ECS Research
Publications
Intranet Tools

nb. next round of REF2013 will NOT be using data from eprints.ecs, but the central university REF interface.

RSS 1.0 Feed
RSS 2.0 Feed
Atom Feed
 

Information Scraps: How and Why Information Eludes our Personal Information Management Tools (in Submission version)

Bernstein, M., Van Kleek, M., Karger, D. and schraefel, m. (2007) Information Scraps: How and Why Information Eludes our Personal Information Management Tools (in Submission version). Transactions on Information Systems . (In Press)

Warning

There is a more recent version of this eprint available. Click here to view it.

Download

[img]
Preview
 Submitted Version
 PDF
1619Kb

Abstract

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings.

Item Type:Article
Creator/Authors:
Michael Bernstein
Max Van Kleek
David Karger
mc schraefel
Editors:
Deborah Barreau
Robert Capra
William Jones
Manuel Perez-Quinones
Keywords:Personal information management, notetaking, information scraps
Research Group:Old ECS Groups > Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia
Current ECS Groups > Agents, Interaction and Complexity
Date:2007
Information about this record:
Downloads (2010):80
ID Code:14231
Last Modified:23 Sep 2011 10:35
Deposited On:23 Jun 2007 by schraefel, monica

Available versions of this item

Tools & Metadata

Download Statistics

Last month

Last year

Members of ECS may view the download statistics dashboard for this record.

References in Article

Select the SEEK icon to attempt to find the referenced article. If it does not appear to be in this archive you will be forwarded to the paracite service. Poorly formated references will probably not work.

ANDERSON, C. 2006. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Hyperion, New York, NY.

BARREAU, D.K. 1995. Context as a factor in personal information management systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science American Society for Information Science 46, 327-339.

BARREAU, D. AND NARDI, B.A. 1995. Finding and reminding: file organization from the desktop. 27, 39-43.

BEDERSON, B.B. 2004. Interfaces for staying in the flow. Ubiquity 5, 1-1.

BELLOTTI, V., DUCHENEAUT, N., HOWARD, M., SMITH, I. AND GRINTER, R.E. 2005. Quality Versus Quantity: E-Mail-Centric Task Management and Its Relation With Overload. Human-Computer Interaction 20, 89-138.

BELLOTTI, V., DALAL, B., GOOD, N., FLYNN, P., BOBROW, D.G. AND DUCHENEAUT, N. 2004. What a to-do: studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager. In CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vienna, Austria, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 735-742.

BELLOTTI, V. AND SMITH, I. 2000. Informing the design of an information management system with iterative fieldwork. In DIS '00: Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems, New York City, New York, United States, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 227-237.

BERGMAN, O., BEYTH-MAROM, R. AND NACHMIAS, R. 2003. The user-subjective approach to personal information management systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 54, 872-878.

BERNSTEIN, M.S., KLEEK, M.V., SCHRAEFEL, M.C. AND KARGER, D.R. 2007. Management of personal information scraps. In CHI '07: CHI '07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, San Jose, CA, USA, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 2285-2290.

BLANC-BRUDE, T. AND SCAPIN, D.L. 2007. What do people recall about their documents?: implications for desktop search tools. In IUI '07: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 102-111.

BLANDFORD, A.E. AND GREEN, T.R.G. 2001. Group and Individual Time Management Tools: What You Get is Not What You Need. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 5, 213-230.

BOARDMAN, R. AND SASSE, M.A. 2004. Stuff goes into the computer and doesn't come out: a cross-tool study of personal information management. In CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vienna, Austria, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 583-590.

BOARDMAN, R., SPENCE, R. AND SASSE, M.A. 2003. Too Many Hierarchies? The Daily Struggle for Control of the Workspace. In HCI International, Anonymous , 616-620.

BOWKER, G.C. AND STAR, S.L. 2000. Classification and its Consequence. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

BRUCE, H., JONES, W. AND DUMAIS, S. 2004. Keeping and Re-finding information on the Web: What do people do and what do they need. In Proc. of ASIST 2004.

CAMPBELL, C. AND MAGLIO, P. 2003. Supporting notable information in office work. In CHI '03: CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 902-903.

CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, M. 1991. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. {Harper Perennial},

DAI, L., LUTTERS, W.G. AND BOWER, C. 2005. Why use memo for all?: restructuring mobile applications to support informal note taking. In CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Portland, OR, USA, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 1320-1323.

DUCHENEAUT, N. AND BELLOTTI, V. 2001. E-mail as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management. interactions 8, 30-38.

FISHER, D., BRUSH, A.J., GLEAVE, E. AND SMITH, M.A. 2006. Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's email overload ten years later. In CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Banff, Alberta, Canada, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 309-312.

GONÇALVES, D. AND JORGE, J.A. 2004. Describing documents: what can users tell us? In IUI '04: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 247-249.

HAYES, G., PIERCE, J.S. AND ABOWD, G.D. 2003. Practices for capturing short important thoughts. In CHI '03: CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 904-905.

ITO, M. AND OKABE, D. 2003. Camera phones changing the definition of picture-worthy. 2007, http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1062208524.php.

JONES, W. 2007a. Introduction. In Personal Information Management, W. JONES AND J. TEEVAN, Eds. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 3-21.

JONES, W. 2007b. Personal Information Management. In Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), B. CRONIN, Ed. Information Today, Medford, NJ, 453-504.

JONES, W., BRUCE, H. AND DUMAIS, S. 2001. Keeping found things found on the web. In CIKM '01: Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Information and knowledge management, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 119-126.

JONES, W., DUMAIS, S. AND BRUCE,HARRY CITEULIKE-ARTICLE-ID = {420503. 2005a. Once found, what then? A study of keeping behaviors in the personal use of Web information. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 39, 391-402.

JONES, W., MUNAT, C. AND BRUCE, H. 2005b. The Universal Labeler: Plan the Project and Let Your Information Follow. In In Proc. of ASIST 2005, Charlotte, NC, Anonymous American Society for Information Science & Technology,

JONES, W., PHUWANARTNURAK, A.J., GILL, R. AND BRUCE, H. 2005c. Don't take my folders away!: organizing personal information to get ghings done. In CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Portland, OR, USA, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 1505-1508.

KALNIKAITÉ, V. AND WHITTAKER, S. 2007. Software or wetware?: discovering when and why people use digital prosthetic memory. In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, San Jose, California, USA, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 71-80.

KARGER, D.R. 2007. Unify Everything: It's All the Same To Me. In Personal Information Management, W. JONES AND J. TEEVAN, Eds. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 127-152.

KARGER, D.R. AND JONES, W. 2006. Data unification in personal information management. Commun. ACM 49, 77-82.

KARGER, D.R. AND QUAN, D. 2004. Haystack: a user interface for creating, browsing, and organizing arbitrary semistructured information. In CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Vienna, Austria, Anonymous ACM Press,

KHAN, F. 1993. A Survey of Note-Taking Practices. HPL-93-107.

KINDBERG, T., SPASOJEVIC, M., FLECK, R. AND SELLEN, A. 2004. How and Why People Use Camera Phones. HPL-2004-216.

KIRSH, D. AND MAGLIO, P.P. 1994. On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action. Cognitive Science 18, 513-549.

LIN, M., LUTTERS, W.G. AND KIM, T.S. 2004. Understanding the micronote lifecycle: improving mobile support for informal note taking. In CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vienna, Austria, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 687-694.

MALONE, T.W. 1983. How do people organize their desks?: Implications for the design of office information systems. 1, 99-112.

MCALPINE, H., HICKS, B.J., HUET, G. AND CULLEY, S.J. 2006. An investigation into the use and content of the engineer’s logbook. 27, 481-504.

OULASVIRTA, A. AND SUMARI, L. 2007. Mobile kits and laptop trays: managing multiple devices in mobile information work. In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, San Jose, California, USA, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 1127-1136.

ROSS, L. AND NISBETT, R. 1991. The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology. Temple University Press,

SCHRAEFEL, M.C., HUGHES, G.V., MILLS, H.R., SMITH, G., PAYNE, T.R. AND FREY, J. 2004. Breaking the book: translating the chemistry lab book into a pervasive computing lab environment. In CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vienna, Austria, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 25-32.

SELLEN, A.J. AND HARPER, R.H.R. 2003. The Myth of the Paperless Office. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.

TEEVAN, J., ALVARADO, C., ACKERMAN, M.S. AND KARGER, D.R. 2004. The perfect search engine is not enough: a study of orienteering behavior in directed search. In CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vienna, Austria, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 415-422.

TRAPANI, G. 2007. Lifehacker. 2007, www.lifehacker.com

VAN KLEEK, M., BERNSTEIN, M.S., SCHRAEFEL, M. AND KARGER, D.R. 2007a. GUI--Phooey! The Case for Text Input. In To appear in Proceedings of UIST 2007.

VAN KLEEK, M. AND SHROBE, H. 2007b. A Practical Activity Capture Framework for Personal, Lifetime User Modeling. In User Modeling, Corfu, Greece, June 2007..

WHITTAKER, S. AND HIRSCHBERG, J. 2001. The character, value, and management of personal paper archives. 8, 150-170.

WHITTAKER, S. AND SIDNER, C. 1996. Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In CHI '96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Anonymous ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 276-283.

Corrections

ECS staff and postgraduates may modify this record

Available Versions of this Item

   Welcome from Deputy Head of School (Research) Research Prospectus Industrial Partnerships New Research Students Notes for Guidance New Research Students Notes for Guidance
The ECS EPrints Repository supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

EPrints is free software developed by the University of Southampton to facilitate Open Access to research.		 EPrints