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.
翻译:计算机用户每天花时间与数字文件和文件夹进行互动,包括下载、移动、命名、导航、搜索、共享和删除这些文件和文件夹。这种文件管理一直是各个领域许多研究的重点,但并未明确承认,也未成为专门审查的重点。在本篇文章中,我们首次专门审查了这一专题及其研究,综合了各种研究领域的230多份出版物,以确定已知和有待调查的内容,尤其是通过审查先前的杂乱无章的工作体所显示的共同动机、方法和发现。我们发现所审查的文献中有三种典型的研究动机:了解用户如何和为什么储存、组织、检索和分享档案和文件夹,了解决定其行为的因素,并试图通过新的界面和信息服务改善用户的经验。介绍了设计和测试系统的相关概念框架和方法,并讨论了有关研究挑战和其他研究领域的重要性。我们的结论是,文件管理是一种常见、具有挑战性且相对不支持性的活动,邀请并吸引了多个学科的关注,对跨科学的专题具有广泛的重要性。