Haven't look at them in half a decade but smart pens always seemed like a solid idea to meet this need. Livescribe was the primary one I looked at years ago but I know there were multiple competitors and technologies available. The end goal being that when you write on paper the strokes are saved digitally. Now tablets are probably nearly completely taking digital handwriting over but I've never felt as comfortable writing on glass screens as on paper.
I picked it up during the Kickstarter campaign. If it has one advantage, it will auto-send your notes to one/more preset destinations out of seven, like email it to you or someone else, send to Evernote, OneNote, etc. It's worked alright for me so far.
I never much liked the writing on glass feeling, either. Growing up I was a bibliophile and always preferred working with paper. I'm trying this out as a happy middle.
If you only need archival, it might be easier to get an autofeeding scanner like a ScanSnap and scan all of the pages when you're done with a notebook. I used mine to scan a lot of old notebooks before throwing them away.
