Archiving and retrieving digital elaborations of ancient manuscripts

Digitalization of ancient manuscripts is becoming a standard in libraries and archives. In many cases, manuscripts suffer of degradations that may require performing different types of elaborations on the digital images, in order to improve their legibility and analyze their contents. Digital archives containing digital images of manuscripts and all the elaborations performed on these images are thus of primary importance for a complete exploitation of all available information regarding the manuscripts themselves. This paper presents a metadata schema suitable for the management of such an archive. The archive will offer the possibility of describing, storing and accessing all the available manuscript versions, and to search them based on their content.