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It's routine for scanning paper documents into a computer-based system because if you don't do it that way all you have are a lot of pictures that can't be searched by humans or computers, i.e. are useless, or you have to manually input all the data on every document by hand into a database and use that instead.
Layering is routine, a side-effect of the combination of scanning and OCR to convert the printed data into a machine-readable form.
Option 1: Scan tens of thousands of birth certificates as single-layer images. You now have tens of thousands of pictures that can't be searched in any way. Someone wants a copy of a birth certificate with a particular name on it? Hard luck. You can't search tens of thousands of pictures for text because there isn't any text from the computer's point of view. It's just pictures.
Option 2: Multi-layer scan with OCR. You now have a neat, organised *and machine-searchable* database of all certificates and the information on them.
Whatever sort of experts those retards claim to be - they're not.