From user needs to opportunities in personal information management: A case study on organisational strategies in cross-media information spaces

Abstract

The efficient management of our daily information in physical and digital information spaces is a well-known problem. Current research on personal information management (PIM) aims to understand and improve organisational and re-finding activities. We present a case study about organisational strategies in cross-media information spaces, consisting of physical as well as digital information. In contrast to existing work, we provide a unified view on organisational strategies and investigate how re-finding cues differ across the physical and digital space. We further introduce a new mixing organisational strategy which is used in addition to the well-known filing and piling strategies. Last but not least, based on the results of our study we discuss opportunities and pitfalls for future descriptive PIM research and outline some directions for future PIM system design.

The ubiquitous digital file: A review of file management research

“…Users thus appear to differ widely regarding most FM actions; what they seem to have in common, however, is a lack of reliance on soft file linking features such as aliases in Mac, shortcuts in Windows, and symlinks in Linux (GonQalves & Jorge, 2003;Ravasio et al, 2004). Nonetheless, different approaches or strategies to organizing have been identified among the varied findings, albeit rather broadly, so that we can describe organizers as: neat or messy (Boardman & Sasse, 2004), prone to saving or deleting (Berlin, Jeffries, O'Day, Paepcke, & Wharton, 1993), and prone to filing or piling (Malone, 1983), extensive filing or single folder filing (Henderson & Srinivasan, 2011), or mixing approaches (Trullemans & Signer, 2014a). To draw conclusions beyond these, studies are needed with commensurable contexts, participant characteristics, file system measures, and results reporting (Dinneen, Odoni, Frissen, & Julien, 2016).…”

Personal information organization in everyday life: modeling the process

“…However, Boardman and Sasse (2004, p. 585) conducted a cross-form study and reported that participants organized digital files more extensively than other formats. Trullemans and Signer (2014) also examined both physical and digital information and reported that participants used filing, piling and mixing strategies when…”

“…Occasional filers/extensive filers/total filers (Boardman and Sasse, 2004) Pilers/filers/structurers (Henderson and Srinivasan, 2011) Piling/filing/mixing (Trullemans and Signer, 2014) Rigid categorizer/flexible categorizer/fuzzy categorizer (Oh, 2017) Source: Adopted from Oh (2013)…”

Organizing personal digital information: an analysis of faculty member activities

“…Hardof-Jaffe and Nachmias, 2013; Zhang and Liu, 2015) or on faculty members practices (e.g. Kwasnik, 1991; Trullemans and Signer, 2014), but when studied, these groups are often considered as overall information workers. This lead to a focus on the classification structures produced and factors motivating their creation rather than on the very meaning of their information organization practices with regard to their broader student or professional lives.…”