Factors that influence users to leave, acquire, and retain information items: A case study of college students' Personal Information Management

Abstract

Personal Information Management (PIM) research has primarily focused on how users manage information items that are in their local collection, under their control. This investigation will broadly study PIM, additionally looking at items that users decide not to acquire, and seeks to identify factors that influence the leaving, acquiring, and retaining behavior. A theoretical framework developed for the study introduces the hoarding literature into the Personal Information Management (PIM) domain. The study uses a multiple-embedded case study design to naturalistically study students' PIM within the context of a college course. BackgroundTechnical advances in devices and tools make the personal retention of information items much easier and data storage less expensive. Nonetheless, the cost of keeping information does not decrease at the same rate; kept information demands time and potentially distracts users' attention from more worthy information (Jones, 2005).Few studies have investigated the underlying motivation of why users decide to keep information in a personal collection given how cognitively taxing it is (Lansdale, 1988) and that an immediate benefit is not always evident (Cole, 1982). In their Keeping Found Things Found research, Bruce, Jones and Dumais (2004a) uncovered that in some cases, particularly with websites, users prefer not to take any action to help them re-find a useful resource. These users merely "leave" the resource where it is, and expect it will be easily located later if needed. Bruce (2005) includes such items that a user decides "to leave in situ ('leaving')" in his definition a personal information collection.The Personal Information Management (PIM) research stream investigates "the activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use and distribute the information needed to meet life's many goals (Jones, 2008)." PIM empirical studies have primarily focused on how people manage their information: how users develop keeping structures (e.g

Constructing information experience: a grounded theory portrait of academic information management

“…Some recent studies have turned attention to students' academic PIM experiences and their contextualized information behaviors. For example, undergraduate library and information science (LIS) students were the focus of Finneran's dissertation examining a variety of factors that influence "keeping and leaving" behaviors in the management of academic information (Finneran, 2010). Another study (Pontis et al, 2015), looking at how researchers maintain awareness of new literature and developments in a given field, used an "information journey model" (p. 22) to examine a discrete function of individual academic information management; this is indicative of the move toward broader, more holistic research approaches in academic information studies.…”

“…Within the body of LIS research about students and/or researchers, many studies have focused on IL and information behaviors, such as the groundbreaking work by Bates and others (Bates, 1996;Mizrachi and Bates, 2013;Rowlands et al, 2008). Other studies have specifically focused on the research workflow and aspects of personal academic information management behaviors of students and researchers (Finneran, 2010;Habibie, 2015;Jaidka et al, 2013). Library influences on the information skills of beginning researchers have been a focus within the IL domain for some time (Bruce, 2001).…”

When PIM goes public: A case study of organizedlikejen

“…Beyond these “active” and “working” (Barreau, ) information items, OLJ is too an information sentimentalist (e.g., Kaye et al, ; Finneran, ), keeping an expansive array of “archived” information: past agendas, journals, notebooks, binders from her various life events, and school binders. Yet, she does so not necessarily for the information content held therein; she notes having not been a student since 2005, but simply still being “proud [of] how organized ” (emphasis added) her schoolwork binders are (“Organizing Like…,” 2011).…”

Personal Health Information Management in Chronic Illnesses

“…A few recent studies on PIM focused on information items. Finneran (2009), for example, examined information items in connection to tasks. Oh and Belkin (2014) looked at the characteristics of Figure 1.…”