Great thoughts from everybody!  I would definitely agree that the scanning should be done in-house - and ours is.  If the item cannot be scanned on our own high-quality scanner (say, its dimensions are too large) then we find a place to out-source the project.  In the meantime, the item(s) is in our possession with a temporary receipt.     Keeping up with the times and ever changing file formats certainly needs to be thought of, hence backups and extra copies.  I would say that the better your scanning/graphic program is now, the better off you will be in the future.  There are programs that create lossless, uncompressed files which take up large amounts of space but are very high quality files.

This may not be the perfect solution for everybody but it is working well for us, and it is just one thought in a pool of others.  I would suggest taking all of these suggestions and discuss them with a collections committee, board of directors, or other group of people to get a consensus on what is best for your institution.  
Best of luck!
Sylvia

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