Abstract: The digitization of ancient books in China developed for many years has obtained plentiful achievements.However, the retrieval of illustrations in ancient books has not been realized yet.This paper tries to explore the retrieval ways to the illustrations attached in the ancient book full text database through the recording items of ancient paintings＇ catalog,large search engines＇ retrieval function and the practice of thematic image database.

Key words: Ancient Book Database,Ancient Book Digitization,Ancient Book Illustration,Retrieval of Ancient Book