This paper presents the work carried out within the EU Cendari project to provide an appropriate customisation of the EAG format that would fulfil the expectations of researchers in contemporary and medieval history describing where they could find collections and documents of specific interests. After describing the general data landscape that we have to deal with in the Cendari project, we specifically address the data entry and acquisition scenario to identify how this impacts on the actual data structures to be handled. We then present how we implemented such constraints by means of a full TEI/ODD specification of EAG and point out the main changes we made, which we think could also contribute to the further evolution of the EAG setting at large. We end up providing a wider picture of what we think could be the future of archival formats (EAG, EAD, EAC) if we want them to be more coherent and more sustainable at the service of both archives and researchers.