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Document Life and Life Cycle
 Like everything that is associated with our lives, documents also do have a life, but the basic difference is that the life of a document is based on the fact that how long the document should be kept for future reference.
The life of a document will vary from trade to trade where for an example a national museum will preserve a document assuming that it needs to be kept forever, but a small business will decide that some of their business documents are not required after 710 years. However there are legislative controls for how long the business documents are to be kept, such as cheques and vouchers etc, but again this can vary form country to country. But for most other business documents, individual companies have to prepare their own standards defining life of documents; this is referred as the "Retention Policy" of an organization.
Life of a document is represented through its "Life
Cycle (Figure 1)"; this is the activity graph of a document
against the time.
Figure (1) represents a generic document through its life, the first portion represents active life of the document where it is being referred and accessed many times by many people. Good example for this is a cheque that is being processed at the back office of a bank.
Once the document passes through this process then typically the access frequency becomes low and the document becomes idle. But what could happen after a while is that customer finds that there is an error in the processing, and log a complaint, causing the cheque to be re-accessed and made active again. This is called the exception processing area and is generally unique to the type of application.
As time goes by the document slowly enters the non-accessed or infrequently accessed area. Now the document should be archived or destroyed based on the retention policy of the organization.
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Definition
of a Document
Prior to the advent of computer-generated data, the
definition of a document was pretty universally accepted as
information on printed media. The dawn of the computer age
and the concomitant expansion of its influence then presented
us with a paradigm shift which we struggled with for some
time. Today a good working definition of a document is one,
which has been proposed by Xerox. According to Xerox, a document
is: "Information structured for human comprehension". There
is nothing about media, format or delivery. Any structured
information which is intended for humans may now be considered
a document: a film clip, a sound clip, a picture, a signature,
a logo, text, data, drawings, and any combination of any of
these could be referred too as a document.
This brings us new challenges in managing, using and preserving
the documents. One of the key elements that need to be addressed
and understand in managing, using and preserving of documents
is the life of documents.
Other Properties
There are also other important properties that need to be understood. If a document is in paper form, its size, color, quality, thickness etc. are important factors and if the document is in electronic format then the file type, associated application, version and file size are important factors
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