Adaptive binarization techniques are proposed for the restoration of degraded documents for Waferfiche™ archival. Waferfiche™ is a compact archival solution for long-term preservation of documents in a human-accessible image based format. Bi-level images are preferable for the lithographic fabrication utilized in Waferfiche™ production. Binarization of degraded documents poses challenges due to the tonal variations in the foreground text and background paper. Using dispersion and edge based measures, our methods are specifically optimized for preserving information while eliminating unwanted noise. In addition, we present several pre/post-processing techniques that improve image quality. The effectiveness of our methodology is experimentally demonstrated by images captured from Waferfiches. Adaptive binarization using dispersion and edge based noise elimination thus provide an effective restoration method for degraded documents for Waferfiche™ archival.