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Personal information management (PIM) is an activity in which people store information items in order to retrieve them later. The purpose of this paper is to test and quantify the effect of factors related to collection size, file properties and workload on file retrieval success and efficiency.

In the study, 289 participants retrieved 1,557 of their shared files in a naturalistic setting. The study used specially developed software designed to collect shared files’ names and present them as targets for the retrieval task. The dependent variables were retrieval success, retrieval time and misstep/s.

Various factors compromise shared files retrieval including: collection size (large number of files), file properties (multiple versions, size of team sharing the file, time since most recent retrieval and folder depth) and workload (daily e-mails sent and received). The authors discuss theoretical reasons for these negative effects and suggest possible ways to overcome them.

Retrieval is the main reason people manage personal information. It is essential for retrieval to be successful and efficient, as information cannot be used unless it can be re-accessed. Prior PIM research has assumed that factors related to collection size, file properties and workload affect file retrieval. However, this is the first study to systematically quantify the negative effects of these factors. As each of these factors is expected to be exacerbated in the future, this study is a necessary first step toward addressing these problems.

State-of-the-art cloud applications are problematic for collaborative document management; their current design does not encourage active personal folder categorization. Cloud applications such as Google Drive and Microsoft’s OneDrive store documents automatically, so at no point are users directed to categorize them by placing them in folders. To encourage active categorization and promote effective retrieval of cloud documents, the authors designed an add-on “nudge” called Personal Organizer which prompts Google Drive users to categorize by storing cloud documents in personal folders. The add-on prompt is triggered when users attempt to close uncategorized or unnamed documents. The purpose of this paper is to test whether using the Personal Organizer add-on leads participants to actively store their documents in folders that they personally created, and whether this promotes more successful and efficient retrieval.

To test the add-on, the authors conducted a pretest-manipulation-post-test intervention study with 34 participants lasting over three months. In both tests, participants were asked to retrieve personal documents taken from their own “Recents” list to improve ecological validity.

Using our add-on doubled the percentage of documents that were actively stored in folders. Additionally, using personally created folders substantially improved retrieval success while decreasing retrieval time.

Implementing our findings can improve document storage and retrieval for millions of users of collaborative cloud storage. The authors discuss broader theoretical implications concerning the role of active organization for retrieval in collaborative repositories, as well as design implications.

This paper describes a dialogue modelling approach to information access. We apply this approach to the design of software used by management professionals for whom technology should be seen and not learnt. From dialogue data we identify context and mutual coverage as key dialogue features for this class of interface. We compare the handling of these features by existing systems, describe a novel query mechanism called Query By Format and conclude with the results of an evaluation study noting its strengths and weaknesses.

In a previous paper (Nardi & O'Day 1996), we chose to begin thinking about intelligent software agents with a detailed look at what human agents do. Our interest is in agents that provide expert services to end users. We analysed data from two studies of reference librarians to see how they provide value to their clients, considering the librarians as exemplary human agents. Shneiderman (1995) observes that claims about intelligent software agents are vague, dreamy and unrealised: we wanted to bring some precision and optimistic realism to the discussion.

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.

This paper explores the practice experience and dilemmas of being a social worker in a case management role. It draws on a case study taken from actual practice to highlight how social workers' training places them in an ideal position to smoothly manage the transitions that individuals and their families face. Permission of those involved has been sought and given, although names have been changed to protect confidentiality.The paper highlights how the fact that brain injury can be a ‘hidden disability’ can mean that its effects on both survivor and carers may be understated, with a consequent inadequate allocation of service provision and support.Support for those with brain injuries often comes from more than one statutory organisation and the challenges of managing and co‐ordinating this across organisational boundaries are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to present findings from a research project designed to determine the qualifications held by those staff who had perpetrated abuse in private sector care and nursing homes for older people during a 12-month period.

A self-completion, postal questionnaire was issued to the safeguarding teams of all local authorities in England with adult social care responsibilities to determine the qualifications held by staff who were proven to have perpetrated abuse in these facilities.

Though findings with respect to qualified nurses who had perpetrated abuse when considered in isolation were inconclusive in numerical terms, the proportion of all nursing and care staff who had perpetrated abuse, and who held either a professional or vocational qualification was high.

Responses to the postal questionnaire represented 21.8 per cent of local authorities with social services responsibilities, yet the data secured suggests that care providing staff who have received recognised training are disproportionately represented among those proven to have perpetrated abuse.

Findings indicate that recognised training for those who provide care in care and nursing homes is of limited efficacy in the prevention of abuse.

Computer‐based fax‐on‐demand systems will answer the phone and guide a caller through voice menu selections. The caller identifies the information desired by pressing the numbers on the touchtone keypad of the phone. The fax‐on‐demand system then delivers the information to the caller through either a one‐call or two‐call/call‐back method. Fax‐on‐demand is often confused with two other forms of fax messaging—fax broadcasting and fax mail. Fax broadcasting is the sending of one document to many locations; fax mail is similar to voice mail except fax messages instead of voice messages are delivered to one or more specified mail boxes. In contrast, fax‐on‐demand can better be characterized as a response application that allows individual callers to use touchtone telephones to access a database and other information, which can then be delivered to the caller's fax machine.

Over the past decade, criminology in Australia, Canada and other settler colonies has increasingly engaged with activist challenges to the penal system. These anti-carceral engagements have been levelled at its laws, institutions and agents. Following a long history of criminology explicating and buttressing penal institutions, the criminological gaze slowly transitioned in the 1970s to a more critical lens, shifting focus from the people who are criminalised to the harms of the apparatus that criminalises. However, the focus remained steadfastly on institutions and dominant players – until much more recently. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the strength of activist organisations and grassroots movements in affecting change and shaping debates in relation to the penal system. This chapter will explore the role of activism in informing criminological scholarship during the pandemic period and how criminologists, in turn, have increasingly recognised the need to build alliances and collaborations with grassroots activists and engage in their own activism. The chapter focuses primarily on Australian and Canadian criminology and its growing imbrication with the prison abolition movement, especially in the shadow of ongoing colonial violence. It considers how activist scholars, including ourselves, attempt to build movements for structural change in the criminal system and beyond.

The purpose of this article is to augment evaluation of the effectiveness of broadband videoconferencing among distributed research teams.

Textual output from informal interaction in videoconferencing and chat room sessions was recorded and analyzed using qualitative and content analysis methods to test for knowledge processes thought to be embedded in informal collaborative interaction. An exit survey used nominal and ordinal data categories to measure participant perceptions of using videoconferencing technologies to enhance knowledge‐based collaboration. Indicators of informal interaction and knowledge processes were drawn from the knowledge management (KM) and videoconferencing literatures.

Analysis confirms communication and informal interaction dynamics supportive of knowledge creation and transfer. A summary assessment of the research addresses barriers identified in the study and suggests approaches for future KM research in video‐mediated research domain.

Project time and resource constraints imposed research limits in terms of inter‐coder reliability and attention to several human factors and behavioral considerations highlighted in the study. The latter, however, are suggestive of further research opportunities, specifically in terms of user expectations and cultures of use of videoconferencing in the organizational setting.

The research provides a template for communications‐based evaluation of advanced applications using broadband technology and collaborative workwares.

The paper is a first‐of‐its‐kind evaluation of true broadband videoconferencing that advanced a knowledge management perspective based on human communication dynamics over a normative information technology framework.