Google in the archives

The lethargy got me (although there wasn't a heck of a lot in blogland....although I didn't quite check) so I haven't posted in a spell....

One story that caught my eye today was this little number from The Industry Standard which asks what if Google's mission extended to public records?? An excellent question, and as we know, public perception of what has been digitized and what actually has been transferred are quite different. Ian Lamont here speaks about genealogy and how little there is available to help internet savvy searchers find more about their families. This simple seemign question brings to my mind a whole series of questions like what woudl Google's interests be in this? Would they then own the public records of what they scanned, like censuses (censusi?) or ship records? And would this indeed help the public sector as the documents would be scanned and thus would increased access for this insitutions' users? And again, with digitizing all these records, what becomes of the archivist? A good set of questions that I can see coming back in a few years.