A week of audits and urgent reviews has exposed how years of inconsistent scanning and storage practices left cultural collections riddled with redundant files — and local organisations are now acting.
4 min read
Bendigo's major cultural institutions have spent the past week scrambling to address a mounting duplicate image problem that has quietly degraded digital archives across the region. The issue — where the same photograph, artwork scan or historical document appears multiple times under different file names and metadata tags — has complicated search results, inflated storage costs and, in some cases, pushed genuinely unique items out of public-facing collections entirely.
The problem surfaced publicly this week when staff at the Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Pall Mall flagged the issue to the City of Greater Bendigo's records management team during a scheduled mid-year systems review. The review, which began in late June 2026, was intended as a routine check ahead of a planned infrastructure upgrade. Instead, it revealed a backlog of duplicate entries that archivists say accumulated over more than a decade of piecemeal digitisation projects.
The issue is not unique to Bendigo, but the city's particular history of running parallel digitisation programs — some funded through state government cultural grants, others through federal regional arts funding streams — made it especially vulnerable. When separate teams scan the same physical item using different equipment or software presets, the resulting files rarely share identical metadata, so automated deduplication tools fail to recognise them as copies. Multiply that across thousands of items and the archive bloat becomes significant.
The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street, which holds one of the largest regional public collections in Victoria, confirmed this week that its digital asset management system had been under review since May 2026. A gallery spokesperson said the review was part of an ongoing collection management program and was not triggered by any specific incident — though the timing coincided with the broader archival audit happening across the city. The gallery declined to provide specific figures on the number of duplicates identified, citing the review's ongoing status.
La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which hosts the university's regional research collections and supports postgraduate programs in information management, has been involved in advising several local organisations on best-practice deduplication workflows. The campus's library services team has pointed institutions toward open-source tools and the National Library of Australia's digitisation guidelines, which were last updated in 2024, as a framework for cleaning up existing collections before migrating to new storage systems.
The City of Greater Bendigo confirmed this week that it has engaged an external consultant to assess the scope of the duplicate problem across council-managed digital holdings. That assessment is expected to take six to eight weeks. The council's digital infrastructure budget for the 2025-26 financial year included an allocation for storage upgrades, though the specific dollar figure was not disclosed in publicly available budget documents reviewed by The Daily Bendigo.
Bendigo Health, whose capital expansion program has included significant investment in digital record systems across its hospitals on Lucan Street, said its imaging and patient record systems operate under separate governance frameworks and were not part of the archival review. However, the organisation noted it conducts its own regular audits of digital asset integrity.
For community groups and smaller organisations — including the many historical societies affiliated with the Goldfields region — the practical advice coming out of this week's review is straightforward: stop adding to the problem before fixing what already exists. Archivists recommend pausing bulk scanning projects until existing collections are audited, adopting consistent file-naming conventions across teams, and using checksum verification to flag identical files regardless of their metadata.
The external consultant's report is expected to land with the City of Greater Bendigo by mid-August 2026. If it recommends a region-wide deduplication program, local institutions may be invited to participate in a coordinated effort — potentially the first of its kind in central Victoria. For now, the week's reviews have at least forced the conversation into the open, and archivists across Bendigo say that is long overdue.
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