Personal information management
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Personal information management (PIM) refers to both the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related and not) and fulfill a person’s various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.). One ideal of PIM is that we always have the right information in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to meet our current need. Technologies and tools such as personal information managers help us spend less time with time-consuming and error-prone activities of PIM (such as looking for information). We then have more time to make creative, intelligent use of the information at hand in order to get things done or, simply, to enjoy the information itself.
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[edit] Tools
For many people, this ideal seems far away. There are a bewildering number of tools available for managing personal information. But these tools can become a part of the problem leading to “information fragmentation”. Different devices and applications often come with their separate ways of storing and organizing information.
[edit] Interest in the study PIM
Interest in the study of PIM has increased in recent years. One goal in the study of PIM is to identify ways to introduce new tool support without inadvertently increasing the complexity of a person’s information management challenge. The study of PIM means understanding better how people manage information across tools and over time. It is not enough simply to study, for example, e-mail use in isolation. A related point is that the value of a new tool must be assessed over time and in a broader context of a person’s various PIM activities.
[edit] Personal Information Manager
A personal information manager (often referred to as a PIM tool or, more simply, a PIM) is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to Personal information management as a field of study. As an information management tool, a PIM tool's purpose is to facilitate the recording, tracking, and management of certain types of "personal information". Personal information can include any of the following:
- Personal notes/journal
- Address books
- Lists (including task lists)
- Significant calendar dates
- Reminders
- Email, instant message archives
- Fax communications, voicemail
- Project management features
- RSS/Atom feeds
- Alerts
Some PIM software products are capable of synchronizing data with another PIM tool over a computer network (including mobile ad-hoc networks, or MANETs). This feature usually does not allow for continuous, concurrent data updates, but rather enables point-in-time updating between different computers, including desktop computers, laptop computers, and personal digital assistants.
Prior to the introduction of the term “PDA” (Personal digital assistant) by Apple in 1992, handheld personal organizers such as the Sharp Wizard and the Psion Organiser were also referred to as "PIMs".[1] [2]
[edit] References
- ^ The Return of the PDA, Marketing Computers, February, 1995
- ^ History of the Personal Data Assistant (PDA), H2G2, BBC, March 31, 2004
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[edit] Literature
Books
- Jones, W. (2008). Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Book info at: Morgan Kaufmann | Amazon ISBN 978-0-12-370866-3
- Jones, W. & Teevan, J. (Eds.) (2007). Personal Information Management. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Book info at: University of Washington Press | Amazon ISBN 978-0-295-98737-8
Articles
- See list of PIM publicationsat the Keeping Found Things Found (KFTF) project website.
Theses
- Boardman, R. (2004). 'Improving Tool Support for Personal Information Management'.Doctoral dissertation, Imperial College, London.
[edit] Scientific Workshops
More literature and a list of people involved can be found starting at the workshops:
[edit] See also
- Who's working on Personal Information Management? Authored by Richard Boardman, Imperial College London (July 2003)
- Resources for Personal Information Management Community Portal managed by the University of Washington, features a link collection, workshops, books
- Memoria-Mea Project, MISG/ICTI EIA-FR Switzerland
- Personal information manager
- Information management
- Calendar
- Information management
- List of personal information managers
- Personal organizer
- Personal wiki
