The ubiquitous digital file: A review of file management research

09/20/2021
by   Jesse David Dinneen, et al.
0

Computer users spend time every day interacting with digital files and folders, including downloading, moving, naming, navigating to, searching for, sharing, and deleting them. Such file management has been the focus of many studies across various fields, but has not been explicitly acknowledged nor made the focus of dedicated review. In this article we present the first dedicated review of this topic and its research, synthesizing more than 230 publications from various research domains to establish what is known and what remains to be investigated, particularly by examining the common motivations, methods, and findings evinced by the previously furcate body of work. We find three typical research motivations in the literature reviewed: understanding how and why users store, organize, retrieve, and share files and folders, understanding factors that determine their behavior, and attempting to improve the user experience through novel interfaces and information services. Relevant conceptual frameworks and approaches to designing and testing systems are described, and open research challenges and the significance for other research areas are discussed. We conclude that file management is a ubiquitous, challenging, and relatively unsupported activity that invites and has received attention from several disciplines and has broad importance for topics across information science.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
07/07/2021

How Big Are Peoples' Computer Files? File Size Distributions Among User-managed Collections

Improving file management interfaces and optimising system performance r...
research
03/21/2014

File System Design Approaches

In this article, the file system development design approaches are discu...
research
09/30/2021

Mac Users Do It Differently: the Role of Operating System and Individual Differences in File Management

Despite much discussion in HCI research about how individual differences...
research
12/06/2013

File System - A Component of Operating System

The file system provides the mechanism for online storage and access to ...
research
06/18/2018

A Survey of Attention Management Systems in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Today's information and communication devices provide always-on connecti...
research
10/26/2020

5W1H-based Expression for the Effective Sharing of Information in Digital Forensic Investigations

Digital forensic investigation is used in various areas related to digit...
research
08/01/2023

Verifiable Data Sharing Scheme for Dynamic Multi-Owner Setting

One of scenarios in data-sharing applications is that files are managed ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset