Abstract
Personal information management (PIM) is a study on how people handle personal information to support their needs and tasks. In the last decade a lot of studies focused on how people acquire, organize, maintain and retrieve information from their information spaces. Results have led to many research prototypes that tried to either augment present tools or integrate these collections within entirely new designs. However, not much has changed in the present tools, and hierarchies still prevail as the storage foundation. Our research aims at understanding the difference between how people organize their information in various applications and physical space and how they actually think of this information in relation to tasks they have to accomplish. We carried out a preliminary study and are currently finishing another study which both show that there is a difference on how information is organized in formal structures on computers and physical spaces and how it is thought of in users’ heads. These findings have motivated the design of an application that tries to mimic the latter and adapts to current computer activities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abrams, D., Baecker, R.: How people use www bookmarks. In: CHI 1997: CHI 1997 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 341–342. ACM, New York (1997)
Bergman, O., Beyth-Marom, R., Nachmias, R.: The user-subjective approach to personal information management systems design: Evidence and implementations. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 59(2), 235–246 (2008)
Boardman, R., Spence, R., Sasse, M.: Too many hierarchies? The daily struggle for control of the workspace. In: Proc. HCI International 2003, Citeseer (2003)
Catarci, T., Dix, A., Katifori, A., Lepouras, G., Poggi, A.: Task-Centred Information Management. In: Thanos, C., Borri, F., Candela, L. (eds.) Digital Libraries: Research and Development. LNCS, vol. 4877, pp. 197–206. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Czerwinski, M., Horvitz, E., Wilhite, S.: A diary study of task switching and interruptions. In: CHI 2004: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 175–182. ACM, New York (2004)
Fisher, D., Brush, A.J., Gleave, E., Smith, M.A.: Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner’s ”email overload” ten years later. In: CSCW 2006: Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 309–312. ACM, New York (2006)
Jones, W., Phuwanartnurak, A.J., Gill, R., Bruce, H.: Don’t take my folders away!: organizing personal information to get things done. In: CHI 2005: CHI 2005 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1505–1508. ACM, New York (2005)
Kaptelinin, V.: Umea: translating interaction histories into project contexts. In: CHI 2003: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 353–360. ACM, New York (2003)
Kljun, M., Dix, A., Solina, F.: A study of a crosstool information usage on personal computers: how users mentally link information relating to a task but residing in different applications and how importance and type of acquisition affect this (November 2009), http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/33816/
Malone, T.W.: How do people organize their desks?: Implications for the design of office information systems. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 1(1), 99–112 (1983)
Ravasio, P., Schr, S.G., Krueger, H.: In pursuit of desktop evolution: User problems and practices with modern desktop systems. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 11(2), 156–180 (2004)
Tungare, M.: Pérez-Qui nones, M.A.: Mental workload in multi-device personal in- formation management. In: PIM Workshop 2009, Vancouver, BC, Canada, November 7-9 (2009)
Whittaker, S., Hirschberg, J.: The character, value, and management of personal paper archives. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 8(2), 150–170 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kljun, M. (2011). Differences on How People Organize and Think about Personal Information. In: Konstan, J.A., Conejo, R., Marzo, J.L., Oliver, N. (eds) User Modeling, Adaption and Personalization. UMAP 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6787. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22362-4_44
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22362-4_44
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-22361-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-22362-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)