Canberra's Digital Archives Are Full of Duplicate Images — Officials and Experts Want a Reckoning

ACT government agencies and federal bodies headquartered in Canberra are sitting on digital image libraries bloated with duplicates, redundant files and poorly catalogued assets, according to records management professionals and digital archivists who say the problem has compounded significantly since the COVID-era shift to remote work. The issue is no longer just administrative housekeeping — it carries real financial and transparency costs.

The timing matters. The ACT Government's Digital Strategy, which runs through to 2025-26, placed explicit pressure on agencies to clean up legacy data holdings and reduce unnecessary storage expenditure. With that framework now at its end date, officials across Northbourne Avenue offices and Marcus Clarke Street departments are under renewed scrutiny to show they've made progress. Many haven't.

Why Duplicate Images Became a Problem Worth Talking About

The duplication issue crept in across multiple channels. Agencies migrating from older platforms like SharePoint 2013 to Microsoft 365 between 2021 and 2024 frequently imported image libraries wholesale, without deduplication. Staff working from Tuggeranong home offices and Belconnen apartments uploaded the same event photographs and campaign graphics to multiple shared drives. Version control broke down. By the time IT teams ran audits, some agencies were storing five or more copies of the same image files.

At the Australian National University's College of Engineering and Computer Science on Acton Peninsula, researchers working on digital asset management have flagged this as a territory-wide issue that extends well beyond the ACT public service. The sheer volume of duplicated files inflates cloud storage costs and, more critically for government, creates ambiguity in official records — when multiple versions of a photograph exist, establishing which one represents the authorised, unedited original becomes a legal and archival headache.

The National Archives of Australia, based in Canberra's Parkes precinct, has updated its guidance on digital records disposal in recent years, pushing agencies toward automated deduplication tools before any bulk destruction of records. Records managers say the guidance is sound but implementation support has been uneven.

Digital asset specialists in the territory point to the same recurring failure: agencies purchase content management systems capable of flagging duplicates automatically, but staff are not trained to use those features. The result is that image replacement workflows — the process of formally retiring an outdated image and substituting an approved version across all platforms — get done manually, inconsistently, or not at all.

What Needs to Happen, and Who's Saying It

Records management professionals speaking at the Records and Information Management Professionals Australasia (RIMPA) ACT Chapter events held at Canberra's Hotel Realm this year have called for mandatory image audit cycles tied to each agency's annual reporting calendar. The argument is straightforward: if agencies must sign off on financial statements every June 30, they should also certify their digital asset registers are clean.

The University of Canberra's Faculty of Arts and Design, which runs programs in digital communication and content strategy from its Bruce campus, has incorporated digital asset hygiene into its curriculum in recent semesters — a recognition that the next wave of public service communications staff needs to arrive knowing how deduplication works in practice, not just in theory.

For individual agencies, the practical advice from specialists is consistent. Run a hash-based deduplication scan — available natively in most modern digital asset management platforms — before any image library migration. Establish a single master repository, not a constellation of shared drives. And assign a named owner to every image collection, so that when replacement decisions need to be made, one person has the authority to make them.

The cost of inaction is not hypothetical. Cloud storage pricing across major government contracts typically charges per gigabyte per month, and agencies carrying duplicated image libraries numbering in the tens of thousands of files are paying real money to store files they cannot even distinguish from each other. With the ACT Budget under pressure and federal agencies in Civic and Barton facing their own efficiency reviews, the argument for fixing this is gaining traction — slowly, but noticeably.