MATION Given their imperfect input/output technologies, finding information on tiny devices can be highly problematic. Researchers, however, are working on tech- nologies that promise to make finding hard-to-access information a snap. Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC), for instance, have created a new tool for organizing and visualizing collections of electronic mail. The system is designed to help legal researchers, historians, and archivists, as well as ordinary business people, deal with large e-mail archives. Developed by Anton Leuski, a researcher at the USC School of Engineer- ing's Information Sciences Institute, the eArchivarius system uses sophisti- cated search software developed for Internet search engines like Google to detect important relationships between messages and people. The technology takes advantage of inherent clues that exist in e-mail collections and then automatically creates a vivid and intuitive visual interface that uses spheres grouped in space to represent relationships. In an experimental exercise, USC researchers collected e-mail exchanges conducted between Reagan administration national security officials. The visu- alization showed some e-mail recipients closely packed toward the display's center and their most frequent correspondents bunched into a tight cluster. Less frequent correspondents were literally out of the loop, with their spheres located far out on the display's periphery. Besides correspondence activity, spheres representing people can also be arranged under other criteria, such as the content of the authored messages. The display configuration would then show communities of people who con- verse on the same topic and the relationships among those communities. With the eArchivarius system, selecting any e-mail recipient opens a new window, which provides a list of all the people with whom the selected person exchanged correspondence. A time-graphed record also shows when the FINDING INFORMATION exchanges took place. "For a historian trying 