# Keeping Found Things Found (Book) - Author(s): [[William Jones]] - Link: https://shop.elsevier.com/books/keeping-found-things-found-the-study-and-practice-of-personal-information-management/jones/978-0-12-370866-3 ![[Keeping Found Things Found (Book).webp|200]] ## Description *Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management* (Morgan Kaufmann, 2007) is the first book that covers [[Personal Information Management (PIM)|personal information management]] (PIM) as a whole. [[William Jones]] wrote it after decades of research on human memory, search and PIM, and it's aimed at researchers and at the people building PIM tools. The title is the book's central thesis: the hard part is finding again what you once found. Finding something once is easy; finding it AGAIN when you need it, months or years later, is where PIM succeeds or fails. The book looks at PIM both as a field of study and as a practice: what people actually do with their documents, emails, web pages and notes, what good PIM looks like, how to measure improvements, and which questions to ask before adopting a new PIM tool. ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Key ideas - Jones splits PIM into three kinds of activities: - **Keeping**: deciding what to save, and how (where to put it, what to call it) - **Finding and re-finding**: getting back to information you need, most often information you've already seen - **Meta-level** work: organizing, maintaining, and managing the flow of information (including privacy) - Central thesis: the hard part is finding again what you once found - Every decision to keep something is a guess about what you'll need later. Keep too little, and something useful is gone. Keep everything without a title, a type or a link, and the clutter makes every other note harder to find. That's the [[Collector's fallacy|collector's fallacy]] again, seen from the research side - My takeaway: re-finding depends on retrieval cues, so combined with the [[Encoding specificity principle|encoding specificity principle]], findability gets decided at keeping time. The cues you store with an item (title, type, links) determine whether you'll get back to it ## References - Publisher page (Elsevier / Morgan Kaufmann): https://shop.elsevier.com/books/keeping-found-things-found-the-study-and-practice-of-personal-information-management/jones/978-0-12-370866-3 - Open Library record (ISBN 9780123708663): https://openlibrary.org/books/OL10071917M - Cover: Open Library, https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9780123708663-L.jpg ## Related - [[William Jones]] - [[Personal Information Management (PIM)]] - [[Encoding specificity principle]] - [[Collector's fallacy]] - [[The Complete Guide to Obsidian Search - Find Any Note When You Need It (Article)]] - [[Why You Can't Find Your Notes - The Science of Re-finding Information (Article)]]