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The study examined the personal information management (PIM) challenges encountered by faculty in six universities in Ghana, their information refinding experiences and the perceived role of memory. The study tested the hypothesis that faculty PIM performance will significantly differ when the differences in the influence of personal factors (age, gender and rank) on their memory are considered.

The study was guided by a sample survey design. A questionnaire designed based on themes extracted from earlier interviews was used to collect quantitative data from 235 faculty members from six universities in Ghana. Data analysis was undertaken with a discrete multivariate Generalized Linear Model to investigate how memory intermediates in the relationship between age, gender and rank, and, refinding of stored information.

The paper identified two subfunctions of refinding (Refinding 1 and Refinding 2) associated with self-confidence in information re-finding, and, memory (Memory 1 and Memory 2), associated with the use of complimentary frames to locate previously found and stored information. There were no significant multivariate effects for gender as a stand-alone variable. Males who were aged less than 39 could refind stored information irrespective of the memory class. Older faculty aged 40–49 who possess Memory 1 and senior lecturers who possess Memory 2 performed well in refinding information. There was a statistically significant effect of age and memory; and rank and memory.

This study was limited to faculty in Ghana, whereas the study itself has implications for demographic differences in PIM.

Identifying how memory mediates the role of personal factors in faculty refinding of stored information will be necessary for the efforts to understand and design systems and technologies for enhancing faculty capacity to find/refind stored information.

Understanding how human memory can be augmented by technology is a great PIM strategy, but understanding how human memory and personal factors interplay to affect PIM is more important.

PIM of faculty has been extensively examined in the literature, and limitations of memory has always been identified as a constraint. Human memory has been augmented with technology, although the outcome has been very minimal. This study shows that in addition to technology augmentation, personal factors interplay with human memory to affect PIM. Discrete multivariate Generalized Linear Model applied in this study is an innovative way of addressing the challenges of assimilating statistical methodologies in psychosocial disciplines.

The purpose of this paper is to explore graduate students’ behaviour and perspectives regarding personal digital document management, as well as insights into the connections between memory and document re-finding.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 graduate students studying information and library science. The interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were analysed using open and axial coding.

Participants were overall positive about the importance of managing their digital documents but they had little knowledge about currently available personal information management (PIM) tools. Characteristics of digital documents frequently used by participants to re-find documents include name, subject, storage location, creation time, keyword, document title, document file type, user’s location and recency. For participants the act of organizing documents is itself a memory aid. Participants’ recommendations for PIM tools include support for information organization and simplistic visualizations that can be customized, e.g., using colour to highlight folders or documents.

The number of study participants was relatively small, and further studies should examine a more diverse participant sample, e.g., to investigate whether tasks influence re-finding. Further studies should also examine PIM with respect to other types of devices and services, including tablets and cloud services.

The results include recommendations for future PIM tool design.

This research identifies documents’ characteristics that participants use to re-find documents and the importance of these characteristics. It also examines the usage and expectations of PIM tools in everyday PIM.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the personal information management (PIM) behaviours of social science faculty in Africa. The study examined the experiences and encounters of selected social scientists in Africa in organising and finding and re-finding of the information they previously created or stored. More specifically, the study sought to examine how faculty keep and refind information, the files and folders in which they store the information. Also, the study examined the nature and characteristics of faculty information spaces with particular respect to electronic documents including emails and paper documents.

Sample survey research design and a mixed methods approach consisting of qualitative and quantitative were used. Data was collected using a discursive technique, an interview schedule and a questionnaire. Data analysis was conducted using factorial analysis of mixed data design, guided by a combination of category and codes identification using NVivo and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 17. Principal component analysis (PCA) of factor analysis was executed to identify key components.

Eleven issues, namely, time, infrastructure, importance of the information, folder/file management, document characteristics and organisational context played significant roles in the PIM behaviours of the respondents. Others were importance of the information, document overload, memory, workload and computer literacy. PCA extracted four major components, namely, document overload, time, computer literacy and importance of the information.

An expansion in the number of faculty involved in this study would probably yield a more reliable outcome. Extending the study to cover Africa would also yield a more applicable result.

The key PIM issues identified in this study, namely, document overload, time, computer literacy and importance of the information should constitute the focus of continuous information literacy education aimed at improving PIM social scientists’ faculty in Africa.

Improved PIM of social science faculty will result to improved research productivity and good health.

PIM of social scientists has not been examined in the literature, and yet it is crucial for further understanding their learning and information behaviours, and improving their productivity. The design and administration of a questionnaire constructed based on codes extracted from qualitative and discursive sessions to the same respondents from whom the qualitative data was collected makes the findings very strong. A further deployment of factorial analysis of mixed data design to handle qualitative data makes the contribution of the study very significant.

Personal information management (PIM) is an activity in which an individual stores personal information items in order to retrieve them later on. As PIM research moves from an infant stage of exploratory studies to more rigorous quantitative ones, there is a need to identify and map variables that characterize and account for the variety of PIM behaviour. This is the aim of the current research.

In an exploratory study, 20 semi-structured 90-minute interviews were recorded and transcribed. Variables were found by comparing the behaviors of participants who represent the two extreme poles of each variable's axis (i.e. when two participants showed a high and low degree of document redundancy, the redundancy variable was identified). In a later analysis, the variables were grouped into categories.

The paper identifies 15 variables grouped in five categories: organization related variables (order, redundancy and name meaning), structure variables (collection size, folder depth, folder breadth and folder size), work process variables (attendance time and modality), memory related variables (memory reliance, dominant memory) and retrieval variables (retrieval type, retrieval success, retrieval time and ubiquity).

Future research could make use of these variables in order to: measure their distribution, find relations between them, test how they are affected by variables external to PIM (e.g. systems design) and find how they affect other dependent variables (e.g. productivity).

This is the first research that systematically explores PIM variables.

Observing that people re‐access what they have seen or used in the past is very common in real lives. The purpose of this paper is to review the subject of information re‐finding comprehensively, and introduce to readers the underlying techniques and mechanisms used in information re‐finding.

After analyzing users' information re‐finding behaviors and their requirements, the paper studies the natural way of re‐finding in human memory, and reviews state‐of‐the‐art techniques and tools developed in the fields of web and personal information management for information re‐finding.

Four main re‐finding support techniques on the Web are: re‐finding tools in Web browsers; history service; re‐finding search engine; and voice‐based re‐finding. Three main re‐finding approaches are used in PIM: browse‐based approaches; content‐based search; and context‐based search.

Following the recalling mechanisms in human memory, the method of recall‐by‐context in both fields of web usage and personal information management can make users feel easy to re‐find information.

The paper gives a comprehensive overview of information re‐finding techniques.

The aim of this study is to investigate the personal information management (PIM) practices of students and its implications for library services at the University of Ghana.

This was a survey research, and questionnaires were administered to 150 students across their various programs of study. Questionnaire design was based on the literature reviewed and research objectives.

Results showed that, format, skills, size of collection, memory, and habits accounted for diverse PIM practices among students. Among the major drawbacks were inadequate skills, information fragmentation, inappropriate habits, and imperfect memory. These aspects when improved, would enhance the effectiveness of students' PIM practices tremendously.

The study adopted the PIM framework developed by James and Teevan and focused on the core activities of PIM namely: keeping, organizing and re‐finding. In order to provide a fair rounded picture of the PIM situation of students, it is expected that subsequent studies would cover the remaining variables notably‐ information maintenance; selection and implementation of a scheme; managing privacy and the flow of information; matters of security; measurement and evaluation; and making sense of things.

The study concludes that, through comprehensive information literacy training programmes offered by libraries; student‐oriented PIM researches; the formation of PIM clubs spearheaded by librarians and supported by university administrators, benevolent organizations and individuals, the PIM practices of students can be made better. PIM efforts should aim at shaping, improving, integrating and supporting students' PIM habits, skills, personal information collections and memories respectively.

PIM practices of students is among the least explored topics in the field of library and information studies in Ghana. This research would not only create awareness about PIM practices, but would also draw attention to the efforts that can be made to improve PIM practices of students in Ghana.

The objective of this paper is to document and analyze the organizational activities of faculty members using a personal information management (PIM) framework developed by Jacques (2016).

Interviews were carried out with seven faculty members, focusing on their personal information organization practices as they relate to their academic activities. These interviews took the form of a guided tour of informants' digital workspaces.

Analyses focused on PIM activities make it possible to identify the different strategies adopted by faculty members to organize their academic personal information. This qualitative approach highlights four activities involved in the organization of personal information: inclusion, exclusion, apprehension and implementation. It also reveals differences in the ability of faculty members to analyze their own practices. Finally, the relationship to time and memory of PIM practices is examined through the lens of the concepts of virtualization and actualization.

This research provides a more nuanced understanding of PIM practices, specifically of organizational activities, by considering the meaning of these practices for individuals as part of their daily lives. It aims to foster literacy by facilitating the interactions of individuals with their personal information through educational activities.

This paper aims to explore the potential of personal information management (PIM) and reference management. The contribution focuses on collaboration: the issues that need to be addressed in planning, the human component in collaborative information seeking, and issues for research by librarians.

The paper is written against the background of research from information behaviour, PIM, collaborative information seeking and collaborative work.

There is growing emphasis on collaboration in information seeking, learning and work. PIM and reference management practices and their supporting software can greatly support this. There are, however, many planning/conceptual issues as well as the human component to recon with.

Although much has been published on developments in PIM and reference management, there is limited coverage of collaboration and PIM and reference management.

Personal projects are any kind of projects whose management is left to an individual untrained in project management and is greatly influenced by this individual’s personal touch. This includes the majority of knowledge workers who daily manage information relating to several personal projects. The authors have conducted an in-depth qualitative investigation on information management of such projects and the tacit knowledge behind its processes that cannot be found in the organisational structures of current personal information management (PIM) tools (file managers, e-mail clients, web browsers). The purpose of this paper is to reveal and understand project information management practices in details and provide guidelines for personal project management tools.

Semi-structured interviews similar to that in several other PIM exploratory studies were carried out focusing on project fragmentation, information overlap and project context recreation. In addition, the authors enhanced interviews with sketching approach not yet used to study PIM. Sketches were used for articulating things that were not easily expressed through words, they represented a time stamp of a project context in the projects’ lifetime, uncovered additional tacit knowledge behind project information management not mentioned during the interviews, and were also used to find what they have in common which might be used in prototype designing.

The paper presents first personal project definition based on the conceptualisations derived from the study. The study revealed that the extensive information fragmentation in the file hierarchy (due to different organisational needs and ease of information access) poses a significant challenge to context recreation besides cross-tool fragmentation so far described in the literature. The study also reveals the division of project information into core and support and emphasises the importance of support information in relation to project goals. Other findings uncover the division of input/output information, project overlaps through information reuse, storytelling and visualising information relations, which could help with user modelling and enhancing project context recreation.

On of the limitations is the group of participants that cannot represent the ideally generalised knowledge worker as there are many different kinds of knowledge workers and they all have different information needs besides different management practices. However, participants of variety of different backgrounds were observed and the authors converged observations into points of project information management similarities across the spectrum of different professions. Nevertheless, its observations and conceptualisations should be repeatable. For one, some of the issues that emerged during this work have been to different extents discussed in other studies.

The empirical findings are used to create guidelines for designing personal project information management tools: support the selective focus on information with the division into core and supportive information; visualise changes in project information space to support narratives for context recreation; overcome fragmentation in the file system with selective unification; visualising project’s information relationship to better understand the complexity of project information space; and support navigating in project information space on two axes: time and between projects (overlaps through information).

The study presents a longitudinal insight into personal project information management. As such it provides a first formal definition of personal project from the information point of view. The method used in the study presented uses a new approach – sketching in which participants externalised and visualised personal information and projects they discussed. The insights derived from the study form design implications for personal project management tools for knowledge workers.

To take full advantage of the unprecedented availability of information on networks and digital systems, professionals need to be comfortable finding information relevant to the tasks at hand. This study was conducted at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research to investigate scientists’ personal information management (PIM) practices.

A qualitative research approach was used. Critical incidents were collected to probe information about PIM activities. The PIM-related critical incidents were gathered through extended conversations in the form of semi-structured interviews.

Extended conversations revealed that scientists were aware of the importance of information organization and management. They collected and received information from various sources regarding their tasks and saved part of the information for future use. Scientists organized saved information into named folders using the categories of projects, clients and planning. The files were updated by regular deletion and cleaning. Different strategies were used to retrieve the information. These included searching by keywords and file names, and browsing using the folder structure. Scientists have used various PIM tools. They reported that time pressure, information overload and anxiety due to information fragmentation were major challenges in PIM.

This study recommends a compilation of guidelines to assist scientists in the efficient management of personal information. As there are only a few studies currently available in the literature on scientists’ PIM, this study makes a valuable contribution to the relevant professional literature.