The amount and variety of information available today in digital form continue to increase at a rapid rate. To keep pace with these trends, knowledge workers must be empowered with enhanced information management capabilities in order to continue to work effectively. Enabling knowledge workers to personalize the information items with which they work is an important capability, one that can facilitate the ability to perform complex tasks. This paper examines a metadata based approach to supporting the personalization process for knowledge workers, especially those that must interact with diverse and distributed information objects. An architecture for supporting the personalization process is described along with a prototype personalization environment that is based upon it. Two of the primary characteristics of the approach are that it is metadata based and decentralized. The advantages of the approach are discussed, along with an examination of the challenges that it presents for ongoing and future research.