Personal Digital Information Resources Management Behavior

Abstract

With the growth and the increasing complexity of digital resources, it is clear that individuals may have to depend on various types of information management tools to organize and retrieve information needed to carry out their personal or professional tasks. With new web applications, "users are provided with the tools and platforms to undertake their own collaborative content creation and distribution". However, it may also worsen the information retrieval problems, for more information resources means higher needs for proper management in order to find needed information in the right format at right time. We assume that user's PIM behavior with PCs will have impact on how they will perform PIM in other environments. There is a need to reassess the existing PIM tools and testing formerly claimed theories of PIM behavior in the context of today's digital information environment. This paper reports on the findings of a survey conducted with 118 computer users to investigate their information organization and retrieval strategy and the factors that affect their choices of adopting different strategies. The results should shed some light of personal information behavior that may aid the design and implementation of the future PIM tools that optimize advanced technology.

A conceptual framework for an interactive personal information management system

“…Also relevant is how people may organize information by temporal cues [26]. Presently, users' cognitive and behaviors are one of the hot topics in PIM, and previous researches had shown the importance of users' behaviors and cognitive in order to obtain a desired data in the desired time [5], [27]. The most challenging aspect which faces the designers of visualizing information is to make the search a pleasurable experience, enhance functionality and usability, be of an aesthetically appealing visual design, and be a joy to use [28].…”

“…The information shelf life also determines the organizational strategy. In addition, attributes of the resources can also affect the organizational strategy and the retrieval process [5].…”

“…Chang et al [5] pointed out that one of the main purposes of PIM tools is to help users to manage their resources in a way that will help them to complete a task which basically can be defined as finding the right resource at the right time and at the right place when an information need arises. Thus far, discovering and re-finding the older information is still a solid task.…”

“…On the other hand, the rising complexity of digital resources shows that further research in organizing and retrieving information is required in order to improve the existing PIM tools [5], [6]. It is also noted that the personal information systems are mostly dealing with novice users (nonexpert user), and for this it must take into account that the systems must have friendly user interfaces [7].…”

Personal information management systems and interfaces: An overview

“…Chang et al [1] defined PIM as tools that can be found in software applications or devices that assist users to organize, store, and retrieve information pertinent to their personal and professional lives. PIM has become an important field in which many systems have been proposed during the last few years [25].…”