Currently over 750 finding aids of archival collections at the IISH are available on the Web. Most of them have been encoded in EAD and are delivered in both SGML and HTML. The HTML version is created from SGML, not on the fly, but using a Perl-script. Besides to an alphabetical list the finding aids are linked to their MARC records and collection level descriptions. Full text searching through an search engine (WebGlimpse) is also possible. Presently the IISH works on delivering the finding aids in XML.
We have started with converting some 500 WordPerfect 5.1 files. These files were first prepared for conversion by checking for consistency and adding extra information and codes required. Conversion to EAD is done automatically with OmniMark. EAD files were (and still are) validated with Author/Editor. After the WordPerfect 5.1 files we have also converted our paper finding aids to digital format using EAD. We didn=t do OCR, instead all documents were rekeyed en encoded according to EAD. At present, we try to develop a suitable procedure to mark up the new finding aids. Information on archives and collections can also be found in an online catalogue (GEAC-geoweb) and on separate webpages on the archives. At both places links to the finding aids will be made.