Personal Information Management (PIM) resources

One of the reasons why this page has come to life is to provide a central resource to PIM research, theory and sources. Several such resources exist but they are either old, exist in a non-editable version or are not so resourceful. These resources are listed below. Some text from these resources is available on these pages as well (always accordingly cited). The main reason is that I came across many potentially interesting links but unfortunately these sites are not available anymore.

Probably the main reason for making this site available as a wiki is to let anyone edit it. Everyone who is interested in contributing/editing/administrating this site is welcomed to do so.

Personal information Management

PIM is area of the research and a practice of the activities like handling, storing, classifying, organizing, sharing, protecting, archiving information for various purposes.

In practice such purposes can be: saving a web bookmark to read that page later, write a post-it note for a wife and put it on a fridge, tidy up a desk and file away documents which will not be needed in the near future, call a client to make an appointment and write the note in a calendar, clean up cluttered email inbox to , frame a family photo and hang it on the office wall for decoration and impression management, create a folder for storing project files, etc. So everyone manages information to support various needs and tasks.

PIM as an area of research tries to understand and interpret these activities and provide better solutions. This area of research is old as are personal computers, but is new as well as in last years more researchers became involved. There are several PIM definitions and theoretical PIM frameworks. PIM also relates to several other disciplines but its focus is on understanding interactions between people, their information and technologies involved in managing this information.

Personal information manager

Most people understanding of a PIM application is an email client integrated with calendar and address book. But PIM applications are more that this.

Personal Information Manager is every tool used to manage personal information. Three main PIM tools or applications are: a file browser, an email client and web bookmarks manager. There are also other PIM applications like: calendar, address book, RSS client, to-do notes, instant messenger stored conversation, voicemail, project managers, etc. In a broader sense an office file cabinet, paper clips, photo/music/video managers, etc. are PIM tools as well. More and more PIM tools are now available online as well such us: blogs, wikis, social networks, forums and such.

PIM tools have always been a challenge to HCI and PIM researchers and several research prototypes emerged in the last three decades. Today a focus of research has become more interested in online PIM tools.

Other resources about PIM

A good starting point to become familiar with Personal Information Management as an area of study is Wikipedia

• Personal Information Management
• Personal Information Manager
• List of Personal Information Managers

Other resources

• Resources for Personal Information Management at The Information School, University of Washington
• Richard Boardman's old web site at University College, London

Other links are available here.

PIM workshops

PIM Workshops are intended to bring PIM researchers together. Workshops are held every 18 months as a part of a bigger conference.

List of past PIM workshops:

• 2011, May 7-12, CHI 2011, Vancouver
• 2009, November 7-8, ASIS&T 2009 Workshop, Vancouver, BC, Canada
• 2008, April 5-6, CHI 2008 Workshop, Florence, Italy
• 2006, August 10-11, SIGIR 2006 Workshop, Seattle, Washington
• 2005, January 27-29, An NSF-Sponsored Invitational Workshop, Seattle, Washington