A study on the personal information management practices among the Research Scholars of University of Kerala

This paper aims to understand how the research scholars of faculty of applied sciences in the University of Kerala manage personal information through internet services. Personal Information Management(PIM) refers to a set of activities a person perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use and distribute personal information for different purposes. Questionnaire method was employed for data collection and out of the 59 respondents, 69.6% females and 30.4% male scholars are using their lap tops for managing personal information. Majority of the respondents prefer e-mail as the most used internet service for personal information management with a mean value 2.41. Majority of the respondents agree that they know more about managing their personal information and apply it on research work. The study also revealed that major difficulties faced by research scholars are inadequate awareness of managing information via Internet. Most of the time research scholars store only that personal information that they want to share with others. Majority always afraid of putting their sensitive personal information at internet services because of privacy concern.