What if Google's mission extended to public records?

Excellent idea. While you're at it, think about the difference between "public record" and "one corporation controlling access to information". Putting this stuff online is a great idea. Putting all this stuff into the hands of one company is not.

Has anyone else noticed that you can search the OCRed text of the Google newspaper archive, but you can't actually download it?

Just a quick thing to add: I spoke with the CEO of Ancestry.com after I wrote this article, and he brought up an important fact relating to the digitization of public records: OCR technology doesn't work well with handwritten records from disparate sources, such as the forms used by census takers. The company actually uses human transcription services outside the U.S. to transcribe many records.

I'll be posting a follow-up article later this week about this issue.