Personal Information Management

Jones, William

doi:10.1002/aris.2007.1440410117

Cited by 203 publications

(242 citation statements)

References 143 publications

(166 reference statements)

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“…The way participants used folders fits generally well with observations from previous PIM studies. Participants created folders and placed items in them so they could reliably access them again in the future, matching the keeping behaviours defined in Jones' and Whittaker's lifecycle frameworks (Jones, 2007;Whittaker, 2011). Barreau and Nardi's (1995) categories of personal information (ephemeral, working and archived) fit well with the observations; participants interacted with a relatively small portion of their folders and files during work and maintained archival collections of older files.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

“…We seek to provide new, detailed descriptions of folder use, and to respond to the ongoing tension between advances in search technology and the continued preference individuals have for using folders to interact with their files. The work also responds to calls for new methods and data within PIM suitable for describing and understanding interactions with information items (Jones, 2007;Whittaker, 2011).…”

Section: Research Aims and Approachmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…The information item is often advanced as the basic unit which is subjected to organizational and managerial effort in PIM (Jones, 2007). Folders provide a means to group information items (such as files, emails, bookmarks and folders themselves) and so impose order and meaning on the information.…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Function and Future of the Folder

Whitham

Cruickshank

2017

Interact. Comput.

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Folders are a commonplace metaphor in computing environments, constituting a link to physical work materials and are a key means for individuals to impose order on their digital work materials. This paper presents the findings of a novel qualitative study examining folder use by 12 information workers, using logging to accurately capture how folders were used in individual everyday work over 6 weeks, and challenging participants to work without using folders. Through observation and interviews, the study provides new descriptions of how folders are used and the dependence some study participants had on their folders to think and create, as well as to access files. The findings call into question whether search and recency-based lists of files could fulfil the functional role of folders, identified as key means for individuals to construct and specialize their work environments. Implications are discussed for document management tools, and more generally for operating system design. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS• Folders are often considered an unwelcome legacy of physical information technologies.• Views of folder structures can offer valuable perspectives on personal information in themselves, independent of the content of the files they contain.• Folders can be strongly intertwined with the process of information work, both in the computer and in the mind of the worker.• Search and recency-based views of files do not eliminate the need to creatively categorize and combine information.• Eliminating folders and manual organization of files may compromise information worker's ability to control their environment, and in turn thinking and working processes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Section: Research Aims and Approachmentioning

confidence: 96%

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The Function and Future of the Folder

Whitham

Cruickshank

2017

Interact. Comput.

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“…Evaluation of desktop search or, in general, personal information management (PIM), has been considered a tricky problem [11] because real desktop collections are not available due to privacy concerns. Performance evaluation of major commercial desktop search engines was tried [14] in standard IR evaluation settings, using TREC Robust track data.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Retrieval experiments using pseudo-desktop collections

Kim

Croft

2009

Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

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Desktop search is an important part of personal information management (PIM). However, research in this area has been limited by the lack of shareable test collections, making cumulative progress difficult. In this paper, we define desktop search as a semi-structured document retrieval problem and introduce a methodology to automatically build a reusable collection (the pseudo-desktop) that has many of the same properties as a real desktop collection.We then present a comprehensive evaluation of retrieval methods for semi-structured document retrieval on several pseudo-desktop collections and the TREC Enterprise collection. Our results show that a probabilistic retrieval model using the mapping relation between a query term and a document field (PRM-S) has the best performance in collections with more structure, such as email, and that the query-likelihood language model is better for other document types. We further analyze the observed differences using generated queries and suggest ways to improve PRM-S, which makes the performance gains more significant and consistent.

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“…Metadata is at the core of these activities, although current research seems to focus more on task completion, rather than the underlying metadata structures and arrangements. Most PIM studies and writings have focused on tool development and finding (Jones 2007), but have rarely look closely at the organizational/metadata practices of individuals. As scientific communities, like evolutionary biology, turn more to cyberinfrastructures for sharing and collaborating with each other, it is important for information professionals to understand the more personal aspects of metadata generation and organization.…”

Section: Exploring Evolutionary Biologists' Use and Perceptions Of Sementioning

confidence: 99%

Metadata for semantic and social applications<br />DC- 2008 Berlin

Greenberg¹,

Klas²

2008

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Personal Information Management

Cited by 203 publications

References 143 publications

The Function and Future of the Folder

The Function and Future of the Folder

Retrieval experiments using pseudo-desktop collections

Metadata for semantic and social applications<br />DC- 2008 Berlin

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