No artifact can be preserved forever. However, the utility of items of historical, cultural and scientific significance can be made to outlive their physical lifetimes through rigorous and accurate documentation. Most of the times, the usefulness of information cannot be fully realized at face value. The amount of information available around us is simply too huge for us to appreciate or make use of; there must be a way to sift only the most relevant data from all the clutter. And this is where documentation studies come in.

As a scientific discipline in its own right, documentation studies seek to create efficient way to collect, store, index, preserve, retrieve, curate and dispense data. From a historical perspective, documentation studies can be seen as the natural by-product of the advancement of science; documentation specialists are responsible for the technology allowing books and digital data to be sorted and retrieved remotely with much ease.

Graduates of Master in Documentation Studies typically find employment in library, museums, archives and internet companies. The field of documentation studies is highly related to the better known information science and information technology. Indeed, it can be argued that the latter two are descendant disciplines of documentation studies. There are relatively fewer universities that offer Master in Documentation Studies programs as compared to other archival science degree. It can be argued that the degrees are related only differing in theoretical construct.