Guiding Users to Improve Personal Information Management

The challenges involved in the practice of personal information management (PIM) has become greater than ever due to dynamic and diverse environment, and increased responsibility for the user. Based on this observation, this position paper argues that more research efforts should be put on guiding users to improve their own PIM practices (behavioral approach), as opposed to building and evaluating tools (tool-based approach). I first describe several trends in the practice of PIM, and difficulties involved in the tooloriented approach. Then I propose the behavioral approach as a promising research direction, suggesting a three-stage model of user guidance.