Content is the intellectual capital of an organization. It is information, separated from its presentation. Content is the information contained in, for example, a product brochure, a user manual, a web site, a Braille menu, or one of many other Information+Product types.

In Library Science, it is called the work, the basic information that all the copies (or physical instances of a work) have in common.

Bob Boiko on content...

Computers have only recently become ubiquitous in the world of information. Traditionally, computers have been tasked with handling data. As opposed to data, which is a fairly concrete term, information is a very vague term. Just about any communication (including data) can be described as information. For the purposes of this discussion, information will be taken to mean all the common forms of recorded communication: writing, recorded sound, images, video, and animations.

Content, stated as simply as possible, is information put to use. Information is put to use when it is packaged and presented (published) for a specific purpose. More often than not, content is not a single “piece” of information, but a conglomeration of pieces of information put together to form a cohesive whole. A book has content, which is comprised of multiple chapters, paragraphs, and sentences. Newspapers contain content: articles, advertisements, indexes, and pictures. The newest entry to the media world, the Web, is just the same; sites are made of articles, advertisements, indexes, and pictures – all organized into a coherent presentation.

With the evolution of the web site from Brochure Ware? to a provider of web-based applications and services, the new umbrella field of Enterprise Content Management defines content as more than just dosuments. They include services and application programs supporting e Commerce? and many other tasks.