William P. Jones

Personal Information Management (PIM) is attracting increased attention as an area of study in many fields in computer science and information management. In an ideal world, we have the right information at the right time, in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to perform the current activity. Tools and technologies help so that we spend less time with burdensome and error prone actions of information management (such as filing). We then have nore time to make creative, intelligent use of the information at hand in order to get things done. The result for us as individuals is better use of our resources of time, money, energy and attention. The results for organizations are better employee productivity and better team work in the near term, and more knowledgeable employees in the long term. This book provides a comprehensive overview of PIM, which refers to both the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, and retrieve information for everyday use. The introduction proves a high level overview of PIM and a sense of its many facets, and is followed by chapters on the basic challenges and fundamental findings- empirical research that relates to PIM and to basic PIM activities including finding, keeping, and m-level activities (maintenance and organization; management of access, privacy and security; manipulation and making sense of information. The book also includes chapters that review technologies, tools, and techniques that can assist people in their practice of PIM, and offers the basics in different appraoches to PIM support, including search tecnnology, indexing, etc. First book that focuses exclusively on one of the most interesting and challenging problems in data management and HCI today-personal information management. Explores what good and better PIM looks like, and how to measure improved PIM. Presents key problems and challenges in PIM, and most promising approaches in development.

The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management

Keeping Found Things Found

Robert Percival Porter

Thomas C. MacMillan

The Inter Ocean Curiosity Shop ...

William Jones

We are well into a second age of digital information. Our information is moving from the desktop to the laptop to the "palmtop" and up into an amorphous cloud on the Web. How can one manage both the challenges and opportunities of this new world of digital information? What does the future hold? This book provides an important update on the rapidly expanding field of personal information management (PIM). Part I (Always and Forever) introduces the essentials of PIM. Information is personal for many reasons. It's the information on our hard drives we couldn't bear to lose. It's the information about us that we don't want to share. It's the distracting information demanding our attention even as we try to do something else. It's the information we don't know about but need to. Through PIM, we control personal information. We integrate information into our lives in useful ways. We make it "ours." With basics established, Part I proceeds to explore a critical interplay between personal information "always" at hand through mobile devices and "forever" on the Web. How does information stay "ours" in such a world? Part II (Building Places of Our Own for Digital Information) will be available in the Summer of 2012, and will consist of the following chapters: Chapter 5. Technologies to eliminate PIM?: We have seen astonishing advances in the technologies of information management -- in particular, to aid in the storing, structuring and searching of information. These technologies will certainly change the way we do PIM; will they eliminate the need for PIM altogether? Chapter 6. GIM and the social fabric of PIM: We don't (and shouldn't) manage our information in isolation. Group information management (GIM) -- especially the kind practiced more informally in households and smaller project teams -- goes hand in glove with good PIM. Chapter 7. PIM by design: Methodologies, principles, questions and considerations as we seek to understand PIM better and to build PIM into our tools, techniques and training. Chapter 8. To each of us, our own.: Just as we must each be a student of our own practice of PIM, we must also be a designer of this practice. This concluding chapter looks at tips, traps and tradeoffs as we work to build a practice of PIM and "places" of our own for personal information. Table of Contents: A New Age of Information / The Basics of PIM / Our Information, Always at Hand / Our Information, Forever on the Web

The Future of Personal Information Management

A history professor describes the impact and history of the opening speech made during the March on Washington by the trade unionist Philip Randolph whose vision and fight for equal economic and social citizenship began in 1941. 15,000 first printing.

William P. Jones

About

Books

Join the club