Personal Digital Libraries of Email

In this paper, I describe the results of user interviews that reveal problems in current email systems, including role conflict, high cognitive overhead associated with organization and retrieval, inability to navigate conversations and difficulties in addressing messages. I also describe the design of a prototype system with an underlying message store for the email collection. Services layered on top of the message store address many problems described by users through improved support for identity and role management, authority control and query interfaces. Many of the solutions described in this paper to improve management of personal email collections can also be applied to other digital library collections.