Duplicate Images in Government Records: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

ACT government agencies are sitting on thousands of duplicate and mislabelled images scattered across internal digital asset systems, and the people responsible for fixing the problem say the scope of the mess has taken years to properly acknowledge. Records managers, information archivists and public sector representatives in Canberra are now publicly weighing in on what it will take to fix it — and what happens if agencies don't.

The issue has gained fresh urgency this year as the ACT Government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028 requires agencies to meet new data integrity benchmarks by the end of the 2026 financial year. That deadline passed on June 30. Several directorates are understood to have submitted compliance assessments, though the results have not been publicly released.

Why It Matters for a Public Service City

Canberra's economy runs on public administration. With the Australian Public Service employing tens of thousands of residents across Barton, Woden, Civic and Tuggeranong, the quality of government digital records isn't an abstract concern — it directly affects how services are delivered, how procurement is documented and how Freedom of Information requests are fulfilled. Duplicate image files compound those problems: they inflate storage costs, slow retrieval systems and, in some cases, result in incorrect images appearing in official publications or planning documents.

The Australian National University's School of Computing houses a digital preservation research group that has previously worked with ACT directorates on metadata standards. Academics there have noted publicly that Australian jurisdictions have been slow to adopt automated deduplication tools compared with counterparts in the United Kingdom and Canada, where national archives have set mandatory image integrity standards for government use.

The University of Canberra's Faculty of Arts and Design, which runs archival and records management courses at the Bruce campus, has fielded increased interest from public sector professionals seeking short courses on digital asset governance. Enrolments in the faculty's professional development stream rose in the first half of 2026, according to the university's published semester intake data.

What the Specialists Are Recommending

Records professionals consulted by The Daily Canberra — speaking in their professional capacity rather than on behalf of specific agencies — describe the core problem in similar terms. Legacy content management systems used by some ACT directorates were not built with deduplication in mind. When agencies migrated to newer platforms between 2018 and 2022, image libraries were often imported wholesale, duplicates included.

The Community and Public Sector Union, which covers many ACT government workers, has raised the broader issue of under-resourcing in records management roles as part of its 2026 enterprise bargaining discussions. The union's position, outlined in bargaining documents circulated earlier this year, is that digital governance work has been absorbed into existing roles without commensurate recognition or pay adjustment.

The National Archives of Australia, headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, publishes guidance on digital image standards for Commonwealth agencies. Its AGLS metadata standard and associated image management advisories are publicly available, though compliance among ACT territory agencies — which are not directly bound by Commonwealth archives law — varies considerably.

Practitioners recommend a three-stage approach: audit existing repositories using hash-matching software to identify true duplicates, establish a controlled vocabulary for image tagging aligned with the Australian Governments' Interactive Functions Thesaurus, and assign clear custodianship to named positions rather than teams. The last point is often where progress stalls. When image libraries span multiple directorates — as is common with planning and infrastructure photography in areas like Gungahlin and Belconnen, where development activity is high — no single agency wants to own the cleanup cost.

Agencies that have not met the June 30 benchmarks under the Digital Strategy face a formal review process through the ACT Chief Digital Officer's office. That process, outlined in the strategy document published on the ACT Government website in late 2024, includes remediation plans with timelines. The next formal reporting period opens in October 2026, giving directorates roughly three months to document progress or request an extension. For records managers working through the problem in offices across Civic and Phillip, that window is already looking tight.