In 1999, it was necessary to build an interface for the Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive (the world's largest digital video archive at the time) that constituted over 120,000 hours of video of over 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors, rescuers and witnesses. In order to build this educational research interface, an interprofessional team was formed. Groups of professionals worked together on the interface design process from Fall 1999--Summer 2001 through the Online Inquiry Working Group series.

The overarching problem that this dissertation examines is how an organization develops a collaborative interprofessional group to build a public, educational research interface for a large video collection, and in what ways this group influences the design process. This problem was explored from two angles: the back of the interface (the archival system itself) and the front (the interface design process). This study examines the overall 2-year iterative process of the Online Inquiry Working Group series and key moments of interaction within particular Working Groups. Data was gathered from an ethnographic perspective by videotaping and then transcribing the Working Group series and collecting artifacts. A second phase of data collection involved conducting interviews with key participants of the Working Group after the conclusion of the series. These data were analyzed using domain analysis and discourse analysis.

This analysis led to three findings. The first set of findings is that preparation for participation is key to ongoing interprofessional interaction. When bringing together more than one interprofessional group to an ongoing interprofessional interaction, complementary preparation for participation is required. The second set of findings focus on issues related to valuing and incorporating the expertise of teachers and education researchers. These findings identified how bringing the educators into the design process in the early stages impacted the usability of the final product. The third set of findings examine what is gained by making the back of the interface visible so that end users have the ability to research an archive and how this process is critical to the support of the inquiry process.