Twentieth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Personal information space refers to documents owned by individual researchers. Activities carried out to achieve this objective are referred to as personal information management (PIM). We conducted a study to investigate the personal information management practices of researchers working at a premier research organization, the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR). Using critical incident techniques collected through extensive conversations (semi-structured interviews) with researchers, we were able to collect information about their behavior for managing their personal information space. A variety of approaches were reported by research for organizing and managing personal information. Some researchers file information on regular intervals (filers), while some keep piling the resources and file only occasionally (pilers), and there are others who wait for concluding the projects before they clean up their files (spring cleaners). In general, information management behavior of researchers at KISR appeared to be in line with the widely cited trichotomous classiﬁcation of frequent ﬁlers, ¬spring cleaners, and no ﬁlers. In our view, regularity in filing and adoption of a structuring strategy to organize information would make researchers more proficient in information management. It is desirable to deploy to create folders in order to split up collections of documents. Folders can be created either during cleanups or just-in-time as they need to save documents for future use. Use of deep and meaningful document structures before there are documents to put in them will be more helpful.