A Web-Based - Multimedia - Collaboratory Empirical Work Studies in Film Archives

Max. 2000 char.) The Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval of Digitized Historical ArchiveMaterial (Collate) is intended to foster and support collaboration on research, culturalmediation and preservation of films through a distributed multimedia repository. The tool willprovide web-based tools and interfaces for collaborative work and content-based access todigital repositories for film archives, researchers and end-users. This report is based onempirical analysis of three film archives in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, andseeks to elicit the user needs for a collaboratory in this domain. Both the collection andanalysis of data have been organised according to principles of Cognitive Work Analysis(CWA) as pioneered at Risø (cf. Rasmussen, Pejtersen & Goodstein1994). Research basedwork on individual film projects is, due to international distribution and multiple versions,dependent on collaboration with international colleagues who mediate access to theircollections. Examining user-requests to the archives this report was able to draw oninformation collected by one of the archives relating to e-mail inquiries. Based on analysis ofthe raw data it proved possible to produce an analysis of the type of information requests thatarchives receive, the nature of the information they require and the kind of information theyprovide in terms of contextualising their interests. In this study there is an extra layer ofcomplexity in that the focus is on three institutions, which, though located in the same workdomain, are significantly different in their organisation. The approach adopted in this reportis, therefore, one that seeks to suggest implications for the implementation of a collaboratorysystem according to the organisation of the archives. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ DescriptorsCOLLABORATORY, FILM ARCHIVES, MULTIMEDIA, FIELD STUDIES____________________________________________________________________________________________Available on request from Information Service Department, Risø National Laboratory,(Afdelingen for Informationsservice, Forskningscenter Risø),P.O. Box 49, DK-4000 Roskilde, DenmarkPhone +45 46 77 46 77, ext. 4004/4005 Telefax +45 46 77 4013