ACT Government's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions Ahead

The ACT Government is facing a decision point on how to handle thousands of duplicate digital images sitting across agency servers — a problem that has quietly accumulated for years but is now colliding with the territory's push to modernise its records management systems ahead of a 2027 compliance deadline under the Territory Records Act 2002.

The issue is not trivial housekeeping. Duplicate image files — photographs, scanned documents, and planning maps stored redundantly across shared drives — consume storage, complicate Freedom of Information requests, and create legal risk when agencies cannot confirm which version of a document is the authoritative one. With the ACT Government spending heavily on digital transformation programs, including the ongoing ServiceNow rollout across directorates on London Circuit, resolving the duplication problem has moved from the IT team's to-do list to senior executive territory.

Where the Problem Sits

Two directorates have drawn particular attention internally. The Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate, which holds large volumes of cadastral maps, heritage photography, and environmental survey images, has been managing records across multiple platforms simultaneously. The same applies to Transport Canberra, whose asset management systems for the light rail corridor between Gungahlin Town Centre and the City Bus Interchange contain overlapping image libraries created during successive stages of the project's documentation.

The ACT Government Archives, based in Mitchell, holds the territory's official record, but the duplication problem largely sits upstream — in working files on agency servers that have never been formally transferred or culled. The Archives' own guidance notes that agencies are responsible for identifying and disposing of duplicate records under approved disposal schedules, but enforcement is uneven across the public service. Staff at several Civic-based directorates are understood to be working through manual audits, a process that analysts in the records management sector describe as slow and error-prone without dedicated software tools.

The Australian National University's digital humanities team, based at the Chifley Library precinct on campus, has separately published research on automated image deduplication workflows, work that some ACT agencies have informally reviewed. The University of Canberra's library and information management program has also been engaged by at least one directorate exploring training options for records staff, according to the university's 2025 annual industry engagement report.

What Happens Next

Three decisions are expected to shape how the ACT Government handles this over the next 12 months. First, the Chief Digital Officer's office is expected to finalise specifications for a territory-wide digital asset management platform by September 2026. Second, the ACT Budget allocated $4.2 million in 2026-27 to records modernisation across general government sector agencies — how much of that flows specifically to image deduplication tooling will depend on procurement outcomes. Third, the territory must decide whether to run centralised deduplication through a shared service model or let directorates procure their own solutions, a question with significant long-term cost implications.

The centralised approach has precedent: the ACT Government consolidated email archiving under a single platform in 2021, which reduced per-agency licensing costs. But image management is more complex, because agencies use different metadata standards and have different retention obligations depending on whether records relate to property, environment, infrastructure, or people.

For public servants working in affected agencies, the practical near-term reality is straightforward: expect audits, expect disposal schedule reviews, and check whether your directorate has nominated a digital records contact under the Directorate Records Management Policy. The ACT Government's records management guidance, published by the Archives on its Barrier Street, Mitchell website, sets out the obligations clearly. The harder question — which software gets bought, and who pays for it — will be answered in the months between now and the end of the 2026 calendar year, when the procurement window opens.