates it with respect to the intended audience. Reviewers often recommend only the best documents to be published. Documented reviews are frequently published as guidelines for document consumers as well.
* An '''editor''' helps to organize and express the content so that the meaning is clear and understandable, and follows the conventions of the symbolic representation such as spelling and grammar.
* A '''publisher''' orchestrates the process of producing a document, often decides whether a document is worth the effort of publishing (usually an economic decision), and collects and disseminates the profits from sales of a produced document.
* A '''printer''' formats the document into a comfortable form such as a bound book. Printing can be a very complex and elaborate process, including
** '''pagination''' - function performed by an individual who takes on the tasks of organizing text, fonts, images, headings, footnotes, chapters and sections to accommodate the physical constraints of a printed page aesthetically.
** pre-press -- function performed by print shops in preparing paper documents for production.
** '''imposition''' - organizing desired pages on a larger media such that when folded and trimmed the pages will be upright and in order.
** '''printing''' - marking paper with ink or toner
** folding pages into sections
** binding pages together and covering
** trimming
** packaging
* A '''distributor''' manages inventory and physical distribution of printed documents to retailers.
* A '''retailer''' manages a local inventory and sales to consumers, and often is familiar with the content and can make appropriate recommendations.
* A '''librarian''' organizes, tracks borrowing of, and archives documents.
A publication process enables a '''consumer''' to purchase or borrow, read and learn from documents. Consumers are often the intended audience of the publication process.

==Document production technology==
Document production technology has evolved significantly through history. While a great deal can be said about ancient production technologies including papyrus, palm leaves, stone tablets and marking devices ranging from quills to chisels, the modern form of the document has evolved largely under the influence of printing technologies. The Illuminated manuscript of Europe is a useful prototypical instance of the document at the end of its evolution before the widespread use of printing. The associated technology was largely a human one. Other cultures at this stage used other forms of pre-print era documents. The history of printing can be traced as follows:

Bronze age civilizations made extensive use of seals for commercial and transactional purposes. The particular case of the signet ring was of particular importance, and is still in use in place of signatures in East Asian countries like Korea, where it is common for individuals to carry a seal.

Chinese Woodblock printing was the first widespread technology that automated important parts of the document production process.

The Gutenberg Printing Press (McLuhan, M., 1969) enabled the mass production of faithful copies of documents, and hence the widespread dissemination of information. The widespread access to information enabled (and necessitated) fundamental changes to society in religion, government, law, business, and entertainment. Prior to the press the huge effort required to faithfully hand-copy severely limited the number of documents available, and hence access to the information contained therein. The effort to set type and prepare a document for reproduction was still high, but many high fidelity copies could be produced.

The development of Lithography constituted the next great advance in document production technology and continues today to dominate the economic landscape of document production, an economic sector estimated to be of the order of $1 trillion. Lithography brought economies of scale and extremely high quality and low cost to documents.