The project "Modern access to historical sources" is a cross-border cooperation program between Bavaria and the Czech Republic. The project is an interdisciplinary project in collaboration with the NLP group of the University of West Bohemia, the State Archives of Pilsen and Bavaria, and West Bohemian Institute for Monument Conservation and Documentation (ZIP o.p.s.) and the pattern recognition lab (FAU). The project goals are: 1) First consolidation and online presentation of historical maps and plans on the common Czech-Bavarian history up to 1918 from Bavarian and Czech archives. 2) Clear presentation and selection of image files with the help of automatic image analysis, segmentation and indexing. 3) Intelligent full text access to documents by means of natural language processing.