: This paper deals with the topic of the retrieval of document images focussed on a specific application : the ornaments of the Hand-Press period. It presents an overview as a result of the work and the discussions undertaken by a working group on this subject. The paper starts by giving a general view about the digital libraries of ornaments and the associated retrieval problematics. Next, main issues related to these problematics are discussed : image enhancement, block tracking, visual comparison and content based retrieval. Conclusions and open problems arising from this overview are at last discussed at the end of the paper. Keywords : ornament, retrieval, tracking, comparison, visualization, content-based