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If you examine them, you will see that the maps are various forms of conical projections, not rectangular Mercator projections. They only approximate projectable images in the equatorial regions, and would not lend themselves to significant orthorectification. Their margins would need to be removed if they were to be used in adjacent pairs, and in some cases copyright issues would have to be addressed.

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As long as they were all produced by US Government agency, there should not be any copyright issues. You can't scan a US Government document and then claim copyright.

Collars can also be easily removed. I would actually leave the collars in and just make it so only one map can be viewed at a time so there is no overlap issues.

As for projection issues, any decent GIS program should be able to address that. For example here is Geologic Map of the United States that I did for Google Earth. The original map was a 23,000 x 15,000 JPG in conic projection. I georeferenced it and then converted to Geographic projection for GE.

Don't get me wrong, it would be an incredible amount of work to georeference all of these. But what a great resource that would make.

I'd be willing to help out, but it's too much work for one person.

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Matt Fox
Google Earth Library