The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 1. William Jones

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. Computer-based, for sure. But also paper-based. PIM brings an informational focus to everyday objects too. The light left on by the front door may be a reminder to take out the trash. The office door closed even though the light within is on may be sending our colleagues a message “I’m here but don’t bother me unless it’s really important.”

      In recent years, there has been discussion of human-information interaction (HII) in contrast to HCI²¹. In fact, arguments for a focus on information are not new. Fidel and Pejtersen (2004) asserted that the terms “human-information interaction” and “human information behavior (HIB)”represent essentially the same concept and can be used interchangeably. As such, HII-relevant discussions have been a long-standing mainstay in the field of library and information science (LIS) field²².

      People. Information. Tools (and technologies). Three concepts connected (see Figure 1.2). An initial focus on people and information (in the spirit of LIS, HIB & HII) eventually brings us to a consideration of the tools and technologies by which this information is created and stored, sent and received. An initial focus on people and tools eventually causes us to think about the information that is being managed (sent, received, created, stored) through the use of the tools under study. For example, we might study a person’s use of a large-display device but without the broader perspective of PIM we might miss the sticky notes that encircle the display device.

Figure 1.2: The triangle of people, information and technology. A focus on the human-information interaction inevitably involves tools and technology (computer-based and otherwise). Likewise, a focus on the human-computer interaction inevitably involves a consideration of information.

1.3.4 KNOWLEDGE VS. INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT VS. INFORMATION MANAGEMENT, PKM VS. PIM

      The study of information management and knowledge management in organizations also has relevance to the study of PIM²³. Issues seen first at an organizational level often migrate to the PIM domain. The merits of various schemes of classification or the use of controlled vocabularies, for example, have long been topics of discussion at the organizational level²⁴. But these topics may find their way into the PIM domain, as the amounts of personally kept digital information continue to increase. This migration has already happened in the area of privacy, protection, and security²⁵.

      Discussions often reflect an implicit ordering of the terms data, information and knowledge, i.e., information trumps data and knowledge trumps information. In a corporate/organizational context, information management came first as a field of inquiry, followed, beginning in the 1990s by discussions of knowledge management as a related but separate field of inquiry. Knowledge is, as O’Dell et al. said, “information in action” (1998, p. 5). Similarly, we might say that information is “data in motion”—data communicated, data sent or received with intention²⁶.

      Now, predictably, we have discussions of personal knowledge management (PKM)²⁷, as a field of inquiry that relates to but is separate from personal information management (PIM). Elsewhere, I argue for the following²⁸.

      1. Information is a thing to be handled and controlled; knowledge is not.

      2. Knowledge can be managed only indirectly, through the management of information.

      3. Personal knowledge management (PKM) is, therefore, best regarded as a subset of personal information management (PIM)—but a very useful subset addressing important issues that otherwise might be overlooked such as self-directed efforts of knowledge elicitation (“What do I know? What have I learned? How can I best communicate this knowledge the people I am training?”) and knowledge instillation (i.e., “Learning what it is I need to know”).

1.3.5 TIME, TASK AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

      The terms “task” and “project” (and associated terms such as “task analysis,” “task management,” “project management”) mean different things to different people in different research communities²⁹. Even within a single community such as the HCI community, the term “task” takes on different meanings in phrases such as “task management”³⁰