Hur organiserar forskare sitt material?
Personlig informationshantering i en vetenskaplig forskningsmiljö
The domain of this thesis is Personal Information Management (PIM) which is a sub-domain to human-computer interaction (HCI) that specifically concerns the interaction between human and information. The purpose of the study is to make an exploration of information management in a scientific research setting, to study which tools and strategies for information interaction that are used in the context and to suggest possible improvements of today's practices. Three in-depth interviews with scientific researchers have been conducted followed by a qualitative analysis of the results. The results show that there are great variations among the three respondents and that there can be distinguished as much as 15 different dimensions that when put together forms a unique PIM profile for each individual. The recommendation following this is that tools for PIM have to allow a high degree of individualisation. Findings also indicate that better metadata support in the file handling applications of common operating systems would improve the PIM in this context. Another, more general, finding is that there is a strong need to make the field of Personal Information Management more accessible. A suggested mean to accomplish this is to build a knowledge bank in which users can pick their preferred strategies from a range of collected best practices. As a theoretic conclusion an extension of the theory that presents re-finding and organizing as complementary activities is put forward.