  Computer users spend time every day interacting with digital files and
folders, including downloading, moving, naming, navigating to, searching for,
sharing, and deleting them. Such file management has been the focus of many
studies across various fields, but has not been explicitly acknowledged nor
made the focus of dedicated review. In this article we present the first
dedicated review of this topic and its research, synthesizing more than 230
publications from various research domains to establish what is known and what
remains to be investigated, particularly by examining the common motivations,
methods, and findings evinced by the previously furcate body of work. We find
three typical research motivations in the literature reviewed: understanding
how and why users store, organize, retrieve, and share files and folders,
understanding factors that determine their behavior, and attempting to improve
the user experience through novel interfaces and information services. Relevant
conceptual frameworks and approaches to designing and testing systems are
described, and open research challenges and the significance for other research
areas are discussed. We conclude that file management is a ubiquitous,
challenging, and relatively unsupported activity that invites and has received
attention from several disciplines and has broad importance for topics across
information science.
