Collecting bulky series of paper materials happens very often in an institution as large as the Archives de Paris. Questions arise of how to give access to those materials and how to produce finding aids well suited to their many diverse uses. The numerous specific application programs that are used by the offices of origin of the archives can provide precious metadata for the archivist. Using the EAD DTD in order to preserve and recycle that information can be one way to solve a double problem: the description of modern serial paper-based public records and the enhancement of value for a certain type of electronic record. The use of the EAD DTD presented in this paper is a bit unusual in some ways. It reveals the DTD's capabilities as an archival interpretative tool for information created by different professional communities as well as its limitations as a tool for exchange of structured data. (Contains 6 notes.)