Finding and reminding'' revisited: appropriate metaphors for file organization at the desktop

Abstract

In the January 1996 SIGCHI Bulletin, Scott Fertig, Eric Freeman, and David Gelernter offered an interesting challenge to our 1995 paper on the information organization and retrieval behaviors of individuals in the work place. While they agreed with our categorization of information use in working environments as ephemeral, working, and archived, they took issue with our findings concerning the importance of location-based searching over logical retrieval, with our suggestion that the user's perception of their information space and the location of information within that space serves a reminding function, and with the evidence given that archival information has limited value to users in their work. At the core of their criticisms is the charge that our studies were constrained by the narrow scope of the desktop metaphor which favors certain types of interaction over others. They suggest that users only need better tools to find the value in archiving. While we applaud their call for better tools and recognize that archived information is critical to researchers, librarians and a few other professions, our studies suggest that the major information management problem facing most individuals at work today is the volume and variety of ephemeral information. Like Phaedrus, we wish to call the reader's attention to the crucial difference between memory and reminding. While Phaedrus was concerned that writing would make people forgetful and viewed the reminding function of writing as degenerate, in this literate age, we are fully accustomed to using inscriptions to remind us of things. (And indeed how would we know what Plato thought if he hadn't written it down?) We tend to think of an electronic file system as a repository of stored information - and indeed it is - but as our research shows, it is also a space upson which people inscribe things they wish to be reminded of. The use of spatial cues to manage this difficult but important reminding process extends from the physical world of the paper office to the virtual space of the electronic desktop.

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