“it’s supposed to be a digitially stored image that can be both hueristically searched and reproduced as an analog image.”
Are you claiming the image that was posted contains searchable text in the layers? I don’t believe that is the case.
That’s the way the data base in Hawaii is set up. The output is simply a print job that’s been run through something like PhotoShop to fit it to one or another standard print formats ~ so it’ll look like the original document!