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1. a government report on any subject
2. a British publication that is usu. less extensive than a blue book
Which naturally leads to the question, "What is a blue book?" to which Webster
replies:
a book of specialized information often published under government auspices.
My speculation is that industry borrowed the term and then developed into a
unique type of highly technical and formal marketing paper. Sometimes the
author's name and qualifications/expertise are also attached to white papers,
lending weight to the content.
Phil Wilkerson
phillipw -at- allensysgroup -dot- com
----------
> From: Paula Foster <foster -dot- 242 -at- OSU -dot- EDU>
> To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject: "white papers"
> Date: Tuesday, June 03, 1997 4:06 PM
>
> Hello all... (Breaking out of lurk mode for a moment)
>
> My take on what a "white paper" might be is related to the use of colored
> paper to designate revisions of a document. The movie and television
> industry, for example, uses a standard sequence of colors to help people
> keep track of the constantly mutating script. Each time the screenwriters
> make a change, which on some productions happens several times a day, the
> changes are "published" (copied and distributed to the people working on the
> film) on a new color of paper. Everybody in the entire film business knows
> that the color sequence is white, yellow, blue, green, pink, etc. (Something
> like nine colors go by before you get to white again). Once you know the
> color sequence, you need never be confused about which version of this or
> that scene is the current version. Your script eventually looks like a
> multicolored mess, but it isn't really a mess because you know that every
> page is current.
>
> I am not suggesting that the same is true of all industries that write and
> revise documents, but I do know that the film business isn't the only place
> where color is used to indicate temporal order. For example, my research
> partner was telling me just the other day that a certain 1995 government
> publication called the "White Paper" (which makes recommendations to
> Congress about intellectual property law) was at one time called "The Green
> Paper," before it was finalized.
>
> So maybe the expression "white paper" got started as a temporal order thing,
> but got fixed at some point, in some industries, to designate a particular
> genre of document?
>
> I dunno. FWIW!
>
> Back to lurking,
>
> Paula Foster
> Ohio State University
>
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