Sep 26, 2008

infoplace or infospace needs for manipulation

Borgman, C. L. (2003). Personal digital libraries: Creating individual spaces for innovation. Paper presented at the NSF Workshop on Post-Digital Libraries Initiative Directions, Chatham, MA.:
"Individuals need a “place” or a “space” in which to assemble and manipulate information resources for their own purposes, with flexible tools that they can adapt to their practices, skills, habits, and artistry."
[PDF in D:/Phd/Bib - Info Spaces]

Sep 22, 2008

Information overload

Houghton-Jan, Sarah (2008). Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload, Ariadne, Issue 56:
"What is information overload? 27 instant messages. 4 text messages. 17 phone calls. 98 work emails. 52 personal emails. 76 email listserv messages. 14 social network messages. 127 social network status updates. 825 RSS feed updates. 30 pages from a book. 5 letters. 11 pieces of junk mail. 1 periodical issue. 3 hours of radio. 1 hour of television. That, my friends, is information overload."

ethics

Incorporate and adapt for research protocol: ethical issues related with participants. See Amy Bruckman (2002) Ethical Guidelines for Research Online, available online.

Sep 15, 2008

the knowledge worker information behaviour

Kidd, A. (1994). The marks are on the knowledge worker. In CHI '94: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 186-191, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press:
"Knowledge workers do not carry much written information with them when they travel and rarely consult their filed information when working in their offices. Their desks are cluttered and seemingly function as a spatial holding pattern for current inputs and ideas." [186]

"It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use (...)" [p. 187]
Most of what the author talks, back in 1994, reasons with my own observations, namely what concerns clutter desks, use of floor space and sense of order out of (apparent) disorder corresponds with the descriptions and transcripts of what was observed 15 years ago.