The character images are the kernel in the research work of ancient Chinese characters. Nowadays, more and more optical sensing device such as scanners and digital cameras are used for transforming ancient Chinese books into digital images for character research instead of paper documents to overcome the difficulties resulted from the rarity and fragility of ancient documents. How to cooperate the images with researchers in web environment becomes a key topic for the higher efficiency and quality of research work. In this paper, considering the requirements in research work of ancient Chinese characters, a web-based cooperation and retrieval model of character images is constructed which consists of several modules including ancient Chinese image management and retrieval, research work cooperation, research conclusion data management and so on. The key techniques employed in this system are discussed. Firstly, the cooperation mechanism of ancient Chinese character images was designed to make character images cooperate with researchers to avoid the occurrence of the situations that a character image is analyzed by several researchers simultaneously or not assigned to any personal for long time. Secondly, the method of integrated image-text arrangement was constructed to adapt to the special situation of ancient Chinese character research that their study conclusion records often contain the mixture of text and images. Thirdly, the conclusion record sorting algorithm by Chinese character radicals was proposed which could arrange the records according to various kinds of dictionary radical orders to meet the needs of research works. Finally, the global and local retrieval method of ancient Chinese character images is proposed for researchers to search the similar character images in database with the global or local area features of character images. The experimental results show that the system constructed with the proposed model has effective assisting function for the research work of ancient Chinese characters.