Work centered evaluation of collaborative systems - the Collate experience

The paper presents a qualitative empirical evaluation of a collaboratory for interactive knowledge integration within the domain of film archive research. The empirical evaluation of the Collate collaboratory was conducted in an evaluation workshop where professional users from three national film archives interacted. The evaluation workshop found that the facilities in the prototype did not support the collaborating users' strategies for knowledge integration, and that there was a need for an integrated and uniform representation of the semantics of their common workspace.