http://www.collate.de

COLLATE - Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval of Digitized Historical Archive Material

The R&D project COLLATE (IST-1999-20882) was funded by the EU within the "Digital Heritage and Cultural Content" activities. It ran from September 2000 until the end of 2003.

Within COLLATE we designed, implemented and evaluated in real life a highly innovative Web-based collaboratory for archives, researchers and end-users working with digitized historic material. It is one of the first working collaboratories in the Humanities. COLLATE 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.

Very impressive work but not very user friendly yet. You have to adjust your screen resolution to 1280*1024, most texts right now are only in German or Polish and the whole Java application is very slow and takes up all your computer's memory (well at least mine).

The texts are really good scans and there's alot to be found there though. I retrieved a nice article about Fritz Lang's M. So keep an eye on the project.