Personal Information Managementby William Jones and Jaime Teevan

Articles on How People Keep and Organize Personal Information

And

How People Manage Personal Information over a Lifetime

Judging value• Information is easier to re-find if it was recognized as

important the first time it was seen.– What do you do to recognize the potential future use of

information• In email?• In web sites?• In Other information sources?

– Post-valued recall -- recognizing the value of previously encountered information

• Some people e-mail information to themselves– Have you ever done this? What does it accomplish?

• Lack of knowledge of future importance makes it harder to store and organize information effectively

Reviewing from last week --

Information fragmentation• On how many different devices do you store electronic

information?– Phone, pda, desktop computer, laptop …– How do you recall what is where?

• Do you have any kind of overall index?• Do you ever lose something entirely because you cannot recall where

it is stored?• Do you use online sites such as Google docs to make files accessible

from a variety of places?– What are the pros and cons of that approach?– How do you handle multiple e-mail accounts? (Do you?)

– How do you know that this version is most recent? Naming conventions help or hinder.

• How do you name the versions of a file?– Cathy Marshall study at Microsoft

Information Keeping

• People keep things -- including information -- for a variety of reasons– Expected future need– Reminder of an experience, usually

pleasant, but perhaps something significant that should not be forgotten (VT April 16 collection -- see http://www.vt.edu/remember/)

– Increasing amounts of information available, but it is hard to know what to keep

Define: Information keeping

• Decision-making and actions relateing to the information item currently under consideration that impact the likelihood that the item will be found again later. Decisions can range from: (1) “ignore, this has no relevance to me”; (2) “ignore, I can get back to this later”… (3) “keep this in a special place or way so that I can be sure to use this information later.”

• This is the keep or don’t keep decision, not related to how to keep anything.

Quoted from How People Keep and Organize Personal Information in

Personal Information Management

Define: Information organizing• Decision-making and actions relating to the selection and

implementation of a scheme of organization and representation for a collection of information items. Decisions can include: (1) How should items in this collection be named? (2) What sets of properties make sense for and help to distinguish the items in this collection? (3) How should items within this collection be grouped? Into piles or folders?

• Note the movement from an item to a collection as we talk about keeping and organizing– “Keeping” response is triggered frequently by ordinay

events.– “Organizing” response is less often triggered

• What triggers the impulse to organize?

Quoted from How People Keep and Organize Personal Information in

Personal Information Management

Define: Information Maintaining

• All decisions and actions relating to the composition and preservation of a personal information collection. Decisions involve what kind of new items go into a collection, how information in the collection is stored (Where, in what formats? In what kind of storage? Backed up how?) and when do older items leave the collection (e.g. When are they deleted or archived?)

• A mixed blessing -- the Apple migration when a new machine replaces an old one.– Easily obtain an exact copy of the old disk system.

• Is this good, bad, some of both?

Keeping decisions: Multifaceted and Error-prone

• Some sorting attributes for paper items– Title, author– Disposition (discard, keep, postpone)– Order scheme (group, separte, arrange– Time (duration, currency)– Value (importance, interest, confidentiality– Cognitive State (don’t know, want to remember)

• Heavily influenced by anticipated future use

Other approaches to keeping

• Collection building, independent of expected future use

• Packrat• Legacy

• What do you do with something you do not intend to use again? Do you get rid of it or just put it aside? How much effort is required to make that decision?– Alex and the business card scenario

Decision influencers• Is the information potentially useful

– Jacket pocket treatment

• Do special steps need to be taken to keep it for later use?– Transcribe or scan something that was on paper, convert a file format to make it more

useful?– Business card may duplicate information readily available elsewhere

• How should the item be kept, where? On what device? In what form? To be accessed again when?

– Separate collections for immediate use or later sorting– Adding a note to a business card to remember the context of possible later

communication– Transcribe the information into a contacts database or cell phone– The card itself may provide a visual reminder

• Weighing consequences - – Missing something that should be there vs having to sort through too much stuff to find

what is needed

Organizing

• Little research on how the same person organizes different forms of information

• Some results– People do not take time to assess their organization

– People complain about needing to organize separate type of information and the resulting fragmentation

– People are not consistent about the approaches they take, using different schemes on different days

– Some people go to great lengths to consolidate types of information -- sending documents by email or storing email in file folders, for example.

Structures

• Making sense of organization includes both internal representations and external representations– Internal representation requires a cognitive

connection, an understanding of where each information item fits into a larger scheme and how it will be retrieved later

– External representation is a translation of the internal understanding of the structure needs of organization into a realization that can be seen and used.

My definitions, not from the author

Features that would be useful for organization

• A manual ordering of folders– People force this by strange folder names (AAA…)

• An ability to set reminders ,due dates, and other tasklike properties on folders– Subfolders often correspond to tasks, but cannot be treated

like tasks

• An ability to add notes– Some people add a notes document to a folder

• An abillity to use and reuse structures– If an organization of a folder or directory is useful for a variety

of activities, it would be nice to be able to reconstitute its structre, ready for new particulars. -- For me, an ABET visit, for example.

End review from last week

Related research activity

• The Universal Labeler - Part of Keeping Found Things Foud (KFTF)– Motivation

• People use iformation organization to get back (refid) information, but for other things also

• People are hampered– Lack of system support for features such as organization options

and structure reuse– Lack of integrative organization for multiple information modes (e-

mail, electronic documets, notes, etc.)

• Separation of organization activities from other activities related to acquiring or using the information…

– “An effective organization of information can emerge as a by-product of efforts to plan a project for which the information is acquired.”

Components of UL• Extend “Save as” to include “Label with”• Task reminder

– Set Remind by and Due by properties for a folder– These properties are integrated ito a Microsoft Outlook calendar

• See Figure 3.3.b for example of merging of organizational structure and project planning. (Sorry, I don’t have access to a digital copy.)– Discuss. Does this solve a problem? Or complicate what you

already have to do?• Would you make good use of such a resource if it were available? • What would make you decide yes or no?

– Basic concept -- creation, keeping, retrieval of information within the context of an over all project or activity.

There are opportunities for interesting IS projects here

Managing Personal Information over a Lifetime

• One thing to support the in context management of information

• What happens long after the project is over? How do we recreate the mental environment in which the information was created? Do we need to?

• How do we recognize that something that was important (or perhaps peripheral) in the context of one project may be useful in another context later? How do we make the connection?

Changing role of information

• The contexts at the beginning of the C. Marshall article

– First, A ticket.• Initially a reminder of a time commitment

– Something to look forward to– A committed time on the calendar

• Later a reminder of a good time– A good time to keep in mind– (Did anyone save this morning’s newspaper?)

• Much later – Reminder of a time of life, friends, the kinds of events

taking place then …

– The significance of the ticket changes over time.

Context

• Alex’s secret interest. (see http://www.rongorongo.org/)• Various articles from many sources.• Possible external index for all of them?• Some sort of organization for all of them• (A digital library even?)

•

Distributed Storage

• Example is photo collection– Probably we can all relate to the example?

• Likely to have items that are related to each other spread over a number of locations, as well as various formats.

Curation, Value

• Example - multiple types of e-mail kept for a variety of reasons

• Mix of personal and professional– May have to split when leaving a position

• Numbers become overwhelming quickly

• Curation requires judging the future value of the items

Long term PIM issues

• Technical– Storage, preservation, access– Changing formats and applications

• Social– Roles of current and emerging materials– How long do we want to keep our blogs? Our web

page collection? Other things?

• Legal– Digital Rights Management -- What are our rights in

keeping materials? What can we keep in a personal archive?

Benign neglect -- common approach -- may let us down

Not an entirely new problem

• Libraries and museums deal with questions of what to keep, how and for how long

• New to have individuals have so much to do in that domain

• Exercise -- stop now for a moment and list some of the information or artifacts that you have, think you would like to keep, may or may not have a formal plan for organizing. – Take a few minutes to think about it, jot some

notes. Plan to report back.

Archiving Personal Digital

belongings

Internet archiving

Archiving institutional library holdings

Scientific data archiving

Records archiving

Digital arts archiving

Concerns:Link preservationcoveragesnapshot frequencycopyright

Concerns:Intentional transience (performance, installation)Fidelity (color)Discovery (obscure but important works)Provenance)

Concerns:Temporal integrityContent integrityauthenticity

Concerns:Scientific context (instrumet callibration, data cleansing)Data representation/processing softwareProvenance (tracing intermediate results to data & context)

Concerns:Trusted repositoriesReplicationMetadataprovenancecopyright

Concerns:Anticipating valueDistributed contentLong-term accessResponsibility for curation

Figure 4.2, reproduced

A lot of issues, but also a lot of experience in some of them

Attributes of personal digital belongings

• Accumulates quickly– Obscuring long-term value

• Distributed over on and off-line stores– Difficult to keep track of individual items

• Derives meaning from context– May not always be preserved with the item (an attachment without its

original email, etc.)

• Easily passed around and replicated– Tension about privacy, copyright, security (protection) and future

access

• Formats may become obsolete• Curating is time-consuming and requires skill• Computing environments do not include mechanisms and

metaphors for long term access

Issues• Predicting value

– Keep everything? Pros and cons?– Effect of having “too much stuff”– Pleasure of discarding unwanted or unpleasant material?

• Distributed Storage– Sometimes for replication, sometimes because of varying sources– Exercise -- take five miutes and make a list of all the places and

modes used to store ay personal information received, obtained, or created in the last month or so.

• Digital context• What is the role of context in assigning value to an item?• Is a picture less valuable if you do not know where it was taken? Who

is pictured? Will you remember your student friends’ names in 20 years? Will that matter?

More issues

• Protection vs. long term maintenance– Digital Rights Management– The inherent conflict between easy access and good protection

• Formats– Choices complicate use for many people– Formats may become obsolete

• Print everything? What happens as the digital representation is exploited and cannot be adequately represented in print? How else to maintain use?

• Curation– Time consuming– File conversion, active decision about what to keep

• Long-term access– “Cannot look for something that you don’t remember you have”– Associating place and value (The box under the bed has important stuff)

The case study of email

• All of the issues previously discussed are explored in a exercise to capture e-mail between two friends, that lasted a period of six years

• 1400 message

• 800 pages of text

The issues for the case study

• Predicting value -- how do you determine what email messages have value?

• Distributed storage -- most people will have used more than one e-mail system over that long a time.

• Digital context -- attachments and urls– Average web page lasts 44 days?!?

• Protection and access. Privacy, security, availability

• Format variations over email systems• Curatorial effort• Long term access

Promising directions• Automatically generated visualizations• Manually defined “digital places” for valuable stuff

and stuff we don’t know if we will want again• Heuristics for detecting relative value “because

people demonstrate the worth of their belongings much more reliably than they declare it.” (what does that mean?)

• Methods and tools for revealing provenance – Making the importance evident to others as well – Issues of heritage -- what would be valueable to another

generation?