Toward Zero-Effort Personal Document Management

Effective document management in the Information Age must require nearly zero effort, be economically reasonable, offer efficient retrieval methods, and satisfy users' concerns about security and privacy.During the past three years, the California Research Center has evaluated a radically simple approach to personal document management called Save everything!To achieve zero-effort document capture, the authors modified conventional printers, digital copiers, and fax machines to automatically save representations of every document processed. Their approach exploits users' familiarity with their personal document collection to retrieve documents without using filenames, paths, or keywords. The authors report a case study that demonstrates how Save everything! has proven to be an effective and cost-efficient tool for integrating document capture into daily work practices.