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 sources exist but they are either old, exist in a non-editable version or are not so resourceful. These sources are listed below. Some text from these sources 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 applications is an email client integrated with calendar and address book.
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, etc. are PIM tools as well.
PIM tools have always been a challenge to HCI and PIM researchers and several research prototypes emerged in the last three decades.
Other sources on PIM
A good starting point to become familiar with Personal Information Management as an area of study is Wikipedia
- PIM wshington
- Boardman