Jones' "Personal Information Management" is a brick of an article. The sheer size of this paper makes me wonder if he was being paid by the word. Personal Information Management (or PIM), as defined by Jones, is "the practice and the study of the activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use, and distribute the information needed to complete tasks" (Jones 2007, pg. 453). To simplify that, its how we deal with our tasks. We live in an age of information; we constantly check, update, store, retrieve information to deal with the myriad issues of our day. From the weather to traffic to birthdays to school assignments, we are constantly bombarded with information.
What I found interesting about the way that Jones uses the term "information" is that by his definition, it seems as if there is no such thing as information poverty. We can't escape information. Even without computers and the Internet, and the types of documents that we get from them, there are still "the clothes we choose to wear, ...the car we choose to drive, ...the way we choose to act. We send information ...with every sentence we speak or write" (Jones 2007, pg. 460). Information items, as Jones calls documents, are not just Web sites, email messages, or pieces of paper, but also "paragraphs or even individual sentences," depending on a person's definition of information (Jones 2007, pg. 461).
With so much information, and so many information items and information forms, it's no wonder we need PIM activities. According to Jones, there are essentially three PIM activities: finding/refinding, keeping, and meta-level (i.e., organizing personal information collections themselves) (Jones 2007, pg. 464). The “finding/refinding” aspect is interesting: as Jones notes, we need to remember where to look. In fact, we need to remember to remember. As an absent-minded sort of person, this is often what holds me back. Keeping an assignment book aids me in tracking homework, but I need to remember to check it, too. In addition to the difficulties of memory, Jones discusses fragmentation: we save information in various forms in various places. Tagging is one way to link information items, though this is obviously limited to digital information.
Duff and Johnson's "Accidentally Found" deals with the searching methods of historians, specially in an archival setting. I believe these two articles go hand in hand because “Accidentally Found” deals with the information forms and information collections of historians. Instead of librarians attempting to help other professionals or people in different groups, “Accidentally Found” focuses on historians attempting to understand other historians (i.e., the archivists), and how they have organized the information in the archive. While Jones PIM is about an individual's methods of management his or her individual information, I believe that it can be applied in some form to Duff's article: the historians share an innate love and understanding of the information items and the messages that they contain.
Fragmentation as discussed by Jones relates to the Duff's historians' ability to locate material through indirect means (Duff 2002, pg. 491). Because information documents could be placed under a variety of categories, a historian had think of different places to look.
One historian mentioned something that I found particularly striking: he would "chat" with the archivist, keeping it "open-ended so as not to limit the archivist's responses" (Duff 2002, pg. 490). This is a switch from our other readings in which the librarian was the one careful not to direct or judge a person's reference questions, and rather to listen without assumptions to discover what the person was really asking. Here it is the person asking the reference questions who is concerned about misdirecting the conversation or ending it before s/he has learned everything.
The articles on the searching behaviors of other professionals emphasized the lack of communication between them and librarians. The articles on doctors and nurses in particular showed the gaps between the groups. Zoe presentation uncovered the same results; however, I believe librarians should have an easier time communicating with them. Archivists a bridge between the librarian and the historian, surely the divide between the groups can't be so expansive. The soft sciences often go hand in hand, and librarians have no excuse for not understanding the literature or the topics, which may be the case when dealing with medicine or law.
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