Jones, WilliamPhuwanartnurak, Ammy JiranidaGill, RajdeepBruce, Harry2005-01-112005-01-112005-01-11http://hdl.handle.net/1773/2031William Jones, Ammy Jiranida Phuwanartnurak, Rajdeep Gill & Harry Bruce, Don’t Take My Folders Away! Organizing Personal Information to Get Things Done, Technical Report IS-TR-2005-01-01, Information School, University of Washington, January 11, 2005.A study explores the way people organize information in support of projects (“teach a course”, “plan a wedding”, etc.). The folder structures to organize project information – especially electronic documents and other files – frequently resembled a “divide and conquer” problem decomposition with subfolders corresponding to major components (subprojects) of the project. Folders were clearly more than simply a means to one end: Organizing for later retrieval. Folders were information in their own right – representing, for example, a person’s evolving understanding of a project and its components. Unfortunately, folders are often “overloaded” with information. For example, folders sometimes included leading characters to force an ordering (“aa”, “zz”). And folder hierarchies frequently reflected a tension between organizing information for current use vs. repeated re-use.237774 bytesapplication/pdfen-USPersonal Information ManagementHuman Problem SolvingArticle