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A Conceptual Framework for Personal Information Management

Sarah Henderson
Department of Management Science and Information Systems, University of Auckland
s.henderson@auckland.ac.nz

Abstract
Information workspaces are the interfaces we use to
access and manage information resources. There is very
little systematic research investigating how people use
these workspaces, what limitations they have and what
factors affect their effectiveness or efficiency. This short
paper presents a conceptual framework outlining some
of the major aspects of personal information
management. These include the demographics and
information behaviour of the knowledge worker, the
format and type of the information, and the
organisational paradigm and features and capabilities
of the information workspace. The framework is used to
highlight areas where there are gaps in the current
research, and a methodology is outlined to address some
of those gaps.
1. Introduction
Over time most knowledge workers will acquire a
large collection if information related to their work.
Knowledge workers will spend time interacting with this
collection of information through acquiring new
information and adding it to the collection, searching for
known existing information, browsing through the
information, structuring and organising the information,
and removing information.
The process of managing, storing, structuring and
acquiring this information is called personal information
management. It is personal in the sense that the
information is under the direct control of the knowledge
worker, rather than being information about the
knowledge worker.
Because information workspaces are ubiquitous and
are constantly in use throughout the day, small
improvements to usability could potentially have a
significant impact on knowledge worker productivity and
satisfaction.
2. Conceptual Framework
A conceptual framework of personal information
management has been derived from a review of the
literature. Figure 1 shows the framework, with the three
interrelated aspects identified. The first is the knowledge
workers themselves (the personal aspect), the second is
the information space (the information aspect) and the
third is the information workspace (the management
aspect). All of these factors and the interactions
between them may contribute to the perceived usability
of the information workspace.


Figure 1. Personal information management
conceptual framework
2.1. Knowledge Workers
The information behaviour of a knowledge worker
encompasses their attitudes to information and their
strategies for managing and making sense of it.
Information behaviour includes what people do with
information they acquire, how (and if) they choose to
store it, how they classify it, and how they retrieve it.
The more effort that is spent in filing the document,
the less effort is spent in retrieving it. This becomes a
trade-off, and each person has to decide the optimum
strategy according to his or her needs (Lansdale, 1988).
Finding the optimum choice of filing effort vs. finding
effort depends on a number of factors, including the
amount of information in the information space, and the
degree of structure and repetitiveness in the workers
tasks.
At one end of a continuum is a strategy called filing.
Filers generally try to create a folder structure, and make
an ongoing effort to try and file new information into this
structure on a regular basis. In email, they try to clear
their inboxes daily, moving messages frequently into a
folder hierarchy. At the other end of the continuum
non-filing. Non-filers tend to keep all their email in
their inbox, and tend not to use folders to organise their
messages. Studies of email also found a middle strategy,
which they called spring cleaning. Spring cleaners
employ a non-filing strategy most of the time, but
periodically go through everything and try to sort it into
folders.
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Figure 3. Filing vs. finding continuum
One of the primary difficulties in the process of filing
information is that it is difficult to specify a single,
unambiguous classification for any piece of information
(Kidd, 1994; Lansdale, 1988; Malone, 1983). The
cognitive difficulty involved in doing so is so great that
many users do not even attempt to classify documents at
all, fearing that if they file them, they will be lost.
Some demographic aspects of the knowledge worker
are likely to have implications for the design of the
information workspace. These include the length of time
spent in the current job and field and the type of job the
worker is engaged in. There are also possible gender and
age effects.
2.2. Information Characteristics
In current information workspaces, different forms of
information (e.g. files, email and bookmarks) are
managed through separate tools, and to some extent
might have separate needs. But it is also clear from the
research that many of the findings apply equally well to
all forms of information. Although the integration of
information of different formats has been mentioned by
several researchers, and has been implemented in several
prototypes, there is as yet no empirical evidence whether
this provides a more usable system.
The type of information also affects information
management practices (Barreau & Nardi, 1995). Action
information is information that has a short-term focus,
and usually needs to be acted on in the very near future.
The lifetime of a piece of information is in the range of
hours to days. Working information has a longer time
horizon, usually days or weeks, sometimes months.
Archived information has a span of months or years, and
is often historical or reference information. It is not
known which type is the most prevalent or the most
important, and there is debate about whether archived
information is important at all (Barreau & Nardi, 1995;
Kidd, 1994; Whittaker & Hirschberg, 2001)
2.3. Information Workspace Characteristics
The organisational paradigm employed by most
current information workspaces is hierarchical.
Alternative systems have experimented with temporal,
spatial, and logical paradigms, however there is no clear
evidence of which is better, nor for what circumstances
each might be suited.
The features and capabilities required for an
information workspace must support all the information
activities the users need to perform. A minimum set of
features would include filing, deleting, versioning,
arranging, annotating, reminding, sending and finding.
3. Methodology
The aim of this research is to investigate and explore
aspects of personal information management, and to
understand the implications that these have for the design
of usable information workspaces.
Phase One: Empirical Data Gathering. Semi-
structured interviews and data gathering software will be
used to study how knowledge workers currently use their
information workspace tools. As there is no existing
software that allows this type of data to be analysed,
software will be written to allow visualisation, synthesis
and analysis of the data gathered, and to understand
patterns and trends that emerge from the data.
Phase Two. Based on the findings from phase 1,
prototype information workspace tools will be developed
and tested in real use by knowledge workers.
4. Progress and Timeline
Timeline for completion of this research is as follows:
Table 1. PhD Timeline
Date Activity
October 2003 Development of Information Structure
Analyser software completed
November 2003 Pilot interviews to be conducted
Preliminary data analysis to be
conducted
Development of analysis software to
commence
December 2003 Interviews to be conducted
Further development of analysis
software
Interview analysis ongoing
March 2004 Development of prototypes for phase 2
to commence
May 2004 Testing of phase 2 prototypes to be
conducted
July 2004 Writing up to commence
PhD study part time
February 2005 PhD to be completed

5. References
Barreau, D., & Nardi, B. A. (1995). Finding and Reminding:
File Organization from the Desktop. SIGCHI Bulletin,
27(3), 39-43.
Kidd, A. (1994, April 24-28, 1994). The Marks are on the
Knowledge Worker. Paper presented at the CHI'94
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Lansdale, M. (1988). The psychology of personal information
management. Applied Ergonomics, 19(1), 55-66.
Malone, T. W. (1983). How do people organize their desks?
Implications for the design of office information systems.
ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1(1),
99-112.
Whittaker, S., & Hirschberg, J. (2001). The Character, Value,
and Management of Personal Paper Archives. ACM
Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 8(2), 150-
170.