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.
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Knowledge acquisition/elicitation 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.
A seminal paper in personal information management research is "Finding and Reminding" by Barreau and Nardi in 1995.[1] 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.[2] 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. Whereas the focus there is on philosophy and integration with the theories created within knowledge management – 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).
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 for information about tools for personal information management.
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 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.
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, 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, 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.
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 and decision making. For example, folders created to hold information for a big project such as “plan my wedding” may sometimes resemble a problem-decomposition.[3] To take another example, signal detection task[4] 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.[5]
Or consider categorization 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 and writing. 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, distributed cognition, and social cognition all relate to the study of PIM.
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 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[6]. Another JASIST paper with evidence and implementation for the approach was published in 2008[7]. The paper had won the Best JASIST Paper award in 2009[8]. The first user-subjective design scheme was developed and positively evaluated in a Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems paper published in 2009[9]
The study of information management and knowledge management in organizations relates to the study of PIM. Jones notes that issues seen first at an organizational level often migrate to the PIM domain.[10]
PIM can help to motivate and will also benefit from work in information retrieval and database management. For example, data mining techniques might be applied to mine and structure personal information.
By similar argument, a discussion of time management or task management 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.
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