Nov 8, 2005

Information behaviours and using information

When reading the comments made by Jack Vinson, a lot of things came to my mind. While commenting on the reflections of Christina Pikas, Jack ends his notes with:

"One of the comments suggests that re-finding can be more frustrating because we know it exists and because it is already part of a larger context of our work. It's just that we don't know how to use our tools to articulate context when we save something and when we look for it later."

Then I recalled a paper by Bruce, H., Jones, W. e Dumais, S. (2004). Information behaviour that keeps found things found (Information Research, 10(1), paper 207) that I’ve used to explain as one of the reasons that made me start blogging, althought the authors didn’t considered it in the study.

I agree it’s not about keeping, it’s about using. But in order to use it we have to know that the resources exist so we develop strategies that will enable us to use that information. Keeping, is just a small part of it as is our use of tools that allow us to extend our capabilities.

When one uses a blog it tends to add meaning for the later use of information, allowing others to relate also with it. For me it’s not so much about keeping, it’s about living clues so when we need to use the information we are able to recall it, when need it.

1 comment:

  1. When I took the Personal Information Management short course from William Jones in 2004, I specifically asked how blogging process fits in their models. They haven't really looked at that. One thing that's nice about the Jones and Bruce (and this session) is that they're not concentrating on technology, but individuals. However, I think blogging is more than technology, it's really a different way to Keep Found Things Found.