ACT Government's Digital Records Unit Tackles Duplicate Image Crisis Across Agency Archives

The ACT Government's Digital Records and Information Management team confirmed this week it is mid-way through a territory-wide audit targeting duplicate image files embedded across agency document archives, a problem that has quietly ballooned alongside the shift to hybrid working since 2020. The audit, running through the Service Directorates housed at 220 Northbourne Avenue and across satellite offices in Belconnen and Gungahlin, has already flagged thousands of redundant image assets in shared drives and electronic document management systems.

The timing matters. The ACT public service completed its phased rollout of Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online across most directorates through 2024 and into early 2025. That migration, while overdue, has exposed a long-standing housekeeping problem: when agencies migrated legacy files into the new environment, duplicate scanned images — many of them high-resolution PDFs and TIFF files from physical record digitisation programs — were copied multiple times across different folder structures. The result is inflated storage costs billed against agency budgets and, more critically, compliance headaches under the Territory Records Act 2002.

What the Audit Is Finding

The review is being coordinated through the Territory Records Office, which sits within the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate. According to publicly available guidance the office updated in June 2026, agencies are required to maintain a single authoritative version of each record — duplicates that cannot be linked back to an original file classification create disposal and accountability risks under the Act.

The Canberra Institute of Technology's Digital Services team, which manages records for several thousand students and staff across its Bruce and City campuses, has been identified as one of the pilot sites for a deduplication tool being trialled before broader rollout. The Australian National University's Scholarly Communication team at the Chifley Library on the Acton campus is separately running its own duplicate image removal program through its institutional repository, targeting research data sets that have accumulated redundant image versions over successive grant cycles.

Storage costs are not trivial for agencies operating under tight budget allocations. Cloud storage pricing under the whole-of-government Microsoft agreement — the terms of which the ACT Government has not publicly disclosed in full — still charges per gigabyte once agencies exceed their base allocation. Across the Australian public service more broadly, a 2024 Australian National Audit Office performance audit of digital records management found that duplicate and unclassified files represented a significant proportion of total cloud storage consumption, driving avoidable expenditure. The ACT audit is drawing on those ANAO findings as a benchmark.

Practical Steps for Agencies and Staff

The Territory Records Office has circulated an internal advisory — visible to staff through the ACT Government intranet — recommending that directorates complete a self-assessment by 31 August 2026. The advisory points to four specific actions: running SharePoint's built-in duplicate detection reports, reviewing scanner settings at multi-function devices to prevent double-saving, establishing a single authoritative library for image assets within each team site, and flagging any files that predate the 2024 migration for manual review before disposal.

For public servants working out of Holt, Tuggeranong and the newer Gungahlin government service centres, the practical instruction is simpler: before scanning any document, check whether a digital version already exists in the directorate's SharePoint library. That single habit, the advisory notes, eliminates the most common source of duplication.

The full audit report is expected before the ACT Legislative Assembly's administration and procedure committee by October 2026. If the deduplication tools trialled at CIT prove workable at scale, the Territory Records Office intends to recommend their mandatory adoption across all directorates in the 2026-27 financial year. For agencies already stretched by workforce pressures and rising operational costs, getting this right before the next migration cycle starts is the cleaner path forward.