I want to come up with a better scheme for organizing files and folders on my PC and networked drives. I do photography plus sw and web design, so the file types are varied, including raw, TIFF and JPEG images, text and Word files, spreadsheets, C# and C++ source files, HTML, CSS, javascript, icon, and other sw development files, plus audio and video files in various formats. As of this morning I had about 40,000 files on my desktop PC and maybe another 100,000 files on networked storage, and I really DO need to search these from time to time. A typical example is that I'm writing some code and I know I once wrote a class to do something similar awhile back so I want to find it. This morning I wanted to find all the high-key studio shots I've done in the last few years to get ideas for a model shoot I have next week.
I am NOT looking for personal advice here - there have been several threads on this topic in the archives on ixda and invariably they are met with advice that begins with "Here's what I do . . . " I'm not interested in anecdotal accounts (yet) - What I AM looking for are sources of rigorous academic research on information organization and searching that I can use in developing a solution. A good solution should involve human factors and interaction design, information theory and information architecture, and data representation. Presumably I'm not the first person to try to apply some real science to this problem so I'm wondering what researchers have discovered. Thanks in advance. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
