Our marked up documents are accessed through a search and retrieval system created in-house and based on I-site freeware. This system, we call SUUper Search, indexes and parses the marked up documents and also provides for web access. Searches can be conducted through the web and the hit list is translated to html on the fly for viewing. Many of the items in our archive are instantly viewable using hot links embedded in the item description.
We entered the mark up world with little or no need for retrospective conversion so our documents are "born digital." We mark up our documents using the WordPerfect SGML editor and have been very pleased with it. We have automated many of the more complex nested tag arrangements required at the item level by creating Word Perfect macros. This has worked so well that we have student employees that can mark up large finding aids after only a short supervised training period.