Thesis (M.C.S.) - Carleton University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 92-96). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Montana, 2007. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 9, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 59).

Abstract As the Internet and wireless technologies become mature, people may use more than one digital device to manage their personal data. However, the complexities and difficulties in personal information management will arise due to various devices and heterogeneous platforms. To cope with this problem, we design an intelligent architecture for personal information management based on the XML-RPC technology, which allows the software running on disparate operating systems and in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet. We also implement an information server to manage the whole data and handle the synchronization process. The system provides users a simple and convenient environment to manage and synchronize their personal information. Besides, the group facility in this system makes the people in the same group or community capable of sharing their information more easily.

Thesis (M. Ed.(RGO)--Universiteit van Pretoria, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-71).

Thesis (MA--Art and Design) -- Auckland University of Technology, 2003. / Not all images visible in e-thesis. Also held in print (45 leaves, ill., CD-ROM, 30 cm.) in Wellesley Theses Collection. (T 709.93 CAM)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 322-335).

Email has become deeply embedded in many users' daily lives. To investigate how email features in users lives, particularly how users attend to email and get lost within it, I ran five studies that probed how users determined relevancy of messages, logged interactions with email, gathered diary entries related to individual sessions, and investigated the gratifications sought from email use. For the first study, I performed an exploratory experiment in the laboratory to determine how participants assessed the importance of individual emails (N=10). The next investigation I undertook involved three different studies, which I detail individually: a survey on email usage (N=54); a two-week study of email usage (N=20); and finally, the application of Attentional Network Test (N=9). My final study was to validate my findings around the reasons for attending to email, this was done through deploying a survey that followed the Uses and Gratification Theory tradition (N=52) In my studies I found that the majority of attentional effort is around reading email and participating in conversations, as opposed to email management. I also found that participants attended to email primarily based on notifications, instead of the number of unread messages in their inbox. I present my results through answering several research questions, and leverage Conversation Analysis (CA), particularly conversation openings, to explicate several problematic aspects around email use. My findings point to inefficiencies in email as a communication medium, mainly, around how summons are (or are not) issued. This results in an increased burden on email users to maintain engagement and determine (or construct) the appropriate moment for interruption. My findings have several implications: email triage does not seem to be problematic for the participants in my studies, somewhat in contrast to previous research; much of the problem around email, particularly emph{getting lost in email} is in managing the tension between promptly responding to messages while limiting engagement with email; due to the social nature of the problems with email, modifications to the email client are limited in their potential effectiveness to prevent getting lost and reduce email related anxiety. / Ph. D.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Masters of Commerce in Management, 2018 / This study sought to contribute to a further convergence between three topical research areas: Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Individual Work Performance (IWP) and SelfPerceived Employability (SPE). Specifically, this study investigated the moderating effect of SPE on the relationship between PKM and IWP. PKM is an interdisciplinary concept, connected with management science, information science; information technology and other disciplines. The shift from the industrial economy to the knowledge economy has contributed to the surfacing of the knowledge-based view of the organisations and the emergence of the concept of knowledge workers or “people who think for a living” (Davenport, 2005). Knowledge workers are individuals who possess or seek to develop unique cognitive competencies and skills built upon effective PKM. While it has been acknowledged in the literature that PKM encompasses a competency aspect on the one hand and a technological perspective on the other hand, the overall reflection conducted in this study claimed to be skills/competencies centric. In that regard, a competency model developed by Kirby (2005, 2008) comprising of four-fold dimensions was used in this study to measure PKM. These four dimensions include analytical competencies (ANL), social competencies (SOC), information competencies (INF) and learning competencies (LRN). The construct of IWP relates to the individual behaviours or actions displayed by knowledge workers which are relevant to the goals of the organisation. This implies that IWP focuses on behaviours or actions of workers rather than the results of these actions. In addition, these behaviours should be under the control of the individual, thus excluding behaviours that are constrained by the environment. IWP was measured using the three components relevant to the IWP namely task performance (TSK), contextual performance (CON) and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). Employability concerns the extent to which people possess the skills and other attributes to find and stay in the kind of work they want. Such individuals are assumed to display a greater propensity to IWP. SPE is relating to a self-assessment of the employees as to how the organisation they are working for value them as individuals. Most importantly, SPE is associated with v individuals’ self-perception of their merit based more on their personal competencies than features of their occupation. Through a review of relevant literature this study discussed how PKM impacts IWP, and how SPE can potentially impact that relationship. This study used a sample of working professional students studying at Wits Plus (the University of the Witwatersrand’s centre for part-time studies), Wits Business School and Wits School of Governance and will perform Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) and hierarchical regression for data analysis. / XL2019

Personal Information Management (PIM) studies the practice of storing, organizing, and retrieving information by an individual in support of their roles and tasks (Bergman, et al., 2004). One important problem in PIM is information fragmentation (IF) — the condition of having data in different formats, distributed across multiple locations, manipulated by different applications, and residing in a generally disconnected manner (Tungare, 2007). IF can conflict with the PIM ideal that users should have access to the right information at the right time, in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to perform the task at hand (Bergman, et al., 2004). It is typically assumed that IF is unintentional, and occurs as a result of the many applications and devices we use to do our daily work. It is further assumed that IF is "bad" or has negative consequences. In this thesis, I study when IF occurs intentionally. Intentional IF (IIF) refers to the fragmentation in PIM that occurs when a person fragments his or her own personal data purposefully. Although research into the problem of IF has been growing quickly in the past decade, IIF has not been investigated in the literature. Prior studies have portrayed IF as a problematic type of information management. Email is a common context in which IF is found. While IF in email may be unintentional, such as when required by an employer, it is also likely to be intentional, as is the case when users use separate email accounts for different purposes. To further the research in this field, this project investigated the phenomenon of IIF in email by conducting and analyzing data from an online survey. In addition to finding the extent of IIF in email, the survey addressed what motivates the participant to purposely fragment their email as well as the advantages and disadvantages in doing so. My study is the first that has explored intentional fragmentation of information. The findings of this study show that IIF exists in email usage, revealing that IIF occurs across a user's devices and also across a user's multiple email accounts. The two most common motivations for IIF are to keep information separated by the user's social roles (work, school, personal communications, etc.), and to filter out extraneous information in order to simplify their information management. These results show that in addition to the negative consequences of IF there also exists positive uses of IF, that is helpful for some users. / Master of Science

Providing an effective mechanism for personal information retrieval is important for many applications, and requires different techniques than have been developed for general web search. This thesis focuses on developing retrieval models and representations for personal search, and on designing evaluation frameworks that can be used to demonstrate retrieval effectiveness in a personal environment. From the retrieval model perspective, personal information can be viewed as a collection of multiple document types each of which has unique metadata. Based on this perspective, we propose a retrieval model that exploits document metadata and multi-type structure. Proposed retrieval models were found to be effective in other structured document collections, such as movies and job descriptions. Associative browsing is another search method that can complement keyword search. To support this type of search, we propose a method for building an association graph representation by combining multiple similarity measures based on a user's click patterns. We also present a learning techniques for refining the graph structure based on user's clicks. Evaluating these methods is particularly challenging for personal information due to privacy issues. This thesis introduces a set of techniques that enables realistic and repeatable evaluation of techniques for personal information retrieval. In particular, we describe techniques for simulating test collections and show that game-based user studies can collect more realistic usage data with relatively small cost.