I work for a student newspaper, and we are trying to get a collection
of old issues available online, we plan to try OCR, but compressed
images will work to.

We have about 20 microfiche sheets in mediocre condition (fully
legible) - they were photographed from open papers, so the look a bit
rough on the edges of each page.

Anyway, we need these scanned, our medium-end Epson scanner with
transparency adapter did not get legible resolution except on
headlines. Photographing our microfiche viewer did not seem feasable,
and our local library charges $.35 per page for copies of microfiche
pages, a bit much for our volume, plus scanning labor.

So - we need a service that will do, either in the San Francisco Bay
Area or the US by mail that will scan microfiche. It seems easy, but I
have had no luck so far.

A quick Google search for "microfiche scanner" gives you a whole host
of services to use. I am not sure if they will be within your price
range though.

If you get it scanned to PDF, software is available to convert it back to text.