Editing metadata to support the content analysis, storage and retrieval of ancient documents

Digital archives containing images and detailed descriptions of cultural heritage objects are of primary importance in order to guarantee the preservation and to foster the fruition of many fragile artifacts of our culture and history. Digital elaboration of these digitalized images is frequently needed in order to improve their readability, and to correct degradations and damages. This paper presents a metadata schema and a metadata editor which support the description and the archiving of all elaboration and restoration activities performed. The archive allows one to perform content based searches of the original object's descriptions as well as of the results of the elaboration activities.