Multimedia information extraction and digital heritage preservation This book contains efforts on digital preservation of both textual and non textual matters. In addition it focuses on digital content and community building for archiving and global sharing of cultural and heritage resources. It contains work ranging from multimedia digital library development image retrieval from traditional metadata based to content based indexing and retrieval making it a blend of traditional and contemporary issues in the digital preservation and information extraction of heritage documents Multimedia Information Extraction and Digital Heritage Preservation is an edited volume of contributions by various distinguished researchers on issues in digital libraries particularly in connection with heritage documents. This excellent collection of 20 papers covers various aspects of the problem. Cultural and scientific heritage resources are of fundamental value for human civilization and their preservation is of utmost importance to mankind. Such preservation work has two aspects. First the preservation of original objects and documents at source or in museums and two preservation of their imaged replica in digital form in libraries and other archives. The second approach is essential because objects may disintegrate due to age or ruin by disasters like earthquake fire flood war and also vandalism. The imaged replica and associated digital database will at least prove their past existence and provide sufficient information if they are wiped out of the world. Even for physical preservation of the currently available heritage documents digital systems and approaches are of great importance in many ways The volume focuses on research oriented work which can help opening up new vistas of research for the research community and explore new mechanisms of retrieval of information from multimedia documents particularly from heritage documents apart from using the conventional methods This volume would find its place among personnel in libraries museums archives and other such institutions dealing with preservation archiving and retrieval of heritage documents. Among the academic community computer science library science and information science community will also benefit from this book