January 22, 2014

• Questions?• PIM lecture• In Class Activities• Readings for next week

Personal Information Management defined:

“both the practice and the study of the activities people perform to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve, use, and control the distribution of information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), Web pages, and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and to fulfill a person's various roles.[..]”

Jones and Teevan, 2007

Concept Overview: The Basics

• Personal, not Private• PSIs-- Personal Spaces of Information • PICs-- Personal Information Collections• Personal Information Management and Group

Information Management• Where and When PIM occurs

Finding, Keeping, and Meta-level

Finding: retrieval, refinding, etcKeeping: archiving, savingMeta-level: everything else…including

organization

Where does organization fit in?

Studies on Organization in PIM

When studying organization a variety of conclusions have been made about PIM:

• Unnecessary (Whittaker, Bellottii, and Gwidka, 2006)

• Provides Context (Malone 1993; Kwasnik 1990; Barreau 1995)

• Assists in keeping and finding (Barreau 2008, Jones 2007)

• Reminds (Cole 1982; Malone 1983; Barreau 1995, 2006)

3 Classes of PIM Organization Styles

1. Pilers2. Filers3. Spring Cleaners

But it may vary depending on the environment or collection…

Personal Information Management (PIM) and Metadata Practices of Evolutionary Biologists

Summer 2008

-- Collaborative effort between SILS MRC and NESCent.-- Repository for data supporting publications in evolutionary biology journals.

Who creates metadata in Dryad?-- Author depositor (scientist or someone involved with the scientists)

--Dryad curator

Dryad and Evolutionary Biology• Evolutionary Biology is a diverse field covering a

variety of topics… how can one organization or metadata scheme sufficiently cover this?

• Evolutionary Biology is changing– technology is changing the way people use and organize their data

• Dryad– perfect example… a place where many types of data, organized in a variety of ways come together to be shared, reused, and preserved

Questions before the study• Does the way libraries deal with knowledge

organization--- through LCSH and LOC--- really reflect what Dupre calls the “true ontological complexity of the world”?

• Most PIM literature focuses on “finding” and “tool creation”, but labels studying organization as hard…why?

• As Information professionals, we look at the way individuals seek and find, but we dismiss the way people organize. Should we?

Interviews • Method: Exploratory, ethnographically-inspired, free-flowing

interviews.

• Interview Length: 15 minutes to 1 hour and 25 minutes.

• Interview Focus: Interviews addressed the following topics:

• type of data collected• organizational style and motivation• perception of sub-domain organizes trends• organizational style preference and rational

underlying that preference

Participants• Participant Description: 7 Evolutionary Biologists

• 5 male and 2 female• lab and field foci• various age and experience levels• all have published works

• Sub-Domains Represented:• botany• genetics• palentology• mammology• entomology

Findings

Scientists collect weird stuff…are we ready for that?

• GPS data• Gene Sequences• Herbarium samples• Fossils• Mammal life histories• Photographs• Insect Measurements

Do scientists use metadata for their own research?

Yes -- 6No -- 1

6

1

Does the research question impact the organization of your data?

Are there trends in how scientists organize their data?

Yes– it appears there are trends by sub-domain.*

By individual – (Mammalogist and Entomologist)

Gene unit – (Geneticists and Synthetic Scientist)

Species – (Botanist and Paleontologist)

*Sample size is too small to be sure.

Why do scientists organize their data the way they do?

• Only way they know• Research question• Everyone does it this way-- standard• To create change in the way the field thinks• Easiest way to collect data

Interesting Organization comments:

• Organization is done to fulfill psychological need

• Database thinking/org. vs. spreadsheet thinking/org

• Organizing for the self or organizing for others

• Anxiety? …why?

• Some have preferences and others feel that preference should have nothing to do with it.

Additional ReadingsDryad readings:• Carrier, S., Dube, J., & Greenberg, J. (2007). The DRIADE Project: Phased Application Profile Development in

Support of Open Science. In DC-2007: Application Profiles: Theory and Practice. International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Singapore, August 27-31, 2007, pp. 35-42.

• White, H. Carrier, S., Thompson, A., Greenberg, J., & Scherle, R. (2008) The Dryad Data Repository: A Singapore Framework Metadata Architecture in a DSpace Environment. In DC 2008, the 2008 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Berlin.

PIM readings:

• Jones, W. (2008). Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

• Jones, W. & Teevan, J. (Eds.) (2007). Personal Information Management. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

Science and Organization readings:

• Dupre, J. (1993) The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science, Harvard University Press.

• Szostak, Rick (2004) Classifying Science: Phenomena, Data, Theory, Method, Practice. Dordrecht: Springer.

In Class ActivityThis assignment examines selected environments that organize information:

• e-mail files• electronic desktop on a shared and personal stationary or laptop computer • electronic filing system on a personal computer (e.g., file structures)• filing system on a mobile/hand-held device (iPhone, iPod, e-reader…) Choose one of the 4 environments above to examine. In observing the environment, ask the following questions:

• What is being organized?• How is it organized? Note patterns--obvious and not too obvious. Assign concepts to the patterns. Don’t worry if

you use discipline-specific concepts, just describe what you observe in your own words.• Consider why the information is organized in the way that you have observed. What appears to be system

controlled, organic, or manipulated by the users/s? Does is seem that the number of people working with the system have an impact on the organization, or not?

• What does not seem to be organized (if anything)?• How might the information organization be improved in the environment you are examining?• Note other observations that you think are important.

Be prepared to talk about your observations in class during session two. This will be a chance for us to share concepts and compare environments. You may want to take a few screen snapshots or digital photographs to share with the class.

Readings for Monday • Barreau, D. and Nardi, B. A. (1995). Finding and Reminding: File

Organization from the Desktop. SIGCHI Bulletin, 27, 3: 39- 42: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/sigchi/bulletin/1995.3/barre au.html

• Nardi, B. & Barreau, D. (1997)"Finding and Reminding" Revisited: Appropriate Metaphors for the File Organization at the Desktop. SIGCHI Bulletin, 29, 1: 76-78: http://bulletin.sigchi.org/1997/january/finding-and- reminding-revisited-appropriate-metaphors-for-file- organization-at-the-desktop/.

• • Vohs, K., Redden, J., & Rahinel,R. (2013) Physical Order Produces

Healthy Choices, Generosity and Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity. Psychological Science 24(9): 1860-1867.