Robin Sease
David W. McDonald
Abstract
The growing volume of digital music, photos and video challenges media management software and organizing schemes alike. Through 20 in situ, two hour interviews we explored the when, why and how of our participants' organizational schemes. We sought and studied significantly larger media collections than in previous studies. For these larger media collections some common assumptions like the distinction between popular and classical music collectors do not hold. Our analysis identifies organizing schemes commonly used on a day-to-day basis. We found that participants often rely on overrides or exceptions to their organizational schemes that they consider idiosyncrasies. However, our findings illustrate that those idiosyncratic behaviors are more common than participants believe. Our analysis reflects upon prior research and on the relationship between physical and digital artifacts, relating computer supported cooperative work systems to contemporary media management applications. Our findings can inform the design of media management and media player software.
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Index Terms
- The organization of home media
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Reviews
George Popescu
Faced with an endless number of media items, people need more complex ways for organizing personal and home collections. This paper constitutes an in-depth study that starts by assessing individual and group needs for managing media, and ends with developing guidelines for media systems to meet users' expectations. Most notably, the paper offers a wide description and understanding of issues related to the management of personal collections in the "world of free music." Distinct from previous work, this paper focuses on the media repositories of 20 users, as well as the users' individual and group practices. The media repositories range in size. Through open-ended, semi-structured interviews, the authors developed strong insight into which strategies people use, and what motivations they have for organizing their media the way they do. The authors asked interviewees general questions about collecting and retrieving media content, and tested the participants' organizational schemes. The impact of the study concerns best practices for growing media collections. A successful system must embrace both individual and group needs, and must support easy information retrieval for both small and very large music and video collections. An important issue that users face is that of remembering which content they store. For this, they build multiple-level organization schemes to facilitate finding items. A very meaningful contribution of the paper is its insight on compilations, group subcollections, personal categories and playlists, and ways that some individuals borrow other organizational schemes. Additionally, based on user findings, important design guidelines arise such as merging partial collections of music for multiple individuals. Owners create media libraries based on the way they search for items, and systems need to adopt these user practices. Scalable systems can help people better manage their collections and use customizable organization schemes. Online Computing Reviews Service
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