  While all individuals deal with increasingly large amounts of digital
information in their everyday lives and professionally, prior works suggest
visual artists have unique information management practices and challenges.
This study therefore examined the personal information management (PIM)
practices and challenges of six practising visual artists using guided tours
and short interviews. It was found that the visual artists had some unique
practices connected to their strong emphasis on serendipity, inspiration, and
visual dimensions of information. Like non-artists, the participants faced
challenges across all phases of PIM, chiefly an excess of information and
fragmented organisation, and they found it especially hard to assess how
personal and valuable their information could be. After characterising this
rarely discussed PIM demographic, we draw on the findings to provide concrete
recommendations for artists doing PIM, for information and cultural heritage
institutions, and for designers of PIM software.
