Empirical assessment of individuals' 'personal information management systems'

Jones, Stephen; Thomas, Peter J.

doi:10.1080/014492997119888

Cited by 27 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…The total usage of electronic tools reported here is higher than that found by Jones and Thomas [13], who present the results of a pilot study of ''personal information management tools'' that concludes that few (less than 20% of the 23 subject in their informal survey) make use of any electronic information management aids, but that most people (more than 50%) use two or more aids of some sort, of which the to-do list is the most common. This difference can be accounted for by the small size of both samples, the relative technological sophistication of the users in the current study, and the free availability of Meeting Maker to all users in this study.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 54%

Group and Individual Time Management Tools: What You Get is Not What You Need

Blandford

Green

2001

Personal Ub Comp

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Some studies of diaries and scheduling systems have considered how individuals use diaries with a view to proposing requirements for computerised time management tools. Others have focused on the criteria for success of group scheduling systems. Few have paid attention to how people use a battery of tools as an ensemble. This interview study reports how users exploit paper, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and a group scheduling system for their time management. As with earlier studies, we find many shortcomings of different technologies, but studying the ensemble rather than individual tools points towards a different conclusion: rather than aiming towards producing electronic time management tools that replace existing paper-based tools, we should be aiming to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each technology and look towards more seamless integration between tools. In particular, the requirements for scheduling and those for more responsive, fluid time management conflict in ways that demand different kinds of support.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 54%

Group and Individual Time Management Tools: What You Get is Not What You Need

Blandford

Green

2001

Personal Ub Comp

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“…A surprisingly limited use of readily accessible computerbased organisational tools, such as web-favourites (bookmarks), email folders and music / image management software was also highlighted, although this has also been observed in other PIM studies [Hightower et al, 1998;Jones and Thomas, 1997]. Even when these tools are used, our results show that they are seldom used to their full potential.…”

Section: Overcoming Memory Lapsescontrasting

confidence: 39%

“…Other scholars have also made similar observations. For example, Jones and Thomas [1997] surveyed people's use of new personal information management technologies and found low adoption rates, the findings of Tauscher and Greenberg [1997] indicate that less than 1% of webbrowser actions are on the history list, and Hightower et al [1998] suggest that the value is less than 0.1%. The preference for user creativity over explicitly design tools has explained by the fact that bookmarks and web-history lack the ability to 1) Remind the users that they have this information 2) Access from multiple locations 3) Supply some context that will remind the user why they decided to keep the information [Bruce et al, 2004b].…”

Section: Categorisation and Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting human memory in personal information management

Elsweiler

2008

SIGIR Forum

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In their daily lives people constantly interact with a wide range of electronically stored information objects; email messages, web pages, digital images, video samples, etc. These objects come from different sources, are in different formats and can be stored in different locations, including on distributed devices such as mobile phones, PDAs and MP3 players. The wealth and diversity of digital information that people access and use makes it incredibly difficult for an individual to organise his / her information in such a way that it can be re-accessed and re-used when it is needed in the future. Personal information management (PIM) as a research field covers attempts to understand PIM behaviour and develop systems to help people manage and re-find their information effectively. Our research investigates PIM from the perspective of the psychology of memory. Re-finding information is different from finding information that has not been accessed before and involves different psychological processes. Whereas finding involves understanding an information need and recognising information that is relevant, re-finding relies on memory. When re-finding information, the user knows that the information they are looking for exists because they have seen it before. The details remembered are clues to help re-access the information, while the details forgotten represent the barrier to re-finding. However, current PIM tools require specific attributes of information objects to be remembered and consequently make it difficult to re-access and re-use information. This means that the problems associated with managing and re-finding personal information are related both to the limitations of human memory and to the failure of PIM tools to account for these limitations. Our research is based on the premise that PIM tools should support the function of memory and has three objectives: 1) To develop an increased understanding of the role memory plays in the management of personal information. What do people remember about their information objects, how do they use these recollections when re-finding, and what factors influence what people remember and use? 2) To design, implement and evaluate PIM tools that have been specifically designed to support characteristics of human memory. 3) To address the difficulties involved in performing PIM evaluations. The work is grounded by the theoretical understanding of how memory works. A review of appropriate cognitive psychology literature offers a means to critique existing PIM tools and a basis from which to start designing novel tools that support the function of memory. Building on this, our early experimental work compares PIM behaviour to everyday memory problems, examining the problems people encounter and the strategies they employ to prevent and recover from memory lapses. We uncover a range of memory problems and solutions and relate these to the memory difficulties experienced in a PIM context. By combining the psychology findings with the particpants' explanations for the behavioural changes they make to prevent and recover from memory lapses, we develop a set of design principles for PIM tools that are hypothesized to assist the user when re-finding. Using these principles we develop two novel re-finding interfaces - one for personal photographs and one for personal email messages and evaluate these using current tools as benchmarks. The evaluation work not only allows the interfaces themselves to be evaluated, but also offers the chance to learn about what the experimental participants remember about the information they need to re-find. In this respect, we discover that for both email messages and personal photographs, what people tend to remember is the context surrounding previous interactions with the sought after photograph(s) / email message(s). However, our findings suggest that people tend to have fuller recollections of the emails they need to re-find, with recollections for photographs being more fragmented. Another important finding from the email study is that people tend to remember different attributes of email messages in different situations and that the attributes remembered will depend on a number of factors, including the time that has elapsed since the information was last accessed, the amount of experience the participant has with re-finding, the number of email messages in their collection, the way that they file their email messages, and their preferred means of re-finding. The evaluation of the interfaces also allows several discoveries to be made regarding which features of the evaluated interfaces are supportive and which are restrictive, as well as the reasons why. The main finding, however, is that, like recollections, the interface features that help participants re-find change in different situations. Therefore, flexibility is crucial to PIM interfaces. It is important that PIM interfaces support multiple varieties of memory so that different memories can be used in different situations. The evaluations also highlight the usefulness of supporting visual memory, which few existing PIM tools and research prototypes support. Another finding is that it can be helpful when PIM interfaces supply cues to help people remember more about the information they need to find. However, again the evaluations reveal that different types of memory cues are useful in different situations. Therefore, it is important that the PIM tool designers consider the factors that our studies show to affect this: the type of information object being re-found, the tasks that cause people to re-find this type of object, and re-finding strategies that the participants may already have. The method of evaluation used is in itself a contribution to the field of PIM. A major limitation of the PIM research performed to date is that few tool evaluations have been performed. Several scholars have proposed that this situation stems from the difficulties involved in conducting evaluations. The difficulties include incorporating the personal connections people have with their own information in evaluations, creating balanced experimental designs, preparing experimental tasks, and protecting the privacy of participants. Based on a study of the types of task that cause people to re-find email messages and web pages, we propose, evaluate and then use a methodology for performing PIM evaluations that overcomes difficulties outlined above. Our work, therefore, offers contributions associated with each of our three objectives. We offer an increased understanding of the role of memory in PIM, provide insight into how PIM tools can be designed to support human memory, and propose a method of evaluation that allows PIM behaviour and interfaces to be studied with a laboratory-based approach.

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“…Recent work has started addressing the organization of email and web-browsing activity [24,33,34]. Many of these works have been motivated by works in psychology and human factors on how people organize personal information --both paper and electronic [23,25,5,10,12,21,22].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal chronicling tools for enhancing information archival and collaboration in enterprises

Kim

Podlaseck

Pingali

2004

Proceedings of the the 1st ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences

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One of the greatest challenges in enterprises today is the lack of dynamic and ongoing information about individuals' activities, interests, and expertise. Availability of such "personal chronicles" can provide rich benefits at both an individual and enterprise level. For example, personal chronicles can help individuals to far more effectively retrieve and review their activities and interactions, while at an enterprise level they can be data-mined to identify groups of common and complementary interests and skills, or to identify implicit work processes that are commonplace in every enterprise. Today's existing tools are very limited in their support for dynamic capture of ongoing activities, in the organization and presentation of captured information, and in supporting rich annotation, search, retrieval, and publication of this information. In this paper, we propose a set of Personal Chronicling Tools (PCT) to support enterprise knowledge workers in digital event archiving and collaboration-oriented publishing. PCT is composed of four primary tools with the following capabilities:(1) event monitoring, (2) interactive annotation, (3) browse/search, and (4) edit/publish. All are designed to exploit existing enterprise infrastructure, storing captured raw data and metadata in secure databases. The first tool is a group of event monitors. These run on user client devices and capture user events such as emails, web pages browsed, instant messaging sessions, and documents edited. Monitors for new event classes are easily added as plug-ins through an XML interface. The second tool, the event annotator, enables context-sensitive user tagging and book marking of interesting moments. The third is an event browser which extends corporate email tools, providing semantic search (by embedding WordNet as a common dictionary) and the ability to follow threads of many kinds. Finally, a publishing tool facilitates the publication of relevant events with a fraction of the effort required to maintain a manual chronicle such as a weblog. This paper presents the overall system architecture, and a prototype implementation.

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Empirical assessment of individuals' 'personal information management systems'

Cited by 27 publications

References 0 publications

Group and Individual Time Management Tools: What You Get is Not What You Need

Group and Individual Time Management Tools: What You Get is Not What You Need

Supporting human memory in personal information management

Personal chronicling tools for enhancing information archival and collaboration in enterprises

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