In reading some of the Zaptag discussion tonight, and reading a bunch on stuff about this, especially in the case of the Katrina scenarios where people lost all records to the floodwaters, I decided to do some deep research into the legality of self-scanned documents (as in YOU made the scan) of stuff like a birth certificate, a marrige license, a death certificate, a passport, a driver's license and so forth.

The results of the research in a word: worthless.

There is no legally acceptable way in the US for you to scan your documents and use the electronic facsimile as an equivilent to the original.

Here's one of the better-written stuff I found on the subject:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/30/BUGU2M1EU11.DTL

In the UK things are differerent:
http://www.datasave.ltd.uk/why_datasave/...38780360eba425a

In the USA, it's paper. All paperm everywhere. You can get certified (notarized) copies of some documents, but not all.