INF385Q KMS
Sarah Kim
12/05/2008
Research Paper Final
What Archiving means in Personal Information/Knowledge Management
Introduction
Today’s working environment is expanding beyond the boundary of a traditional office
space. Ubiquitous computing and pervasiveness of digital communication tools let more people
work at personalized/remote spaces such as home offices. In this personalized working
environment, how to management information becomes a responsibility of individuals often
without any aid from information specialists or organizational guidance. At the same time, as
Bush projected in his visionary paper, As We May Think, in 1945, contemporary individuals are
accumulating ever-increasing volume of hybrid digital information in their daily lives, more than
our capacity to process them. These trends increase a demand for personal information
management (PIM) systems and tools that can assist knowledge workers manage their personal
information effectively. The PIM research emerges responding these needs.
The scope of PIM covers the wide spectrum of personal information behavior such as
how knowledge workers collect, keep, organize, classify, retrieve, and archive information and
use information as reminder. Among these personal information activities, this paper focuses on
the issue of personal archiving in the PIM research and reviews the meaning of archiving in
personal knowledge management.
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Archiving: Selection
According to Wittaker and Sidner, personal archiving is the way that people organize and
categorize longer-term information, so that it can later be retrieved. Archives are not of
immediate relevance to current tasks, but are constructed for reference or anticipated future use
(Wittaker and Sidner, 1996). Archiving means to keep old or end-of-use information items
generally by transferring them into separate locations.
While archiving is a part of information keeping and maintaining activities, traditionally
archiving involves a certain decision-making process of what to keep and what to discard based
on (primary, secondary, etc.) values of the given information item. The whole body of appraisal
theories and practices developed in the archives profession discusses selecting methods and types
of values that end-of-use information items have. Although selecting archival records is
complicated and often controversial, in the paper-based working environment, reducing the
quantity of information items through selecting and destroying was highly necessary due to the
physical limitation of a paper storage space.
Keeping-everything approach
In the digital working environment, digital technologies seem to solve this old problem
supporting a keeping-everything approach. First, the spatial limitation of storage is not a big
issue any more. There is various digital data storage available from low cost external storage
devices to near-zero cost web-spaces. Second, regarding the quantity of digital information that
individuals are struggling with, deciding what to keep and what to discard is not a simple task
but requires an amount of time and labor. This means, not only is it possible to keep every
information in digital form using low cost digital storages with enhanced information retrieval
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systems, but also keeping-everything may be a more cost and labor effective way of archiving
digital information. This promising notion of keeping-everything became a frequent argument
even in the archives profession where appraisal has been practiced as one of the core tasks of the
profession.
Keeping-everything strategy could be found in the PIM research, especially ones
focusing on personal long-term data storage methods and systems. First, this keeping-everything
idea is reflected in Bush’s vision of a Memex, which is regarded as the modern origin of PIM
studies (Jones and Teevan, 2007). While thinking of the abundance of information and memory
accumulated beyond our processing capability, Bush envisioned mechanized tools that will aid
our “repetitive thought process” through computing. A Memex is what he thought as “a device in
which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized
so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility” (Bush, 1945).
Lifestreams is one of the early pioneer projects to develop a virtual storage model for
personal electronic data in 1996. Lifestreams uses the time-base ordering as its key mechanism
to store and organize all documents created and received. Lifestreams model is based on three
time streams: present, future, and past. A newly created or incoming document will appears at
up-front of the lifestream interface, which belongs to the “present” stream. Reminders or to-dolist information is treated as the “future” portion of the stream. When the date arrives, the
reminder appears in the present stream. As a document ages and push back to the time stream,
these older documents eventually are “archived” consisting of the “past” stream. In the
Lifesstems system, this past stream becomes invisible so it prevents the pile of old documents
distract a person’s attention to working documents. As Freeman and Gelernter said “here we
mean archiving in the conceptual sense,” this archiving process is just a part of overall data
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storing function of Lifestreams. Lifestreams does not provide any explicit step to select and
delete a certain old information items in the process of archiving. The way that Freeman and
Gelernter regard archiving reflects the notion of keeping-everything. The authors argue that the
archiving process should occur automatically so users do not need to throw out old documents.
They believe, if the system can support convenient finding method, automatic archiving will help
to reuse old information more often.
MylifeBites is a widely known project pursuing to realize the vision of a Memex.
MyLifeBits is a database type personal digital store in where all aspects of an individual’s life
will be saved digitally. The aim of MyLifeBits is to preserve a person’s life in a digital form for
future generations and to create database that can function as a memory aid. MylifeBites is based
on a not only keeping-everything, but also saving-everything strategy. In this project, the scope
of personal digital information is not limited to information items accumulated by an individual
but includes automatically captured information about a person via a wearable digital camera, socalled Scan cam. Along with digitized non-digital materials, these born digital pictorial data
about a person’s daily activity will be stored in the database. The goal of MyLifeBits project
partially shares the purpose of archival institutions in terms of preserving our cultural heritage
overall. However, the system itself does not support individuals to actively edit and select
information items based on their personalized values or meanings.
What and why do people actually archive?
Keeping-everything may be a more cost and labor effective way for individual
knowledge workers to archive their old information items, regarding the continuing improvement
of digital technology and the quantity of personal digital information. It also reduces the risk of
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destroying important items and it is beneficial to preserve the context of items as well as items.
However, the fact that we can keep everything technically does not mean that we have to keep
everything (Bailey, 2008). The PIM related research that examines individuals’ archiving
behavior in their real life settings provides interesting insights on why people archive and what
archives mean to them, beyond the keeping-for-later-use purpose.
In their research on the nature and function of personal paper archives in office work,
Whittaker and Hirschberg discussed what factors influence individuals’ decisions to keep
particular paper documents. They collected on-line survey data from 50 people in one
organization about how much and which types of data they preserved and discarded. They also
conducted follow-up interview with 14 workers asking attitudes to paper archives, reasons for
keeping and discarding of documents, and their preservation strategies. Regarding archiving
activity, they found out that 49% of personal paper archives contain unique items: working
memo, mostly hand-written; materials related to completed projects for a future reference; legal
and administrative documents, that often contains irreplaceable signatures. 41% of personal
paper archives consist of not unique items: unread and publicly available documents. While
unread materials are kept for later evaluation, people retain publicly available materials for
immediate access for later re-use, as a reminder of the possession of that information, and due to
the lack of trust in external stores. Besides these practical reasons, people have a sensational or
emotional reason for archiving materials. For example, people keep their first published papers
and materials on their thesis that do not have practical needs any more but are regarded as a part
of a person’s intellectual history (Whittaker and Hirschberg, 2001).
Kaye et al. observed individuals’ archiving and organizing behavior both physical and
virtual places. They conducted semi-structured interviews and tours of interviewees' actual office
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spaces and personal computers of forty-eight scholars working in various academic fields. As a
result, they suggest five goals of personal archiving. First, people archive materials so that they
can easily find them later. Second, individuals build so-called legacy archives as a unified body
of materials that reflect their career trajectory, achievements, and personal prides. Third, sharing
resources is another reason for personal archiving. Forth, fear of losing irreplaceable information
due to unexpected catastrophe drives needs for archiving and long-term preservation. Finally,
people construct and show their identity through archiving. Items in the personal archives reflect
and describe the owner indicating who they are, what they have achieved, what their interests
are, what role they play in a certain community, and so forth. (Kaye et al., 2006)
The Digital Lives is an on-going research project, in which individuals’ own digital
behavior and their build-up of a digital collection as a part of digital archiving process are
explored. Through in-depth interviews with 25 individuals in the field of politics, arts, and
sciences the Digital Lives research team gathered a wide variety of personal experiences,
behaviors, and approaches of how individuals manage their digital collections. They found out
both affective and utilitarian reasons for personal archiving. People archive for the possibility
that a document can be used or recycled in the future and for a back-up. People also archive
items that have professional, academicals, or emotional values. These items consist of materials
that individuals investigated a certain time and effort to create; materials that represent important
points of the person’s life and contain a person’s private memories or family histories. (Williams,
Dean, Rowland, and John, 2008)
Bailey argues, “regardless of the criticisms of bias levelled at appraisal it is a simple fact
of life that not all information is of equal value and that surely there must come a point at which
the overheads associated with storage outweigh the value of its content (Bailey, 2008, p.106).”
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The findings of these three papers support this point of view showing that there are social and
psychosocial functions of personal archiving activity. Through the process of selecting and
destroying certain personal information items, moving selected items to personal archives, and so
editing traces of ones’ social activities captured in documents, individuals have an opportunity to
review their professional or private lives and (re)construct their social identities. At this point,
archiving is the step to add values to the end-of-use information items, mostly different values
from one for their original use. As a whole, a personal archive or the body of archived
information items carry personal values, meanings, believes, and perspectives embedded in this
archiving practice.
Conclusion: Archiving and KM
When knowledge is articulated in formal language, and expressed in a written form,
knowledge becomes one or more items of information (Jones and Teevan, 2007). This explicit
knowledge is a major concern in many PIM research. However, capturing tacit knowledge is
considered somewhat more important than managing explicit knowledge in KM since the power
of knowledge comes from values and beliefs as much as from information and logic (Davenport
and Prusak, 2000).
If we see personal archives as the mere collection of explicit knowledge, keepingeverything, especially automatic archiving, may be appealing to us as a more labor and time
effective approach. However, if we want to capture personal experiences and beliefs that would
be reflected in personal archives and archiving activities, the current PIM systems and tools need
to include functions that can assist their users to make meaningful decisions on what to keep and
what to discard when they archive old information items.
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Reference
Bailey, S. (2008). Managing the Crowd: Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0
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Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly 176 (1), 101-108.
Davenport, T., H. and L. Prusak (2000). Working Knowledge. Harvard Business School Press.
Freeman, E. and D. Gelernter (1996, March). Lifestreams: a storage model for personal data.
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