Affect, Emotion, and Personal Information Management: The Feelings Behind Our Files

Bringing together psychological, cognitive, and sociocultural perspectives, this book offers a new way of understanding personal information management as an emotional as well as practical activity. It explores how everyday acts such as saving, sorting, retrieving, and discarding information are tied to memory, identity, responsibility, care, and control. Affective PIM examines the emotional dimensions of personal information management, showing how what we save, delete, organise, and search for is shaped as much by feeling as by function. Organised in three parts, the book moves from conceptual foundations to empirical case studies and narratives from everyday life and periods of transition, and then to future directions, including AI-enabled automation, wearable technologies, and user-centred design. Reflection prompts throughout support critical engagement and help readers connect the discussion to their own information practices. The result is a theoretically grounded and accessible account of how personal information management is lived, felt, and negotiated in contemporary digital life. The book is intended for researchers and students in Library and Information Science, information behaviour, digital literacy, human-computer interaction, and user experience design. It will also be valuable to designers, educators, and other readers interested in the human side of personal information, digital life, and the changing relationship between people, technologies, and everyday information practices.