Personal Digital Information Resources Management Behavior

With the growth and the increasing complexity of digital resources, it is clear that individuals may have to depend on various types of information management tools to organize and retrieve information needed to carry out their personal or professional tasks. With new web applications, “users are provided with the tools and platforms to undertake their own collaborative content creation and distribution”. However, it may also worsen the information retrieval problems, for more information resources means higher needs for proper management in order to find needed information in the right format at right time. We assume that user's PIM behavior with PCs will have impact on how they will perform PIM in other environments. There is a need to reassess the existing PIM tools and testing formerly claimed theories of PIM behavior in the context of today's digital information environment. This paper reports on the findings of a survey conducted with 118 computer users to investigate their information organization and retrieval strategy and the factors that affect their choices of adopting different strategies. The results should shed some light of personal information behavior that may aid the design and implementation of the future PIM tools that optimize advanced technology.