How Canberra's Public Records Archives Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and Why It Took Years to Get Here

The ACT government is confronting a problem that crept up slowly and then arrived all at once: tens of thousands of duplicate images buried inside its digital records infrastructure, clogging storage systems, complicating Freedom of Information requests, and adding cost to an already stretched public sector IT budget. The territory has now committed to a formal duplicate-image replacement program, but understanding why the problem exists at all requires going back more than a decade.

Digital recordkeeping in the ACT expanded rapidly after the territory adopted its Electronic Document and Records Management System — known internally as EDRMS — in the mid-2000s. The system was designed to centralise files across directorates, but agencies migrated data independently and at different speeds. Planning files from the Tuggeranong Town Centre redevelopment consultations, community engagement photographs from the Gungahlin District sports precinct, and infrastructure images from Light Rail Stage 1 construction along Northbourne Avenue were all ingested at different times, by different teams, using different naming conventions. Nobody was checking for duplicates at the point of upload.

A Problem Built File by File

The ACT Archives, located on Aquilaine Place in Hume, holds the territory's official historical record. Staff there have long flagged that migrated image collections frequently contain multiple versions of the same photograph — sometimes four or five copies with marginally different file names. The situation worsened after the 2020 machinery-of-government changes, when several directorates were restructured and their digital holdings merged without a systematic deduplication step. The Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate, for instance, absorbed records from at least two predecessor bodies, each of which had its own image libraries.

The practical consequences go beyond untidy filing. Under the Territory Records Act 2002, agencies have legal obligations to manage records efficiently and ensure they remain accessible and authentic. Duplicate images create ambiguity about which version is the authoritative record — a genuine compliance headache when documents are requested under the Freedom of Information Act 2016 or subpoenaed for planning tribunal proceedings. Staff at the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate on Constitution Avenue in the city have, according to publicly available agency reports, flagged the retrieval delays this creates when processing complex development applications in growth corridors like Molonglo Valley and Belconnen.

What a Fix Actually Looks Like

Duplicate-image replacement — as opposed to simple deletion — is the more cautious approach favoured by records management professionals. Rather than removing a file outright, a placeholder or pointer replaces it, preserving the audit trail and confirming that a record once existed at that location. The Australian Capital Territory's approach draws on guidance from the National Archives of Australia, which published its Digital Continuity 2025 policy framework with a target that all Australian Government records be managed in digital systems by 2025. ACT agencies are not bound by federal frameworks but have historically aligned their practices with them.

The cost dimension is real. Cloud storage for government is not free, and maintaining redundant image files across multiple platforms — including the ACT government's SharePoint environment and legacy departmental servers — represents ongoing expenditure that procurement officers have begun to scrutinise more closely since the 2025-26 ACT Budget tightened operational funding across most directorates. Deduplication software licensing and the labour cost of auditing high-volume image libraries, particularly those tied to major infrastructure projects like the Light Rail Stage 2 corridor from the City to Woden, add up quickly.

For public servants working in the capital's biggest employment hubs — the Nishi building on NewActon's Odgers Lane, the Sirius Building in Woden, or the Services Australia campus at Greenway — the day-to-day effect is largely invisible. But for records officers and IT managers, the program represents the first serious attempt to rationalise an image archive that grew organically and without consistent governance for nearly two decades. Agencies have been asked to complete initial audits by the end of the 2026 calendar year, with replacement workflows to be tested in pilot directorates before a territory-wide rollout. Whether the timeline holds will depend heavily on resourcing decisions still being worked through in budget supplementary estimates.