[Asis-l] It's 2008... Do you know where your information is???

[William Jones]

To those of you attending ASIST 2008, this may be your last chance to sign-up for the workshop:

Personal Information Management as a Study and a Practice:
Putting our information in its place in a digital age.
(http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM08/pim.html)

The course will draw upon two recently published books on PIM:
1. Keeping Found Things Found (http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Found-Things-Information-Technologies/dp/0123708664/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211489421&sr=1-1)
2. Personal Information Management (http://www.amazon.com/Personal-Information-Management-William-Jones/dp/0295987375/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b)

Special focus goes to the practical:
1 what matters no matter where our information is and no matter what cool tools come our way?
2.what questions should we always ask whenever we consider new schemes, strategies or tools of personal information management?

Feel free to email me with questions.
See below for a longer course motivation.
-- William

William Jones
Research Associate Professor
The Information School
University of Washington
http://faculty.washington.edu/williamj/


<<Longer motivation for the course>>
We are well into a second age of digital information. Information is everywhere and nowhere in particular. Vast amounts of information can be concentrated into a device that we carry with us in our pocket or purse. Our information - information that is "personal" for any of several reasons --  is also scattered "out there" in ways we don't fully understand and can't (shouldn't) fully trust.

Old, physical, paper-based metaphors are being discarded even if we sometimes continue to use the paper-based terms. What is a Web "page" when content is generated on the fly and changes with every move of a pointing device or simply with the passage of time? Or take the letter metaphor for email. Most of us send nothing like the multi-page letters that our parents and grandparents sent (and we sometimes still send). Moreover, email itself is now often discarded in favor of other modes of communication including blogs, wikis and instant messaging. Even the digital "document" itself is beginning to lose its metaphorical connection to the conventional paper document. Is, for example, a Google Doc really anything like a paper document? Or, like wikis or blogs, does it provide a meeting place for the expression and evolution of a shared representation? Such a representation may never be "done" and it may never see the light of printed day. And, if the digital document is morphing into a form bearing little resemblance to the printed paper document, what about the folder as a metaphor? Do we still need folders when we can tag instead?

Even as old metaphors lose their power to explain or reassure we haven't yet found new metaphors to take their place. Moreover, we're uncertain whether a full transition to the digital necessarily forces us to abandon our familiar metaphors. Maybe not. Burt what should we preserve and in what ways?
These are all questions of PIM for which the study of PIM is beginning to yield some practical answers.  The lecture will explore the future of PIM both as a research area and as practical developments (on the Web, in mobile computing, in companies, homes, etc.) of impact and value to each of us in our everyday lives. The lecture will cover pitfalls and dangers associated with a heedless embrace of new technologies. But the overall tone will be very positive. This 2nd digital age of information - when information moves off the desktop and into our lives - presents tremendous opportunities - especially if we know to look for them.