Toward Zero-Effort Personal Document Management

Integrating document capture into daily work practices and exploiting familiar retrieval methods are the keys to "Save everything!" - a radically new approach to personal document management from the California Research Center (CRC). To achieve zero-effort document capture, we modified conventional printers, digital copiers and fax machines to automatically save representations of every document processed. Our approach exploits users' familiarity with their personal document collection to retrieve documents without using filenames, paths or keywords.