Using Personal Information Management to Strengthen Information Literacy at Work

Personal information management (PIM) practices of 83 knowledge workers from 11 companies in Kuwait were surveyed focusing on finding; organization & management; and re-finding of information.Results indicated that information was gathered from a variety of sources for performing tasks at hand.About more than 50% of it was also kept for future use.Employees saved this information on desktops and hard drives and also used Favorites and Bookmarks to facilitate its refinding.They used different work related categories to organize information in folders.They regularly updated their files and folders and also used tools to support PIM activities.Awareness needs to be created about knowledge organization schemes such as personal taxonomies and categorization to better organize e-documents in personal collections.Enhanced information literacy training with appropriate integration of PIM skills will improve information finding and re-finding to help exploit digital information more effectively.