The collection had been assembled from various film and state archives by Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF, Filmarchiv Austria and Národní Filmový Archiv in the framework of the EU-funded project 'COLLATE: Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval of Digitized Historical Archive Material'. COLLATE, running from 2000 to 2003, created a collaborative online working environment for cataloguing, indexing and annotating those documents. However, after the end of the project, the assembled material had only been available within a closed system. In order to bring the material back online for EFG, Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF joined forces with experts from the Department of Multimedia and Internet Applications at the FernUniversität in Hagen, migrating the stock to a new public online system. Full-scale search and access of the collection will be possible via the EFG and Europeana portal later this year.