This report represents the latest study in the activity on Ecological Information Systems conducted in the Center for Human Machine Interaction situated at Ris National Laboratory and the University of Aarhus. The purpose of this activity is to give a description of the characteristics of work domains that will serve to outline the general context of concern to design of collaboratories. In addition, a set of preliminary implications for the design of a collaboratory are derived from the cognitive work analysis. To anticipate, further research on this approach to the design of collaboratories will show how the preceding analysis is likely to lead to a novel theoretical framework, called Ecological Collaborative Information Systems (ECIS), required for the design of collaboratories. The intention is to illustrate how the general principles of ECIS can be instantiated to develop a concrete design product: A crossdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboratory to support customer service and professional research in archives. A web based Collaboratory Numerous valuable historic and cultural films and their sources are scattered in various national archives. Knowledge and usage of the multinational film material are severely impeded by access problems. To fully exploit the cultural film heritage internationally, a high degree of cross-disciplinary and international collaboration among professionals working with the film media is required. The Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval of Digitized Historical Archive Material (Collate) is intended to foster and support collaboration on research, cultural mediation and preservation of films through a distributed multimedia repository. The collaboratory will provide webbased tools and interfac..
