Canberra's duplicate image problem: how the capital stacks up against cities wrestling with the same digital mess

The ACT Government holds tens of thousands of digital image files across its agencies, and a significant share of them are duplicates. That is not unique to Canberra. But how the capital is choosing to deal with it — leaning on its unusually dense concentration of federal and territory public servants, its two major universities, and a procurement culture shaped by Commonwealth standards — sets it apart from how comparable mid-sized government cities are approaching the same problem.

Duplicate image management, once dismissed as a minor housekeeping matter, has become a live operational issue for digital archivists and ICT managers as storage costs rise and freedom-of-information obligations grow more demanding. When an agency cannot quickly establish which version of an image is the authoritative one, it creates compliance headaches and slows down records release timelines.

What Canberra is doing differently

The Australian National University's archives and digital preservation unit in Acton has been piloting automated deduplication workflows since early 2025, working through a backlog of research and institutional photography that had accumulated across shared network drives for more than a decade. The University of Canberra, based in Bruce, launched a parallel internal audit of its digital asset management system in the first quarter of 2026, focusing on imagery held by its communications and marketing teams.

At the territory government level, the ACT's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate has been updating its digital records framework in line with revised guidance from the National Archives of Australia, whose headquarters sit on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes. That guidance, updated in late 2025, put greater emphasis on agencies being able to demonstrate single-source-of-truth records management — which, in practice, means eliminating duplicate files before they create problems during audits or FOI requests.

Wellington, New Zealand — a city of comparable size and a similarly public-service-heavy workforce — moved earlier. Its digital government unit mandated deduplication standards for all central agency image libraries by mid-2024, with compliance checks built into annual ICT audits. Ottawa's Treasury Board Secretariat issued binding guidance on the same issue in 2023. Canberra's territory agencies are not yet operating under a mandatory framework at the local level, though Commonwealth entities based here are subject to National Archives oversight.

The cost of doing nothing

Cloud storage is not cheap. Enterprise object storage through the major providers used by Australian government agencies was running at roughly $23 to $28 per terabyte per month as of mid-2026, depending on contract tier and redundancy requirements. An agency sitting on even five terabytes of avoidable duplicate image data is burning several hundred dollars a month for no administrative benefit — a figure that scales quickly across a large department.

Edinburgh, Scotland, which manages a devolved government apparatus of broadly comparable complexity to the ACT, completed a whole-of-government digital asset audit in 2025 and reported removing more than 1.2 million duplicate files, the majority of them images, from shared government repositories. Canberra has no equivalent published figure yet, though the ACT Government's digital strategy roadmap, released in late 2025, flags a digital asset audit as a priority for the 2026-27 financial year.

ANU's pilot is expected to produce a public case study later this year, which archivists at smaller territory agencies have indicated they are watching. The National Library of Australia, also based in Parkes, has been running its own deduplication processes on the Trove digitisation program for several years and is considered a domestic benchmark for how to handle the problem at scale.

For public servants working in Civic or the Barton precinct whose agencies are yet to act, the practical advice from digital records specialists is consistent: do not wait for a mandatory framework. Agencies that begin cataloguing and deduplicating now — before a compulsory audit cycle forces the issue — tend to find the process faster and less disruptive than those who start under deadline pressure. The technology exists. The main variable is whether someone in the organisation decides it is worth scheduling before it becomes someone else's emergency.