How Canberra's Digital Archives Ended Up Full of Duplicates — and What's Being Done About It

The ACT Government's digital asset libraries contain a significant volume of duplicate image files accumulated over more than a decade of fragmented digitisation work — a problem that has quietly ballooned as agencies uploaded records independently, without a shared standard or centralised storage system to catch the overlap.

The issue matters now because the ACT Government is midway through consolidating its digital infrastructure under a broader data governance push tied to the territory's Digital Strategy, a framework that has been in development since at least 2022. Storage costs, retrieval inefficiencies, and the risk of the wrong image version being used in public-facing documents have all been cited by government IT planners as reasons the problem can no longer be managed informally.

How the Duplicates Accumulated

The story begins with good intentions. Throughout the mid-2010s, ACT agencies from Access Canberra to the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate independently scanned and uploaded photographs, maps, and heritage images to support their own operational needs. There was no single platform. Transport Canberra used one content management system; the cultural institutions along London Circuit — including the National Library of Australia's ACT-focused collections and the ACT Heritage Library in Civic — used others. Each agency set its own file-naming conventions, which meant a photograph of Garema Place taken in 2016 could exist under a dozen different filenames across six different servers.

The light rail construction corridor along Northbourne Avenue generated a particular surge of image capture from around 2017 through to the Stage 1 opening in April 2019. Engineering teams, communications officers, and heritage consultants all photographed the same infrastructure at overlapping intervals. Those images fed into separate project folders that were never reconciled.

Rapid staff turnover in the public service compounded the problem. When a communications officer at a Canberra Avenue-based directorate left their role, their local image folders often stayed behind on shared drives, duplicating what had already been uploaded to the agency's content management system. There was no formal offboarding protocol requiring file rationalisation.

The Push Toward a Fix

The Australian National University's digital preservation unit flagged related issues in its own collections several years ago and implemented checksum-based duplicate detection across its Chifley Road repository servers — a technical approach that cross-references file fingerprints rather than relying on filenames alone. That method is now being examined by ACT Government ICT planners as a model for the territory's own consolidation effort.

The University of Canberra's Faculty of Science and Technology has also engaged with the question through research into automated deduplication pipelines, work that sits alongside broader national conversations about the cost of unmanaged digital storage. Cloud storage pricing — which for government-grade services in Australia has generally tracked between $0.02 and $0.05 per gigabyte per month depending on redundancy tier — means even modest libraries of unrationalised image files carry a recurring budget line that compounds year on year.

The ACT Government's Whole of Government ICT Strategy, updated in 2024, includes reference to asset lifecycle management and rationalisation of legacy data holdings. Progress, however, has been incremental. Each directorate must assess its own holdings before any centralised deduplication tool can function reliably, and that assessment work is resource-intensive for agencies that are already managing day-to-day operational demands.

For Canberrans who work directly with government digital systems — communications staff in the inner north's cluster of Dickson-based agencies, or archivists at the ACT Heritage Library on Mildura Street in Fyshwick — the practical upshot is a likely transition period over the next two to three years as legacy systems are audited and consolidated. Staff who manage image libraries are being encouraged to document file provenance now, before any centralised migration begins, to avoid the next generation of duplicates being created during the fix itself. The lesson from a decade of fragmented digitisation is straightforward: without a shared standard from day one, good-faith effort produces disorder at scale.