Bendigo leads regional cities in tackling duplicate digital image archives — but the global race is just beginning

Bendigo's major cultural institutions have begun systematically purging duplicate images from their digital archives, placing the central Victorian city among a small group of regional centres globally that are ahead of larger metropolitan rivals in managing what archivists call a growing storage and access crisis.

The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street and the City of Greater Bendigo's library services, which operate across branches including the Bendigo Library on Hargreaves Street, have both confirmed active duplicate-image-replacement programs as part of broader digitisation reviews. The push comes as heritage organisations around the world grapple with the costs — financial and curatorial — of holding thousands of redundant digital files across collections that have grown without consistent governance since the early 2000s.

Why now? The trigger is partly technological and partly financial. Cloud storage costs have climbed steeply since 2023, and many institutions that deferred collection audits during the COVID-19 years are now confronting backlogs. The broader pressure is real: the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions flagged in its 2025 trend report that unmanaged digital duplication is among the top three operational cost pressures for regional cultural institutions globally.

What Bendigo is doing differently

The Bendigo Art Gallery's approach centres on a tiered review process that distinguishes between exact duplicates — identical pixel-for-pixel copies — and near-duplicates, which may be different scans of the same physical object at different resolutions or from different digitisation rounds. Near-duplicates require curatorial judgment before deletion, because a higher-resolution version may have genuine research value even if the lower-resolution copy appears redundant to a casual viewer.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which houses the Bendigo regional library collection and supports research partnerships with the gallery, has contributed technical expertise through its information management programs. Students enrolled in the campus's applied computing and information studies courses have worked on pilot audits, giving the project both workforce scale and an applied-learning dimension that purely commercial approaches lack.

Compare that to Ballarat, a city of similar size and cultural infrastructure roughly 75 kilometres to the south-west. Ballarat's Art Gallery of Ballarat has publicly acknowledged its digitisation backlog but has not yet announced a structured duplicate-replacement program. In Geelong, Council's library corporation is mid-way through a collection review begun in early 2025, though its scope has focused primarily on physical holdings rather than born-digital assets.

Internationally, the comparison is instructive. Rockhampton in Queensland — a regional city with demographic and institutional parallels to Bendigo — began a similar program in late 2024 through its Rockhampton Museum of Art but has concentrated on photographic negatives rather than digital files. In the United Kingdom, regional councils including Gloucester City Council completed digital archive audits between 2023 and 2025 under a national digitisation framework funded by Arts Council England, giving those institutions a structural advantage that Australian regional bodies have had to replicate without equivalent federal co-ordination.

The numbers behind the clutter

Storage is not cheap. Industry benchmarks published by the Australian Library and Information Association in 2024 put the annual managed cloud storage cost for a mid-size regional gallery's digital collection at between $18,000 and $45,000, depending on redundancy settings and access frequency. Duplicate files — which in unaudited collections can account for between 15 and 40 per cent of total stored assets, according to the same benchmarks — represent direct waste within those figures.

Bendigo Health, which maintains its own medical imaging archive as part of its capital expansion program on Lucan Street, is separately working through a medical-image deduplication project that, while clinically distinct from cultural archiving, has generated shared learnings about workflow design that the gallery and library teams have drawn on informally.

For Bendigo residents and researchers who use these collections, the practical outcome will be faster search results, cleaner metadata, and — eventually — lower institutional operating costs that administrators can redirect toward acquisition and access programs. The City of Greater Bendigo's digital strategy, which runs through to 2028, identifies collection quality as a key performance measure. Institutions yet to start should note: the longer the audit is deferred, the larger the backlog and the higher the remediation cost. Bendigo's head start, modest as it is, already looks like the smarter call.