Keeping Found Things Found The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management

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.