ACT Government's Digital Archives Overhaul Hits a Snag: Duplicate Image Problem Proves Harder to Fix Than Expected

Efforts to purge duplicate images from the ACT Government's centralised digital asset and records management systems have stalled mid-process, with territory agencies still working through a backlog that officials acknowledged this week is larger than originally estimated. The duplication problem — where identical or near-identical image files are stored multiple times across different departmental servers — has been a known issue inside the Canberra public service since at least early 2025, but the scale of the remediation task has caught several agencies off guard.

The timing matters. The ACT Government committed in its 2025–26 budget to a broader digital transformation agenda, allocating funding toward modernising records infrastructure across territory directorates. Part of that commitment involved reducing unnecessary storage overhead and improving the searchability of government image libraries — everything from planning maps used by the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate to public-facing photography held by Visit Canberra. Duplicate files directly undermine both goals.

Where the Problem Is Concentrated

The duplication issue is most acute in systems used by agencies that handle large volumes of visual content. The ACT Education Directorate, which manages digital resources across more than 140 public schools, and the Transport Canberra and City Services directorate — which maintains image banks related to infrastructure works across suburbs from Gungahlin to Tuggeranong — are understood to be among those working through the cleanup. Neither directorate provided specific figures this week on the volume of duplicate files identified.

The issue also touches institutions on the territory's periphery. The Canberra Institute of Technology's Fyshwick campus, which runs courses in digital media and design, uses shared government credentialling and file systems that intersect with ACT directorates. Staff there have flagged internally that overlapping image libraries make it harder to source accurate, rights-cleared materials for course content — a practical downstream consequence of a problem that can seem abstract at the infrastructure level.

The Australian National University, while not part of the ACT Government system, operates its own parallel digitisation program across its Acton campus. ANU Library has been working since 2024 on a separate deduplication project for its digital collections, a process that archivists there have described in published updates as time-intensive even with purpose-built software tools.

What the Remediation Actually Involves

Fixing duplicate image problems is not as simple as running a single deletion script. Industry-standard practice involves three distinct phases: identifying duplicates using hash-matching or perceptual comparison tools, reviewing flagged files to confirm they are genuinely redundant rather than intentional versioned copies, and then updating any internal links or references before deletion. For a government environment with legacy systems dating back to the early 2000s, that third step — the relinking — is where projects most often bog down.

The ACT Government uses the HPE Content Manager platform as its primary electronic document and records management system, a product widely deployed across Australian public sector agencies. Deduplication within Content Manager environments requires careful coordination between records managers and IT teams, and agencies that have attempted bulk cleanups without that coordination have occasionally created broken references inside official files — a compliance risk under the Territory Records Act 2002.

Storage costs provide some urgency. Commercial cloud storage pricing, which the ACT Government increasingly relies on for scalable capacity, runs at rates where holding tens of thousands of redundant multi-megabyte image files adds measurable cost over a financial year. That pressure is one reason the current remediation push accelerated in the second half of 2025–26.

Agencies working through the duplicate image cleanup are expected to report progress to the ACT Chief Digital Officer's office by the end of July 2026. For public servants navigating the process at their desks in Civic or out at the Dickson offices, the practical advice from records managers is consistent: do not delete any flagged files without written sign-off from your directorate's records coordinator, and check whether any image referenced in a formal document has been cleared before the original is removed. Getting that step wrong creates more work than it saves.