Advice for using Acrobat/PDF to preserve 110-year-old book

Question

I am a volunteer on a project for our historical society. The only known copy of a rare book from the early 1890's was found containing valuable historical and genealogical data (10,000 names which we indexed) plus woodcut portrait images. It will be an extremely important and popular resource if we can get it into a universal format such as PDF. I really need EXPERT advice.
The book itself is deteriorating, and literally crumbling. Each page was scanned (and can't be re-scanned due to its fragility) and the resulting tiff images were repaired to replace the missing pieces using the Paint program, a painstaking process taking hours per page. (About 200 kb each)
We have been trying to combine the 256 full-page tiff images by pasting them into MSWord documents containing 20 of the page images each, and then making PDFs of each 20-page document.
The tools we have available are: Acrobat 4.0 on my home computer and Acrobat Standard 6.0 on my work computer, Word 2003 and Word 2000, Paint, Microsoft Picture Editor and Microsoft Picture Manager.
I want to be sure the many hundreds of hours of work that has gone into this so far will not be lost for the future. What can I do to ensure a file that can be read on-screen, can be printed for people asking for copies, and will be readable into the future? I see that 8.0 is now the standard. Am I risking that no one will be able to open these in the future using 4.0 or 6.0?
The PDF documents made with the 4.0 Acrobat have the nicest, clearest print images while the 6.0 appear smeary in print but OK on screen. We have tried all types of different settings for Acrobat 6.0 yet the results have all been the same - nothing we do seems to change the appearance but the file size increases.
Can someone who really knows the workings of these programs please give me some advice on what settings to use to optimize the results and preserve our work for the future? If you or someone you know can talk an amateur thru this, it would be a great service. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

> We have been trying to combine the 256 full-page tiff images by pasting
> them into MSWord documents containing 20 of the page images each, and then
> making PDFs of each 20-page document.
Word might be introducing it's own compression into the workflow (blurring
the image, data loss), and it does not store this type of data efficiently.
Instead of using Word, I would recommend using Irfanview (freeware) to
combine the 256 TIFF files into a single multi-page TIFF file
(View/Multi-page images/Create Multi-page TIFF...). Use the LZW compression
option (no data loss) in Irfanview when combining to keep the file size down
(that's if there are any color or grayscale images, otherwise use CCITT Fax
4 if they are all monochrome).
You can then open and print the multi-page TIFF from Irfanview to Acrobat to
get a complete PDF file. You can experiment with different compression
settings when printing the TIFF to PDF. You can disable image compression
and downsampling when creating the PDF to preserve image quality, but you
will end up with a pretty large file (will people be downloading it from a
web site?). If the images are grayscale or color then try JPEG medium
compression with 200 dpi downsampling as a starting point and see how that
looks. To save time when testing compression settings, just print one
typical page from the project. Then you will know what settings to use when
printing the entire 256 page file to PDF.
Also the multi-page TIFF, like a single page one, would be a pretty good
option as an archive format (and all the pages will be in order in a single
file).