--- /dev/null
+<!---
+ Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
+ or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
+ distributed with this work for additional information
+ regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
+ to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
+ "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
+ with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
+
+ http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+
+ Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
+ software distributed under the License is distributed on an
+ "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
+ KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
+ specific language governing permissions and limitations
+ under the License.
+-->
+
+# Apache Arrow Documentation
+
+This directory contains source files for building the main project
+documentation. This includes the [Arrow columnar format specification][2].
+
+Instructions for building the documentation site are found in
+[docs/source/developers/documentation.rst][1]. The build depends on the API
+documentation for some of the project subcomponents.
+
+[1]: https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/docs/source/developers/documentation.rst
+[2]: https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/master/docs/source/format