The paper presents in brief a project aimed at the development of a methodology and corresponding software tools intended for building of proper environments giving up means for semantics oriented, web-based access to heterogeneous multilingual archival collections. Some widespread international encoding standards for archival description and for representation of structured electronic versions of various kinds of documents have been used. An analysis is made on the applicability of appropriate Semantic web methods and technologies in order to provide versatile, user-friendly access to archival collections based on the semantics of their contents. Some practical results concerning the digitisation of a collection of archival documents from the period of the organization of the Sofia Municipal Government (1878 - 1879) and the development of a website presenting this collection are described in the paper.