ACT Government's Digital Archives Overhaul Hits a Snag Over Duplicate Image Problem

ACT government agencies spent much of this week wrestling with a specific and frustrating technical problem: thousands of duplicate images lodged across departmental websites, internal document management systems and public-facing digital archives. The issue, which has been building for months, came to a head after a scheduled audit by the ACT Digital, Data and Technology Solutions division flagged redundant files consuming significant server storage across at least four directorates.

The timing matters. The ACT government has been midway through a broader digital transformation push, with agencies instructed to consolidate records management onto a unified platform by the end of the 2026 financial year. Duplicate image files — the same photograph, map, infographic or scanned document stored multiple times under different file names or folder structures — create a specific compliance headache under the Territory Records Act 2002, which requires agencies to maintain accurate, retrievable and non-redundant public records.

Where the Problem Is Showing Up

Two agencies have been most visibly affected. The Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate, which manages large volumes of aerial photography, heritage site imagery and development application documents, was identified as holding a significant volume of duplicate files across its planning portal — the same online system Canberrans use to check development applications in suburbs like Gungahlin and Tuggeranong. Separately, the ACT Health Directorate flagged duplicate images in its public communications archive, a collection used to populate the health.act.gov.au website and internal intranet pages.

The problem is partly a legacy of the COVID-19 period, when government teams shifted rapidly to remote work and file management discipline slipped. Staff across directorates based at offices on London Circuit and in the Canberra CBD were uploading images to multiple shared drives simultaneously, with no automated deduplication system in place at the time. The ACT's digital infrastructure team has since deployed a deduplication tool, but running it retrospectively across legacy folders has proven slower than anticipated.

The Australian National University's digital preservation research group, based on the Acton campus, has been in informal discussions with the ACT government about best-practice approaches to this class of problem. The University of Canberra's library and information science faculty, located at Bruce, has separately produced research on public sector image metadata standards that is understood to be circulating within at least one ACT directorate, though no formal procurement or partnership arrangement has been announced.

What This Week's Audit Found

The Digital, Data and Technology Solutions division completed a preliminary assessment this week. Without citing the internal document directly, sources familiar with government digital infrastructure work in the Territory say deduplication projects of this scale — across agencies with 10 or more years of accumulated digital assets — routinely uncover file counts in the hundreds of thousands. Government cloud storage costs in the Australian public sector are generally benchmarked at between $0.02 and $0.08 per gigabyte per month depending on contract tier, meaning even modest reductions in redundant storage can produce ongoing savings over multi-year periods.

The ACT Budget delivered in June 2026 allocated funding to the Digital, Data and Technology Solutions division as part of a broader shared-services consolidation, though specific line items for archival deduplication work were not separately itemised in the publicly released budget papers.

The practical fix involves more than just deleting extra copies. Agencies must first verify which version of a duplicated image is the canonical record, update all internal links and database references pointing to the deleted copies, and log the remediation action to satisfy Territory Records Act obligations. That three-step process is where the current backlog sits.

For Canberrans using government digital services — whether checking a planning application near Flemington Road in Gungahlin or downloading a health directive PDF — the immediate impact is minimal. Broken image links on a small number of older web pages have been reported but are being patched progressively. Agencies have been advised to complete the primary deduplication pass before the end of July 2026, with a compliance report due to the Territory Records Office in August.