Our EAD files are delivered as HTML files to the web, being converted to HTML on the fly. They remain fully searchable SGML files, however, on our server, using the Open Text 5.0 search engine. This software also builds the indexes for searching, and this operation includes parsing against the EAD.DTD.
Our EAD project began with the New Australia Newspaper collection (a unified digital collection created from sources shared between the State Library of N.S.W. and the University of Sydney Library.) The finding aid created for this collection (which will expand to include other resources in 19th century and early 20th century Australian labour history and incorporate other holding institutions) was created from scratch, ie straight to mark-up. We have also worked on previously created print indexes to non-catalogued manuscript collections in the University of Sydney's Rare Book and Special Collections library. An EAD template was created for the conversion of these indexes from simple ASCII files to EAD-compliant finding aids. Creating the files has been with Author Editor, but also and increasingly with the non-SGML-aware text editor available on our main server.