From user needs to opportunities in personal information management: A case study on organisational strategies in cross-media information spaces

The efficient management of our daily information in physical and digital information spaces is a well-known problem. Current research on personal information management (PIM) aims to understand and improve organisational and re-finding activities. We present a case study about organisational strategies in cross-media information spaces, consisting of physical as well as digital information. In contrast to existing work, we provide a unified view on organisational strategies and investigate how re-finding cues differ across the physical and digital space. We further introduce a new mixing organisational strategy which is used in addition to the well-known filing and piling strategies. Last but not least, based on the results of our study we discuss opportunities and pitfalls for future descriptive PIM research and outline some directions for future PIM system design.