Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management

Preface

This book has its origin in the Keeping Found Things Found (KFTF) project, which began in 2000 at the University of Washington Information School. Funding for the project originally came through a three-year National Science Foundation¹ grant to study how people keep web information for later use and how tools might help. As primary author of the grant proposal, I selected the working title, “Keeping found things found on the Web.” It stuck and was shortened to become the name of the overall project (see http://kftf.ischool.washington.edu/).

Finding information is an important and well-studied problem. Communities of researchers study how people seek information and the ways in which information retrieval systems might help. But, once ...