The character, value, and management of personal paper archives

Abstract

We explored general issues concerning personal information management by investigating the characteristics of office workers' paper-based information, in an industrial research environment. We examined the reasons people collect paper, types of data they collect, problems encountered in handling paper, and strategies used for processing it. We tested three specific hypotheses in the course of an office move. The greater availability of public digital data along with changes in people's jobs or interests should lead to wholescale discarding of paper data, while preparing for the move. Instead we found workers kept large, highly valued paper archives. We also expected that the major part of people's personal archives would be unique documents. However, only 49% of people's archives were unique documents, the remainder being copies of publicly available data and unread information, and we explore reasons for this. We examined the effects of paper-processing strategies on archive structure. We discovered different paper-processing strategies ( filing and piling) that were relatively independent of job type. We predicted that filers' attempts to evaluate and categorize incoming documents would produce smaller archives that were accessed frequently. Contrary to our predictions, filers amassed more information, and accessed it less frequently than pilers. We argue that filers may engage in premature filing: to clear their workspace, they archive information that later turns out to be of low value. Given the effort involved in organizing data, they are also loath to discard filed information, even when its value is uncertain. We discuss the implications of this research for digital personal information management.

An empirical study of long-term personal project information management

“…For this purpose we carried out semistructured interviews similar to that in several other PIM exploratory studies (Barreau and Nardi, 1995;Malone, 1983;Voida et al, 2011;Whittaker and Hirschberg, 2001). In addition, as described later, we enhanced interviews with sketching approach not yet used to study PIM.…”

Family memories in the home: contrasting physical and digital mementos

“…In work settings, people still accumulate huge collections of paper documents for both functional and emotional reasons (Whittaker and Hirschberg, 2001). They also archive large numbers of emails (Whittaker andSidner, 1996, Whittaker, 2005), and other information such as webpages relevant to their work, and sometimes social life (Abrams et al, 1998, Jones et al, 2003.…”

“…One common observation from this research is that people are generally dissatisfied with the organisation of their collections, feeling their personal information is disorganised and hard to access. They also tend to be very conservative in their habits, building up large collections of materials 'just in case', they find it hard to delete materials and defer decisions about keeping information until they see how and when that information will be used (Whittaker andHirschberg, 2001, Whittaker andSidner, 1996).…”

Helping Users Sort Faster with Adaptive Machine Learning Recommendations

“…While the government workers nominally sort items with a defined, global taxonomy, the sorting and clustering process is based on local needs and information. Malone [12] examines office workers' organization of their desks; Whittaker and Hirschberg [17] look at how people manage personal paper archives. Both studies find that users use local, idiosyncratic organizations, moving things into categories that make sense for their own tasks.…”

“…Malone [12] explores how people organize their office desks, and Whittaker and Hirschberg [17] look at how people manage personal paper archives. They find the now classic breakdown between 'filers' and 'pilers', and that people very naturally arranged items in piles.…”