Personal information management: From information consumption to curation

An implicit, but pervasive view in the information science community is that people are perpetual seekers after new public information, incessantly identifying and consuming new information by browsing the Web and accessing public collections. One aim of this review is to move beyond this consumer characterization, which regards information as a public resource containing novel data that we seek out, consume, and then discard. Instead, I want to focus on a very different view: where familiar information is used as a personal resource that we keep, manage, and (sometimes repeatedly) exploit. I call this information curation. I first summarize limitations of the consumer perspective. I then review research on three different information curation processes: keeping, management, and exploitation. I describe existing work detailing how each of these processes is applied to different types of personal data: documents, e-mail messages, photos, and Web pages. The research indicates people tend to keep too much information, with the exception of contacts and Web pages. When managing information, strategies that rely on piles as opposed to files provide surprising benefits. And in spite of the emergence of desktop search, exploitation currently remains reliant on manual methods such as navigation. Several new technologies have the potential to address important