Nice work! For others with journals in the U.S., but not feeling up to all the scanning and transcription work, I volunteer with the American Diary Project (https://americandiaryproject.com/) based in Cleveland Ohio. You can donate journals to be archived and shared. It's only been established in the past few years, and all scanning/transcription is done by volunteers, but are currently evaluating more automated pipelines like OPs. So great to see it in practice!
Do you know of any similar organization that would be interested in tackling a lavishly written and illustrated school newspaper published in Germany from 1902-1906? It's about 50 issues total, each about 12 pages long, and I've already scanned them all; I just need somebody to do the heavy lifting of setting up the OCR/transcription pipeline that can handle old German script. (Bonus: the newspaper was co-created by the future wife of a pretty famous person.)