From the project home page http://www.deutsches-filminstitut.de/collate/:
[COLLATE is] a Web-based collaboratory for archives, researchers and end-users working with digitized historic material. It… offers new ways of document-centered knowledge work to distributed user groups. European film heritage and censorship processes in the 1920s and 1930s were chosen as an example domain for the project. The developed COLLATE technologies, however, can easily be adapted to other application domains and usage contexts which are similarly information-intensive.
The current COLLATE collection of rare historic documents was provided by three major film and national archives from Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. It consists of about 20000 digitized document pages describing film censorship procedures related to historic films and enriched context documentation including press material and digitized photos and film fragments. Members of these institutions – film historians and archivists – worked as pilot users, employing the COLLATE system for detailed cataloguing of the document collection and for in-depth content indexing and annotation of relevant sub-collections.
At the end of the project we established both an innovative Web-based collaboratory with a comfortable work environment for in-depth knowledge work with the material and a comprehensive, selected digitized collection of rare historic documents on European historic film that was interpreted and annotated by a multination team of film experts.
Since the end of the project the achieved results have been maintained and made available to the public. The project partners plan to further promote the system, i.e. both the technologies and contents (first of all Fraunhofer IPSI as the coordinator and major technology delevoper and the Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF as coordinator of the content providers).
Source(s): Web-based solutions
Digital Medievalist 