Many museums and libraries digitize their collections of historical manuscripts, to preserve the historic documents and to make them easily accessible. The collections are available as digital images and they need annotation to be accessible and exploitable. The annotations can be created manually, automatically or semi-automatically. 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. In this article we present a digital archive model and prototype of a collaborative system for the management of online ancient manuscript. The application offers an online annotation service, an assistant for semi-automatic annotation, and a tracing system that saves traces of important actions in order to reuse them later in a recommender system.