But I don't see the complication on the tech side.

Getting the scanned copies is likely the most complex portion of this and is outside the realm of the site. The rest is just displaying static content and filling a Solr cluster with OCR data for search which is a trivial task with off the shelf OSS tools. Seems like a 2 week MVP project given how clunky the website is (why on earth does it move to the top of the page when I click the 'next' arrow when viewing the article, arg).