Historical documents as monuments and as sources

Abstract. The main functions of a digital library of historical documents are the digital recording of documents, transcriptions and translations of documents, subject indexing, annotation and retrieval. Using such a system, scholars can efficiently study the documents without involvement of the originals, thus ensuring the preservation of documents and the protection of researchers from exposure to potential health hazards. An important part of the study of historical documents consists of classifying the material and annotating it in such a way that retrieval is facilitated in the future. We present the development of a historical document management system that supports both digital library functionality and archival management of the original documents. This system includes semantic indexing and multifaceted classification of historical documents with the use of a built-in thesaurus aimed at attaining satisfactory levels of efficiency of the classification process, completeness and precision of the retrieved information, and user-friendliness