Queries in context: Access to digitized historic documents in a collaboratory for the humanities

In contrast to standard digital libraries, systems addressing the specific requirements of cultural heritage need to deal with digitized material like scanned documents instead of home digital items. Such systems aim at providing the means for domain experts, e.g. historians, to collaboratively work with the given material. To support their work, automatic indexing mechanisms for both textual and pictorial digitized documents need to be combined with retrieval methods exploiting the content as well as the context of information items for precise searches. In the COLLATE project we devised several access methods using textual contents, feature extraction from images, metadata, and annotations provided by the users.