Collaborative Research and Documentation of European Film History: The COLLATE Collaboratory
Adelheit Stein, Jürgen Keiper, Laura Bezerra, Holger Brocks, Ulrich Thiel · 2004
Whereas various collaboratories have been established since the early 1990s in the domain of natural sciences, we find so far only few comparable efforts in the arts and humanities aside from experimental systems with very limited functionality. The COLLATE system is one of the first working collaboratories in the humanities. Based on extended user requirement studies it was developed and evaluated in real life for an application dealing with the heritage of historic European film making. The implemented system employs innovative technologies for digital information management in order to allow content-based access to the digitized document collections. It also provides a comfortable Web-based work environment for supporting distributed user groups in their collaborative, document-centered knowledge working. In this article we describe our collaboration concept and the resulting system design decisions, illustrating by some concrete examples how the current real-life users interact with the COLLATE system and their distributed collaboration team. 1 Collaboratories for the Humanities When scientists publish articles in journals like NATURE they describe specific results of their work gained from numerous experiments and detailed scientific research. They have recognized rules that