ACT Government's Digital Archives Hit by Duplicate Image Crisis — Here's What Changed This Week

The ACT Government's Shared Services ICT division quietly escalated a months-long duplicate image remediation project this week, after an internal audit identified more than 40,000 redundant image files spread across departmental content management systems — a problem that has been quietly inflating storage costs and creating version-control headaches for public servants across the territory.

The audit, conducted through June and finalised on 30 June, fed directly into a broader digital asset management overhaul that Shared Services has been rolling out since late 2025. The timing matters: the ACT Government is mid-cycle on its Digital Canberra Action Plan, and agencies are under pressure to demonstrate measurable efficiency gains before the next budget round in October.

What the Audit Found — and Where the Problems Were Worst

The bulk of the duplicated material was traced to two clusters: the Access Canberra service portal, which handles everything from vehicle registrations to development application imagery, and the Transport Canberra and City Services directorate, whose Light Rail Stage 2 project team had been uploading site-progress photos to multiple shared platforms simultaneously since construction documentation began in earnest in early 2025.

Dickson and Gungahlin — two of the suburbs most directly affected by Stage 2 corridor planning — generated a disproportionate share of the duplicated planning and site imagery. Documents lodged with the ACT Planning Directorate on Challis Street in Dickson were being cross-saved by different project officers, creating near-identical file sets that differed only in metadata timestamps.

The Australian National University's digital records team flagged a related problem in April, though the university's own systems sit outside ACT Government infrastructure. ANU Libraries, based on Acton Peninsula, had separately identified duplicate photographic assets in its institutional repository and began its own deduplication process using open-source tooling — a parallel effort that Shared Services ICT is now looking at as a potential model.

The Replacement Push: What Agencies Are Doing Right Now

From Monday this week, Shared Services deployed a deduplication script across the ACT Government's Microsoft SharePoint environment — the primary document platform for most directorates operating out of the Canberra CBD offices along London Circuit and Constitution Avenue. The script flags probable duplicates for human review rather than auto-deleting, a deliberate choice after an earlier 2024 pilot in the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate accidentally removed a batch of approved development application photographs.

The storage cost justification is straightforward. Government cloud storage contracts, typically benchmarked against Australian data centre pricing, mean that unmanaged file bloat carries a direct dollar cost per gigabyte per month. Across 40,000-plus files — many of them high-resolution planning or construction images running to several megabytes each — the cumulative redundancy represents a non-trivial budget line that Shared Services is not publicly quantifying but has flagged internally as a six-figure annual saving if the remediation succeeds.

The replacement workflow being piloted this week requires each directorate's designated records officer to approve substitutions — swapping a duplicate set with a single canonical master file — using a case-management interface built into the existing HPE Content Manager system that the ACT Government standardised on several years ago. Staff in the Transport Canberra offices in Tuggeranong are among the first cohort to complete the training module, which went live on 1 July.

For public servants accessing shared drives through the MyServiceACT internal portal, the practical experience this week has included broken thumbnail previews and temporarily unavailable images while the replacement process runs — a short-term disruption Shared Services says should resolve by the end of next week. Anyone needing urgent access to planning imagery held in Access Canberra's development application register has been directed to contact the helpdesk on extension 27400 or visit the walk-in service counter on Moore Street in the city.

The broader deduplication project is scheduled for completion across all major directorates by 30 September, ahead of the October budget process. Shared Services has indicated it will publish a summary report on file-count reductions and storage reclaimed at that point, giving the public — and Treasury — a clear line of sight on whether the cleanup delivered what was promised.