WORKSHOP REPORT

Personal Information Management (PIM) 2008
Jaime Teevan
Microsoft Researchteevan@microsoft.com

William Jones
University of Washington
williamj@u.washington.edu

Robert Capra
University of North Carolina
rcapra3@unc.edu

Abstract
This paper reports on the Personal Information Management(PIM) 2008 workshop held at the CHI 2008 conference. The
workshop addressed many challenges that must be overcome for
personal information management to become a natural andeffortless part of people’s everyday information experience. The
topics explored included how to build good PIM tools, how todevelop sound methodologies so that PIM can be studied andunderstood, how to account for the influence of other people on
an individual’s PIM practices, and how to understand the affectof widespread mobile information access on PIM.

1

Introduction

Personal information management (PIM) is the study and practice of the activities that people performto acquire, organize, maintain, and retrieve information for everyday use. PIM is a growing area ofinterest as we strive for better use of our limited personal resources of time, money, and energy, as wellas greater workplace efficiency and productivity. In an ideal world, we would always have the rightinformation, in the right form, with the right context, right when we needed it. The purpose of the PIM
2008 workshop was to explore how people in the real world manage the massive amounts of information
they encounter daily, and discuss how tools can bring real-world information interactions closer to theideal.
Researchers exploring PIM-related topics participate in a large set of disparate conferences, including
those related to information retrieval, human computer interaction, and information science. The PIM
2008 workshop summarized in this paper was held at the ACM SIGCHI conference in Florence, Italy, as
part of a series of meetings organized every year and a half to bring these communities together. Priorworkshops have occurred at the University of Washington in 2005 (an NSF sponsored workshop) and at
SIGIR in 2006. The next workshop will take place during ASIS&T 2009. These meetings provide an
opportunity for PIM researchers to share research findings on a regular basis and for a broad researchcommunity to engage in the study of personal information management.

2

Day 1: Understanding PIM

The first day of the workshop focused on understanding what activities and strategies people use to
manage information in an information-saturated world.

ACM SIGIR Forum96

Vol. 42 No. 2 December 2008

2.1 Understanding PIM
The workshop began with panel presentations exploring how people perform PIM activities, moderated
by Deborah Barreau. Rob Capra, in a presentation titled Studying Elapsed Time and Task Factors in ReFinding, talked about characterizing re-finding tasks by information need. The process of re-finding canvary greatly depending upon task characteristics such as whether the target is exact (e.g., “the web site
for Joe’s Pizza”) or fungible (e.g. “any web site for Joe’s Pizza”). He also discussed the importance of
the amount of time elapsed between initially finding an item and trying to re-find it. Tim Coughlan‘spresentation titled PIM for Creative Practitioners explored the role of creativity in PIM. He noted thatcreativity is difficult to schedule or plan, and that creative thoughts often occur when people are mobile
or engaged in other tasks. This creates challenges for the expression and capture of creative ideas.
Melanie Kellar (An Overview of Web-Based Monitoring) described research into Web content
monitoring as an increasingly prevalent web activity. People often repeatedly visit web sites, forexample, to stay tuned concerning important changes of status (e.g., in flight arrival/departure times) orfor distraction and recreation (e.g., Facebook or Twitter).
A common theme that emerged in all of the presentations was the importance of considering people’s
personal information management practices in the greater context of their lives, as people spend most of
their time away from conventional desktop or laptop computers. This theme was echoed in thediscussion, which focused on the capture and use of personal information beyond the desktop.
Participants explored the trade-offs between the clutter that can be created by capturing information andthe benefits that can come from it.
Two examples discussed were handwritten notes and the unanticipated value of captured information.
Although nearly all workshop participants took notes during the workshop, the majority of the notes
were made on paper, and most participants never expected to actually return to their notes. Sensemaking was cited as a reason for why people may take notes they expect not to re-use. In this case, theprocess of capturing the information is more valuable than the captured information.
Participants also discussed how information captured for one purpose can provide unanticipated value
for other purposes. William Jones related a story a colleague told him about an outing to a zoo. Hiscolleague’s daughter arrived at the zoo with a jacket and lost it over the course of the day. Because herfather had been taking pictures throughout the trip, he was able to go back through the photos todetermine where his daughter last had the jacket and retrieve it. The unintentional capture ofsuperfluous information provided value to the family.

2.2 How PIM is Personal
The second session of the workshop consisted of short presentations and small group discussion looking
at the “personal” aspect of “personal information management.” In a presentation titled How isInformation Personal?, William Jones discussed several meanings for “personal information,”including: 1) information controlled or owned by us, 2) information about us, 3) information directed
towards us, 4) information sent to others by us, 5) information experienced by us, and 6) information
relevant to our needs. He argued that the different senses can form a yardstick by which to evaluate
tools, organizational schemes, and overall PIM strategies.
Unique aspects of dealing with personal information were discussed further in several breakout groups.
Deborah Barreau led a group that explored what makes the fields of information management andpersonal information management different. The group concluded that PIM is unique because its goals
are different, with the study of information management typically restricted to the collection anddistribution of information. William Jones ran a breakout group exploring who we trust with our
ACM SIGIR Forum97

Vol. 42 No. 2 December 2008

personal information. They explored a number of schemes for storing personal information, including
on the desktop, in the cloud, or on a local storage device. The group discussed one possible path ofgradual change from the desktop to the cloud: Storage space on the Web could initially provide backup
functionality for a local storage device, but become the primary storage location as services andsupporting tools develop.
In addition to diving deep into the nuances of “personal” information, workshop participants also
considered how the experience of information management can be made “personal” throughpersonalization.
Andreas Rath’s talk on Context Aware Knowledge Services discussed apersonalization system, DYONIPOS, which attempts to automatically identify a user’s work task andcontextualize different types of knowledge services accordingly. A break out group lead by Paul Andreon the topic discussed the meaning of “personalization” and how it differs from “automation”.
Special focus was given during the workshop to the ongoing revolution in mobile and Web-based tools
for information management. Manas Tungare led a breakout group exploring how the management of
personal information is different off the desktop. The group discussed how many people now rely
primarily on mobile computers for their personal information management. Other people do not rely ona single device, but rather access, organize, and manage their personal information through any device
that provides access to the Web.

2.3 Research and Design Methodologies
The third and final session of the first day discussed research and design methodologies for studying
PIM. Olha Bondarenko talked about methodologies for understanding PIM in a presentation titled How
Do People “Read” Their Desk. She summarized the use of a triad elicitation method (part of arepertory grid methodology), and then led a breakout group on the topic. The group discussed theimportance of studying diverse sets of people in real-world situations, and debated the value of
understanding current personal information management practices for building future tools, since thelessons any learned are inherently biased by existing tools.
Ofer Bergman talked about design methodologies for PIM in his talk entitled The User Subjective
Approach. He described the application of the user subjective approach, which is one of the few design
methodologies developed specifically for designing personal information management tools, to thecreation of several prototypes. In the following breakout group on design methodologies, the group
questioned whether PIM system design should focus on applications or on the personal information
items being managed.
There were two talks in this session on methodologies for evaluating PIM tools, Now It’s Personal!
Evaluating PIM Retrieval Tools by Daniel Gonclaves, and Evaluating PIM Using an Activity Logs
Enriched Desktop Dataset by Sergey Chernov. Goncalves discussed the limitations of traditional
methodologies of tool evaluation as applied to evaluation of PIM tools. He then discussed amethodology used in the development of a personal document retrieval tool and stressed the importanceof time as a contextual element in the retrieval process (e.g. “the document I wrote around Christmas of lastyear”) . Chernov’s talk explored the use of activity logs and enhanced desktop datasets. Chernov argued
that while methods evaluating retrieval effectiveness are well-developed for the public stores of
information, evaluations involving desktop retrieval tools are neither repeatable nor comparable. He
proposed that desktop datasets, enhanced with logs of actual use by an individual over a multi-month
period, could provide a basis for the evaluation and comparison of desktop retrieval tools. A breakout
group discussing evaluation methodologies further explored issues of evaluation, including what
measures should be used for PIM evaluation, who should be studied, and how. Workshop participants
ACM SIGIR Forum98

Vol. 42 No. 2 December 2008

as a whole expressed an interest in creating test beds that could be used across research groups to
support the comparison of results, but acknowledged creating these test beds is challenging. One firststep in the right direction may be the creation of common tasks for study, as is done for TREC tracks.

3

Day 2: Supporting PIM

Focus in Day 2 of the workshop shifted from understanding how people manage their personal
information to exploring promising solutions.

3.1 PIM Tools: Finding v. Organizing
The day began with the presentation of two papers about tools for finding personal information. Duen
Chau presented Feldspar: A System for Finding Information by Association. Feldspar lets users create
queries by association. For example, a person may remember that a webpage was mentioned in an email
from a particular person, even in the absence of remembering particular keywords about the page. This
paper lead to discussion of how personal information search systems can support natural ways of
expressing their information target, with some people suggesting that the process is iterative. Liadh
Kelly continued the discussion of finding and re-finding in her talk Applying Contextual Memory Cues
for Retrieval from Personal Information Archives. She conducted a study capturing computer activity,
events, and locations for one participant for six weeks, and found evidence that using content andcontext together helped in relocating information.
Following these presentations were two talks about tools to support personal information organization.
In a talk titled Ontology Creation and Visualization for a PIM System, Alan Dix suggested using
personal ontologies to describe domains of interest and to help users organize their personal information.
Ji-Lung Hsieh presented A Web-based Tagging Tool for Organizing Personal Documents. The systemallows users to add tags to documents in their personal collections and then use these tags as part ofsearch queries.
After the paper presentations, Michael Bernstein led a group discussion on the topic of finding versus
organizing. To start the discussion, he queried the room about how many people regularly used adesktop search tool. Although 90% of the participants did, only one person said he was willing to giveup traditional hierarchical folders as an organizational tool because he felt search supplanted his need toorganize. William Jones confirmed that in his research he has found only about one in 20 people arewilling to give up folders in favor of search.
The group discussed different organizational metaphors, including files and tagging, with an emphasison the value each metaphor provides for different PIM behaviors. The behaviors focused on wereprimarily finding and organizing, but also included reminding, handling interruptions, and dealing withtask management. Collections with a lot of meta-data, such as email, appear to be searched differently
than meta-data poor collections. Tagging or automatically extracting meta-data from information items
may affect people’s interactions with those collections.

3.2 The Disappearing Desktop
As mentioned earlier, special focus was given in the workshop to personal information management that
occurs beyond the desktop via mobile devices and the Web. In the second session of Day 2, participants
explored the implications of the disappearing desktop on personal information management throughpanel presentations and discussion.
Several of the panel presentations dealt with the issues that make personal information management in a
mobile environment different from personal information management on the desktop. Manas Tungare,
ACM SIGIR Forum99

Vol. 42 No. 2 December 2008

in his talk titled Thinking Outside the (Beige) Box: PIM Beyond the Desktop, explored which device
important messages should be delivered when a person is working on multiple devices. Daniel Robbins
presented a proposal for unifying multiple PIM applications on a mobile device in his discussion of
TapGlance: Designing a Unfied Smartphone Interface for PIM. He argued that mobile devices may be
a good place to begin exploring solutions to fragmentation because such devices typically have fewer
applications, less data, and only one user.
Unification of data was a common theme in the presentations. Andreas Komninos, in a panelpresentation about Holistic PIM: Managing PI for a Nomadic Generation, argued that to support mobile
scenarios, information needs to travel with people and be available from multiple locations. Wolfgang
Woerndl, in a presentation of SeMoDesk: Towards a Mobile Semantic Desktop, discussed how to apply
principles of the Semantic Desktop, where meta-data is assigned to information items and used to relate
items, to mobile devices.
Following the presentations, Jens Dittrich led a group discussion. To start the discussion, he asked
participants to look into the future and imagine what non-desktop-centric tools will look like in ten
years. The discussion quickly focused on people’s ability to gain access to personal information in avariety of settings. People questioned whether information should be device-centric or stored in thecloud. None of the workshop participants reported currently relying on the cloud exclusively. Somepeople discussed the influence of future hardware, such as bigger portable displays and battery power,
on mobile PIM, and others questioned whether there is value to distributing PIM among different
devices or consolidating it onto one device. Regardless of the future of mobile technology, participants
agreed that social aspects of PIM on mobile devices will remain as important in the future as they are
now. Divided attention will always be an issue, and the availability of plausible deniability (e.g., cell
phone dead spots as a reason for not answering the phone, or spam-filters as an excuse for ignoring anemail) will likely continue to provide a benefit.

3.3 Fragmentation
As was touched upon in the session on mobile PIM, a grand challenge for personal information
management is dealing with fragmentation. Personal information is fragmented across electronic
documents, email messages, paper documents, instant messages, photographs, etc. Each type of
information is organized and used to complete different tasks and to fulfill disparate roles in an
individual’s life. The session on fragmentation began with two panel presentations, The Semantic
Desktop as a Foundation for PIM Research by Leo Sauermann, and ZOIL – A Cross-Platform User
Interface Paradigm for PIM by Hans-Christian Jetter. Sauermann suggested fragmentation could be
minimized by building relationships between existing files (or file fragments) on a person’s desktop.
Jetter presented a design proposal for a system, called ZOIL, which provides different views into
information.
Following the panel presentations, Steve Whittaker began discussion by asking why fragmentation
happens, and why researchers have not fixed it yet. A few participants argued that some fragmentation
can be good, or that it may be a necessary aspect of application innovation and specialization of
applications. Text was cited as a successful example of a unifying format, with many applications being
able to export or import text. However, while universal, text does not preserve relationships between
artifacts. One problem highlighted by trying to unify relationships is that a single namespace is often
used to refer to all sorts of information artifacts. It was suggested that by making applications
namespace- and URI-aware, designers could expose artifacts and relationships using RDF to achieve asemantically separated but shared representation. The conversation then shifted to a discussion of how
external programs (such as, for example, Task Tracer) might be able to create cross-application models
ACM SIGIR Forum100

Vol. 42 No. 2 December 2008

by observing user behaviors across open applications. The idea is appealing, but also presents many
challenges.

3.4 Group Information Management
The study of personal information management cannot succeed by considering a person in isolationfrom the various groups in which that person works and lives. In the final session of the workshop,
participants heard several talks as part of a panel on group information management (GIM). As seen in
the panel, group information management can refer to many things, including how other people
influence an individual’s personal information management, how people share personal information, andhow groups manage shared group information. Prabhakar Tadinada presented a system for sharing
personal information within a group in his talk titled Semantic ‘LS’ – An Approach for Personal andPrivate GIM. The system reduces fragmentation across group members’ information by allowing accessbased on content rather than storage location. Chris Middup, in a talk called Managing the Adoption of
PI in Co-located Work Groups, described a study and model of how groups synthesize personal
information into group information, and in doing so develop a shared understanding of the artifact.
Tara Whalen highlighted several challenges with GIM in her talk titled File Sharing and Group
Information Management. Through a survey of how people share slides, she found that people have a
hard time keeping track of who has an item, and that they sometimes accidentally share private
information. Anthony Collins also found that privacy is important in his study of Collaborative PIM
with Shared, Interactive Tabletops. He presented a system where information is exported to a tabletop
device and shared among users of the tabletop.
Following the panel presentations, Kirstie Hawkey led a discussion on GIM. Privacy in GIM, whichcame up often in the talks, was also a major topic of discussion. Once personal information is released
to a group, some control over it is lost. Privacy was also discussed in the context of group interaction
with personal information. For example, accessing personal information in a group setting via desktop
search may expose private information in a way that accessing it via folder navigation would not.
Similarly, a person’s notes taken during a meeting may contain private information that can be
inadvertently shared when the notes are shared. Offices and organizations may have ad-hoc rules orpractices that have been established over time for managing and sharing GIM, but these may not be
codified. There are also issues of the level of detail or summarization that is used when sharing
information in a GIM setting, and more summarization may be desirable in GIM.

4

Summary

In contrast to previous PIM workshops, the PIM 2008 workshop included less of an emphasis on
defining terminology, identifying related fields, and building a common background, and morediscussion of active research. This change perhaps reflects the fact that the study of personal
information management is starting to mature as a field. Common topics of interest included the valueof tagging versus using folders, searching versus browsing, and capturing information versus
comprehending it. Discussion was generally tool or solution focused, although participants highlighted
the continuing need to understand users' PIM needs as tools continue to evolve. The tools and solutions
considered were generally holistic in nature. They focused on reducing, rather than increasing,fragmentation, and recognized that individuals do not manage information for its own sake. Instead,personal information management was seen as a means to an end – whether the end is a completion of awell-defined task or something less well understood and harder to articulate. We believe that thisworkshop was a productive step in bringing people closer to completing their personal information
tasks.
ACM SIGIR Forum101

Vol. 42 No. 2 December 2008

Further information about the workshop, including pointers to the accepted papers, can be found at
http://www.pim2008.org. Two recent books on the topic of personal information management, Personal
Information Management edited by William Jones and Jaime Teevan, and Keeping Found Things Foundby William Jones, provide additional background.
The workshop was made possible thanks to the efforts of many people. Jaime Teevan and William
Jones chaired the workshop. Ofer Bergman coordinated reviews, and Ofer Bergman, Danyel Fisher, andSteve Whittaker were review area chairs. Robert Capra was the volunteer coordinator, Antonella
Poggio, the local area chair, Jens Dittrich, the website coordinator, and Jacek Gwizdka, the publicity andonline activities coordinator. Deborah Barreau will lead PIM 2009, to be held in conjunction withASIST in Vancouver in the fall of 2009. Look for a call for papers come spring of 2009.

ACM SIGIR Forum102

Vol. 42 No. 2 December 2008