Cultural institutions and local government across central Victoria are wrestling with how to clean up bloated digital collections — and the debate over who pays and who decides is getting pointed.
4 min read
Bendigo's major cultural institutions are under pressure to act on a growing problem hiding in plain sight: thousands of duplicate and near-duplicate images clogging digital archives, inflating storage costs, and — in some cases — misrepresenting the provenance of items held in public trust. The issue has moved from back-room IT conversation to a policy priority in the first half of 2026, with local libraries, galleries and health services all affected.
The trigger, in part, is money. Cloud storage pricing for public sector bodies in Victoria rose sharply after the state government renegotiated its whole-of-government licensing arrangements in early 2026, leaving regional institutions to absorb costs they had previously been shielded from. For organisations like Bendigo Health — which completed a major capital works phase at its Lucan Street campus and generated thousands of construction and clinical documentation images in the process — the bill for redundant files is no longer trivial.
The Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Bull Street has been one focal point. Staff there have been working through a digitisation backlog that accelerated during the COVID-19 years, when physical access was restricted and institutions rushed to scan holdings. The speed of that effort left collections with multiple scanned versions of the same document or photograph, sometimes at different resolutions and with inconsistent metadata. That creates real headaches for researchers and, more critically, for Aboriginal community members trying to trace cultural heritage records — a process that requires precise, reliable image identification rather than a field of near-identical duplicates.
La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which houses information management and digital humanities researchers, has been involved in conversations with local cultural bodies about automated deduplication tools. The university's involvement reflects a broader recognition that the problem is technical as much as it is administrative. Deduplication software can identify visually similar images using perceptual hashing algorithms, but it cannot make the curatorial judgement call about which version of an image should be retained as the authoritative record. That still requires a human — and funding for that human's time.
The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street, one of regional Victoria's most significant public collections, declined to comment on the specifics of its own digital holdings management when contacted this week. The Gallery has been expanding its digital access programs and is understood to be reviewing its image management policies as part of that work, though no formal announcement has been made.
Public sector storage is not cheap. Industry benchmarks suggest Australian government and cultural sector bodies pay between $0.02 and $0.05 per gigabyte per month for compliant cloud storage, and high-resolution image archives can run into the terabytes quickly. For a mid-sized regional institution managing 50 to 100 terabytes of digitised material — a reasonable estimate for a facility with decades of scanning activity — the annual storage bill can exceed $30,000 before staff and software costs are factored in.
The City of Greater Bendigo, through its library service, has flagged digital collection management as a priority in its current operational planning cycle. The library's Hargreaves Street branch serves as the public access point for much of that digital work. Council has not publicly committed funding to a deduplication program, but information management staff have attended statewide forums run by Public Record Office Victoria in 2025 and 2026 that specifically addressed the duplicate image problem.
For institutions holding Aboriginal cultural heritage materials — a particular sensitivity in central Victoria given the significance of Dja Dja Wurrung country — the stakes around accurate image records are especially high. Duplicate or mislabelled images can distort repatriation claims and obscure the chain of custody for sensitive objects.
The practical path forward being discussed across these institutions involves a staged approach: automated flagging of potential duplicates first, followed by expert curatorial review, with community consultation built in where heritage materials are involved. Funding applications to Creative Victoria and the National Library of Australia's digitisation support programs are being considered by at least two Bendigo institutions, though no applications have been confirmed as lodged. The window for the next Creative Victoria regional grants round closes in August 2026.
Spread the word
About this article
Published by The Daily Bendigo
Daily brief
Free, in your inbox before 7am. Weekdays.
