What ‘types of documents’ means?

Types of documents should be understood very restrictively. Each document can be described in three forms of its existence: the form of document perpetuation, its publishing form and genre. Our dictionary will only capture terms which are connected with the form of document perpetuation – not its publishing form (which can be self-dependent: a document issued separately, e.g. a volume of book; or dependent: a co-issued document, e.g. a chapter in a book) or genre (writing form: e.g. a review, a scientific article, reportage, a column, a monograph, a bibliography, a dictionary, an encyclopaedia, a textbook, etc.). Terms connected with publishing form or genre will not be captured in our dictionary, although it can be assumed that some of the more common genres might be included – if they are important as a search or selection criterion for documents in bibliographic databases. So the scope of registration will cover the terms such as: book, magazine, microfilm, gramophone record, etc. The diagnosis of whether a given term is about the type of document or not can be easily carried out by deciding whether the object marked with this term is possible to present in a different form or not. For example, ‘bibliography’ may exist as a book, as an article in a journal, as a database, and may be published self-dependent or dependent. So it is a genre (writing form). Similarly, a ‘quote’ can be presented in an article, on a website, etc. On the other hand, ‘fortnightly magazine’ is one of the terms designating a data medium (it is one of the kinds of journals) with certain features that distinguish it from other journalistic data media (yearbook, monthly magazine, weekly magazine…). The fortnightly magazine is always a fortnightly magazine, regardless of its publishing form (as an independent title or supplement to another title) and genre (biweekly humor magazine, biweekly business magazine, biweekly scientific journal, biweekly advertising magazine etc.). Excluding genres and publishing forms (which can be counted in hundreds) will facilitate the work on our dictionary greatly and will help to avoid problems that have been reasons of failure in creating similar sources of information in the past.