Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions Ahead for Territory Archives

Thousands of duplicate digital images are clogging the ACT government's records systems, and Territory Records Office officials face a hard deadline on resolving the problem before a new whole-of-government digital asset platform goes live in early 2027. The duplication issue — affecting scanned planning documents, heritage photographs, and public service case files — has been building since at least 2019, when the Territory began accelerating its digitisation program across multiple directorates.

The pressure to act has sharpened this year. The ACT government's broader Digital Strategy 2025–2028 commits agencies to reducing redundant data holdings as part of a wider push toward leaner, more secure record-keeping. Duplicate image files are not just a storage cost. They create compliance headaches under the Territory Records Act 2002, complicate Freedom of Information responses, and — in planning and heritage contexts — can produce conflicting versions of official documents. For a city where the National Capital Authority and the ACT Heritage Council both maintain separate image repositories, the duplication runs across jurisdictional lines as well.

Where the Problem Sits Locally

Two institutions are most directly in the frame. The ACT Heritage Library, housed within the Woden-based ACT Library and Information Service on Callam Street, holds a digitised photographic collection that staff have described in public budget estimates hearings as containing significant duplication across its catalogue entries. Separately, the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate — which operates across its Dickson offices — has flagged in its 2025–26 annual report that legacy scans from the pre-2015 development application system remain partially unreconciled with current holdings on the ACTPLA electronic lodgement portal.

The Australian National University's Archives program on Acton Peninsula also maintains shared-custody agreements with several ACT agencies and has its own deduplication review underway, according to the institution's published records management framework. The risk is that agencies resolve their internal duplicates independently, without coordinating on items held jointly — meaning the same image ends up deleted in one system and retained in another, breaking provenance chains that archivists regard as non-negotiable.

Gungahlin and Belconnen, both subject to intensive planning activity over the past decade, have generated disproportionate volumes of scanned planning imagery. Development applications in those growth corridors account for a significant share of the backlog because large-scale rezoning proposals routinely involve hundreds of site photographs submitted as supporting material.

The Decisions That Will Define the Outcome

Three choices now sit with ACT government decision-makers. The first is whether to run a centralised deduplication process through the Territory Records Office or allow each directorate to manage its own clean-up. A centralised model costs more upfront — estimates for a government-wide digital records audit of this type in comparable jurisdictions have run between $800,000 and $1.5 million — but it produces a single authoritative dataset. The decentralised approach is cheaper and faster, but previous attempts in 2021 across ACT Health digital records left inconsistencies that took a further two years to resolve.

The second decision is the retention standard. Some duplicate images are not genuinely identical — they are near-duplicates with minor metadata differences that can carry legal significance in planning appeals or heritage assessments. Automated deduplication tools flag these as matches; human review does not always catch them in time. Setting the threshold too aggressively risks destroying records with evidentiary value.

The third is timing. The new digital asset management platform — awarded to a vendor under a whole-of-government procurement process finalised in March 2026 — is scheduled for staged rollout beginning in February 2027. Migrating duplicate-laden datasets into a new platform embeds the problem permanently. Archives professionals and records managers generally agree that deduplication should precede migration, not follow it, but that requires agencies to commit resources before the end of the 2026 calendar year.

The Territory Records Office is understood to be working on revised guidance for agencies ahead of a briefing to the ACT Legislative Assembly's Standing Committee on Public Accounts, which has previously examined digital records governance. Whatever framework emerges will need sign-off from the directorate level before October to leave enough time for clean-up work before the February migration window opens.