# William Jones **William Paul Jones** is one of the pioneers of [[Personal Information Management (PIM)|personal information management]] (PIM): how people keep, find again and organize their own information. He is a Research Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington Information School, where he ran the "Keeping Found Things Found" (KFTF) research project. He came to PIM from memory research. His PhD in cognitive psychology (Carnegie-Mellon University, 1982) was about empirical work and computer models of human memory. After that, his career went through Bell Laboratories (later Bellcore), the MCC research consortium, Boeing and Microsoft, before about 15 years at the University of Washington. He holds several patents on search and PIM, and in 2005 he organized the NSF-sponsored "Invitational Workshop on Personal Information Management". His best-known book is [[Keeping Found Things Found (Book)|Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management]] (2007), the first book to cover the whole field. In it, he splits PIM into three activities: keeping, finding and re-finding, and meta-level work. He followed it with a three-part series, *The Future of Personal Information Management* (2012-2015). His current research focuses on information, knowledge and successful aging. ## Recent Activity - ## Insights - The hard part of PIM is finding again what you once found, which is the thesis behind the title of his book - Every decision to keep something is a guess about what you'll need later ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> <!-- SerializedQuery: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> - [[Keeping Found Things Found (Book)]] <!-- SerializedQuery END --> ## Media <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/media AND [[]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Appears in <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/media WHERE contains(cast, this.file.name) AND public_note = true SORT release_date DESC --> ## Related - [[Keeping Found Things Found (Book)]] - [[Personal Information Management (PIM)]] - [[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)]] ## References - University of Washington iSchool profile: https://ischool.uw.edu/people/faculty/profile/williamj - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Paul_Jones - Author bio on the publisher's page (Elsevier): https://shop.elsevier.com/books/keeping-found-things-found-the-study-and-practice-of-personal-information-management/jones/978-0-12-370866-3