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I do some volountary work, scanniing,from a colection of two million negatves donated by our local newspaper to the South West image bank.These willl in due course be available on the Web.10,000+ done to datebut catalouging is advanced enough to be useful for the enquiries whic are coming in.
We have a collection of old maps ,mostly early ordinance survey street maps of Plymouth,out of copyright and some in poor condition.We would like to be able to view thm on screen for the convience of searchers and to save them from damage.

I have scanned maps quiet often using a standard desktop scanner and then importing the sections into photoshop and then stich them together to give one large map.

I would keep the scanning resolution fairly low - around 100 dpi - or the file size will quickly become too big. This should be large enough to show adequate detail.

Once you have stiched all the sections together you can then crop and tidy up the image, a painstaking process depending on how far you want to take it.

I dont know if you will be allowed to but, it can pay to stick fragile old documents such as maps to a large backing sheet of either paper or material, such as a thin canvas. It depends on the owners I suppose but it is one way of stopping them from deteriorating further. Unfortunately maps do tend to fall apart at their folds in particular. Something like spray mount or photo mount is very good for the purpose of sticking to a backing sheet.