A recent digitalization project of the textual and iconographical fund of Department of Archaeology Library of the Catania University, one of the largest and oldest among Italian academies, presented the challenging problem of the iconographical resources on glass plates coated by silver halide. The Library has an archive of about 3,000 glass plates. Several of these are damaged and fractured. Acquisition of these images with a scanner or with a digital camera, after a manual recomposing of the sherds, leaves badly visible gaps and fracture lines. This happens because of an uncorrect alignment of the fragments or for the lost of the emulsion. To solve this problem and to introduce an efficient process to restore a large amount of fractured glass plates, we developed an automatic method for the virtual restoration of this large dataset based on the use of image processing techniques. The paper describes the proposed processing pipeline and discusses the results obtained insofar.