I am a small business owner who has hundreds of paper documents/files
that I would like to capture and store on hard drive or cd-roms
instead of a file cabinet.  How do I do this?  I have a fairly high
resolution scanner already.  What else do I need?

Greetings!
You bascially have two options for storing your files, which you go
with really depends on what you want to do with the documents once you
have them scanned.

If you are looking to import, save and potentially edit them then you
will probably want to get what is called OCR software.  OCR stands for
Optical Character Recognition and what it does is convert the scanned
document into a text document.  One of the better OCR programs
available is OmniPage by ScanSoft.  OmniPage has been around as long
as I can remember and was giving good results 10 years ago when I used
it.

The disadvantage to using OCR software is that it is not perfect. 
Depending on the quality of your source material it could get letters,
words, etc wrong and if you are importing documents en masse you may
not want to spend the time checking over each one to make sure that it
got everything right.

This brings me to your second option, importing things as a PDF.  The
main disadvantage of going this route is that you can not edit the
documents.  If all you want to do is archive though this is the
perfect solution.  This site has a great walkthrough with pictures on
how to go about scanning into PDF.

http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/ict/knowledgebase/scanning_and_acrobat/hp-scan-pdf.asp

These sites are also worth a read...

Tips for Better OCR Results
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/ocr/a/ocr.htm

Top 5 OCR Software for Windows
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/win/tp/ocr_win.htm

Hope that information helps you out.  If you have any questions or
need something cleared up please request a clarification before rating
my answer and I'll be happy to help.

Best,
djbaker-ga

Search Strategy:

scan document save pfd
://www.google.com/search?q=scan+document+save+pdf&hl=en&safe=off

best ocr software
://www.google.com/search?q=best+ocr+software&hl=en

Solid advice!  Thanks!!

There is actually a third option.  You could simply send your
documents to http://www.DigitalDocumentsLLC.com and have them prepped,
scanned,and indexed for pennies per page.

More info at 

http://www.DigitalDocumentsLLC.com