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Why can't Johnny file? And what can we do to help?

2004; Wiley; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/meet.1450410197

0044-7870

William Jones, Jens‐Erik Mai, Marcia J. Bates, Gary Marchionini, Annelise Mark Pejtersen,

Personal Information Management and User Behavior

There is ample evidence to indicate that the creation and use of classification schemes are fundamentally difficult activities and that the reasons for these difficulties have deep philosophical underpinnings. Yet, in our daily interactions with information, we perform a related and equally difficult activity. We file. Most of us maintain several different folder structures in different places (home and workplace) to organize various forms of information including email (sometimes in several accounts), web bookmarks, electronic documents and paper documents. In a world where information is critical to so many of life's activities, the ability to file must surely be regarded as a basic skill much like reading or writing. And yet few of us receive any training whatsoever in the basics of filing. It shows. Studies reveal that people often make mistakes when filing and that these mistakes are costly. People file too much, too little, in the wrong ways or people “file and forget” so that the information is not retrieved again until long after the period of its usefulness has passed. What are the basics of good filing or, more generally, information organization on a personal level? Practical guides on filing or “getting organized” are largely the province of paperbacks written by people with little or no formal training in relevant disciplines such as library and information science, cognitive psychology or knowledge organization. What can the research communities for these disciplines add? What guidelines are there for the organization of personal information? What teachable techniques and strategies can promote effective management of personal information? What empirical evidence do we have for the goodness or badness of different techniques and strategies? What tools can help to make filing and information organization easier? Will the need to file information largely disappear with the new tools that will soon be available? Is there a need to file or otherwise organize information, for example, if full-text search is fast and easy? Will the advent of a system like WinFS (in the Longhorn release of Microsoft Windows) dramatically change filing as we know it -eliminating, for example, the use of folder hierarchies?