In this paper, we would like to present some ideas on the use of the archival standards in various contexts that exemplify the complexity of such standards and provide users with innovative ways to handle EAD content. Our main idea is that researchers, Cultural heritage institutions, archival portals and standards maintenance bodies could greatly benefit from a multiscale modelling of archival data, but also from multiscale representations and documentations. A first step is on the way to being cleared in the domain of the management of heterogeneous archival sources in one single environment, namely a federated portal, like in EHRI. We built a methodology based on a specification and customisation method inspired from the long lasting experience of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) community. In the TEI framework, one has the possibility of defining project-specific subsets or extensions of the TEI guidelines while maintaining both the technical (XML schemas) and editorial (documentation) specification within a single framework. Using the same framework for EAD data allows us to express precise content-oriented rules combined with some interesting possibilities of integrating the human readable documentation in the validation process.