Annotating Illuminated Manuscripts: an Effective Tool for Research and Education

The aim of this paper is to report the research results of an ongoing project that deals with the exploitation of a digital archive of drawings and illustrations of historic documents for research and educational purposes. According to the results on a study of user requirements, we have designed tools to provide researchers with innovative ways for accessing the digital manuscripts, sharing, and transferring knowledge in a collaborative environment. We have found that the results of scientific research on the relationships between images of manuscripts produced over the centuries can be rendered explicit by using annotations. For this purpose, a taxonomy for linking annotation is introduced, together with a conceptual schema which represents annotations and links them to digital objects.