Building a digital library containing digital elaborations of ancient documents

Digital archives containing digitized 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 processing of these images is frequently needed in order to improve their readability, to correct degradations and damages, and to analyze their contents. This paper presents a metadata schema and a metadata editor supporting the description and the archiving of all elaboration 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.