No abstract

Many teams are now adopting shared repositories for their work. Such adoption is paradoxical, however, as past research has repeatedly shown major co-organizational barriers; teams cannot agree a common organizational scheme, making it difficult to retrieve information organized by others. Another barrier is email competition; email provides a reliable alternative for distributing files that are then personally organized. To address this paradox, we explored how 27 participants actively using shared repositories overcome these barriers in a qualitative study. We found teams addressed co-organization using 4 strategies. First they create ContentMaps that provide explicit structure to organize shared information. Participants also co-organize using implicit strategies based on task structure, expertise, and tool affordances. Greater shared repository use also leads to a changed role for email. Versioning problems mean email is not used for distributing attachments, instead for task management. We present technical implications suggesting how new tools might be better integrated with email facilitating these continued email uses.

Individual differences are prevalent in personal information management (PIM). There is large variation between individuals in how they structure and retrieve information from personal archives. These differences make it hard to develop general PIM tools. However we know little about the origins of these differences. We present two studies evaluating whether differences arise from personality traits, by exploring whether different personalities structure personal archives differently. The first exploratory study asks participants to identify PIM cues that signal personality traits. While the aim was to identify cues, these cues also proved surprisingly accurate indicators of personality. In a second study, to evaluate these cues, we directly measure relations between structure and traits. We demonstrate that Conscientiousness predicts file organization, particularly PC users' desktops. Neurotic people may also keep more desktop files. One implication is that systems might be customized for different personalities. We also advance personality theory, showing that personal digital artifacts signal personality.