A Multimedia Information System for Governmental Historical Documents

A multimedia information system has been developed to provide free or structured search in a collection of historical documents belonging to the Arquivo Público Mineiro, a state Government Institution responsible for the gathering, preservation and distribution of historical documents of Minas Gerais state, in Brazil. The Arquivo Público Mineiro stores about 7 million document pages and nowadays has an incipient level of informatization. The historical collection choosen for this work gathers textual documents, photographs, images and video about the personal and political life of Artur Bernardes, a former brasilian President and one of the most important celebrity of the earlier republican period of Brazilian political history. The collection suns up to 40,000 documents and a subset of it was selected to be part of the proposed system. The Multimedia Information System was developed with the most up-to-date Information Technologies such as object-oriented database management system, hypertext and World Wide Web publishing languages. The present work defines a flexible client/server architecture which allows the use of multiple hardware and software platforms proper to the implementation of information systems based on the use of multimedia database to integrate different types of complex data such as free-form text, image, video and audio. User queries to the document database will be provided through keywords or the aggregation of free text terms. The system also provides, beyond all of this query capabilities, interfaces for image processing during the presentation of result set for the user.