The essence I'm after here is the "interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing information in digital libraries" identified by Wulf as the core of the Collaboratory --though he uses the term mostly with respect to geographically remote colleagues in asynchronous contact.
some links worth looking into:
Collaboratories: Scientists Working Together Apart
Collaboratories: Doing Science On The Internet
COLLABORATORIES: BRINGING NATIONAL LABORATORIES INTO THE UNDERGRADUATE CLASSROOM AND LABORATORY VIA THE INTERNET (Jim Myers, Norman Chonacky, Thom Dunning, and Eric Leber)
Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (U. Michigan) --and see also Collaboratory Builder's Environment [CBE])
EMSL Collaboratory Homepage (William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory [EMSL])
The Collaboratory relies on the development of new communications technologies - shared computer displays, electronic notebooks, virtual reality collaboration spaces ... (and ) integration of these communications technologies with scientific resources - instruments, data, analysis software, and the scientific literature...
BioCoRE ("a tool-oriented collaboratory for structural biology" at University of Illinois -- and another with a plethora of links to other Collaboratories)
DOE Collaboratory Pilot Projects
Global Collaboratory of the Global Affairs Institute at University of Syracuse (see also the Global Collaboratory Classroom)
Creating a Collaboratory in Cyberspace: Theoretical Foundation and an Implementation (Anitesh Barua, Ramnath Chellappa, and Andrew B. Whinston --University of Texas at Austin)
The Collaboratory Project [Northwestern University] "... is working to establish an easy-to-use network-based collaborative environment to support education that involves education, research, cultural, nonprofit, business, and industry communities in the greater Chicago area"
Setting up the Collaboratory Notebook from Learning through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis) Project
Baltimore Washington Collaboratory ("A Spatial Information Technology Initiative for Mapping, Monitoring, and Managing the Earth´s Resources")
The Collaboratory (LinguaMOO)
"We collaborate here...definition: "In the mediatrix, you throw yourself to others. You create through others. The media philosopher realizes painfully that she must sacrifice her beloved cogito, her cherished institutionalism, her age-old desire for total control to a communal process-in-the-making" (Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen, _Imagologies_ 8)."
The Triad Collaboratory at Stanford
A national collaboratory is a center without walls, in which the nation's researchers can perform their research without regard to geographical location interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries. The report adds that such a collaboratory is "more than a mere interconnection of computers" and offers in addition "a complete infrastructure of software, hardware, and networked resources to enable a full range of collaborative work among scientists."
Distributed Collaboratory Experimental Environments -- Science in Cyber Space
Report of the Expert Meeting on Virtual Laboratories (UNESCO)
The Virtues (and Vices) of Virtual Colleagues (Nancy Ross-Flanigan)
The DistView Collaboratory Toolkit
DistView is a framework for building collaborative applications. It provides group communication services that meet the various shared state management needs of collaborative environments. The services are provided by the Corona stateful multicast server and they are designed to support both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration over the World Wide Web, where collaborating clients may be dynamically downloaded over the internet.Written entirely in the Java programming language, DistView provides efficient support for multicast messages, a rich interface for group and session management, the ability to ensure uniformly sequenced message delivery, a lock-based distributed synchronization mechanism, and support for selective window sharing.
The DistView framework has been implemented and is currently extensively used in the context of the UARC project, an experimental testbed for wide-area scientific collaboratory work. This testbed is implemented as a large object-oriented distributed system on the Internet and provides a collaboratory environment in which a geographically dispersed community of scientists perform real-time experiments at remote facilities without having to leave their home institutions. Client applications supported by the Corona services provide the users with various facilities for remotely conducting their science. These include various shared data viewers for graphically displaying instrument data, a multi-party chat box for exchanging textual messages, and a notebook-like draw tool for saving and sharing notes, images and drawings.
The Collaboratory at San Francisco State
Learn why and how to use the Collaboratory - one of the most innovative classrooms on campus - for your very own class session or meeting; browse through a library full of Collaboratory tips and tricks; see what faculty and students think about this classroom; reserve the Collaboratory!
Knowledge Management Collaboratory at Drexel ("...envisioned to be a national center focused on the information dynamics of business. It will leverage the considerable IT capabilities within the College of Information Science and Technology with key industrial and academic partners. ")
The Collaboratory Concept from University of West Virginia
A Collaboratory is an open meta-laboratory that spans multiple geographical areas with collaborators interacting via electronic means -working together apart. Collaboratories are designed to enable close ties between scientists in a given research area, to promote collaborations involving scientists in diverse areas, to accelerate the development and dissemination of basic knowledge, and to minimize the time-lag between discovery and application.
Collaboratory : A Virtual Community
A Naturalistic Inquiry into the Collaboratory: In Search of Understanding For Prospective Participants (Joanne Twining)
French and Viles on Personalized Information Environments