Memsy: Keeping Track of Personal Digital Resources Across Devices and Services

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly difficult for users to keep track of their personal digital resources given the number of devices and hosting services used to create, process, manage and share them. As a result, personal resources are replicated at different locations and it is often not feasible to keep everything synchronised. In such a distributed setting, the types of questions that users want answers to are: Where is the latest version of this document located? How many versions of this image exist and where are they stored? We introduce the concept of global file histories that can provide users with a unified view of their personal information space across devices and services. As proof-of-concept, we present Memsy, an environment that helps users keep track of their resources. We discuss the technical challenges and present the results of a lab study used to evaluate Memsy’s proposed workflow.