Personal information management burden: A framework for describing nonwork personal information management in the context of inequality

Abstract

This research reports on qualitative interviews with 31 participants who are Irish parents, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer (LGBQ), and who expressed difficulty in the process of obtaining birth certificates for their children. Our aim was to use personal information management (PIM) and personal digital archiving (PDA) as a lens to explore the invisible work that the Irish government requires of a sexual minority parent group to obtain “equal” treatment in the birth registration and birth certificate process. Our findings suggest overlap with existing information behavior research (IB) that explore invisible information work, IB as a burden, information marginalization, information vulnerability, and information overload, and the everyday in IB. We propose a new framework: personal information burden (PIM-B) which is characterized by additional PIM activities, negative affect, lack of identity self extension to the personal information, and additional information seeking. We propose that a PIM-B may be used as an indicator of inequality in future research.