Many museums and libraries digitize their collections of historical manuscripts, to preserve the historic documents and to make them public. The collections are available in image format and they need manual annotation to be accessible and exploitable. The problem with the manual annotation is that they are expensive and tedious. Hence the reuse of users’ experiences, by tracing their actions during the annotation process, helps other users to accomplish repetitive tasks in a semi-automatic manner, and assists difficult tasks. In this article we present a digital archive model for online ancient manuscripts. This application offers an annotation service online for this type of documents, an assistant for a semi-automatic annotation, and a tracing system that saves traces of important actions in order to reuse them later in a recommender system.