storing & searching docs

Slightly off-topic perhaps but I'm looking for general input here. New idea for a project - save the minutes of my firehouse meetings into a mysql table and build a ui to search them for words and such. The docs are written in Word currently. My simplistic idea is to perhaps convert them to something other than Word format and then to store them into a field of a mysql record with the meeting date as a key field. Of course having them online I should also allow for viewing as a document in something close to their original (?) format. Any ideas - pro or con - on this idea?