Personal Information Management

TL;DR

This paper explores Personal Information Management (PIM), focusing on how individuals acquire, organize, and use various forms of information to meet personal and professional goals, emphasizing the importance of effective information integration.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of PIM activities, challenges, and the role of tools in promoting effective information management and integration across different contexts.

Findings

PIM activities involve acquiring, organizing, and retrieving diverse information forms.

Effective tools can enhance information integration and support PIM activities.

Managing information flow is crucial for meeting personal and professional needs.

Abstract

Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of the activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use, and distribute information in each of its many forms (paper and digital, in e-mails, files, Web pages, text messages, tweets, posts, etc.) as needed to meet life's many goals (everyday and long-term, work-related and not) and to fulfill life's many roles and responsibilities (as parent, spouse, friend, employee, member of community, etc.). PIM activities are an effort to establish, use, and maintain a mapping between information and need. Activities of finding (and re-finding) move from a current need toward information while activities of keeping move from encountered information toward anticipated need. Meta-level activities such as maintaining, organizing, and managing the flow of information focus on the mapping itself. Tools and techniques of PIM can promote information integration with benefits for each kind of PIM activity and across the life cycle of personal information. Understanding how best to accomplish this integration without inadvertently creating problems along the way is a key challenge of PIM.