My boss knows I majored in history, so he brought in a box of documents for me to look at and figure out what to do with. I looked through them and figured out which ones were already available electronically through university libraries and the like, and I actually found a couple that weren't available anywhere. I also have a couple things that are interesting in other ways, like, his however-many-great grandpa worked for two railroads for a combined time of about 40 years, and in that time he apparently kept all of the train tickets he ever bought. I have those in a big stack too. Apparently when he died they were all mailed to a relative; the packaging is torn open, but I still have the original packaging from when they were mailed in the 50s.
My first instinct was to start taking pictures of everything, but there's just too much here for one person to scan. I could probably scan the tickets by myself, but the books are just too big a task. What can I do with these to make sure they get recorded somewhere, and is there any value in recording the books? I'm going to scan the tickets regardless because that'll likely have some personal value to my boss, but I'm not sure he cares so much about the books. The one I'm most interested in knowing the relative "interestingness" of is a manual on diesel engine maintenance from the early 30s. These years are approximate, also, but I do have exact years. I'll go get the exact years later, but there's a person sleeping on me right now.
EDIT: I'm looking through some of the pictures I already took, and I found something I forgot about; there were also a couple hairs in the books, near the binding on a couple pages. I took pictures but didn't touch them. Most of the books were clearly either never read, or just put on a shelf for reference, but never actually used. The book I found the hairs in was the one that had the most signs of having actually been frequently used. My boss is also in to genetics and tracing his family tree back and whatnot; is there any chance that any meaningful data could be extracted from a couple hairs?
EDIT: Correction! The earliest document is from the 1890s.
A good place to start is a museum with an interest in railroad history. They can give you a better idea of what you have and how common it is.
You can choose to donate it, and they will digitize it if they want to, or you can keep it. Museums aren't generally interested in only receiving images/scans of items because they're easy to manipulate and can lose a lot of the context of the originals.
It's entirely up to you whether you keep them or not, but if you have any questions about specifics, especially if you choose to keep them, take your own images, and keep them safe, shoot me a message and I can offer some advice.
I have a diploma in applied museum studies and have worked for a handful of local and national institutions, so I have some insight.