How Canberra's Digital Archives Got Flooded With Duplicate Images — and What It's Taking to Fix Them

The problem did not arrive overnight. Across ACT government agencies, shared network drives, content management platforms and digital record systems had, by the early 2020s, accumulated tens of thousands of duplicate image files — the compounding result of departmental mergers, rushed digitisation projects and staff working across multiple systems without a unified file-naming protocol. The bill for storage and the drag on system performance eventually forced the question: how did it get this bad, and who fixes it?

The answer runs through more than a decade of incremental decisions, several failed attempts at centralisation, and a capital city workforce that expanded faster than the IT infrastructure designed to serve it.

The Accumulation Problem

Canberra's public service grew substantially through the 2010s as successive federal governments added agencies and the ACT public sector expanded alongside population growth in suburbs like Gungahlin and Belconnen. Each new directorate typically inherited legacy file systems. When the ACT Government consolidated a number of its agencies under the Shared Services framework — administered through the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate — staff were encouraged to migrate documents and image assets onto centralised servers. Many did. Many also kept local copies. The duplication began in earnest there.

The National Archives of Australia, based on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, had separately flagged the broader problem of duplicate digital assets in its Digital Continuity 2020 policy, which set benchmarks for how Commonwealth agencies should manage electronic records. That policy expired in 2020, and its successor framework pushed harder on deduplication as a prerequisite for proper digital preservation. For ACT agencies operating in close administrative proximity to Commonwealth counterparts — particularly those around London Circuit and Northbourne Avenue — the policy pressure was impossible to ignore.

The Australian National University's digital infrastructure teams at the Acton campus had encountered a parallel version of the same issue. Research image libraries, particularly those tied to long-running environmental and social science projects, had proliferated across faculty servers without consistent metadata. A 2023 internal review — details of which were reported in ANU's own publications — found significant redundancy in stored image assets, prompting a phased cleanup that the university described as ongoing.

What Replacement Actually Means

Duplicate-image replacement is not simply deleting files. In a government context, it means identifying which version of an image is the authoritative record, migrating references from deprecated copies to the canonical file, updating any database links or web content management entries that point to old file paths, and then archiving or destroying the redundant copies in accordance with records disposal schedules. That last step requires formal approval under the Territory Records Act 2002, which governs ACT government records.

For agencies using platforms like Squiz Matrix — the content management system used across several ACT Government websites — the practical work involves auditing image libraries that in some cases had not been reviewed since initial site builds in the mid-2010s. Some image directories had grown to hold multiple near-identical versions of the same photograph, differing only in compression level or crop, with each version referenced by different pages across the site.

The cost is not trivial. Cloud storage rates for government-grade infrastructure in Australia typically run between $0.02 and $0.05 per gigabyte per month depending on the provider and redundancy tier — figures published routinely in procurement frameworks. For agencies storing hundreds of thousands of image files, the ongoing cost of doing nothing compounds annually.

The ACT Government's Digital Strategy, which was updated in 2024, explicitly listed deduplication and asset rationalisation among its operational priorities for directorates. That document set a target of completing initial audits across major content systems by the end of the 2025-26 financial year — a deadline that arrived this week.

For public servants navigating the change, the practical shift is straightforward: image uploads now route through a single asset management portal rather than individual folder structures. Staff at offices along Callam Street in Woden and at the Civic offices on Petrie Plaza have received updated guidance through their directorate intranet pages. The cleanup is bureaucratic, unglamorous work. But for a city whose economy runs on the machinery of government, getting the records right is foundational to everything else.