Your struggle of wanting to search through scanned documents electronically is super relatable. It can be quite a hassle to manually sift through pages just to find a specific keyword. Your solution of using OCR to convert the documents into searchable pdfs is pretty smart, and I'm glad it's been working well for you!
As for running the conversion on the whole literature archive, it might be a bit too ambitious and time-consuming, but it would definitely be a game-changer for anyone looking to search through the entire archive. I use Smart Engines OCR SDK to make the process more feasible. Check it out!