Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker have just published, The Science of Managing our Digital Stuff, that will be of interest to many of our readers. This landmark book deals with some of the core information processing problems specified in Cognitive Productivity.

The authors argue that dealing with “personal” information is a key problem that is different from dealing with remote information. (Personal information is created or accessed by the user. Compare the Wikipedia entry.)

Like I extensively did in Cognitive Productivity, the authors argue that information technology is still currently not well-suited to dealing with personal information. Knowledge workers are now quite efficient at finding public information. Their challenge is dealing with information they have acquired. Yet R&D still focuses relatively too much on the problems of finding public information.

Bergman & Whittaker provide a collection of principles to guide the design of personal information management software.

They refrain from offering practical advice to knowledge workers, cautioning that more research is needed, and that there are significant individual differences in dealing with personal information. However, some of their claims do have practical implications. For example, they argued that some of the techniques that work well on the web don’t work well on the desktop. In particular, personal information management calls for organizing of one’s knowledge resources (“information items”.)

For a scholarly journal, I intend to write a formal review of this book, which marks that the field of personal information management is coming of age.

My R&D is primarily focused on information processing with technology. CogSci Apps is actively engaged in developing software to help people users apply their knowledge. CogZest aims to help users “thrive in the sea of knowledge”. My Cognitive Productivity books are about helping people use knowledge to become profoundly effective. Those are three different sides of the same cube.