n. (abbr. PIM)the study and practice of organizing and maintaining one’s own recordsJones 2007, 453Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to both the practice and the study of the activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use, and distribute the information needed to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfill various roles and responsibilities (for example, as parent employee, friend, or community member).Bass 2013, 51–52Personal information management studies are also used to discover innovative ways to assist individuals in managing excessive volumes of digital information more efficiently through the design of successful software and hardware to meet specific objectives in what may be referred to as PIM tools or applications.Bass 2013, 75While archivists may not be able to analyze personal recordkeeping behaviours the same way they do corporate records management, they may come to develop frameworks for analyzing patterns of those behaviours based on personal information management research and thereby gain better precustodial understandings of the meta-cultures and practices of personal recordkeeping. Additionally, appraisal decisions disclosed by PIM research participants may influence the way archivists conduct their appraisals of personal digital archives.Chen 2014, 116A deeper understanding of hoarding, and of record creators’ self-defined analogues between hoarding and their digital personal information management practices, can benefit endeavours to educate the public about personal digital records management, by encouraging archivists to take into account more fully the organic ways in which individual organizational practices have developed.Redwine 2015, 5The field of personal information management (PIM) has developed to provide people with resources and practical strategies for organizing and managing personal files. This important field of study and practice is related but distinct from personal digital archiving . . .Chen 2016, 116, fn. 17These concerns have helped to shape the field of personal information management (PIM), which seeks to understand and meet the challenge of managing an increasing, and potentially overwhelming, overabundance of physical and especially digital data.Hinton 2022, 511Drawing on literature from personal information management studies and on the topic of documentation of American military experiences, this article aims to help the archival profession understand the personal digital archiving practices of modern soldiers.
