Steve Whittaker
Abstract
We explored general issues concerning personal information management by investigating the characteristics of office workers' paper-based information, in an industrial research environment. we examined the reasons people collect paper, types of data they collect, problems encountered in handling paper, and strategies used for processing it. We tested three specific hypotheses in the course of an office move. The greater availability of public digital data along with changes in people's jobs or interests should lead to wholescale discarding of paper data, while preparing for the move. Instead we found workers kept large, highly valued papar archives. We also expected that the major part of people's personal archives would be unique documents. However, only 49% of people's archives were unique documents, the remainder being copies of publicly available data and unread information, and we explore reasons for this. We examined the effects of paper-processing strategies on archive structure. We discovered different paper-processing strategies (filing and piling)that were relatively independent of job type. We predicated that filers' attempted to evaluate and catergorize incoming documents would produce smaller archives that were accessed frequently. Contrary to our predictions, filers amassed more information, and accessed it less frequently than pilers. We argue that filers may engage in premature filing: to clear their workspace, they archives information that later turns out to be of low value. Given the effort involved in organzing data, they are also loath to discard filed information, even when its value is uncertain. We discuss the implications of this research for digital personal information management.
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Index Terms
- The character, value, and management of personal paper archives
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Reviews
Jack Noel Rose
Whittaker and Hirschberg have written about issues in personal information management, in light of an era of paperwork reduction. They studied the reasons people collect different types of paper documents, and related behaviors concerning the use and maintenance of such information. Faced with an office move, several fundamental questions about paper archives were investigated in a survey of 50 people (37 researchers, 9 managers, and 4 secretaries), with a 43% response rate. Follow-up interviews of 14 workers provided additional insights. Three main hypotheses were analyzed. Overall, an "obsolescence" hypothesis was not confirmed, as people retained 78% of original archives after the move. Evaluating the 22% of discarded data, 23% was found to have been unread. "Deferred" reading was explained as part of the experience of "information overload." Uniqueness was seen as important, as 49% of the archive consisted of working notes, archives of completed projects, and legal documents. This information was often written by or highly associated with the archiver. Further, 15% of what people kept was unread, and 36% consisted of copies of publicly available documents. If more than 40% of information retained was either unread or working, persons were classified as pilers. If not, they were filers. A statistical analysis was performed on these groups, to examine the relationship between filing strategy and archive characteristics. The conclusions were interesting and sometimes counterintuitive. Pilers had smaller original archives than filers. Filers seemed less disposed to discard information they had invested effort in saving. Filing is, therefore, not necessarily superior to piling.
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