I received word from the JASIST editor last Friday that the IV in PIM paper had not been accepted for publication. It included damning comments from two Reviewers which made me conclude that it isn’t worth trying another publication. Instead, I’m publishing the paper here. At least I know that it’s a coherent piece of work, which faithfully reports a non-trivial process, and from which has emerged two novel sets of ideas – a Model of ‘Decisions associated with Personal Information Collections’ and a list of ‘Retention Criteria for Personal Information Collections’ (the latter of which has already been of use in informing my choice of books for the Electronic Bookshelf work that I embarked upon a few weeks ago). From starting out with some vague questions about the worth of hardcopy documents in an increasingly electronic age, I’ve learned a lot more about the newly emerging PIM discipline, about the professional field of Archiving, about the relationship between Document collections and Memento collections, and about why I keep the physical artefacts that I keep. It’s been a worthwhile journey.