Canberra faces millions in costs over duplicate digital images

Tens of thousands of duplicate digital images are sitting inside government servers across Canberra, costing storage budgets and complicating public access to official records. The problem is not new, but pressure is mounting on agencies to act — and the decisions they make in the second half of 2026 will set the template for how the capital manages its visual archives for the next decade.

The issue has sharpened because of two converging pressures. Federal agencies have been migrating records onto consolidated cloud platforms under the Digital Continuity 2020 framework — a policy that nominally concluded but whose implementation timelines have dragged deep into this decade. At the same time, ACT government bodies have been consolidating records ahead of expected machinery-of-government changes, surfacing enormous volumes of redundant image files that nobody has formally signed off on deleting or retaining.

Who owns the decision — and what it costs to get wrong

The National Archives of Australia, based on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, holds disposal authority over Commonwealth records. Any federal agency wanting to cull duplicate image files must work through the Archives' records disposal framework, which requires a formal appraisal before destruction can proceed. That process is not fast. Agencies that skip it risk breaching the Archives Act 1983, an exposure that creates its own administrative headache.

At the territory level, the ACT's own archives authority — operating under the Territory Records Act 2002 — sets equivalent rules for ACT government agencies. The Legislative Assembly Secretariat on London Circuit and agencies housed in the Civic precinct are among the bodies that have accumulated duplicated photographic and scanned document holdings as staff have turned over and filing conventions have shifted. Without a systematic deduplication audit, storage costs compound and retrieval times for Freedom of Information requests stretch out.

The Australian National University's Research Data Commons and the University of Canberra's library digitisation programs have both grappled with duplicate image management at an institutional level, providing a practical reference point. Neither institution, however, operates under the same legislative constraints as government agencies, which means their workflows cannot simply be copied across.

The practical steps ahead

Three decisions will define what happens next. First, agencies need to choose a deduplication method — algorithmic automated scanning versus manual curatorial review. Automated tools can process large volumes quickly but carry a documented risk of flagging near-identical images that are actually distinct records, a problem the Archives' own guidance on digital preservation has flagged as a material concern. Manual review is slower and more expensive, but defensible.

Second, agencies must decide who bears responsibility for sign-off. In practice this means nominating a Senior Responsible Officer — a title used formally in Commonwealth project governance — to own both the audit and the disposal recommendations. Without that nomination, decisions tend to stall across multiple branch heads with no one willing to authorise deletion.

Third, there is the question of what to do with images that sit in a grey zone: not clearly duplicates, not clearly unique. The National Archives' Digital Preservation Policy, last substantially updated in 2022, provides a framework for that determination, but individual agencies still need to apply it to their own holdings.

For Canberra's large public-service workforce — concentrated in the Barton, Parkes and Phillip corridors — these decisions have a practical daily dimension. FOI officers processing image-heavy requests, archivists in the ACT Heritage Library on Mildura Drive in Fyshwick, and digital records managers at line agencies all feel the drag of unresolved duplicate holdings every time they try to locate and produce a specific file.

The window for getting the frameworks right is narrowing. Several agencies face internal audit reviews in the September quarter of 2026, and the ACT government's broader digital records consolidation project has a reporting milestone before the end of the calendar year. Agencies that have not begun their deduplication planning by then will find themselves making rushed decisions under audit pressure — exactly the conditions in which expensive or legally problematic choices get made.