Hello,
I don't know if the documents you have are already in the list of Al,
anyway if you are in willing to scan,
I think it would be better to scan st least at 300 dpi, possibly 600, in
grayscale (color images of course in color); apart from file size, the
files should be saved in lossless format, usually TIFF LZW.
Copy machine scanners usually save in various formats, as tiff or pdf, but
unfortunately the compression algorithm is often jpg, that gives artifacts
specially with black and white two tones images.
If a scanner saving lossless cannot be found, at least put the quality
factor to the max (minimum compression), or use an even higher resolution.
Post processing is another story.
Usually I take the high resolution grayscale images, clean, deskew, reduce
to final resolution 300 dpi and convert to black and white two tone images.
These can be compressed very well with tiff group3 algorithm, so in the end
the file size is acceptable. Then all images merged in a pdf.
Eventually you can also ocr it to add a search layer over bare images.
If you want, I can help you with batch processing.
Al: your list is very interesting, specially older versions of vms... do
you think you could let it available for folks? :)
Andrea