In this paper, we report on findings from an ethnographic study of how people use their calendars for personal information management (PIM). Our participants were faculty, staff and students who were not required to use or contribute to any specific calendaring solution, but chose to do so anyway. The study was conducted in three parts: first, an initial survey provided broad insights into how calendars were used; second, this was followed up with personal interviews of a few participants which were transcribed and content-analyzed; and third, examples of calendar artifacts were collected to inform our analysis. Findings from our study include the use of multiple reminder alarms, the reliance on paper calendars even among regular users of electronic calendars, and wide use of calendars for reporting and life-archival purposes. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what these imply for designers of interactive calendar systems and future work in PIM research.
Several interesting design concepts have been suggested to make electronic calendar systems less error-prone and smarter. These cover a wide range, from systems that retrieve tasks from email messages @cite_7 , to systems that learn from users' behavior to recommend intelligent defaults @cite_3 , to calendar systems that predict attendance at events @cite_30 . @cite_36 assessed the effectiveness of a priority-based calendar prototype and concluded that integration with other personal information systems (such as email) would make the system more useful for users. Visualizing calendar information on desktop computers and mobile devices has been explored in several studies @cite_4 @cite_11 .
@cite_30 @cite_4 @cite_7 @cite_36 @cite_3 @cite_11
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In this paper, we describe Augur, a groupware calendar system to support personal calendaring practices, informal workplace communication, and the socio-technical evolution of the calendar system within a workgroup. Successful design and deployment of groupware calendar systems have been shown to depend on several converging, interacting perspectives. We describe calendar-based work practices as viewed from these perspectives, and present the Augur system in support of them. Augur allows users to retain the flexibility of personal calendars by anticipating and compensating for inaccurate calendar entries and idiosyncratic event names. We employ predictive user models of event attendance, intelligent processing of calendar text, and discovery of shared events to drive novel calendar visualizations that facilitate interpersonal communication. In addition, we visualize calendar access to support privacy management and long-term evolution of the calendar system. Manufacturers of integrated electronic office systems have included electronic versions of the calendar in almost every system they offer. This paper describes a survey of office workers, carried out to examine their use both of paper calendars and of electronic calendars that are commercially available as part of integrated office systems. It assesses the degree to which electronic calendars meet the needs of users. Our survey shows that the simple paper calendar is a tool whose power and flexibility is matched by few, if any, of the current commercially available electronic calendars. Recommendations for features that should be included in electronic calendars and automatic schedulers are included. Twenty-three professional persons were interviewed extensively to find out how they keep their appointment calendars and to extract from that information suggestions about how calendars could be computerized. For the majority of the persons interviewed calendars are indispensable to the conduct of their business, and, in some cases, their personal lives. At the same time the data show an unexpectedly large amount of diversity in the kinds of calendars people use and in the ways they use them. Substantially more than half of the respondents have more than one calendar, with two persons using as many as six calendars at once. Portability and access from diverse locations are important for many persons. Concerns about privacy vary widely: some persons keep their calendars closely guarded, others allow free access to them. Relevant time spans covered by calendars are enormous. Some few people are concerned only with the current day and the day following, others may plan appointments a year or more in advance. A substantial number of appointments are changed after they have been made and, once again, the range is large, from about 2 per cent for some persons to about 80 per cent for others. Archiving, query patterns, and the insertion of correlated information into calendars also vary greatly among various users. Scholars are increasingly citing electronic “web references” which are not preserved in libraries or full text archives. WebCite is a new standard for citing web references. To “webcite” a document involves archiving the cited Web page through www.webcitation.org and citing the WebCite permalink instead of (or in addition to) the unstable live Web page. This journal has amended its “instructions for authors” accordingly, asking authors to archive cited Web pages before submitting a manuscript. Almost 200 other journals are already using the system. We discuss the rationale for WebCite, its technology, and how scholars, editors, and publishers can benefit from the service. Citing scholars initiate an archiving process of all cited Web references, ideally before they submit a manuscript. Authors of online documents and websites which are expected to be cited by others can ensure that their work is permanently available by creating an archived copy using WebCite and providing the citation information including the WebCite link on their Web document(s). Editors should ask their authors to cache all cited Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs) “prospectively” before submitting their manuscripts to their journal. Editors and publishers should also instruct their copyeditors to cache cited Web material if the author has not done so already. Finally, WebCite can process publisher submitted “citing articles” (submitted for example as eXtensible Markup Language [XML] documents) to automatically archive all cited Web pages shortly before or on publication. Finally, WebCite can act as a focussed crawler, caching retrospectively references of already published articles. Copyright issues are addressed by honouring respective Internet standards (robot exclusion files, no-cache and no-archive tags). Long-term preservation is ensured by agreements with libraries and digital preservation organizations. The resulting WebCite Index may also have applications for research assessment exercises, being able to measure the impact of Web services and published Web documents through access and Web citation metrics. @PARASPLIT [J Med Internet Res 2005;7(5):e60]