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understanding of these concepts; doctors treated diseases, albeit not
always very effectively, long before they had a realistic idea of what
caused them. However, most professions have some understanding of
the basic concepts with which they deal.

“Information” and “knowledge”, however, are tricky concepts,
which can have many different meanings, and can be understood in
many different ways. These are not just academic matters; they can have

a real effect on professional practice. What someone understands by
“knowledge”, for example, and its relation to “information”, will
determine how they go about the practical business of “knowledge
management”.

The same, of course, is true for “document”; what a librarian
understands by a “document” will determine what kinds of thing they
keep on their shelves or in their computer files. And “document” also is

a term which can be understood in various ways, though not, perhaps,
quite as widely as “information”.
It might 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. But
then what about geological specimens in museums or living animals in
zoos? They are physical evidence, which may be studied, and which

may in a sense communicate information. Should they be treated as
documents? Buckland (1997) gives a good concise review of these
issues.

Even if we restrict ourselves, as most information specialists might
wish, to seeing documents as being some physical item deliberately
created for the purpose of conveying information, we still find some
difficulties. In particular, we may have a problem deciding when two

documents are “the same”. If I have a copy of a textbook, and you have
a copy of the same edition of the same book, then these are clearly
different objects. But in a library catalogue they will be treated as two

examples of the same document. What if the book is translated, word for
word, as precisely as possible, into another language: is the same
document, or different? At what point do an author’s ideas, on their way

to becoming a published book, become a “document”?