Web-based Collaboration Support in a Digital Library on European Historic Films - the COLLATE Project
Various Web-based collaboratories have been employed since the early 90ies mainly in the natural sciences, but in art and humanities there are only few efforts and systems with very limited functionality. Whereas preservation and organisation of historical knowledge may be comparable, work processes in interpreting sciences are often different. Especially the process of compiling arguments, counterarguments, examples, definitions and references to historical source material – which is the prevailing method in the humanities – may profit from an electronic environment that improves the capacity and reach of the individual knowledge worker.
Another aspect of collaboratories is their capability to enable virtual teams to work together almost as if they were at the same location. Although many informal contacts between cultural archives constitute specific professional communities, they so far lack effective technology support for collaborative knowledge working. The WWW can serve both as communication platform for such communities and as gateway for document-centred work in such digital libraries and archives.
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