Each of us has an ever-growing collection of personal digital data: documents, emails, Web pages we visited, tasks, contacts, appointments and pictures we took. To use any of this, we have to find it. The ease of finding something depends on how we organize our digital stuff. In this book, personal information management (PIM) experts Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker explain why we organize our personal digital data the way we do and how better design can help us manage our collections more efficiently.
Bergman and Whittaker report that many of us use hierarchical folders for our personal digital organizing. Critics of this method point out that information is hidden from sight in folders that are often within other folders; so that we have to remember the exact location of information to access it. They therefore suggest other methods: search, more flexible than navigating folders; tags, which allow multiple categorizations; and group information management. Yet Bergman and Whittaker have found that these other methods that work best for public information management don’t work as well for personal information management.
Bergman and Whittaker describe personal information collection as curation: we preserve and organize this data to ensure our future access to it. Unlike other kinds of information management fields, in PIM the same user organizes and retrieves the information. After explaining the cognitive and psychological reasons that so many prefer folders, Bergman and Whittaker propose the user-subjective approach, which does not replace folder hierarchies but exploits the unique characteristics of PIM.