Collections: Flexible, essential tools for information management

While collections-aggregation mechanisms such as folders, buddy lists, photo albums, etc.-clearly play a central role in information management, the potential benefits of true first class support for collections are masked by disparate implementations that force users to pay attention to technological distinctions such as application, format, and protocol. We argue that systems should expose a single unified concept of collection and that concepts such as portals, cross-application projects, customized menus, and e-mail-task unification come about naturally as a result of our abstraction. In addition, uniform support for collections brings about a new set of capabilities for supporting creative processes. We discuss a prototype implementation of this abstraction in our Haystack system, give several examples of why we believe our abstraction is useful in everyday information management, and present some preliminary results from user studies that support our hypotheses. © 2004 ACM.