Canberra's Digital Archives Are Full of Duplicate Images. Here's How the Capital Compares to Cities Trying to Fix It.

Australian Capital Territory government agencies are sitting on digital image libraries riddled with duplicates — redundant photographs, scanned documents stored multiple times across separate departmental servers — and the effort to clean them up is quietly consuming IT budget and staff hours that Canberra's public service can ill afford. The problem is not unique to the capital, but the way Canberra is handling it, compared to peer cities, reveals both a structural advantage and a stubborn gap.

The timing matters. Federal and territory agencies across Canberra have spent the past three years migrating legacy records into shared cloud environments, a programme accelerated by the 2023 Data and Digital Government Strategy out of the Department of Finance. That migration exposed just how badly duplication had been allowed to accumulate. When you move files from siloed departmental drives into a unified system, every redundant copy arrives with them — and suddenly storage costs are visible in a way they never were when each agency paid its own infrastructure bills separately.

What Canberra's Institutions Are Actually Doing

The National Library of Australia, whose Trove platform holds more than 900 million digitised items as of mid-2026, has been running perceptual hashing tools since at least 2023 to flag near-duplicate image records before they enter the public catalogue. The library sits at the Parkes Place precinct on the lakeshore, and its digital preservation team has publicly documented the deduplication workflow in its annual preservation reports. That puts it ahead of most comparable national libraries internationally.

Closer to the suburb level, the ACT Government's Integrated Land Information System — administered through Access Canberra and used heavily for planning approvals in growth corridors like Gungahlin and the Molonglo Valley — has historically stored property inspection photographs in ways that created significant overlap. The same site photographed before and after a minor works approval could end up as four or five separate image records in different departmental buckets. A remediation project, flagged in the 2025-26 ACT Budget as part of a broader $14.2 million digital infrastructure line, is intended to address this, though the budget papers do not isolate a specific figure for image deduplication alone.

The Australian National University's library system, on Acton Peninsula, faces the same challenge from a research rather than regulatory angle. ANU manages one of the largest institutional repositories in the southern hemisphere, and duplicate image handling is an ongoing issue in how it ingests research data collections from across its colleges.

How That Stacks Up Globally

Singapore's Smart Nation initiative has been the most aggressive internationally. The Singapore Government Technology Agency, known as GovTech, published guidelines in 2024 mandating automated deduplication checks on any image asset uploaded to whole-of-government platforms, with a target of reducing redundant storage by 30 percent across participating agencies by the end of 2025. Amsterdam's municipal digital archive, Stadsarchief Amsterdam, completed a three-year deduplication project in 2024 covering roughly 1.1 million photographic records, using open-source tooling it has since shared with other European city archives.

Wellington, New Zealand — arguably Canberra's closest structural equivalent as a small capital city dominated by public sector workers — completed a cross-agency image audit through the Department of Internal Affairs in late 2025. Wellington's approach leaned heavily on vendor-supplied AI matching rather than in-house tooling, a decision that drew some criticism from open-government advocates there over transparency and cost lock-in.

Canberra's position sits somewhere between Wellington's vendor dependency and Singapore's systematic mandate. The National Library's in-house capability is genuinely world-class. Elsewhere across ACT and Commonwealth agencies, progress is patchier and relies on individual agency initiative rather than a whole-of-government standard.

For public servants, researchers at UC and ANU, and anyone lodging planning documents through Access Canberra's online portals on Dickson's Cowper Street or the Woden Service Centre, the practical upshot is straightforward. The tools to fix this problem exist and are increasingly cheap to run. What has been missing is a binding cross-agency requirement to use them. The ACT Government's next digital strategy update, expected before the end of 2026, will be worth watching for whether that gap finally gets addressed.