An oft-repeated ideal of personal information management (PIM) is to have “the right information, at the right time, in the right place…” for the current need. But the technologies and innovations that bring us ever closer to this ideal carry costs as well as benefits. In this ninth in a series of PIM workshops, we give closer, critical consideration to the “right time, right place” ideal of PIM. Can we manage the potential downsides involved in achieving this ideal, while preserving its obvious benefits? Or should we revise our ideal of PIM?

Researchers have been studying personal information management (PIM) for many years, but little exists by way of practical advice for how individuals should manage their own information. We employed the Delphi Method to engage PIM researchers with expertise in a variety of relevant areas in a five-round extended dialog about PIM practices. Participants identified key everyday choices of PIM, suggested alternatives, and identified pros and cons of each alternative. Our contributions include: 1) a set of 36 PIM practices, along with pros, cons, and recommendations for or against each practice, 2) directions of future research and development including "near-future" improvements in tool support and 3) a detailed description of how we applied the Delphi Method to study PIM and how it might be used more widely in HCI research as a complement to more established methods of inquiry.

Prototyping and evaluation combine to explore ways that an effective, integrative organization of project-related information might emerge as a by-product of a person's efforts to plan a project. The Personal Project Planner works as an extension to the file manager -- providing people with rich-text overlays to their information. Document-like project plans provide a context in which to create or reference documents, email messages, web pages, etc. that are needed to complete the plan. The user can later locate an information item such as an email message with reference to the plan (e.g., as an alternative to searching through the inbox or sent mail). Results of an interim evaluation of the Planner are very promising and suggest special directions of focus for limited available prototyping resources.

introduction Share on Introduction to keeping, refinding and sharing personal information Authors: Deborah Barreau University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University of North Carolina at Chapel HillView Profile , Robert Capra University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University of North Carolina at Chapel HillView Profile , Susan Dumais Microsoft Corporation Microsoft CorporationView Profile , William Jones University of Washington University of WashingtonView Profile , Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Information SystemsVolume 26Issue 4Article No.: 18pp 1–3https://doi.org/10.1145/1402256.1402257Published:07 October 2008Publication History 3citation0DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads0Last 12 Months0Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation Alerts Save to binder temporarily unavailable - maintenance in progressSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

The Personal Project Planner prototype works as an extension to the file manager to provide people with rich-text overlays to their information (folders, files and also email, web pages, notes). Rich-text, document-like project plans can be created which then provide a context in which to create or reference the email messages, electronic documents, web pages, etc. that are needed to complete the plan. The user can later locate an information item such as an email message with reference to the plan (e.g., as an alternative to a mostly context-free search through the inbox or sent mail). The Planner explores a possibility that an effective organization of project-related information can emerge as a natural by-product of efforts to plan and structure the project.

This paper describes the results of an observational study into the methods people use to manage web information for re-use. People observed in our study used a diversity of methods and associated tools. For example, several participants emailed web addresses (URLs) along with comments to themselves and to others. Other methods observed included printing out web pages, saving web pages to the hard drive, pasting the address for a web page into a document and pasting the address into a personal web site. Ironically, two web browser tools that have been explicitly developed to help users track web information - the bookmarking tool and the history list - were not widely used by participants in this study. A functional analysis helps to explain the observed diversity of methods. Methods vary widely in the functions they provide. For example, a web address pasted into a self-addressed email can provide an important reminding function together with a context of relevance: The email arrives in an inbox which is checked at regular intervals and the email can include a few lines of text that explain the URL's relevance and the actions to be taken. On the other hand, for most users in the study, the bookmarking tool ("Favorites" or "Bookmarks" depending on the browser) provided neither a reminding function nor a context of relevance. The functional analysis can help to assess the likely success of various tools, current and proposed.

Over forty years ago, Vannevar Bush articulated his vision of a “Memex” machine: “associative indexing, … whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another” [Bush 45]. In the sixties, Engelbart [Engelbart, English 68] built collaborative systems to provide idea structuring and sharing. Nelson [Nelson 81] coined “hypertext” and proposed world-wide networks for publishing, linking, annotating and indexing multiple versions of documents. With increasing numbers of research projects, papers, panels and conferences, and commercially available systems (e.g. Notecards by Xerox, Guide by Owl and HyperCard by Apple) in recent years, hypertext may be an idea whose time has finally come — or at least a phenomenon not to be ignored.

We want computer systems that can help us assess the similarity or relevance of existing objects (e.g., documents, functions, commands, etc.) to a statement of our current needs (e.g., the query). Towards this end, a variety of similarity measures have been proposed. However, the relationship between a measure's formula and its performance is not always obvious. A geometric analysis is advanced and its utility demonstrated through its application to six conventional information retrieval similarity measures and a seventh spreading activation measure. All seven similarity measures work with a representational scheme wherein a query and the database objects are represented as vectors of term weights. A geometric analysis characterizes each similarity measure by the nature of its iso-similarity contours in an n-space containing query and object vectors. This analysis reveals important differences among the similarity measures and suggests conditions in which these differences will affect retrieval performance. The cosine coefficient, for example, is shown to be insensitive to between-document differences in the magnitude of term weights while the inner product measure is sometimes overly affected by such differences. The context-sensitive spreading activation measure may overcome both of these limitations and deserves further study. The geometric analysis is intended to complement, and perhaps to guide, the empirical analysis of similarity measures. © 1987 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The benefits of electronic information storage are enormous and largely unrealized. As its cost continues to decline, the number of files in the average user's personal database may increase substantially. How is a user to keep track of several thousand, perhaps several hundred thousand, files? The Memory Extender (ME) system improves the user interface to a personal database by actively modeling the user's own memory for files and for the context in which these files are used. Files are multiply indexed through a network of variably weighted term links. Context is similarly represented and is used to minimize the user input necessary to disambiguate a file. Files are retrieved from the context through a spreading-activation-like process. The system aims towards an ideal in which the computer provides a natural extension to the user's own memory.

The enduring dichotomy between spatial and symbolic modes of representation and retrieval acquires an added pragmatic dimension through recent developments in computer-based information retrieval. The standard name-based approach to object reference is now supplemented on some systems by a spatial alternative-often driven by an office or desktop metaphor. Little rigorous evidence is available, however, to support the supposition that spatial memory in itself is more effective than symbolic memory. The accuracy of spatial versus symbolic reference was assessed in three experiments. In Experiment 1 accuracy of location reference in a location-only filing condition was initially comparable to that in a name-only condition, but deteriorated much more rapidly with increases in the number of objects filed. In Experiment 2 subjects placed objects in a two-dimensional space containing landmarks (drawings of a desk, table, filing cabinets, etc.) designed to evoke an office metaphor, and in Experiment 3 subjects placed objects in an actual, three-dimensional mock office. Neither of these enhancements served to improve significantly the accuracy of location reference, and performance remained below that of a name-only condition in Experiment 1. The results raise questions about the utility of spatial metaphor over symbolic filing and highlight the need for continuing research in which considerations of technological and economic feasibility are balanced by considerations of psychological utility.

The traditional and still dominant form of object reference in computing systems is symbolic - data files, programs, etc. are initially labeled and subsequently referred to by name. This approach is being supplemented on some systems by a spatial alternative which is often driven by an office or desktop metaphor (e.g. Apple's Lisa and MacIntosh systems, or Bolt's 1979 Spatial Data Management System). In such systems, an object is placed in a simulated two- or three-dimensional space, and can later be retrieved by pointing to its location. In order to begin to understand the relative merits of spatial and symbolic filing schemes for representing and organizing information, we compared four ways of filing computer objects. We found location information to be of limited utility, either by itself or in combination with symbolic information. This calls into question the generality and efficacy of the desktop metaphor for information retrieval.