I want to have them archived in either .gz or .bz2 format with a date file naming scheme.
What is the best way to set this up?
#!/bin/bash
DATE=`date +%d%m%y`
cp access_log $DATE
gzip $DATE
...will copy access_log into a file named as the date (ddmmyy in the above example) and then put it into .gz format. You can then schedule it to run every day using cron, as explained in Air's cron tutorial [webmasterworld.com]