Canberra's Digital Archives Have a Duplicate Image Problem — and Experts Say It's Getting Worse

Duplicate images are cluttering Canberra's public sector digital infrastructure at a scale that specialists describe as both expensive and legally hazardous — and the people responsible for fixing it are only now beginning to talk openly about the scope of the problem.

The issue has quietly accelerated over the past three years as ACT government agencies and federal departments based in the Parliamentary Triangle migrated records to cloud storage platforms, often without standardised protocols for identifying or retiring redundant files. The result, according to digital records professionals working across the capital, is sprawling image libraries where the same photograph, diagram or scanned document can exist in dozens of slightly different versions, each carrying its own metadata, rights status and storage cost.

Why does this matter right now? The ACT Government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028, released last year, committed agencies to a significant rationalisation of their data holdings. With the mid-term review of that strategy due in the second half of 2026, pressure is mounting on directorates to demonstrate measurable progress. Duplicate imagery sits at the intersection of storage budgets, copyright compliance and the integrity of public records — three areas where scrutiny is intensifying.

Where the Problem Is Most Visible

Two institutions in particular have become focal points for discussion. The Australian National University's Scholarly Communication and Digital Scholarship teams have been grappling with duplicate image records inside the university's institutional repository, known as ANU Open Research. Sources familiar with the system — speaking without authorisation to be named — say the problem is not confined to old analogue scans. Contemporary research imagery uploaded by multiple investigators across Acton-based faculties is also affected, sometimes because collaborative projects lack a single designated upload point.

At the ACT Heritage Library on London Circuit in the City, staff have been working since early 2025 on a targeted deduplication project covering its photographic collections. The library holds more than 300,000 images documenting Canberra's development from the early 20th century, and the shift to a new digital asset management platform brought the duplication issue into sharp relief. No official completion date for the project has been announced publicly.

Across the lake in Barton, federal departments housed in the Kings Avenue precinct are navigating their own versions of this challenge under the National Archives of Australia's digital preservation frameworks. The Archives' guidelines require agencies to maintain single authoritative copies of records — a standard that is straightforward in theory and considerably harder to enforce across decentralised cloud environments.

What the Specialists Are Recommending

Professionals in the digital asset management field are converging on a handful of practical recommendations. The first is implementing perceptual hashing at the point of ingest — a technical method that flags visually similar images before they enter a repository rather than after. The second is establishing clear ownership rules so that when the same image originates from multiple sources, one designated version is marked canonical and the rest are either deleted or linked as derivatives.

Cost is a significant driver of urgency. Cloud storage pricing for government contracts in Australia typically runs between $0.02 and $0.05 per gigabyte per month, depending on the provider and data classification tier. For an agency storing tens of thousands of high-resolution images, the cumulative expense of retaining multiple identical copies adds up across a financial year — and that figure does not account for the staff time spent searching through redundant files or the legal exposure that comes from holding unlicensed duplicates of commercially rights-managed photographs.

Copyright risk is the detail that tends to focus minds at the senior level. A single licensed image stored in ten slightly different cropped versions may technically constitute ten separate uses, each requiring its own rights clearance under some licensing agreements. Agencies that discovered this through legal review in 2025 have been accelerating their deduplication timelines as a result.

For Canberra's public sector organisations still assessing their exposure, specialists point to July 2026 as a practical moment to act — before the end-of-financial-year data reconciliation period closes and before the ACT Digital Strategy review creates additional scrutiny. The practical starting point, according to guidance published by the Digital Transformation Agency, is a full audit of existing digital asset management policies, followed by a tool assessment to determine whether current platforms support automated duplicate detection at scale.