For Telling" the Present

Research Journal of Economics, Business and ICT, 2011

This present study aims to discover how “better” to manage personal information – both in what William Jones calls KFTF, keeping found things found (Jones 2007); and how “better” to get things done GTD (Allen 2003). Based on observation of various mechanisms used to support the personal knowledge management of knowledge workers, it identifies PIMS with the Individual Information Systems IIS of (Baskerville 2011) and the User Generated Information Systems UGIS of (DesAutels 2011). It suggests that PIMS / IIS / UGIS are only useful insofar as they enable properly informed initial action, action to correct errors, and reflective learning.

An implicit, but pervasive view in the information science community is that people are perpetual seekers after new public information, incessantly identifying and consuming new information by browsing the Web and accessing public collections. One aim of this review is to move beyond this consumer characterization, which regards information as a public resource containing novel data that we seek out, consume, and then discard. Instead, I want to focus on a very different view: where familiar information is used as a personal resource that we keep, manage, and (sometimes repeatedly) exploit. I call this information curation. I first summarize limitations of the consumer perspective. I then review research on three different information curation processes: keeping, management, and exploitation. I describe existing work detailing how each of these processes is applied to different types of personal data: documents, e-mail messages, photos, and Web pages. The research indicates people tend to keep too much information, with the exception of contacts and Web pages. When managing information, strategies that rely on piles as opposed to files provide surprising benefits. And in spite of the emergence of desktop search, exploitation currently remains reliant on manual methods such as navigation. Several new technologies have the potential to address important curation problems, but implementing these in acceptable ways remains a challenge. I conclude with a summary of outstanding research and technical questions.

Proceedings of the Sigchi Conference, 2011

Mainstream PIM tools capture only a portion of the information that people need to manage. Many information scraps seem to exist that don't make their way into these tools, instead being relegated to sticky notes, text files, and other makeshift storage, or simply being lost. In an effort to understand the role of these information scraps, the underlying needs they reflect, and the way PIM tools must be modified to support those needs, we created List-it, a micronote tool for quick and simple capture of information scraps.

International journal of human-computer studies, 2020

In this study, we proposed and examined a theoretical framework for affective interactions with personal information management (PIM). Based on the literature, we identified seven salient affective aspects of PIM: anxiety, efficacy, frustration, desperation, belonging, dependence and loss of control. We examined their frequencies and identified individual differences for age, gender and the number of platforms people use to manage their personal information. Data were collected from 465 participants who filled in a questionnaire built and validated by the researchers. Findings revealed a complex and intense affective experience accompanying PIM that is characterized by anxiety and frustration on the one hand but by a sense of high efficacy and little desperation on the other. The affective experience was more intense for female participants, was correlated with the number of PIM platforms used and decreased with age. We offer various explanations of these findings and suggest implications for future research and platform design.

2011

There are various techniques used in HCI to understand users' personal information management (PIM). behaviours. In our project, we used a diary as a technique to uncover more dumping factors as embedded behaviour that users might have while managing their information on their personal information spaces (PIS). In this paper, we described how we conducted a diary study and highlighted how our diary study affected our data. Later, we suggest how a diary study can better be implemented in a HCI project.

Proceedings of the 2nd Invitational Workshop on …, 2006

Our personal collections of information continue to grow. We keep information because we find it relevant to task at hand, because we foresee its future usefulness, or just because we can do so. The accumulated information however is not only valuable for its own sake. It can be useful in on-going information finding.

Proceedings of UMAP 2011, Girona, Spain, 2011

Personal information management (PIM) is a study on how people handle, store, classify, organize, maintain, archive personal information to support their needs and tasks. In the last decade a lot of studies focused on how people acquire, organize, maintain and retrieve information from their information spaces with a focus on offices, electronic documents, email and web bookmarks and the fragmentation of information between these collections. Results have led to many research prototypes that tried to either augment present tools or integrate these collections within entirely new designs. However, not much has changed in the present tools, and hierarchies still prevail as the storage foundation. Our research aims at understanding the difference between how people organize their information in various applications and physical space and how they actually think of this information in relation to tasks they have to accomplish. We carried out a preliminary study and are currently finishing another study which both show that there is a difference on how information is organized in formal structures on computers and physical spaces and how it is thought of in users’ heads. These findings have motivated the design of an application that tries to mimic the latter.

Proceedings of the CSCW 2002 Workshop: Redesigning Email for …

Document details from CiteSeerX (Isaac Councill, Lee Giles): Email interfaces provide poor support for the personal information management (PIM) activities ...

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2003

Personal Information Management (PIM) is an activity in which an individual stores his\her personal information items in order to retrieve them later on. In a former article, we suggested the user-subjective approach, a theoretical approach proposing design principles with which PIM systems can systematically use subjective attributes of information items. In this consecutive paper, we report on a study that tested the approach by exploring the use of subjective attributes (project, importance and context) in current PIM systems, and its dependence on design characteristics. Participants were 84 personal computer users. Tools included a questionnaire (N=84), a semi-structured interview that was transcribed and analyzed (N=20), and screen captures taken from this sub-sample. Results indicate that participants tended to use subjective attributes when the design encouraged them to, however, when the design discouraged such use, they either found their own alternative ways to use them or refrained from using them altogether. This constitutes evidence in support of the user-subjective approach as it implies that current PIM systems do not allow for sufficient use of subjective attributes. The article also introduces seven novel system design schemes, suggested by the authors, which demonstrate how the user-subjective principles can be implemented. Personal Information Management (PIM) is an activity in which an individual stores his\her personal information items in order to retrieve them later on. PIM is performed in a physical environment (e.g. in an office), with mobile devices (such as mobile phones and PDAs), and by using personal computers. The information items used in personal computers include documents, emails, Web Favorites, tasks and contacts. Following Soergel's (1985) model, Barreau (1995) lists five PIM activities: acquisition, organization and storage,

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the term Personal Information Management System PIMS and compares and contrasts it with the similar terms Individual Information System IIS as discussed by Richard Baskerville and User Generated Information System UGIS as introduced by Philip DesAutels. However, this paper contends (with Baskerville) that it is the personal work system constituted when a human user makes use of a PIMS which exhibits a systemic nature.