A growing backlog of duplicate and misidentified images in regional digital archives is costing institutions time and money — and Bendigo's cultural sector is taking stock of the scale.
4 min read
Bendigo's cultural institutions are sitting on a larger duplicate image problem than most administrators publicly acknowledge. Across the city's major heritage collections, preliminary internal audits have found that between 15 and 30 percent of digitised holdings contain duplicate or near-duplicate files — a figure consistent with benchmarks reported by the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material in its 2024 sector survey, which found regional repositories carried the highest rates of redundant digital assets nationwide.
The timing matters. The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street is midway through a multi-year digitisation push, and Bendigo Health's records management team on Lucan Street has been expanding its digital imaging infrastructure as part of the hospital's broader capital works program. Both institutions, along with the Goldfields Libraries Corporation, are at a decision point: clean up legacy duplication now, or absorb compounding storage and retrieval costs for years to come.
Duplicate image files are not a trivial inconvenience. Storage costs for large unmanaged repositories can run to several hundred dollars per terabyte annually when licensing, redundancy systems and staff retrieval time are factored in. A 2023 report by the Digital Preservation Coalition estimated that unmanaged duplication adds, on average, 22 percent to the total cost of digital asset maintenance for mid-sized cultural organisations. For a regional gallery or library network operating on tight annual budgets, that overhead is material.
The Goldfields Libraries Corporation, which services Bendigo and surrounding municipalities from its main branch on Hargreaves Street, has been working since early 2025 to consolidate image assets across its local history collection. The collection includes more than 40,000 digitised photographs, maps and ephemera — a significant portion of which were scanned in multiple formats and resolutions during successive grant-funded projects dating back to 2009. Without a unified deduplication protocol, staff have reported spending disproportionate hours on manual file comparison during catalogue updates.
At La Trobe University's Bendigo campus on Edwards Road, the library services team manages shared digital collections tied to both academic and community research programs. La Trobe's broader university system adopted an automated deduplication workflow across its campuses in 2024, though the rollout timeline for individual regional sites has not been publicly confirmed. The university's Bendigo campus serves roughly 3,500 enrolled students, many of whom access digitised local history and environmental science image databases for research purposes.
Cloud storage pricing has fallen sharply over the past decade, but the administrative cost of managing bloated image libraries has not followed the same trajectory. Human review of flagged duplicates — distinguishing a true duplicate from a legitimately distinct image captured moments apart — still requires trained staff time. Industry estimates suggest a skilled archivist can review and resolve roughly 200 to 300 duplicate flags per day, depending on collection complexity. For a collection with tens of thousands of flagged files, that represents weeks of dedicated labour.
State and federal funding cycles are also shaping the urgency. The Victorian Government's Regional Arts Fund and the federal government's Catalyst infrastructure grants both list digital collection integrity as an eligible project category for the 2026–27 funding round, with applications closing in September 2026. Institutions that can demonstrate a quantified duplication problem — with audit data attached — are better positioned to secure remediation funding than those presenting anecdotal concerns.
The practical path forward for Bendigo's cultural organisations involves three steps that archivists and digital asset managers consistently recommend: commission a baseline audit using automated hash-matching software to establish the actual duplication rate; prioritise high-access collections first, since those carry the greatest retrieval cost burden; and establish a governance policy that prevents duplication from re-accumulating through future digitisation projects. None of this requires large capital expenditure upfront — the audit software is widely available at low or no cost through sector networks including the Australian Society of Archivists. The harder task is allocating staff time during a period when regional institutions are already stretched. That tension, more than any technical barrier, is what determines whether the numbers improve by 2027 or simply get worse.
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Published by The Daily Bendigo
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