Much PIM research can be grouped according to the PIM activity that is the primary focus of the research. These activities are reflected in the two main models of PIM, i.e., that primary PIM activities are finding/re-finding, keeping and meta-level activities Important research is also being done under the special topics: Personality, mood, and emotion both as impacting and impacted by a person's practice of PIM, the management of personal health information and the management of personal information over the long run and for legacy.
Finding/re-finding In personal information management,
finding refers to locating information needed for a current task, while
re-finding refers to locating information that has been previously encountered. Throughout a typical day, people repeatedly experience the need for information in large amounts and small (e.g., "When is my next meeting?"; "What's the status of the budget forecast?" "What's in the news today?") prompting activities to find and re-find. A large body of research in
information seeking,
information behavior, and
information retrieval relates and especially to efforts to find information in public spaces such as the Web or a traditional library. There is a strong personal component even in efforts to find new information, never before experienced, from a public store such as the Web. For example, efforts to find information may be directed by a personally created outline, self-addressed email reminder or a to-do list. In addition, information inside a person's PSI can be used to support a more targeted,
personalized search of the web. Research in
information seeking,
information behavior, and
information retrieval has treated re-finding as a common activity, especially in relation to web pages, email messages, and personal digital files. A person's efforts to find useful information are often a sequence of interactions rather than a single transaction. Under a "berry picking" model of finding, information is gathered in bits and pieces through a series of interactions, and during this time, a person's expression of need, as reflected in the current query, evolves. People may favor stepwise approach to finding needed information to preserve a greater sense of control and context over the finding process and smaller steps may also reduce the cognitive burden associated with query formulation. In some cases, there simply is not a "direct" way to access the information. For example, a person's remembrance for a needed Web site may only be through an email message sent by a colleague i.e., a person may not recall a Web address nor even keywords that might get be used in a Web search but the person does recall that the Web site was mentioned recently in an email from a colleague). Studies of re-finding emphasize that people often rely on partial contextual cues rather than exact recall. These cues may include where an item was stored, how it was previously reached, who sent it, or the task in which it was used. Re-finding can also be affected by changes in the information environment, including the reorganization, updating, or disappearance of online resources. People may find (rather than re-find) information even when this information is ostensibly under their control. For example, items may be "pushed" into the PSI (e.g., via the inbox, podcast subscriptions, downloads). If these items are discovered later, it is through an act of finding not re-finding (since the person has no remembrance for the information). Lansdale Also, finding/re-finding often means not just assembling a single item of information but rather a set of information. The person may need to
repeat the finding sequence several times. A challenge in tool support is to provide people with ways to group or interrelate information items so that their chances improve of retrieving a complete set of the information needed to complete a task. Over the years, PIM studies have determined that people prefer to return to personal information, most notably the information kept in personal digital files, by navigating rather than searching. With these improvements, preference may be shifting to search as a primary means for locating email messages (e.g., search on subject or sender, for messages not in view). However, a preference persists for navigation as the primary means of re-finding personal files (e.g., stepwise folder traversal; scanning a list of files within a folder for the desired file), notwithstanding ongoing improvements in search support. i.e., navigation to files appears to use mental facilities similar to those people use to navigate in the physical world. Preference for navigation is also in line with a
primacy effect repeatedly observed in psychological research such that preferred method of return aligns with initial exposure. Under a
first impressions hypothesis, if a person's initial experience with a file included its placement in a folder, where the folder itself was reached by navigating through a hierarchy of containing folders, then the person will prefer a similar method – navigation – for return to the file later.
Keeping Many events of daily life are roughly the converse of finding events: People encounter information and try to determine what, if anything, they should do with this information, i.e., people must match the information encountered to current or anticipated needs. Decisions and actions relating to encountered information are collectively referred to as keeping activities. The ability to effectively handle information that is encountered by happenstance is essential to a person's ability to discover new material and make new connections. People also keep information that they have actively sought but do not have time to process currently. A search on the web, for example, often produces much more information than can be consumed in the current session. Both the decision to keep this information for later use and the steps to do so are keeping activities. Keeping activities are also triggered when people are interrupted during a current task and look for ways of preserving the current state so that work can be quickly resumed later. People keep appointments by entering reminders into a calendar and keep good ideas or "things to pick up at the grocery store" by writing down a few cryptic lines on a loose piece of paper. People keep not only to ensure they have the information later, but also to build reminders to look for and use this information. Failure to remember to use information later is one kind of
prospective memory failure. In order to avoid such a failure, people may, for example, self-e-mail a web page reference in addition to or instead of making a bookmark because the e-mail message with the reference appears in the inbox where it is more likely to be noticed and used. The keeping decision can be characterized as a signal detection task subject to errors of two kinds: 1) an incorrect rejection ("miss") when information is ignored that later is needed and should have been kept (e.g., proof of charitable donations needed now to file a tax return) and 2) a false positive when information kept as useful (incorrectly judged as "signal") turns out not to be used later. Information kept and never used only adds to the clutter – digital and physical – in a person's life. Keeping can be a difficult and error prone effort. Filing i.e., placing information items such as paper documents, digital documents and emails, into folders, can be especially so. To avoid, or delay filing information (e.g., until more is known concerning where the information might be used), people may opt to put information in "piles" instead. Tagging provides another alternative to filing information items into folders. A strict folder hierarchy does not readily allow for the flexible classification of information even though, in a person's mind, an information item might fit in several different categories. A number of tag-related prototypes for PIM have been developed over the years. A tagging approach has also been pursued in commercial systems, most notably
Gmail (as "labels"), but the success of tags so far is mixed. Bergman et al. found that users, when provided with options to use folders or tags, preferred folders to tags and, even when using tags, they typically refrained from adding more than a single tag per information item. Civan et al., through an engagement of participants in critical, comparative observation of both tagging and the use of folders were able to elicit some limitations of tagging not previously discussed openly such as, for example, that once a person decides to use multiple tags, it is usually important to continue doing so (else the tag not applied consistently becomes ineffective as a means of retrieving a complete set of items). Technologies may help to reduce the costs, in personal time and effort, of keeping and the likelihood of error. For example, the ability to take a digital photo of a sign, billboard announcement or the page of a paper document can obviate the task of otherwise transcribing (or photocopying) the information. A person's ongoing use of a smartphone through the day can create a time-stamped record of events as a kind of automated keeping and especially of information "experienced by me" (see section, "The senses in which information is personal") with potential use in a person's efforts to journal or to return to information previously experienced ("I think I read the email while in the taxi on the way to the airport...").
Activity tracking technology can further enrich the record of a person's daily activity with tremendous potential use for people to enrich their understanding of their daily lives and the healthiness of their diet and their activities. Technologies to automate the keeping of personal information segue to personal informatics and the
quantified self movement, life logging, in the extreme, a 'total capture" of information. Tracking technologies raise serious issues of privacy (see "
Managing privacy and the flow of information"). Additional questions arise concerning the utility and even the practical accessibility of "total capture".
Maintaining and organizing Activities of finding and, especially, keeping can segue into activities to maintain and organize as when, for example, efforts to keep a document in the file system prompt the creation of a new folder or efforts to re-find a document highlight the need to consolidate two folders with overlapping content and purpose. Differences between people are especially apparent in their approaches to the maintenance and organization of information. Malone Activities of keeping correlate with activities of organizing so that, for example, people with more elaborate folder structures tend to file information more often and sooner. Activities of organization (e.g., creating and naming folders) segue into activities of maintenance such as consolidating redundant folders, archiving information no longer in active use, and ensuring that information is properly
backed up and otherwise
secured. (See also section, "Managing privacy and the flow of information"). Studies of people's folder organizations for digital information indicate that these have uses going far beyond the organization of files for later retrieval. Folders are information in their own right – representing, for example, a person's evolving understanding of a project and its components. A folder hierarchy can sometimes represent an informal problem decomposition with a parent folder representing a project and subfolders representing major components of the project (e.g., "wedding reception" and "church service" for a "wedding" project). However, people generally struggle to keep their information organized and often do not have reliable backup routines. People have trouble maintaining and organizing many distinct forms of information (e.g., digital documents, emails, and web references) and are sometimes observed to make special efforts to consolidate different information forms into a single organization. At the same time, these stores offer their owners the opportunity, with the right training and tool support, for
exploitation of their information in new, useful ways. Empirical observations of PIM studies motivate prototyping efforts towards information tools to provide better support for the maintenance, organization and, going further, curation of personal information. For example,
GrayArea applies the demotion principle of the user-subjective approach to allow people to move less frequently used files in any given folder to a gray area at the bottom end of the listing of this folder. These files can still be accessed but are less visible and so less distracting of a person's attention. The
Planz prototype supports an in-context creation and integration of project-related files, emails, web references, informal notes and other forms of information into a simplified, document-like interface meant to represent the project with headings corresponding to folders in the personal file system and subheadings (for tasks, sub-projects, or other project components) corresponding to subfolders. The intention is that a single, useful organization should emerge incidentally as people focus on the planning and completion of their projects.
Managing privacy and the flow of information People face a continual evaluation of tradeoffs in deciding what information "flows" into and out of their PSI. Each interaction poses some degree of risk to privacy and security. Letting out information to the wrong recipients can lead to
identity theft. Letting in the wrong kind of information can mean that a person's devices are "infected" and the person's data is corrupted or "locked" for
ransom. By some estimates, 30% or more of the computers in the United States are infected. However, the exchange of information, incoming and outgoing, is an essential part of living in the modern world. To order goods and services online, people must be prepared to "let out" their credit card information. To try out a potentially useful, new information tool, people may need to "let in" a download that could potentially make unwelcome changes to the web browser or the desktop. Providing for adequate control over the information, coming into and out of a PSI, is a major challenge. Even more challenging is the
user interface to make clear the implications for various privacy choices particularly regarding
Internet privacy. What, for example, are the personal
information privacy implications of clicking the "Sign Up" button for use of social media services such as Facebook.
Measuring and evaluating People seek to understand how they might improve various aspects of their PIM practices with questions such as "Do I really need to keep all this information?"; "Is this tool (application, applet, device) worth the troubles (time, frustration) of its use?" and, perhaps most persistent, "Where did the day go? Where has the time gone? What did I accomplish?". These last questions may often be voiced in reflection, perhaps on the commute home from work at the end of the workday. But there is increasing reason to expect that answers will be based on more than remembrance and reflection. Increasingly data incidentally, automatically captured over the course of a person's day and the person's interactions with various information tools to work with various forms of information (files, emails, texts, pictures, etc.) can be brought to bear in evaluations of a person's PIM practice and the identification of possible ways to improve.
Making sense of and using information Efforts to make sense of information represent another set of meta-level activity that operate on personal information and the mapping between information and need. People must often assemble and analyze a larger collection of information to decide what to do next. "Which job applicant is most likely to work best for us?", "Which retirement plan to choose?", "What should we pack for our trip?". These and many other decisions are generally based not on a single information item but on a collection of information items – documents, emails (e.g., with advice or impressions from friends and colleagues), web references, etc. Making sense of information is "meta" not only for its broader focus on information collections but also because it permeates most PIM activity even when the primary purpose may ostensibly be something else. For example, as people organize information into folders, ostensibly to ensure its subsequent retrieval, people may also be making sense and coming to a deeper understanding of this information.
Personality, mood, and emotion Personality and
mood can impact a person's practice of PIM and, in turn, a person's emotions can be impacted by the person's practice of PIM. In particular,
personality traits (e.g., "conscientiousness" or "neuroticism") have, in certain circumstances, been shown to correlate with the extent to which a person keeps and organizes information into a personal archive such as a personal filing system. However, another recent study found personality traits were not correlated with any aspects of personal filing systems, suggesting that PIM practices are influenced less by personality than by external factors such as the operating system used (i.e. Mac OS or Windows), which were seen to be much more predictive. Aside from the correlation between practices of PIM and more enduring personality traits, there is evidence to indicate that a person's (more changeable) mood impacts activities of PIM so that, for example, a person experiencing negative moods, when organizing personal information, is more likely to create a structure with more folders where folders, on average, contain fewer files. Conversely, the information a person keeps or routinely encounters (e.g., via social media), can profoundly impact a person's mood. Even as explorations continue into the potential for the automatic, incidental capture of information (see section
Keeping) there is growing awareness for the need to design for forgetting as well as for remembrance as, for example, when a person realizes the need to dispose of digital belongings in the aftermath of a romantic breakup or the death of a loved one. Beyond the negative feelings induced by information associated with a failed relationship, people experience negative feelings about their PIM practices, per se. People are shown in general to experience anxiety and dissatisfaction with respect to their personal information archives including both concerns of possible loss of the information and also express concerns about their ability and effectiveness in managing and organizing their information.
Management of personal health information Traditional, personal health information resides in various
information systems in healthcare institutions (e.g., clinics, hospitals, insurance providers), often in the form of
medical records. People often have difficulty managing or even navigating a variety of paper or
electronic medical records across multiple health services in different specializations and institutions. Also referred to as
personal health records, this type of personal health information usually requires people (i.e., patients) to engage in additional PIM finding activities to locate and gain access to health information and then to generate a comprehensible summary for their own use. With the rise of consumer-facing health products including
activity trackers and health-related
mobile apps, people are able to access new types of personal health data (e.g., physical activity, heart rate) outside healthcare institutions. PIM behavior also changes. Much of the effort to keep information is automated. But people may experience difficulties making sense of a using the information later, e.g., to plan future physical activities based on activity tracker data. People are also frequently engaged in other meta-level activities, such as maintaining and organizing (e.g., syncing data across different health-related mobile apps). == Methods and methodologies of PIM study and tool design ==