Great the Arctic will be booming while the rest of the planet is uninhabitable.

Where we work we have a number of maps, some older than 100 years and not in that great of shape. If they are in a frail condition we will put them in a protective sleeve before scanning in our large format scanner. Normally a large format scanner has rollers or something to pull the map through the scanner. The rollers could damage old frail maps. The sleeves we made are basically 2 large, thin (transparency thick), clear plastic sheets that are taped on three sides to make a pocket. Slide the old map into it and run it through the scanner. Scanners use light and there is the possibility of problems with reflections so you may have to play around with it some and find the right plastic sheets but it will work and it does a good job of protecting your maps.

You mentioned putting them in a safety deposit box, so you are talking off line storage. You probably dont want to raid them. It is just another point of failure weather you are talking a battery in a raid controller a software raid. I would just store them in a regular filesystem on large capacity drives. Simple, easy to plug in and start again. Having said that Tape is still king and the LTO 5 drives will be out this month (march 2010) according to both HP and dell reps that I have heard from. I would put one copy on Hard drive and one on tape. good redundancy; store them in different locations.

Blackberry did the same thing with the storm.