Table Of ContentJones
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Edited by William Jones + Jaime teevan teevan
in an ideal World, everyone would always have the right information, in the right
form, with the right context, right when they needed it. Unfortunately, we do not live
in an ideal world. this book looks at how people in the real world currently manage
to store and process the massive amounts of information that overload their senses
and their systems daily, and discusses how tools can help bring these real information
interactions closer to the ideal.
Personal information management (PiM) is the practice and the study of the activities
people perform to acquire, organize, maintain, and retrieve information for everyday
use. PiM is a growing area of interest as we al strive for beter use of our limited P < I J F E 8 C
personal resources of time, money, and energy, as well as greater workplace effciency
and productivity.
one chalenge is that personal information is curently fragmented acros electronic I E = F I M 8K I F E
documents, email messages, paper documents, digital photographs, music, videos,
instant messages, and so on. each type of information is organized and used differently
to complete diferent tasks and to fulfl disparate roles and responsibilities in an M 8 E 8 > < M < E K
individual’s life. existing PiM tools are partly responsible for this fragmentation.
they can also be part of the solution that brings information together again. a major
contribution of this book is the integrative treatment of PiM-related research.
PIM
“Jones and teevan have put together a fabulous resource on the subject of managing
personal information. With the excellent contributions of their notable guest authors,
they look at all angles of the problem of keeping track of everyone and everything
in our lives. they’ve done a thorough investigation and it shows that we have a long
journey ahead to handle the torrent of emails, calendars, contacts, bookmarks, and
everything else that deluges us regularly. this book will become the seminal reference
for anyone thinking about how we solve this critical problem.”
— AXi\[M, %UserJ ingterffafce cengineering
N`cc`X dis a reAsefarceh \asjsociate professor in the information school at the
University of Washington, seattle. AX`d\\m isKX ae researcher in the Context,
learning, and User experience for search (ClUes) group at Microsoft research,
redmond, Washington. the contributors include scholars from major universities
and researchers from companies such as Google, ibM, and Microsoft research.
e d i t e d by
isbn: 978-0-295-98737-8 LEIM<IJIKPF=N8P JI?<IJEJ>KFE N ICC I8 MAFE"<AJ8I MK<<<M8E
seattle and london
www.washington.edu/uwpress
book design by ted Cotrotsos
PIM pb cover final.indd 1 7/12/07 12:25:45 PM
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Personal Information Management
Personal Information Management
Edited by
William Jones and Jaime Teevan
University of Washington Press
Seattle and London
We dedicate this book to our mothers,
Lorna L. Buckingham-Jones and Connie M. Teevan
© 2007 by the University of Washington Press
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Ted Cotrotsos
12 11 10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
University of Washington Press
P.O. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145 U.S.A.
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Personal Information Management / edited by William Jones and Jaime Teevan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-295-98755-2 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-295-98737-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-295-98755-3 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-295-98737-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Personal Information Management. I. Jones, William P., 1952 – II. Teevan, Jaime.
HD30.2.P472 2007
650.1—dc22 2007010636
This book is printed on New Leaf Ecobook 50, which is 100 percent recycled,
containing 50 percent post-consumer waste, and is processed chlorine free.
Ecobook 50 is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO
Z39~V48~W1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
1. Introduction, 3
William Jones and Jaime Teevan
Part I. Understanding Personal Information Management
2. How People Find Personal Information, 22
Jaime Teevan, Robert Capra, and Manuel Pérez-Quiñones
3. How People Keep and Organize Personal Information, 35
William Jones
4. How People Manage Information over a Lifetime, 57
Catherine C. Marshall
5. Naturalistic Approaches for Understanding PIM, 76
Charles M. Naumer and Karen E. Fisher
Part II. Solutions for Personal Information Management
6. Save Everything: Supporting Human Memory
with a Personal Digital Lifetime Store, 90
Desney Tan, Emma Berry, Mary Czerwinski, Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell,
Steve Hodges, Narinder Kapur, Brian Meyers, Nuria Oliver, George Robertson,
and Ken Wood
7. Structure Everything, 108
Tiziana Catarci, Luna Dong, Alon Halevy, and Antonella Poggi
8. Unify Everything: It’s All the Same to Me, 127
David R. Karger
9. Search Everything, 153
Daniel M. Russell and Steve Lawrence
10. Everything through Email, 167
Steve Whittaker, Victoria Bellotti, and Jacek Gwizdka
11. Understanding What Works: Evaluating PIM Tools, 190
Diane Kelly and Jaime Teevan
v
CONTENTS
Part III. PIM and the Individual
12. Individual Differences, 206
Jacek Gwizdka and Mark Chignell
13. Personal Health Information Management, 221
Anne Moen
Part IV. PIM and Other People
14. Group Information Management, 236
Wayne G. Lutters, Mark S. Ackerman, and Xiaomu Zhou
15. Management of Personal Information Disclosure:
The Interdependence of Privacy, Security, and Trust, 249
Clare-Marie Karat, John Karat, and Carolyn Brodie
16. Privacy and Public Records, 261
Michael Shamos
17. Conclusion, 269
William Jones and Jaime Teevan
Acknowledgments, 276
Bibliography, 277
Contributors, 315
Index, 317
vi
Personal Information Management
1 Introduction
_____________________________________________________________
William Jones and Jaime Teevan
In his autobiography (1790), Benjamin Franklin describes thirteen virtues. The
third, Order, was the one that gave him the most trouble: “Order . . . with regard
to places for things, papers, etc., I found extreamly [sic] diffcult to acquire.”
Over two hundred years later, order continues to be an elusive goal—especially
as this relates to the information that impacts us in our daily lives.
Personal information management or PIM is both the practice and the
study of the activities people perform to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve,
use, and control the distribution of information items such as documents
(paper-based and digital), Web pages, and email messages for everyday use to
complete tasks (work-related and not) and to fulfll a person’s various roles (as
parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.).
Concerns about PIM have probably been with the human race since
our ancestors frst began to make drawings on the walls of caves. However,
the modern dialog on PIM is generally thought to have begun in 1945 with
Vannevar Bush’s description of a “memex” as 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 fexibility” (Bush 1945).
The phrase “Personal Information Management” was frst used in the 1980s
(Lansdale 1988a, b) in the midst of general excitement over the potential of the
personal computer to greatly enhance the human ability to process and manage
information. The 1980s also saw the advent of so-called PIM tools, with basic support
for the management of appointments, to-do lists, and contact information.
Interest in PIM has increased in recent years; it is now not only a hot topic
but also a serious area of inquiry focusing the best work from a diverse set of
disciplines including cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, data-
base management, information retrieval, and library and information science.
Renewed interest in PIM is double-edged. On one side, the pace of
improvements in various PIM-relevant technologies gives us reason to believe
that some visions of PIM may soon be realized. Digital storage is cheap and
plentiful. Better search support can make it easy to pinpoint the information we
need. The ubiquity of computing and the miniaturization of computing devices
3
