Dealing with fragmented recollection of context in information management

It is important to find new ways to manage our personal digital information, because as the quantities of information we possess continue to grow, existing tools, which place burden on the user's memory systems will become progressively inefficient. This paper reports our work to develop a multi-dimensional interface for re-accessing objects within personal information spaces. We describe a small scale examination of the recollection of contexts in which photographs were taken or used. Our aim is to utilise contextual recollections as a means of making the re-accessing of information more intuitive and more akin to natural human recollection. This presentation outlines our theories and illustrates them in the context of a tool for the management of personal photographs. The ideas embodied by our tool show promise and raise a number of issues for further exploration. In future work, these ideas will be adapted to offer support for the management of other types of information object.