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.

This paper describes the results of an observational study into the methods people use to manage web information for re-use. People observed in our study used a diversity of methods and associated tools. For example, several participants emailed web addresses (URLs) along with comments to themselves and to others. Other methods observed included printing out web pages, saving web pages to the hard drive, pasting the address for a web page into a document and pasting the address into a personal web site. Ironically, two web browser tools that have been explicitly developed to help users track web information -- the bookmarking tool and the history list -- were not widely used by participants in this study. A functional analysis helps to explain the observed diversity of methods. Methods vary widely in the functions they provide. For example, a web address pasted into a self-addressed email can provide an important reminding function together with a context of relevance: The email arrives in an inbox which is checked at regular intervals and the email can include a few lines of text that explain the URL's relevance and the actions to be taken. On the other hand, for most users in the study, the bookmarking tool ("Favorites" or "Bookmarks" depending on the browser) provided neither a reminding function nor a context of relevance. The functional analysis can help to assess the likely success of various tools, current and proposed.

In a given week, an active person may be working on, or at least thinking about, several different projects. Some are work-related (“prepare annual report”); others are not (“plan family ski vacation”). Projects have duration (several days to several months) and a structure that includes basic tasks (“book plane tickets”) and subprojects (“decide on hotel”). This article describes exploratory research that looks at the kinds of projects people manage in their daily lives, the problems they encounter and the kinds of support people need to manage better. The personal project is advanced as a tractable unit of analysis for the study of personal information management (PIM). Over time, a personal project often involves several forms of information (paper and digital documents, email, web pages, handwritten notes, etc.) and several supporting applications. People face problems of information fragmentation that are more widely experienced in their practice of PIM. A Project Planner prototype explores an exciting possibility that an effective, integrative organization of project-related information can emerge as a natural by-product of efforts to plan and structure the project.

Associate Professor Soo Young Rieh“Because there is a group of us using the site I find it difficult to keep up with what is located where, and so ask people to email me direct copies of materials I need.” — a group information repository user, the inspiration for this researchc ○ Emilee Jeanne Rader All Rights Reserved 2009 For Dr. Bethany, because she finished first.

Human memory plays an important role in personal information management (PIM). Several scholars have noted that people re-find information based on what they remember and it has been shown that people adapt their management strategies to compensate for the limitations of memory. Nevertheless, little is known about what people tend to remember about their personal information and how they use their memories to re-find. The aim of this article is to increase our understanding of the role that memory plays in the process of re-finding personal information. Concentrating on email re-finding, we report on a user study that investigates what attributes of email messages participants remember when trying to re-find. We look at how the attributes change in different scenarios and examine the factors which impact on what is remembered.