PIM definitions

PIM has been defined by different authors. Although definitions are similar to one another they also supplement each other. The main reason is that some authors have different understanding of what personal information is. Richard Boardman for example defines personal information as information under one person's control. Williams Jones on the other hand understands personal information in a much broader sense.

Before defining Personal Information Management a few other terms have to be defined.

Personal Information

Richard Boardman defines personal information as information owned by an individual and over which this individual has a direct control.

William Jones and James Teevan state that personal information can take various senses.

• the information a person directly or indirectly keeps for personal use,
• information about a person kept under control of others (e.g. medical records),
• information experienced by a person but not in a person’s control (a book from library) and
• information directed to a person (email).

It has to be noted that personal information can exist in various formats and types and it resides in physical or real world and in many digital worlds on our digital devices.

Information Item

Information item is a self contained unit of information which in digital world exists in different technological formats (files, emails, web pages, etc.) and may contain metadata defined by the user or system (size, creation date, name, etc.).

Another definition describes information item as packaging of information in a persistent form that can be acquired, created, moved, grouped with other information items, given name and properties, distributed, deleted or otherwise manipulated. Information items exists in various information forms or types determined by tools or applications that make it possible to manipulate them.

Information items as described above can be for example: a MS Word file, a digital photography, stapled papers, a printed photo book, a cut out article from a newspaper, a book, etc. Any of these information items can be manipulated as a whole.

There is another view on this issue. People reference to sentences, paragraphs, chapters in books. They might be interested in only one recipe in a recipes book for example. Or they are interested in only a small part of a web site or an email. Or they refer to a table in a digital document which has 100 pages. As Scott Fertig, Eric Freeman and David Gelernter argued that desktop metaphor is full of artifacts that shape our information management , maybe documents' formats are artifacts that prevent us to manipulate information chunks. Some might argue that copying/pasting a piece of text does allow us to use information from one item in another but it loses its original context. Some PIM tools (Snip!it, Haystack) have addressed this issue and allowe users to granulate information. The opened question is what is a piece of information to users in relation to an information item as described above.

Personal Information Collection

Personal Information Collections (PIC) are formed by information items.

Boardman describes a collection of personal information as a self-contained set of information items that share the same technological format and can be accessed in a particular application (with the exception of a file system that holds files in different technological formats): email collection, web bookmark collection, a collection of email addresses, etc.

Jones and Teevan do not limit PICs to one technological format, rather PICs are formed based on person’s activities. As such a PIC can take forms of a sub-collection of well organized files or stored bookmarks or even contain files, emails and other information types. PICs are important as they represent smaller chunks (e.g. folders in a hierarchy) out of PSI which can be managed together.

Personal Space of Information

Boardman calls a complete set of collections a Personal Information Environment (PIE).

Jones and Teevan call it a Personal Space of Information (PSI).

PSI or PIE is not limited to a person's digital world. Rather it includes all (four groups of) personal information from the physical and digital worlds on different devices.

Personal Information Management

Mark Lansdale, The psychology of personal information management, 1988, Applied Ergonomics 19/1, pp 55-66

PIM are the methods and procedures by which we handle, categorize, and retrieve personal information on a day-to-day basis. Personal information is information not in a sense that it is private, but that we have it for our own use. We own it and would feel deprived if it would be taken away. The primary reason (there may be others) for keeping this information is to be able to retrieve and use it in the future.