ACT Government Archives Tackles Duplicate Image Crisis This Week

The ACT Government's digital records directorate has this week escalated its duplicate image replacement program, targeting a backlog of redundant scanned documents and photographs sitting across multiple agency repositories — a problem that has quietly consumed storage capacity and complicated Freedom of Information searches for years.

The timing matters. Across the public service, which employs roughly 23,000 people in the territory, the shift toward fully digitised workflows has accelerated since the Commonwealth pushed its own agencies toward paperless processing after 2023. ACT agencies followed. The side effect: duplicate files proliferated as staff uploaded the same scanned images to SharePoint, the whole-of-government records system known as TRIM, and individual agency drives simultaneously.

What Went Wrong and Where

The problem is most visible at two locations. The planning and land authority offices on Constitution Avenue, Canberra, and the Access Canberra service centre in Gungahlin have both flagged internal audits showing duplicate image rates running well above acceptable thresholds in their document management systems. Staff processing development applications in Gungahlin — one of the territory's fastest-growing suburbs — have encountered repeated instances of the same cadastral maps and site photographs stored under different file names, slowing approval workflows.

The ACT Digital, Data and Technology Solutions unit, which sits within the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate, is leading the remediation. The program uses automated deduplication software to identify pixel-level matches across stored images before flagging them for human review. Replacement images — correctly named, properly tagged with metadata, and linked to the right case files — are then substituted before the originals are archived or deleted under the territory's Records Management standard.

Libraries ACT, which manages the ACT Heritage Library collection on Maitland Street in Hackett, has also been drawn into the process. Digitised historical photographs held there overlap with images stored by the ACT Cultural Facilities Corporation, and a joint review launched in May 2026 found a meaningful number of duplicates spread across both collections. Librarians have been working through roughly 4,000 image records identified in that audit, a process expected to run through August.

Why This Week Marks a Step Change

July 1 triggered the new financial year compliance cycle. That date activated updated records management obligations under the Territory Records Act 2002, which require agencies to certify that their digital repositories meet currency and accuracy standards within the first quarter of each financial year. The duplicate image replacement work is now formally linked to that certification process, giving it a bureaucratic urgency it previously lacked.

For public servants in Belconnen — home to several major Commonwealth and ACT agency campuses — the practical effect is visible in changed workflows this week. Staff have received updated guidance through their agency intranets asking them to use a single nominated upload pathway rather than saving copies to multiple locations. The guidance does not carry financial penalties for individuals but agencies that fail their Q1 records certification can face additional oversight from the Territory Records Office.

The broader cost of the cleanup is not trivial. Cloud storage fees for ACT government systems are billed per gigabyte per month, and duplicated image files — particularly high-resolution planning scans — can run to several megabytes each. Eliminating confirmed duplicates across the system is expected to reduce the government's total stored data volume meaningfully before the end of the 2026-27 financial year, though the directorate has not publicly released projected savings figures.

For residents and businesses dealing with ACT agencies — particularly those lodging development applications through the electronic DA portal or requesting records under FOI — the practical upside is faster retrieval. A correctly deduplicated records system returns cleaner search results and reduces the chance of an agency accidentally releasing an outdated version of a document in response to an information request.

Agencies have until September 30, 2026 to complete their Q1 records certification. Anyone who believes their records have been affected — including applicants waiting on planning decisions — can contact Access Canberra directly through its Civic service centre on Challis Street or via the online portal.