dokumenter

Dokumenter are records that convey information and may serve as evidence, reference, or proof of transactions and activities. They are produced or received by individuals, organizations, or institutions and are managed to support accountability, decision making, and continuity.

Dokumenter can be physical, such as handwritten correspondence, contracts, or printed reports, or digital, such as word processing files, PDFs, emails, spreadsheets, databases, or multimedia assets. Digital documents are often accompanied by metadata and may require preservation strategies to remain readable over time.

Key characteristics include content (the information itself), metadata (data about the document), provenance (the history of creation and handling), authenticity and integrity (verifiability of origin and unchanged state), and versioning (tracking edits and revisions). Access controls and retention policies govern how long documents are kept and who may use them.

Management of dokumenter commonly follows records management or information governance frameworks. Standards and practices include retention schedules, classification schemes, and metadata standards such as Dublin Core. For long-term preservation, formats like PDF/A or TIFF and preservation metadata standards such as PREMIS are used, along with format migration and checksums.

Uses of dokumenter include legal evidence, regulatory compliance, auditing, historical research, and daily operations. Libraries, archives, and government agencies often maintain controlled repositories to ensure discoverability, authenticity, and durability.

Digital environments require ongoing preservation activities: regular backups, redundancy, format migration, and integrity checks. OCR and indexing improve searchability, while robust provenance records support trust in the documents’ origins and changes over time.