How Canberra's Government Agencies Quietly Built a Crisis in Visual Records — and Why It's Only Getting Harder to Fix

Somewhere inside the National Archives of Australia's Repository at Mitchell, and across the server farms underpinning dozens of ACT and federal government departments, the same image files exist in multiple copies — sometimes dozens of copies — catalogued under different names, stored in different systems, and costing public money every year to maintain. Duplicate image replacement, the technical process of identifying those redundant files and replacing or consolidating them across digital infrastructure, has moved from a niche IT concern to an active pressure point for agencies managing ballooning storage costs and mandatory digital accessibility standards.

The issue has sharpened in 2026 for a specific reason. The National Archives' digital preservation obligations under the Archives Act 1983 require agencies to transfer records that are at least 20 years old. That pipeline has swelled considerably as the volume of digital photography and scanned documents produced in the early 2000s reaches maturity. Files that were duplicated carelessly across shared drives on Parkes Way and Constitution Avenue are now eligible — or overdue — for formal transfer, and the duplicates are travelling with them.

How the Backlog Built Up

The problem is not new, but its scale is. During the mid-2000s, the Australian Public Service moved aggressively toward shared network drives as its primary document management infrastructure, well ahead of any standardised naming or deduplication protocols. Agencies operating out of the Barton precinct, including several major Commonwealth departments, ran parallel imaging systems for policy documents and ministerial correspondence. When those systems were consolidated — first around 2012, then again when the whole-of-government cloud migration gathered pace under the Digital Transformation Agency after 2015 — duplicate files were routinely bundled into the new environment rather than resolved.

The Australian National University's digital curation research unit, based on the Acton campus, has documented the broader challenge across Australian public institutions. Academic work published through ANU Press between 2019 and 2023 flagged that image deduplication in large public collections is complicated by the absence of shared metadata standards, meaning two identical photographs of, say, the Brindabella Ranges can exist as entirely separate records if their file names, creation dates or embedded EXIF data differ even slightly. The problem is structural, not simply a product of carelessness.

At the ACT government level, agencies using the Objective ECM platform — the territory's primary electronic document and records management system — have had deduplication tools available since at least 2018, but uptake has been inconsistent across directorates. The ACT Auditor-General's Office has previously examined records management compliance across territory agencies, and those reports have consistently flagged gaps between policy and practice in document storage, though the specific question of image duplication sits at a technical layer below most compliance audits.

What Replacement Actually Involves

Duplicate image replacement is not simply deletion. Agencies must verify that a nominated master copy meets quality and accessibility standards before any secondary copies are removed or linked back to it. For the federal government, the Digital Continuity 2020 policy — extended informally into the current period — sets minimum requirements around file format, resolution, and metadata completeness that every retained image must satisfy. Images that fail those standards cannot serve as the master copy, which means some consolidation work requires re-scanning or re-exporting source material before any rationalisation happens.

For agencies clustered around the Russell offices and the Treasury building on Langton Crescent, this is largely an internal IT and records management exercise. For smaller ACT government bodies, including some operating out of the Dickson Group Centre precinct, the challenge is finding the staff capacity to run the process at all. Records management roles in the ACT public service are frequently filled by generalists rather than specialists, and the technical steps involved in bulk image comparison and replacement exceed what most standard record-keeping training covers.

The practical path forward for most agencies involves a phased audit — identifying which image libraries are the largest, oldest, and most duplicated — before committing to replacement workflows. Several federal departments have begun contracting this work to specialist digital asset management firms, with initial audit contracts in the $80,000 to $200,000 range depending on collection size, according to publicly available procurement records on AusTender. The ACT government has no centrally published equivalent program, though the question of legacy digital records is likely to feature in the territory's next digital strategy review, expected before the end of 2026.