Councils, arts institutions and heritage bodies across central Victoria are being forced to confront a growing backlog of duplicated digital images — and the choices made in the next six months will shape how the region's visual record survives.
4 min read
Bendigo's cultural institutions are sitting on tens of thousands of duplicate digital images, and the decisions about how to handle them are no longer optional. The City of Greater Bendigo, Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Mundy Street, and the Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street each manage their own digital asset collections — and all three have been quietly grappling with the same problem: multiple versions of the same photograph, scan or artwork reproduction clogging storage systems and complicating public access.
The issue has sharpened this winter for a simple reason: money. The State Government's Regional Arts Fund, which supports digitisation projects across Victoria, closes its next funding round on August 15, 2026. Institutions that want to use those grants to clean up their collections need to have a plan in place before that date — not just for storing images, but for deciding which copies to keep, which to discard, and who owns the master file.
Digital storage is not free. Estimates from the Public Record Office Victoria place average cloud storage costs for regional councils at between $4,000 and $12,000 a year depending on volume, and those figures climb sharply once collections pass the 500,000-file threshold. Several Bendigo institutions are approaching or have crossed that point. Duplicate images — often created when files are scanned multiple times, migrated across systems, or shared between departments without a central registry — can represent 20 to 40 percent of a collection's total footprint, according to sector guidance published by the Australian Society of Archivists in its 2024 digital stewardship framework.
The problem is particularly acute for Aboriginal cultural heritage records. The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, which holds custodial responsibilities across much of the Bendigo region, has been working with local councils to ensure that digitised cultural materials are not inadvertently duplicated across public databases — a process that carries both legal and cultural weight under Victoria's Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006. Getting the de-duplication process wrong in this space does not just waste storage money; it risks creating legally non-compliant records or stripping context from sensitive materials.
Three choices are sitting on desks across Bendigo right now. First, institutions need to decide whether to run de-duplication algorithmically — using software that identifies pixel-identical or near-identical files — or manually, which is slower but catches cases where two images look the same but carry different metadata, provenance notes or rights information. La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which houses a media and communications faculty on Edwards Road, has offered technical advisory support to local councils on exactly this kind of workflow question, though no formal agreement has been publicly announced.
Second, organisations need to settle on a master file standard. TIFF files at 600 DPI are the current benchmark for archival-quality images under the National Archives of Australia's digital preservation policy, but many institutions in regional Victoria still hold large volumes of JPEG-only collections from early 2000s digitisation drives. Choosing a master standard now determines what gets migrated and what gets flagged for re-scanning.
Third — and most politically fraught — is the question of who controls the consolidated master collection when multiple organisations contributed to building it. The Bendigo Art Gallery's permanent collection includes works photographed by both council staff and external contractors over a period of more than 20 years. Ownership of the resulting image files has not always been clearly documented.
The August 15 Regional Arts Fund deadline gives institutions roughly six weeks to assemble a coherent proposal. Those that arrive at that date without a de-duplication policy risk having grant assessors question whether the organisation can manage a new digitisation project responsibly. The Mundy Street archives centre and the View Street gallery have both indicated to council working groups that they intend to submit applications, according to agenda papers from the June 2026 City of Greater Bendigo ordinary meeting. Whether they apply jointly or separately will signal a great deal about how seriously local institutions are taking the coordination problem at the centre of this debate.
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Published by The Daily Bendigo
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