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Towards the Integration of Language Tools Within Historical Digital Libraries

During the last years the campaign of mass digitization made available catalogues and valuable rare manuscripts and old printed books vie the Internet. The Manuscriptorium digital library ingested hundreds of olumes and it is expected that the volume will grow up in the next years. Other European initiatives like Europeana and Monasterium have also as central activities the online presentation of cultural heritage. With the growing of the available on-line volumes, a special attention was paid to the management and retrieval of documents within digital libraries. Enabling semantic technologies and intelligent linking and search are a big step forward, but they still do not succeed in making the content of old rare books intelligible to the broad public or specialists in other domains or languages. In this paper we will argue that multilingual language technologies have the potential to fill this gap. We overview the existent language resources for historical documents, and present an architecture which aims at presenting such texts to the normal user, without altering the character of the texts.