prometheus - das verteilte digitale Bildarchiv für Forschung und Lehre: neuartige Werkzeuge zur Bereitstellung von verteiltem Content für Wissenschaft und Forschung

"As part of its 'New Media in Education'-program the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is financing the cooperative university project 'prometheus - the distributed digital image archive for research and academic teaching' since April 2001. The aim of prometheus is to provide a unified interface to a conceptually very large number of different image data bases focused on history of art and archaeology. The basic philosophy of the project is, that the individual image databases can have arbitrary different formats, which are unified by a server acting as a technical - and potentially conceptual - 'broker.' Based on this joined image archive und its media specific potential, prometheus provides a variety of didactic units to support academic teaching and learning. On the 24th of March 2003, an association ('Verein') was founded to guarantee the long-term existence and further development of the project." (author's abstract)