Today people are storing increasing amounts of personal information in digital format. While storage of such
information is becoming straight forward, retrieval from the vast personal archives that this is creating poses
significant challenges. Existing retrieval techniques are good at retrieving from non-personal spaces, such as the
World Wide Web. However they are not sufficient for retrieval of items from these new unstructured spaces
which contain items that are personal to the individual, and of which the user has personal memories and with
which has had previous interaction. We believe that there are new and exciting possibilities for retrieval from
personal archives. Memory cues act as triggers for individuals in the remembering process, a better
understanding of memory cues will enable us to design new and effective retrieval algorithms and systems for
personal archives. Context data, such as time and location, is already proving to play a key part in this special
retrieval domain, for example for searching personal photo archives, we believe there are many other rich
sources of context that can be exploited for retrieval from personal archives