A Historic Documentation Repository for Specialized and Public Access

Abstract

The web is currently the information searching and browsing environment of choice for scholars and lay users alike. The goal of most cultural heritage applications is to interest a large audience, and therefore web interfaces are being developed even when part of their functionality is not offered to the general public. We present a web-based interface for managing, browsing and searching a repository of historic documents. The documents pertain to a region which has been an important regional power in medieval times and their originals are under the custody of the Portuguese national archives. The challenges of the project came from its requisites in three aspects: rigorous archival description, the incorporation of document analysis and a flexible search interface. The system is an instance of a multimedia database framework providing both browse and retrieval functionalities to end users and configuration and content management services to the collection administrators.

Supported by FCT under project POSC/EIA/61109/2004 (DOMIR).