Contextualising information practices and personal information management in mobile work

Traditional, centralised offices and workspaces have provided a common setting for information practices research (Courtright, 2007; Harris and Dewdney, 1994). One specific line of information practices inquiry concerns personal information management, individuals’ daily activities of “acquiring, organising, maintaining, retrieving, using, and controlling the distribution of information items” (Jones and Teevan, 2007), both physical and digital, that they encounter. As personal information management is equally applicable to professional and non-professional instances, it might be considered an apt lens for studying mobile work; individuals who perform mobile work navigate various boundaries— spatial, temporal, social, informational, and otherwise (e.g., Kakihara and Sorenson, 2001; Urry, 2007)—so to access, use, and store their professional content successfully, and also plan and corral artefacts in order to enable their work in and across various settings (Perry, O’Hara, Sellen, Harper, and Brown, 2001) and configurations (Olson and Olson, 2014; Sorensen, 2011). (Here, the term mobile work is used to denote the professional work tasks of individuals who are required or enabled to transit more often than episodically between disparate locations— offices, homes, and coffee shops, for example.) Further, mobile work not only depends upon informational considerations like these, but is often itself inherently ‘informational’ and knowledge-based (Davis, 2002).