Can I make editing changes to a document to obtain copyright protection?

This post is a continuation of the discussion in my last post, Can I obtain a copyright of a copy of an old document? The commentary is directed at websites that claim copyrights to digitized images of old documents of interest to genealogists, such as U.S. Census records, wills, deeds, maps and other such items. Let's suppose that as an attorney, I have read all the copyright cases concerning copies of documents in the public domain and a prospective client comes to me and says, I have several thousand (or a million or so) old documents that I want to scan and put online. Can I get copyright protection for my work?

In this case, as the attorney, I rock back in my chair and give the client a brief synopsis of the U.S. law on copyrights, and end by telling him or her that a copy of a public domain document cannot receive copyright protection. So then the client says to me, "We can't afford to put all our stuff online unless we have some kind of protection. What do we need to do to make the documents subject to copyright?" Now, what would I say to that? In my case, I would probably tell the client to go to some other attorney. But in reality, the answer is to add originality to the documents. Can I edit the documents in some way that will cause them to be subject to copyright protection?

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