File managment, folders and tags

Written by Prasad Addagatla

In the article “File Management with Hierarchical Folders and Tags” Shanshan and Susan emphasizes the importance of managing and organizing files with the hierarchical folders which are prominent in the digital data files and tags which helps in easier search process of files. Hierarchical folders involve subfolders where the files are stored and one can find a particular file by checking each and every level of subfolders and folders. The author identifies risks involved in the hierarchical folders. Users have to use the search to “re-find files” which are already been saved. Hierarchical folders cause confusion and some files may be difficult to find because of deeper levels and also there are restrictions on the folder names. Some new systems are developed to avoid this problem which are “recall and recognition” and tagging. In the first one, the users have a rough idea of location of the file and they can identify the file by recognition. Tagging is a process of assigning the users own description to the files which is proven to be a good system for the file organization. This method overcomes almost all the problems of the hierarchical files and it’s the mostly used. Finally, the author concludes the article by conducting an experiment to find out which one of the systems hierarchical, tagging and hybrid (both hierarchical and tagging) is the best. The results show that there are quite a few people who use hybrid but the tagging system is the dominantly used system. But still research is going on to determine which system is the best one for the file management.

Work Cited:

Shanshan, M., Susan, W (2009) File management with hierarchical folders and tags. Proceedings of the 27th international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. Boston, MA, USA. ACM Press: 3745-3750.