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Hi Wayne,
What a GREAT and IMPORTANT project. I do wish you well.
A couple of points and thoughts:
Your 70 years of your magazine: In my organization someone also had not only volunteered to take care of our journal but had paid a "professional" company to do the work. I only saw the result long after the work had been done and was very disappointed to see that it also had been scanned into JPG and also scanned at low resolution so that if you zoomed in you not only got immediate pixelation but also you could see the jpg degradation caused by scanning into jpg.
Here's what I'm talking about:
You've probably seen this when a co-worker makes a flyer about an upcoming social event and sends it out as a JPG as opposed to a PDF.
JPG is fine for the last stop for images but when you have a dark color against a light color, such as what you have with text, the jpg degradation is very ugly.
When you're doing this scanning it is very important to scan to the TIF format. Yes you will be blown away about the size of the images but do not worry. My regular scanner is a flatbed Epson (V800 Photo) and when I scan a standard letter sized image at 100 % at 300 ppi, the file storage size is around 8+ MB. But after converting to a PDF via Acrobat Pro, a full page of text (no images) will convert to about 70-150 KB. As you add images, the storage size will go up but nothing tremendous.
I appreciated your comments about using your scanner to scan all that's there taking you beyond your expiration point. Over my years of photography, I had some 10,000 slides that I wanted to digitize. To get a good quality, high-resolution scan can easily take about 5 minutes each. That also would have taken me past my expiration point. What I ended up doing was to photograph each of the slides. I wrote a complete description of this process and Adobe posted this here:
The important issue about scanning is that it is not all that different than photography: the better quality the original document is, and the less "photoshopping" you need to do. And from that, the much higher quality the end result will be.
I was delighted to see that you appreciated my comment "faster is not always better." That must always be weighed against the realities of time. It's a compromise that only you (or whomever is doing the work) must balance.
With that in mind, I do suggest that you set aside (say) 10 pages, scan these exact same pages at various levels of quality and then process them all the way through the OCR process. When you are done, then in Acrobat convert them to a Word document and look for those tale tale red underlines showing questionable spelling. Those will be either (1) pronouns it doesn't recognize, (2) hyphenated words (e.g., var-ious), or (3) actual OCR mistakes (e.g., "ri" being seen as an "n"). As a Word document it's much easier to see and review the mistakes.
I am also going to suggest you look at this other blog I wrote that Adobe published on how to create a clean scan to get a clean PDF:
https://forums.adobe.com/community/creativepipeline/blog/2018/01/22/scanning-clean-search-able-pdfs
One thing that photography has taught me is that EVERYTHING in life is a compromise. If you want to take a photo of your kids in front of the mountain you have a choice as to whether you take a photo of the mountain with your tiny kids in front of it or a photo of your kids with a part of the mountain in the background. You cannot have both. (Well, you can if you make a billboard-sized print out of the photo...)
You know the amount of time you have, you know your knowledge and experience. The good news is that by the time you finish this project you'll be on these boards helping others. (And I look forward to the help!)
Please share your progress on this project and thank you for doing it!
Wow, GARY! I feel like I won the lottery with the wealth of valuable information and the details provided in the links!
Either you have ESP, or have my house bugged 
Later on I was going to ask about digitizing photos and negatives - yet another item on my radar. Yes, I used my Nikon DSLR, with macro lens to 'copy' old family photos - some from the 1880's. But there are several storage bins of old photos, some from WWII, lots from my earlier years, that I sometimes hear screaming at me to take action! Your links are priceless!
Now, back to the scanning process, I certainly made many of the mistakes that you mentioned with processing newspaper clippings, but am eager to try again with the hundreds of yellowed WWII related clippings I now have.
As I document my procedures, I will condense all of your suggestions into a checklist.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
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