Bookmarks are used as "personal Web information spaces" to help people remember and retrieve interesting Web pages. A study of personal Web information spaces surveyed 322 Web users and analyzed the bookmark archives of 50 Web users. The results of this study are used to address why people make bookmarks, and how they create, use, and organize them. Recommendations for improving the organization, visualization, representation, and integration of bookmarks are provided. The recommendations include simple mechanisms for filing bookmarks at creation time, the use of time-based visualizations with automated filters, the use of contextual information in representing bookmarks, and the combination of hierarchy formation and Web page authoring to aid in organizing and viewing bookmarks.

Most windowing systems follow the independent overlapping windows approach, which emerged as an answer to the needs of the 1980s' technology. Due to advances in computers and display technology, and increased information needs, modern users demand more functionality from window management systems. We proposed Elastic Windows with improved spatial layout and rapid multi-window operations as an alternative to current window management strategies for efficient personal role management [12]. In this approach, multi-window operations are achieved by issuing operations on window groups hierarchically organized in a space-filling tiled layout. This paper describes the Elastic Windows interface briefly and then presents a study comparing user performance with Elastic Windows and traditional window management techniques for 2, 6, and 12 window situations. Elastic Windows users had statistically significantly faster performance for all 6 and 12 window situations, for task environment setup, task...

We contend that managing one's own electronic world can be a frustrating task for most computer users, requiring too many separate applications, too many file transfers and format translations, the invention of too many pointless names and the construction of organizational hierarchies that too quickly become obsolete. What is needed is a metaphor and system for organizing the electronic "bits of paper" we all so easily collect, whether we create them ourselves or they come to us in the form of email, downloaded images, web pages, or scheduling reminders. Lifestreams is such a system. BASIC MODEL Lifestreams uses a simple organizational metaphor, a time-ordered stream of documents, to replace conventional files and directories [3, 4]. Stream filters and software agents are used to organize, locate, summarize and monitor incoming information. Lifestreams subsumes many separate desktop applications to accomplish the most common communication, scheduling, and search and retrieval tasks;...

This paper reports a study of Personal Information Management (PIM), which advances research in two ways: (1) rather than focusing on one tool, we collected cross-tool data relating to file, email and web bookmark usage for each participant, and (2) we collected longitudinal data for a subset of the participants. We found that individuals employ a rich variety of strategies both within and across PIM tools, and we present new strategy classifications that reflect this behaviour. We discuss synergies and differences between tools that may be useful in guiding the design of tool integration. Our longitudinal data provides insight into how PIM behaviour evolves over time, and suggests that the supporting nature of PIM discourages reflection by users on their strategies. We discuss how users may benefit if tools and organizations promote increased reflection on PIM.