Christina Pikas has been reporting from last week's ASIST conference. The session on personal information management sounds like it would have been right for me. Here are some selected quotes and phrases from her ASIST: Personal Information Management (subtitle: Personal Information Management in the Present and Future Perfect)
- information science has provided no help in solving the PIM issue
- PIM is not about finding info when you need it, but having information when you need to use it.
- binge organizing
- benign forgetting
- Information ... tends to "silt-up" in patterns
- keeping affects how you experience information
- memory is an important part of PIM
The comments about search / finding / re-finding are interesting. I heard the idea that "search is not important, people want to find things" a few years ago. Now this idea is being refined further to use. I don't randomly search for stuff (unless I'm bored), I want to find things that will help me do something. I had also not explicitly seen an explicit difference between find and re-find. One of the comments suggests that re-finding can be more frustrating because we know it exists and because it is already part of a larger context of our work. It's just that we don't know how to use our tools to articulate context when we save something and when we look for it later.