Personal information management strategies in higher education

Abstract

Personal Information Management (PIM) is a complex non-linear process, described by Jones (2007) as the acquisition, organisation, maintenance and retrieval of the information people keep for their own use; it is, however, a concept with which we are all familiar. For students growing up with digital information, but studying in a transitional environment, the complexity is marked by the increasing importance given to their strategies for organising information which are themselves complicated by the rapidly changing digital formats. This paper reports on the initial findings of a larger study which aims to better understand the factors that influence student’s PIM in the digital environment and sets out through a literature review and case study to identify the key issues for students and their PIM in an academic setting. Management of personal information collections is often performed without conscious thought; mundane items such as shopping lists and to do lists reside alongside complex reports, research notes and emails that require more formal decisions in keeping or discarding. The need for information systems to organise items such as photos, videos, emails, documents and then use them in diverse ways is obvious, however the unique nature of each individual system creates methodological challenges in how to collect and analyse data and how to study the behaviour of user interaction with these items.