Cultural institutions and council agencies across Bendigo are grappling with a surge of duplicated digital imagery in public-facing collections, and those closest to the problem say the fix is more complex than it looks.
4 min read
A quiet but increasingly urgent problem has surfaced across Bendigo's network of cultural and government institutions: thousands of duplicate digital images clogging archives, slowing public access portals, and in some cases misrepresenting records held under Aboriginal cultural heritage protections. The issue has pushed archivists, technology officers and heritage advocates into the same room, and they are not entirely agreeing on what to do next.
The timing matters. Several Bendigo institutions are mid-way through significant digital infrastructure upgrades. Bendigo Health is managing a capital expansion that includes digitising patient-related administrative records. La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, anchored on Edwards Road, has been expanding its digital humanities research capacity. The City of Greater Bendigo is simultaneously pushing toward a consolidated open-data platform. Each project has independently identified duplicate imagery as a bottleneck — and each has approached the problem differently.
Duplicate image replacement — the process of identifying, flagging, and systematically substituting redundant files with a single canonical version — sounds straightforward. It is not. At institutions managing tens of thousands of image assets, automated deduplication software regularly generates a false-positive rate that archivists describe as operationally significant. A file duplicated deliberately for backup or accessibility purposes can be flagged alongside a file duplicated by error. Without human review, the distinction collapses.
The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street, whose permanent collection includes works requiring high-resolution archival photography at multiple stages of conservation, has been one of the more vocal institutions on the cost side of the equation. Professional archival re-photography of a single artwork can run from $180 to over $600 depending on size, lighting complexity and metadata requirements. When duplicates inflate a collection's apparent size, grant applications and storage procurement decisions can be skewed — a concern flagged in broader sector guidance published by the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material.
Regional Libraries Victoria, which provides back-end support to the Goldfields Library Corporation operating the Bendigo Library on Hargreaves Street, has pointed to a 2024 sector audit indicating that regional library digital collections across Victoria contained duplicate image rates of between 12 and 28 percent, depending on how duplicates were defined. That audit, prepared for Libraries Victoria, did not name individual member libraries but the range gives a sense of how widespread the issue is across comparable institutions.
The conversation becomes more pointed when Aboriginal cultural heritage material enters the frame. The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, the Registered Aboriginal Party for the Bendigo region, has long maintained that digital management of culturally sensitive imagery requires community-controlled protocols — not just technical deduplication. When image replacement processes run without adequate cultural consultation, there is a real risk that images subject to access restrictions are inadvertently re-uploaded, re-indexed, or made publicly searchable through a replacement file that carries different metadata than the original.
La Trobe's Bendigo campus has been developing curriculum in this space through its digital humanities and information management programs, with researchers working alongside regional heritage bodies. The university's involvement gives the debate an academic framing that some practitioners find useful and others find removed from day-to-day operational reality.
City of Greater Bendigo's information governance team has been reviewing its own holdings as part of a broader records management policy refresh, with a target completion date of late 2026. How duplicate image replacement will be handled within that review has not yet been publicly detailed.
For institutions looking at practical next steps, technology officers at several Bendigo bodies point to a phased approach: automated flagging first, human review second, and community or stakeholder sign-off third where heritage sensitivity applies. The sequencing is less glamorous than a software fix, but those working through it say skipping any stage creates downstream problems that cost more to resolve than the original duplicates did. The conversation in Bendigo is still early, but it is happening — and the institutions involved are not waiting for a state-level directive to move.
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Published by The Daily Bendigo
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