Years of fragmented record-keeping across council departments and arts organisations have left the city with a growing catalogue of duplicated images, and fixing it will take more than a spreadsheet.
4 min read
Bendigo's civic image archive, spanning decades of public art commissions, heritage photography and community program documentation, contains hundreds of duplicate files, a problem that administrators at the City of Greater Bendigo have been working to address since at least early 2025. The duplication crept in gradually, the product of siloed workflows, successive software migrations and the well-meaning but uncoordinated efforts of multiple agencies storing the same material independently.
The issue matters now because the council is midway through a broader digital asset management overhaul, timed to coincide with Bendigo Health's capital expansion on Lucan Street and a parallel push by La Trobe University's Bendigo campus to integrate its regional research collections with civic databases. Both institutions generate substantial photographic and documentary records. When those feeds hit a central repository that already contains duplicate images from the Bendigo Art Gallery's digitisation program on View Street, the scale of the problem compounds quickly.
The roots go back to the mid-2000s, when Bendigo's various cultural bodies began digitising physical archives independently. The Bendigo Regional Arts Centre on View Street ran its own scanning program. The Bendigo Art Gallery, one of regional Victoria's oldest public galleries, founded in 1887, maintained a separate catalogue. Council's heritage team on Hargreaves Street logged streetscape and building photography into a different system again. Nobody was deliberately duplicating material; they were simply solving immediate local problems without a shared standard.
Software migrations made things worse. At least three separate platform changes between 2010 and 2022 generated orphaned file sets, where images were exported from one system, re-imported into another and never cleaned from the original. By the time administrators began auditing the central repository in late 2024, some photographs of landmarks such as the Bendigo Town Hall and the Sacred Heart Cathedral on Wattle Street existed in six or more versions, often with inconsistent metadata, different dates, different attribution fields, occasionally different resolution specifications for what was ostensibly the same image.
The practical consequences are not trivial. Duplicate images inflate storage costs, slow search results and, critically, create uncertainty about which version carries the correct rights clearance or provenance record. For a city actively promoting its Aboriginal cultural heritage collections, material that requires strict custodianship protocols under Victorian law, a messy underlying archive is more than an administrative inconvenience.
The City of Greater Bendigo's library services team, which administers much of the civic digital archive from the Bendigo Library on Hargreaves Street, began a structured deduplication project in the first quarter of 2025. The work involves cross-referencing file hashes, creation dates and metadata fields to identify true duplicates versus legitimately distinct versions of similar subjects. It is painstaking. Archives professionals generally estimate that a collection of around 50,000 unaudited image files requires roughly 300 hours of skilled review time to clean properly, a benchmark that gives some sense of why this has not been resolved overnight.
Regional arts funding has become part of the conversation. The Victorian Government's Creative Victoria regional grants stream, which allocated funding rounds in both 2024 and 2025, has supported digitisation projects at organisations including the Bendigo Historical Society. But grant money tends to fund the creation of new digital content, not the unglamorous work of cleaning up existing archives. That funding gap is one reason the deduplication effort has relied heavily on council staff time rather than specialist contractors.
For residents, community groups and researchers trying to access Bendigo's image collections, the most practical near-term advice is to go through the Bendigo Library's reference service directly when sourcing historical photographs, rather than relying on general web searches that may surface deprecated or incorrectly attributed versions. The library's digital collections desk can confirm which file version holds current rights clearance and correct provenance. Administrators say the bulk of the deduplication audit is expected to be complete before the end of 2026, at which point the cleaned archive will feed into a unified platform shared across council, Bendigo Health and La Trobe's regional campus.
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Published by The Daily Bendigo
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