A bigger point is that our visions of PIM should not be constrained by conventional images of a desktop or a file cabinet. Our informational overviews can be much richer and much more evocative. And a bigger point: PIM is not only necessary and important. It might even be fun.
1.2 WHO BENEFITS FROM BETTER PIM AND HOW?
PIM may be “personal” but better PIM promises to bring broad societal benefit.
Within organizations, better PIM means better productivity as employees develop a clearer understanding of their information needs and the ways in which tools and techniques of PIM can address these needs. Such an understanding can also facilitate better teamwork and better group information management9.
Progress in PIM is evidenced not only by better tools but also by teachable strategies of information management of direct relevance to education programs of information literacy10.
People generally become more forgetful and their working memory span (the number of things they can keep in mind at one time) decreases with advancing age. Better PIM can translate to compensating tools and strategies of PIM to support our aging workforce and population.
The challenges of PIM are especially felt by people who are battling a life-threatening illness such as cancer even as they try, as nearly as possible, to live their lives and fulfill their roles as parent, spouse, friend and, even, as they try to maintain their jobs and profession-related activities. Better PIM can help patients manage better in their treatments and in their lives overall11.
But certainly better PIM benefits people, regardless of their special circumstances. There is little chance you could be reading these lines were information and external forms of information (email messages, web pages, newspapers, this book) not of great importance to you in your everyday life.
Consider two kinds of people: information warriors and information worriers. Information warriors see their information and their information tools as a strategic asset. Information warriors are willing to invest time and money to keep up with the latest in mobile devices, tablet computers, smartphones, application software and anything new on the Web. For an information warrior, information technology is, so to speak, a profit center.
On the other hand, information technology for information worriers is a cost center. New offerings in mobile devices, new releases in operating system or application software, … new developments in the alphabet soup of Web-based initiatives—these and other developments in information technology represent more time and money that needs to be spent just to keep up with everyone else. Information worriers may have a nagging feeling they could do better in their choice of supporting tools and strategies. But they don’t know where to begin.
Even if these descriptions are stereotyped, many of us can probably think of people we know who come close to each description. Perhaps you are an information warrior or an information worrier. Or perhaps you are a little of both.
For the simple fact is that even if we embrace new developments in information technology, we must recognize that we don’t have time in the day to learn about all the latest developments. We need a basis for deciding whether a new tool or a new way of doing things is likely to work for us. We’d like to avoid an extended investment of money and, more important, time to learn the use of a new tool or strategy only then to conclude belatedly that it won’t work for us.
Better PIM starts by asking the right questions. Better PIM means that each of us becomes a student of our practice of PIM.
1.3 RELATED FIELDS AND RELEVANT TERMS
PIM is a practical meeting ground for many disciplines including cognitive psychology/cognitive science, human-computer interaction (HCI), library and information science (LIS), artificial intelligence (AI), database management and information retrieval (IR).
People don’t do smart things like PIM in isolation from an external environment that includes other people, available technology and organizational settings. Consequently, the study of situated cognition, distributed cognition and social cognition12 all have relevance to the study of PIM. Also very relevant is the study of affordances provided by the environment and by the everyday objects of a person’s environment13. People vary greatly in their approach to PIM-relevant behaviors such as planning and with respect to personality traits such as risk-aversion—making the study of individual differences and personality also very relevant to PIM14.
1.3.1 A USEFUL INTERPLAY
Other fields contribute to PIM. PIM, in turn, provides a useful domain for the study in other fields. Benefits flow in both directions. The better, smarter searching methods that come from information retrieval (IR), for example, have obvious application to the finding and refinding of personal information. Similarly, as we learn more from the field of cognitive psychology concerning how information is represented in human memory, this understanding can guide us in our design of PIM tools to support in the keeping and organization of personal information. To take a simple example, what memories for an event in our lives (e.g., a party, vacation, wedding, graduation, etc.) will prove most durable over the long run—Time? Location? The people involved? The weather outside? Answers have direct implication to the design of a system for managing our photographs15.
In the other direction, PIM offers many practical situations that might help to keep the researchers of other fields “relevant,” so to speak, concerning the practical realities of everyday information management and use. For example, work on a big project such as “plan my wedding” can be viewed as an act of problem solving, and folders created to hold supporting information may sometimes resemble a problem decomposition16. For another example, the decision to keep or not to keep can be viewed as a signal-detection task and, as such, invites questions concerning the rationality of our keeping choices and our ability to estimate costs and outcome17.
1.3.2 “PIMS” AND PDAS
PIM is often, incorrectly, equated with the development of “personal information managers” (some-times referred to as “PIMs”) and personal digital assistants (PDAs)18 which first appeared in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Characteristic of “PIMs” was the Sharp Wizard19 first released in 1988 and famously featured on an episode of the TV show “Seinfeld ”20. The Sharp Wizard was small enough to carry and offered an integrated set of basic functions for time and task management.
Today’s handheld devices are much smaller and much, much richer in features and in raw computational power. But even as these devices solve some informational problems they create new ones. We can look up the location to a restaurant while we’re driving … and we may very well kill ourselves and others if we try.
These days, the information we need may come from any of several sources—a hand-held device, a Web service as accessed from someone else’s computer or, still, a paper-based source such as a print-out or a flyer. Also, PIM casts a broad net to include information of relevance to us for any of a number of reasons. We seek to manage, for example, not only “our” information but also the information about us or directed towards us.
1.3.3 HUMAN/COMPUTER INTERACTION, HUMAN-INFORMATION INTERACTION AND LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCE
Much of the early PIM-related research came from practitioners in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). But concerns of PIM force us to look beyond the computer. PIM includes a consideration of our personal use of information in all of its various forms.
