Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions Ahead for ACT Government Archives

The ACT Government is facing a concrete decision point over how to manage tens of thousands of duplicate images sitting across its digital asset libraries — a problem that has quietly ballooned alongside the expansion of agencies into cloud-based storage over the past three years. The question now is not whether to act, but who holds the authority to do it, and what rules will govern what stays and what goes.

The issue carries real stakes. Government photographs, scanned documents, and visual records held across agencies including the ACT Public Service Directorate and the ACT Heritage Library at Civic square are subject to the Territory Records Act 2002, which sets strict conditions on the disposal of official records. Deleting a duplicate that turns out to be the only surviving high-resolution version of a public record could constitute an unlawful disposal — a risk that has made agency staff cautious about acting unilaterally.

Why This Is Coming to a Head Now

The timing is not coincidental. The ACT Government's whole-of-government cloud migration, which has pushed major directorates onto shared Microsoft Azure infrastructure over recent years, created conditions where the same image file can be ingested, copied, and stored multiple times across different project folders, SharePoint libraries, and legacy systems running in parallel. Storage is not free. Government IT procurement documents reviewed by The Daily Canberra indicate per-gigabyte cloud storage costs are a standing line item in directorate budgets, and duplicated assets compound those costs directly.

The Australian National University's digital preservation team at the Chifley Library on Acton campus has been grappling with a parallel version of the same problem. ANU's institutional repository holds research image datasets where duplication is common after collaborative projects conclude and multiple research groups retain copies. The university's library services have been refining de-duplication protocols since at least 2024, and ACT government officials have informally engaged with that work as a reference point.

At the same time, community organisations that access ACT government digital image collections — including the Canberra Museum and Gallery on London Circuit — have raised concerns that overzealous automated de-duplication tools could strip metadata or collapse distinctions between images that appear identical but carry different provenance records. A photograph of Northbourne Avenue taken for a heritage assessment in 2018 and again for a light rail planning document in 2021 may look the same to an algorithm but serve entirely different archival functions.

The Decisions That Cannot Be Deferred

Three questions now sit on the desk of the ACT Chief Digital Officer's office. First, which agency holds disposal authority — the originating directorate, a central digital governance body, or the Territory Records Office? Second, will any de-duplication process require human sign-off on each deletion, or will automated tools be permitted to act on defined rules? Third, how will the government handle images that exist in both a legacy on-premise server and the cloud migration copy — a scenario that creates legal ambiguity about which version constitutes the official record.

A review process is understood to be underway inside the ACT Government's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions branch, though no public consultation has been announced as of July 4, 2026. The Territory Records Office, which operates under the direction of the ACT Executive, has the power to issue disposal authorisation schedules that would give agencies legal cover to remove confirmed duplicates — but drafting and approving such a schedule takes months, not weeks.

For public servants working in growth suburbs like Gungahlin, where the Transport Canberra and City Services directorate manages large volumes of construction and planning imagery, the practical effect is a daily accumulation problem. Files keep arriving. Storage keeps filling. And without clear rules, the safer choice is always to keep everything.

The next formal checkpoint is expected to be a briefing to the ACT Government's Digital Transformation Ministerial Advisory Council, though no date for that session has been publicly confirmed. Organisations that rely on government image archives — journalists, researchers, heritage advocates — would be well served by watching for any public consultation window. Once a disposal schedule is approved, the deletions can happen fast, and appeals after the fact are complicated.