I developed this workshop as part of my work as a graduate assistant with Reference, Research, and Scholarly Services at University of Illinois Libraries. It is part of the Savvy Researcher seminar series which teaches information skills for scholars and researchers. The workshop covers the rudiments of Personal Information Management in a scholarly context. It introduces the concept of PIM, and goes into some of the history of information overload and strategies and tools to deal with it. This is followed by a brief overview of the personal productivity community online, and other examples of PIM strategies and workflows in the wild.

The meat of the workshop focuses on building strategies to manage, organize, and access digital documents and annotations across multiple technological platforms and physical locations. It also introduces tools to put those strategies into practice, such as Dropbox, EverNote, and Delicious. Finally, it introduces the rudiments of making those tools work together to get the most out of your research and resources. It’s designed as a participatory workshop, and works best when there’s significant exchange between participants about their own information management problems and solutions.

In addition to the Prezi presentation below, the lesson plans are also available, including a thorough list of links to supporting resources online.