Councils, archivists and heritage bodies speak out on the push to fix Bendigo's duplicate image problem

Bendigo's cultural institutions are sitting on thousands of duplicate, mislabelled or degraded digital images — and the people responsible for managing those collections say the problem has reached a point where it can no longer be patched over one grant cycle at a time.

The issue has sharpened in recent months as the City of Greater Bendigo finalises a broader digital heritage strategy, and as Bendigo Health's capital expansion project on Lucan Street has triggered obligations to document and archive photographic records of structures being altered or demolished. When multiple agencies photograph the same site independently, the resulting duplication clogs collection management systems and makes accurate public search close to useless.

What the institutions are saying

The Goldfields Library Corporation, which operates branches across the region including the main Bendigo Library on Hargreaves Street, manages one of the most heavily used local history collections in regional Victoria. Library staff have flagged publicly — through the corporation's annual service reports — that deduplication of image holdings is among the most resource-intensive tasks facing collection teams. The corporation's network covers seven municipalities and holds photographic material dating to the 1860s gold rush era, much of it digitised in multiple passes over the past two decades under different state-funded programs, producing overlapping copies at varying resolutions.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, anchored on Edwards Road, runs postgraduate programs in information management and has collaborated with local councils on heritage documentation projects. Academic staff working in that space have pointed to a sector-wide pattern: digitisation funding from bodies such as the Public Record Office Victoria tends to be project-specific, which means institutions digitise in bursts rather than maintaining a rolling deduplication workflow. The result is collections that grow faster than they can be curated.

The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, the recognised Traditional Owner body for the Bendigo region, has a direct stake in how photographic and archival records are managed. The corporation has previously raised concerns through heritage consultations about the risk that culturally sensitive images — particularly those depicting ancestors, sacred sites or Sorry Business — can circulate undetected when duplicate handling is poor and provenance metadata is stripped or lost. Proper image management is not just an administrative matter; for Dja Dja Wurrung representatives it carries cultural and legal weight under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006.

The scale of the problem

Public Record Office Victoria reported in its 2024–25 annual report that Victorian councils collectively hold more than 4.2 million digitised images under various retention schedules, with no uniform deduplication standard applied across local government. That figure does not include holdings managed by statutory health services or universities, which operate under separate frameworks.

The City of Greater Bendigo allocated $180,000 in its 2025–26 budget toward digital collections infrastructure, according to council budget documents published last October. Officers working on the heritage strategy have indicated that a portion of that allocation is directed at improving metadata standards — a necessary precondition for any automated deduplication tool to function reliably across the council's image library, which spans planning records, heritage overlays and the Bendigo Art Gallery's digitised photographic archive on View Street.

The Bendigo Art Gallery itself holds one of the most significant regional photography collections in Australia, with works and documentary images that have been scanned under at least three separate digitisation programs since 2005. Gallery management has previously noted in public forums that reconciling those scan generations remains an ongoing curatorial challenge.

The practical path forward, according to collection managers who have spoken at forums including the Regional Libraries Victoria network meetings, involves three steps: adopting a shared metadata schema across institutions, running deduplication software against consolidated repositories rather than siloed ones, and establishing a triage protocol that flags culturally sensitive material before automated processes touch it. None of those steps is technically complicated. All of them require institutions that have historically worked in parallel to start working together — and to secure recurrent funding rather than relying on one-off project grants that expire before the work is finished.

The City of Greater Bendigo's digital heritage strategy is expected to go to council for endorsement before the end of the 2026 calendar year.