ACT Government's Digital Archive Push Hits Snag Over Thousands of Duplicate Images This Week

The ACT Government's digital records program has been grappling this week with a larger-than-expected catalogue of duplicate images embedded across multiple agency databases, an issue that surfaced during a scheduled mid-year audit of the Territory's shared document management infrastructure. The duplication problem, which spans everything from planning application photographs to public health records, has triggered an emergency review by Digital, Data and Technology Solutions — the ACT public service division responsible for the Territory's core IT platforms.

The timing matters. The ACT Government is currently mid-roll-out of its whole-of-government cloud migration, a project that has been publicly flagged in budget documents as a priority for the 2025–26 financial year. Carrying duplicate image files into a new cloud environment does not just waste money — it degrades search reliability, inflates licensing costs, and creates compliance headaches under the Territory Records Act 2002. Getting the archive clean before migration closes is now the pressing task for agency records managers across the city.

What the audit found and where the problem sits

The duplication issue was first flagged internally in late June, when records officers at the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate on Challis Street in Dickson noticed inconsistencies during a pre-migration data-quality check. The same images — in many cases aerial survey photographs tied to development applications in growth suburbs like Gungahlin and Belconnen — were appearing under multiple file names and across separate folder hierarchies, suggesting years of manual uploads without deduplication controls.

The University of Canberra's Centre for Creative and Cultural Research has separately been dealing with a related but distinct version of the problem. The Centre runs a publicly accessible digital collection of ACT heritage photography, and administrators confirmed this week that a batch import conducted in March 2026 introduced several hundred duplicate entries into the collection's metadata index. Staff are working through a manual review process, though no timeline for completion has been publicly confirmed.

Scale matters here. Industry benchmarks from digital asset management research — including work published by the International Association of Records Managers — suggest that unmanaged enterprise image repositories can accumulate duplication rates of between 20 and 40 per cent over five to seven years without active deduplication tooling. The ACT Government's shared drive environment has been operating since at least 2019 without a dedicated image-deduplication layer, according to publicly available procurement records on the ACT Government's tenders portal.

What agencies are being told to do now

DDTS circulated internal guidance to agency ICT contacts on Wednesday, July 2, outlining a three-stage response. The first stage involves running automated hash-matching tools — software that identifies identical files by generating a unique digital fingerprint — across each directorate's image folders before July 18. Stage two requires human review of near-duplicate files, which are images that are visually similar but not byte-for-byte identical, a far more labour-intensive task. Stage three is the actual deletion and consolidation, which must be signed off by each agency's records authority before any file is removed.

For public servants based at workplaces along Marcus Clarke Street in the CBD and at the Dickson and Belconnen service centres, the practical effect this week has been slower-than-usual response times from the shared document portal. The review process is consuming server resources during business hours.

Records managers across the service have been advised to hold off on any new bulk image imports until the audit is complete. Staff with active planning or grant-assessment files that depend on photographic evidence have been told to work from locally cached copies in the interim, a workaround that itself creates a fresh version-control risk if not carefully managed.

The mid-July deadline for the first audit phase is tight but achievable if agencies prioritise it. The bigger test comes in stage two. Manual near-duplicate review across the Territory's full image catalogue — estimated internally at several hundred thousand files — will almost certainly require additional resourcing. Whether DDTS absorbs that within existing budgets or seeks a supplementary appropriation will be one of the cleaner indicators of how seriously the government is taking the mess it has discovered.