Personal Information
Management
Uichin Lee
KAIST KSE
Personal Information Management, Williams Jones
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology
Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 453–504, 2007
Some slides are based on Bob Glushko’s lecture on PIM: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i202/f08/lectures/202-20081020.pdf
Plan for Today’s Class
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Defining Personal Information Management
Review key historical influences
Analysis of PIM
Understand how people do PIM
Cognitive overhead (information utility)
Approaches to PIM integration
1. Temperance
2. Silence
3. Order
4. Resolution
5. Frugality
6. Industry
7. Sincerity
8. Justice
9. Moderation
10. Cleanliness
11. Tranquility
12. Chastity
13. Humility
Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues
Slides from "http://people.csail.mit.edu/teevan/work/publications/talks/campustech06.ppt"
1. Temperance
2. Silence
3. Order
4. Resolution
5. Frugality
?
6. Industry
7. Sincerity
8. Justice
9. Moderation
10. Cleanliness
11. Tranquility
?
12. Chastity
13. Humility
?
?
“Order .. with regard to
places for things, papers,
etc., I found extremely
difficult to acquire.”
?
Slides from "http://people.csail.mit.edu/teevan/work/publications/talks/campustech06.ppt"
Personal Information Management (PIM)
--- A Fanciful Definition
• PIM is a game of catch
... in which a person tosses their personal
information into the future
... in the hope of being able to catch it later
• Maybe "later" is "forever" and we hope that
someone else will do the catching
PIM - A More Serious Definition
• "The practice and the study of the activities that people
perform to acquire, organize, maintain, and retrieve
information for everyday use"
• So we limit PIM to cover actions (or inactions) that are the
result of individual choices
• It is also personal -- rather than social -- is that we decide
on the activities and organizational schemes and carry
them out by ourselves (although it may be part of our PIM
strategy to rely partly on others)
• Having this discretion about information organization and
"making sense of it“ to make decisions is a defining
characteristic of professional, as opposed to clerical,
information work
Why PIM Matters?
• PIM matters to us as individuals and professionals
because better PIM results in better use of our time
and attention and ultimately in better quality of life
• PIM matters within enterprises because better PIM
means increased productivity (in the short term) and
better knowledge management (in the long term)
• Advances in PIM may also translate to improvements in
education and in helping old people "match their
mental lifespan to their physical lifespan"
PIM and Prevailing Technology
• We can view many inventions as responses to the need for PIM
• Because PIM is embedded in user tasks and work context it reflects
the prevailing technology support for information work
• The personal computer has had the greatest impact (so far) on PIM
technology
• But as processors and connectivity is increasingly embedded in
objects of all kinds information "from and about stuff" will have to
be managed and the PC may lose its central role
• And replication of digital objects so they can be stored "in the
cloud" is becoming common 19th
19th Century PIM Technology
Breakthroughs
Vannevar Bush's Personal Information Manager?
As We May Think, Vannevar Bush, 1945
“A memex is 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”
• Full-text search, text & audio annotations, and
hyperlinks
20th Century PIM Technology
• 1970s-80s: Ringbound organizer
(aka filofax)
• Late 1980s: Early electronic
organizer
– Compatibility/data format problems
• 1990s-2000s: Enter PIM/PDA
devices
– PC link, standard functions, user
friendliness, stylus input, compatible
s/w
– Leading companies:
• Casio, Sharp, Psion, etc.
• Palm pilots, iPaq, etc.
Reference: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2284229
Filofax
Psion
Organizer
Palm
Zire
Compaq
iPaq
21st Century PIM
• 2000s-now: Smartphone revolution:
– Phones, emails, social nets, user generated content
(text, audio, photos, videos, sensors)
– Leading companies:
• Handset manufactures
• S/W giants (Google, MS) + many s/w developers
Information and Information Item
• What is information?
– Aural comments, emails, web pages, hand-written notes,
etc..
• Information item: packaging of information
– Encapsulate information in a persistent form that can be
created, stored, moved, given a name, and other
properties, copied, distributed, deleted, transformed, and
so forth
– Examples: Paper documents, electronic documents and
other files, e-mail messages, web pages, references
• Information form:
– Determined by the tools and applications
A Personal Space of Information (PSI)
• Personal information
– Information that a person keeps for personal use
– Information about a person kept by and under the control of
others (e.g., health records)
– Information experienced by a person (e.g., browsing a book,
reading web pages, etc); either pushed/pulled..
• Personal Space of Information (PSI)
– All the information items that are at least nominally if not
exclusively under an individual’s control
– Examples: books, emails, e-documents, web pages, other files
(on various computers)
– A person has only a single PSI
– People have some sense of control over the items in their PSIs,
which is partly illusory..
Personal Information Collections or
Containers (PICs)
• Use of collection/container in managing personal info
– e.g., piles of papers, papers in a cabinet, project related
items, a collection of bookmarks
• PICs are “islands” in our PSIs where we have made some
conscious effort to control both the information that
goes in and the manner in which it is organized
PSI
PIC
PIC
Content
Networking
Project
PIC
My Photos
PIM Activities
• Finding/re-finding activities:
– Move from need to information and affect the output
of information from a PSI
• Keeping activities:
– Move from information to need and affect the input
of information into a PSI
• Meta-level (or mapping) activities:
– Curatorship: focus on the PSI itself and on the
management and organization of PICs within it
– Efforts to get organized in a physical office, e.g.,
constitute on kind of meta-level activity
PIM Activities
• PIM activities viewed as an effort to establish, use, and
maintain a mapping between needs and information
Needs
Remind John about meeting
Mapping
Calendar
Folders
Listen to relaxing music?
Desktop
Searchable
content
Information
Phone # for John
Meeting time
Smooth jazz in mp3 file
M-level activities
Finding activities
Keeping activities
Finding: from Need to Information
• Difference between seeking and finding?
• Finding is more inclusive
• Wilson’s definition (2000):
– The purposive seeking for information as a consequence of a need to
satisfy some goal. In the course of seeking, the individual may interact
with manual information systems (such as a newspaper, or a library),
or with computer-based systems (e.g., WWW)
• Information finding:
– Find information outside a PSI (e.g., brick/mortar library or WWW)
– Finding is more direct (expressing goals): location of items that meets
the need
– People find not only information but also physical items
– Finding is complementary to keeping; e.g., old saying, what we find,
we can keep
• Trade-off exists: keeping vs. finding
Finding: from Need to Information
• Finding public information (on-line search)
– Berrypicking model (Bates, 1989)
• Information is gathered in bits and pieces in the course
of serious of steps where the user’s expression of need
as reflected in the current query, evolves.
– Stepwise orienteering (2004)
• People have a sense of control and context over the
search progress; lessen the cognitive burden associated
with query articulation
Finding: from Need to Information
• How to re-find personal information from a
PSI?
• Four steps:
1. Remembering to look
2. Recall information about the information that can
help to narrow the subsequent scan
3. Recognizing the desired items
4. Repeating as need in order to “re-collect” the set
of items required to meet the current need
Finding: from Need to Information
• Step 1: Remembering
– Related to awareness of information
– Reminders: visibility! (e.g., desktop screen, postits, e-mail reminders, etc)
– Why is reminding so important?
• Answer: information fragmentation
• Information items are scattered in different forms
across various organizational devices
• Support grouping and interrelating items is not well
developed
Finding: from Need to Information
• Step 2/3: Recall and Recognition
– Recall: typing a search word
– Recognize: scan through a list of results
– These steps may be tightly coupled (e.g., desktop
search tool)
• Why people prefers to use file browser?
– People use desktop search tool as a last resort..
– Some explanations:
• Easy to recall, orienteering is feasible (e.g., smaller steps,
less burden to working memory)
• Generation effect (when a person names a file)
– Not all files are named by the person..
Finding: from Need to Information
• Step 4: Repeating
– People want to access a collection of items (which
may be scattered in different forms within
different organizations)
– Output interference??
• Items retrieved first may interfere with the retrieval of
later items in a set
• E.g., recalling all the people who partied together..
Keeping: from Information to Need
• People encounter information and try to
determine what, if anything they should do
with it
• Keeping: decisions and actions relating to
encountered information
– Any types of information, including: magazine
subscription, RSS/Twitter feeds, even your friends
– Consume immediately? Ignore? Keep?
Keeping: from Information to Need
• Keeping is difficult and error-prone
– Syndrome: damned if you do, damned if you don’t
• If you keep information, you never access it; if you don’t keep it, we
may need it later; further, if you keep it in a wrong way, it is useless..
• Filing information items is cognitively difficult and errorprone
– Exemplar document classification behavior
• Attributes (title/author), keeping behavior (discard, keep),
order/scheme, time, value, etc..
• Piling information items is also problematic:
– Low accessibility and visibility
• Do nothing:
– Especially for web search: search again, type a few characters,
and navigate to the web from another web site, etc.
Keeping: from Information to Need
• Keeping everything? (w/ automated keeping)
– Could be faulty (e.g., rule based auto
classification of incoming emails?)
– People may forget to look again later (can’t
remember what’s in a PSI)
Meta-level: Mapping between Need
and Information
• How to map between need and information?
• Two aspects:
– Maintenance and organization (folders)
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Neat or messy?
Information fragmentation makes this hard..
Old magazine effect: keeping cost outweighs potential use
Deletion paradox: spending precious things on items of little value
Stuff goes in but doesn’t come back out – it just builds up?
– Making sense of information and planning its use
• Too many folders?? Why not using a flat folder, and use search tool
instead? (e.g., Google desktop?)
• Folder hierarchy is still important: internal category, easy to access,
generation effect, category name could be associated with
task/project/goals
Krish on Cognitive Overload
• Kirsh points out that "where we work" is a
superposition of many specific environments and
applications that we move in and out of
• Each of these environments and applications has its
own cost structure for handling information based on
the tools and resources it makes available
• These diverse cost structures result in "computational
complexity" for making PIM decisions about keeping
and finding information and encourage suboptimal
reactive methods rather than careful planning
Kirsh on "Information Utility"
• People think about and value different kinds
of information in different ways - their utility
functions are non-monotonic and non-linear
• When you are looking for information, can you
tell how hard or long it will be before you find
it?
• How long should you look before you give up?
• How valuable will information you don't yet
have turn out to be?
Kirsh's Information Utility Functions
• Utility means how valuable information is in
improving performance.
PIM Strategies
• The lack of a coherent utility or demand function for information means
that different people (or the same person at different times) will follow
radically different PIM strategies
• Pack Rat or Blind Accumulation
– just save everything, usually spends excessive time filing
• Insurer
– Doesn't keep everything, but creates multiple copies (paper and digital) of
information items to maximize re-finding
• Surface Clutterer
– Doesn't keep everything, but strives to keep information accessible, often in
spatially organized piles
• Just-in-Case Learner
– Spends excessive time consuming information when it arrives so they can
always be prepared for some future information need
• Just-in-Time Gatherer
– Ignore all information needs except those needed immediately for current
tasks. Maximizes the average value of information items, but some high-value
information can't be found this way
Approaches to PIM Integration
• Through e-mails: Taskmaster
• Through search: Google Desktop, Spotlight, SIS
(Microsoft Stuff I’ve Seen)
• Through projects/tasks: Taskmaster
• Through properties: PRESTO (structureless
approach), MEMOIRS (time-based)
• Through a common representation (e.g., RDF?)
• Through a digital recording of everything? (or
Lifelogging)