Digitisation
Years ago when I first started on family history, there was someone I think did scanning using a BOOKEYE professionally.
He went along to his local Records Office and made an offer. If they would loan him various books and records, he would scan them and return within days along with copies on CD-ROM which they coul use, to save wear and tear on the originals and also sell copies in their shop (this was in days before most of these were available online.
More recently, someone from the North of Scotland Archaeological Society saw something of interest in Ross-shire and could not find it on the old maps but someone suggested trying the Lovat Estate Archive. He went there and they had a set of map drawers in a chest with detailed maps from the 1700s.
He spent a couple of days cataloguing these then asked about the possibility of scanning. The estate wanted to clear the building used by the archive so they made an agreement where the estate hired a A0(?) scanner, volunteers scanned them using the hired scanner - many were too large even for that so had to be scanned in sections.
The maps all then went to the Highland Archive and the scans were put online by the National Library of Scotland. The files were far too big for laptops or home PCs so were taken down to Edinburgh on portable hard discs to be edited for easy access.
A similar project had previously done in the Borders where maps and plans were collected together from local estates and scanned.