> Al, you name came up in a discussion at the computer history
> museum. I read the bitsavers page but wonder if you might have
> some more advice on the question about production scanners for
> digitizing one's archives that I pose here

My current preference is the Kodak 2500D / Panasonic KV-S6xxx series SCSI
scanner for the bulk of my scanning. They can be had used for $500 or so and
will handle 11x17 documents. 400dpi monochrome is what I do the bulk of my
scanning in.

The main question are you scanning this for preservation, or access? If the later,
xerox-quality (400dpi bitonal) is adequate. Preservation (one-of a kind things
of substantial value) have different requirements. I think a week of someone's
time on a scanner is pretty optimistic. On a good day, I can get through a book
box worth of paper (roughly 5000 pages) without any postprocessing. The volume
of paper that I have (millions of pages) is one of the things that prompted my creation
of bitsavers.org over five years ago. Since that time, I've scanned several million pages
and post-processed (basic cleanup and pdf-ing) about 1/3 of it.

My advice is come up with a moderately priced duplex scanner, and set up a workflow
for dealing with the digitization. You are unlikely to get agreement on what to do for
postprocessing, scan at as high a resolution as you can afford (time, storage, etc.) and
do minimal postprocessing to make sure the scans you have are good (no missing pages..)

As far as a 'club' goes, check if the others have the same material that they want to scan
to try to minimize duplication.