This project concerns the management of a multimedia database (text and image) of historical papers representing ancient watermarks. The current database contains roughly 3'000 images of such watermarks; the system allows archival and retrieval by means of textual or morphological criteria. During the archival phase, textual description are stored, as well as descriptive primitives extracted together with the watermark itself by image analysis methods. For the retrieval phase, several types of queries are supported; they allow textual search on the basis of the accompanying descriptions, morphological search according to global characteristics, and shape-based search on the basis of the watermark shape.