Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Capital Stacks Up Against Cities Tackling the Same Digital Headache

Across Canberra's government agencies and cultural institutions, duplicate digital images — the same photograph, map, or document scanned twice, catalogued under different file names, sitting in separate databases — are quietly eating storage budgets, slowing archival searches, and undermining the integrity of public records. The problem is not new, but it is getting harder to ignore.

The scale of the issue has sharpened into focus this year as federal agencies accelerate digitisation drives ahead of the National Archives of Australia's 2027 digital-transition deadline. When the same record exists in three places under three different identifiers, staff waste time, agencies duplicate storage costs, and the public — or a Freedom of Information applicant — can end up with an incomplete or contradictory picture of what the government actually holds.

What Canberra's Institutions Are Dealing With

The National Library of Australia on Parkes Place is among the institutions managing this most visibly. Its Trove platform, which indexes millions of digitised newspaper pages and photographs, has long relied on contributor institutions submitting clean, deduplicated metadata. But as more ACT-based organisations — including the Australian War Memorial on Treloar Crescent in Campbell and various university libraries — feed collections into shared systems, mismatches and duplicates accumulate. The National Library has not published a specific figure for the number of duplicate records in Trove, but the platform's known data-quality issues have been a recurring point of discussion in the library and archives sector since at least 2022.

At the ACT government level, the planning and land authority's property image repositories carry their own deduplication burden. Every development application lodged through the ACT Planning portal can attach site photographs, and with Gungahlin and Belconnen among the fastest-growing urban corridors in the country, the volume of submitted imagery has grown substantially. Without automated deduplication tools, staff manually audit records — an approach that works at low volume but strains quickly.

The Australian National University's library system, which manages more than 2.3 million physical items and a large and growing digital collection, began a formal metadata remediation project in 2024 specifically targeting duplicate digital assets across its institutional repository. The University of Canberra has undertaken similar work through its library services.

How Other Capital Cities Are Handling It

Wellington and Ottawa offer the most instructive comparisons, partly because both are mid-sized federal capitals where government and cultural institutions dominate the digital-asset landscape — a profile that maps closely onto Canberra's roughly 460,000 residents and public-service-heavy economy.

Statistics New Zealand has embedded deduplication checks directly into its data ingestion pipelines, meaning duplicate images are flagged before they enter the official record rather than cleaned up afterwards. Library and Archives Canada piloted a machine-learning deduplication tool across its photographic holdings in 2023, reducing identified duplicate records in one collection by an amount the agency described in its annual report as significant, though specific percentages were not publicly released.

Edinburgh, which manages cultural collections through a mix of National Records of Scotland and City of Edinburgh Council systems, has taken a vendor-led approach, contracting a third-party digital asset management platform to run deduplication algorithms quarterly. The cost for that contract, as reported in the council's published budget documents for 2025-26, was £340,000 annually — a figure that gives some sense of what serious deduplication infrastructure costs even for a city smaller than Canberra.

Canberra, by contrast, has no single coordinated strategy. Responsibility is fragmented across the National Archives, individual agencies, the ACT government, and research institutions, each running its own systems.

For anyone working in or with Canberra's public sector, the immediate practical step is straightforward: check what digital asset management policy your agency or institution actually has in writing, and whether it includes any deduplication standard. Many do not. The National Archives publishes digitisation policy guidance that agencies are expected to follow, and that guidance is worth reading before the 2027 deadline arrives and the full scope of the problem becomes unavoidable.