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The L3S Research Center is building a new test collection to compare performance of Personal Information Management (PIM) Systems. The effective evaluation is a crucial problem in PIM. While evaluation methodologies for Web information retrieval and in digital libraries are well-developed, the experiments with the advanced desktop tools are neither repeatable nor comparable. As privacy concerns do not allow to copy and distribute personal data outside the research lab, we suggest to overcome this problem by creation of desktop datasets within different research groups using a single methodology and a common set of tools. A dataset can include not only a static snapshot of the desktop documents, but also the logs of user activity on the desktop within several last months. We developed the structure of the required dataset and a set of logging tools. A sample dataset collected within the L3S Research Center. While it is not possible to share it outside L3S because of privacy concerns, we are able to perform PIM evaluation internally. Our dataset contains information about user's Web queries, clickthrough history, focus switching between different applications, timestamps for opening/closing/editing the text files and email messages, etc.

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