Personal information management
Encyclopedia
Personal information management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfill a person’s various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.).

One ideal of PIM is that we always have the right information in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to meet our current need. Technologies and tools such as personal information managers help us spend less time with time-consuming and error-prone activities of PIM (such as looking for information). We then have more time to make creative, intelligent use of the information at hand in order to get things done, or to simply enjoy the information itself.

History and background

Knowledge acquisition/elicitation
Knowledge acquisition
Knowledge acquisition is a method of learning, first proposed by Aristotle in his seminal work "Organon". Aristotle proposed that the mind at birth is a blank slate, or tabula rasa...

 has been an important area of study in its own right receiving special prominence in the 1980s as a way to define rules to drive expert systems
Expert system
In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, like an expert, and not by following the procedure of a developer as is the case in...

.

A seminal paper in personal information management research is "Finding and Reminding" by Barreau and Nardi in 1995.
It shows how ethographic field studies can be used to derive testable theories for improving personal information management practices and tools. Many publications by others followed, until a workshop series was initiated with the first NSF-sponsored workshop on PIM held in Seattle, Washington, on January 27-29, 2005. The group gathered at this workshop started defining the field in a published report.
This report formed the basis of the book Personal Information Management and follow-up workshops.

Research in the area of PIM also relates to work done under the term personal knowledge management
Personal knowledge management
Personal knowledge management refers to a collection of processes that an individual carries out to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his/her daily activities and how these processes support work activities...

. Whereas the focus there is on philosophy and integration with the theories created within knowledge management
Knowledge management
Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...

 – a holistic approach – the focus of PIM research is on collecting statistically relevant data to support the core hypothesis of PIM (see for example the work of Steve Whittaker), and on creating and validating tools for PIM (see works by William Jones or David Karger).

Tools

There are a number of tools available for managing personal information, but these tools can become a part of the problem leading to “information fragmentation”. Different devices and applications often come with their separate ways of storing and organizing information. NOTE: Many people confuse PIM tools with the study and practice of personal information management itself. See personal information manager
Personal information manager
A personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to Personal information management as a field of study...

 for information about tools for personal information management.

Study

Interest in the study of PIM has increased in recent years. One goal in the study of PIM is to identify ways to introduce new tool support without inadvertently increasing the complexity of a person’s information management challenge. The study of PIM means understanding better how people manage information across tools and over time. It is not enough simply to study, for example, e-mail
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 use in isolation. A related point is that the value of a new tool must be assessed over time and in a broader context of a person’s various PIM activities.

Related activities and areas

PIM shares considerable, potentially synergistic overlap with disciplines such as cognitive science, human-computer interaction, information science, artificial intelligence, database management and information retrieval. PIM relates to but differs from other fields of inquiry that study the interactions between people, information and technology.

Cognitive psychology and cognitive science

Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....

, as the study of how people learn and remember, problem solve, and make decisions, necessarily also includes the study of how people make smart use of available information. The related field of cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

, in its efforts to apply these questions more broadly to the study and simulation of intelligent behavior, is also related to PIM. Cognitive science has strong connections to, some would say subsumes, the field of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

.

There is great potential for a mutually beneficial interplay between cognitive science and PIM. Sub-areas of cognitive science of clear relevance to PIM include problem solving
Problem solving
Problem solving is a mental process and is part of the larger problem process that includes problem finding and problem shaping. Consideredthe most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of...

 and decision making
Decision making
Decision making can be regarded as the mental processes resulting in the selection of a course of action among several alternative scenarios. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.- Overview :Human performance in decision terms...

. For example, folders created to hold information for a big project such as “plan my wedding” may sometimes resemble a problem-decomposition
Decomposition (computer science)
Decomposition in computer science, also known as factoring, refers to the process by which a complex problem or system is broken down into parts that are easier to conceive, understand, program, and maintain.- Overview :...

. To take another example, signal detection task
Detection theory
Detection theory, or signal detection theory, is a means to quantify the ability to discern between information-bearing energy patterns and random energy patterns that distract from the information Detection theory, or signal detection theory, is a means to quantify the ability to discern between...

 has long been used to frame and explain human behavior and has recently been used as a basis for analyzing our choices concerning what information to keep and how – a key activity of PIM.

Or consider categorization
Categorization
Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge...

 and concept formation. How are categories and concepts learned and used? Categories and concepts can be seen directly but may be reflected in the tags and folders people use to organize their information. Or consider the activities of reading
Reading (process)
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...

 and writing
Writing
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...

. Both are areas of study in cognitive psychology with clear relevance to the study of PIM.

Now large portions of a document may be the product of “copy-and-paste” operations (from our previous writings) rather than a product of original writing. Certainly, management of text pieces pasted for re-use is a PIM activity, and this raises several interesting questions. How do we go about deciding when to re-use and when to write from scratch? We may sometimes spend more time chasing down a paragraph we have previously written than it would have taken to simply write a new paragraph expressing the same thoughts. Beyond this, we can wonder at what point a reliance on an increasing (and increasingly available) supply of previously written material begins to impact our creativity.

As people do PIM they work in an external environment that includes other people, available technology and organizational setting. This means that situated cognition
Situated cognition
Situated cognition poses that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts....

, distributed cognition
Distributed cognition
Distributed cognition is a psychological theory developed in the mid 1980s by Edwin Hutchins. Using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky it emphasizes the social aspects of cognition. It is a framework that involves the coordination between individuals,...

, and social cognition
Social cognition
Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, in the brain, of information relating to conspecifics, or members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the...

 all relate to the study of PIM.

Human-computer and human-information interaction

The study of PIM is also related to the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). But PIM research puts emphasis on the broader study of how people manage their information over time using a variety of tools – some computer-based, some not.

The User-Subjective Approach
The User-Subjective Approach
The User-Subjective Approach is the first interaction design approach dedicated specifically to Personal Information Management . The approach offers design principles with which PIM systems can make systematic use of subjective attributes...

 is the first approach dedicated specifically to PIM systems design. Its theoretical foundations were first published in a Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology paper in 2003. Another JASIST paper with evidence and implementation for the approach was published in 2008. The paper had won the Best JASIST Paper award in 2009. The first user-subjective design scheme was developed and positively evaluated in a Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems paper published in 2009

Management of data, information, knowledge, time and tasks

The study of information management
Information management
Information management is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences. This sometimes involves those who have a stake in, or a right to that information...

 and knowledge management
Knowledge management
Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...

 in organizations relates to the study of PIM. Jones notes that issues seen first at an organizational level often migrate to the PIM domain.

PIM can help to motivate and will also benefit from work in information retrieval
Information retrieval
Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...

 and database management
Database management system
A database management system is a software package with computer programs that control the creation, maintenance, and use of a database. It allows organizations to conveniently develop databases for various applications by database administrators and other specialists. A database is an integrated...

. For example, data mining techniques
Data mining
Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

 might be applied to mine and structure personal information.

Relation to time management and productivity

By similar argument, a discussion of time management
Time management
Time management is the act or process of exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase efficiency or productivity. Time management may be aided by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific...

 or task management
Task management
Task management is the process of managing a task through its life cycle, including planning, testing, tracking and reporting. Task management can help either individuals achieve goals, or groups of individuals collaborate and share knowledge for the accomplishment of collective goals...

 on a personal level quickly takes us back to a discussion of PIM. Both time and task management make heavy use of information tools and external forms of information such as to-do lists, calendars, timelines, Gantt charts, etc. This information, to be managed like other information.

See also

  • Personal information manager
    Personal information manager
    A personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to Personal information management as a field of study...

  • Personal knowledge management
    Personal knowledge management
    Personal knowledge management refers to a collection of processes that an individual carries out to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his/her daily activities and how these processes support work activities...

  • Time management
    Time management
    Time management is the act or process of exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase efficiency or productivity. Time management may be aided by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific...

  • Information management
    Information management
    Information management is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences. This sometimes involves those who have a stake in, or a right to that information...

  • Group information management
    Group information management
    Erickson uses the phrase group information management or GIM, for short, to refer to personal information management “as it functions in more public spheres.” People acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items to support individual needs...

     (GIM)
  • List of personal information managers
  • Personal organizer
    Personal organizer
    A personal organizer, day planner, personal analog assistant, or personal planner is a small book/binder, designed to be portable, usually containing a diary, calendar, address book, and other sections usually including blank paper. It may also include pages with useful information, such as maps,...

  • Personal wiki
    Personal wiki
    A personal wiki is a wiki maintained primarily for personal use. Personal wikis allow people to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without the need for collaboration by multiple users....

  • Semantic desktop
    Semantic desktop
    In computer science, the Semantic Desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface and data handling capabilities so that data is more easily shared between different applications or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a...

  • Desktop wiki

Books and articles on PIM

  • Bellotti, Victoria, Ducheneaut, Nicolas, Howard, Mark & Smith, Ian. (2003) "Taking email to task: the design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA : ACM
  • Bergman, Ofer, Boardman, Richard, Gwizdka, Jacek & Jones, William. "Personal information management." Extended Abstracts of the 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1598-1599), Vienna, Austria.
  • Bergman, Ofer, Beyth-Marom, Ruth & Nachmias, Rafi (2006). "The project fragmentation problem in personal information management." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems. Montréal, Québec, Canada : ACM.
  • Bergman, Ofer, Beyth-Marom, Ruth & Nachmias, Rafi (2008). The user-subjective approach to personal information management systems design: Evidence and implementations. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59(2): pp 235-246.
  • Bergman, Ofer, Beyth-Marom, Ruth, Nachmias, Rafi, Gradovitch, Noa & Whittaker, Steve (2008). Advanced search engines and navigation preference in personal information management. Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Information Systems on Keeping, Re-finding and Sharing Personal Information 26(4): pp. 30-54.
  • Bergman, Ofer, Whittaker, Steve, Sanderson, Mark, Nachmias, Rafi, & Ramamoorthy, Aanad (2010). The effect of folder structure on personal file navigation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(12): pp 2426–2441.
  • Boardman, Richard & Sasse, M. Angela. (2004) "Stuff goes into the computer and doesn't come out": a cross-tool study of personal information management." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Vienna, Austria : ACM.
  • Dumais, Susan, Cutrell, Edward, Cadiz, J. J., Jancke, Gavin, Sarin, Raman & Robbins, Daniel C. (2003) "Stuff I've seen: a system for personal information retrieval and re-use." In Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. Toronto, Canada : ACM
  • Jones, W. (2008). Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Book info at: Morgan Kaufmann | Amazon ISBN 978-0-12-370866-3
  • Jones, W. & Teevan, J. (Eds.) (2007). Personal Information Management. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Book info at: University of Washington Press | Amazon ISBN 978-0-295-98737-8
  • Jones, W. (2004).Finders, keepers? The present and future perfect in support of personal information management. First Monday, 9(3). Available at http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1123/1043.
  • Jones, W. (2007). Personal information management. In B. Cronin (Ed.), Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) (Vol. 41). Medford, NJ: Information Today.
  • Kaye, Joseph 'Jofish', Vertesi, Janet, Avery, Shari, Dafoe, Allan, David, Shay, Onaga, Lisa, Rosero, Ivan & Pinch, Trevor. (2006) "To have and to hold: exploring the personal archive." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems. Montréal, Québec, Canada : ACM.
  • Lansdale, M.W. (March 1988) "The psychology of personal information management." Applied Ergonomics. 19:1, pp.55-66.
  • Ravasio, Pamela, Schär, Sissel Guttormsen & Krueger, Helmut. (2004) "In pursuit of desktop evolution: User problems and practices with modern desktop systems." ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.. 11:2, pp.156-180.
  • Teevan, Jaime, Jones, William & Bederson, Benjamin B. (2006 January) "SPECIAL ISSUE: Personal information management." Commun. ACM. 49:1
  • Whittaker, Steve & Sidner, Candace. (1996) "Email overload: exploring personal information management of email." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada : ACM.
  • Whittaker, S., and Hirschberg, J. (2001). "The character, value and management of paper archive." ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, 8, 150-170.
  • Whittaker, Steve (2011). Personal information management: From Consumption to Curation. In B. Cronin (Ed.), Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) (Vol. 45). Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Other resources

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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