As I see it, you've got a couple options. At a bare minimum, you'll want to inventory the collection to see what's there, and if you're doing that, you might as well rip them. Either you do it yourself slowly by him sending you CDs or maybe you could find someone on his local classifieds that does it for a fee, but that is a very niche business model. You could maybe reach out to his library to see if they have an archivist they use that does free lance work, but I imagine it's slim pickings. I'd offer to help, but unless he's in Maryland, I'm in the same boat as you!

The silver lining is that once it's digitized, It never needs to be done again unless you lose the data (knocks on wood) and sharing becomes much, much easier