How Bendigo Is Tackling the Digital Archive Problem That's Stumping Cities Worldwide

Thousands of photographs sitting in Bendigo's public digital archives are duplicates. Some are near-identical scans filed under different names, others are degraded copies that have displaced the originals entirely. The City of Greater Bendigo and institutions along Pall Mall are now working through a systematic image-replacement program, and the approaches they're taking are drawing quiet interest from archivists in comparable regional cities across Europe and North America.

The problem has sharpened in 2026 because heritage digitisation funding cycles are closing. The Victorian government's Regional Collections Access Program, which directed money to institutions outside Melbourne, wound down its core digitisation grants at the end of the 2025-26 financial year. That cutoff is forcing archives to consolidate and clean what they have, not simply scan more.

What Bendigo's Institutions Are Actually Doing

The Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Mundy Street is one of two local facilities actively running what archivists call a duplicate-image replacement pipeline, a process that flags lower-resolution or mislabelled copies, traces the provenance of each file, and systematically substitutes the best available version. The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street, which holds one of regional Victoria's more substantial photographic collections, began a parallel audit of its digital asset management system in March 2026, focusing first on its pre-1950 holdings.

Both institutions are drawing on the GLAM Peak framework, a national collaboration between galleries, libraries, archives and museums, for their deduplication standards. The framework sets minimum resolution thresholds and metadata requirements, which gives local archivists a defensible benchmark when deciding which file survives and which gets flagged for deletion or replacement.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus has a stake in this too. The university's library services team has been coordinating with the Archives Centre on shared digitised records related to the Dja Dja Wurrung country heritage collection, where accurate image provenance carries particular cultural weight. Replacing a duplicate with the wrong source file isn't just a technical error in that context, it can misrepresent a site or object in ways that matter to Traditional Owners.

The Global Comparison

Cities that offer a reasonable comparison to Bendigo, regional centres with populations between 100,000 and 130,000 that hold significant heritage collections, include Inverness in Scotland, Whanganui in New Zealand, and Ferrara in northern Italy. All three have faced versions of the same problem since mass digitisation accelerated in the 2010s.

Whanganui's Sarjeant Gallery completed a deduplication audit in late 2024 and reported, in a publicly available project summary, that roughly 18 per cent of its digitised photographic holdings contained at least one duplicate entry. Ferrara, through its municipal archive, adopted automated hash-matching software in 2023 to catch pixel-identical copies before they entered the live database. Inverness has leaned on volunteer labour through the Highlands Archive Centre's community indexing program.

Bendigo's approach sits somewhere between Ferrara's automated model and Inverness's community-led one. The Archives Centre is using open-source deduplication tools but still relies on staff review for anything flagged as culturally sensitive. That hybrid approach costs more in staff hours, estimated internally at roughly 1.2 full-time-equivalent positions for the current audit cycle, but reduces the risk of automated tools discarding a contextually unique image that a hash-matching algorithm reads as a copy.

The Bendigo Art Gallery has set a target of completing its pre-1950 audit by December 2026. The Archives Centre is working to a longer timeline, with a full collection review projected to run into 2028.

For anyone who has donated photographs or documents to either institution, the practical advice from archivists is straightforward: if you hold original physical prints or negatives that were previously digitised, do not dispose of them yet. The audit process sometimes identifies that the digitised copy on file is not the best available version, and institutions may seek to re-scan from the original. Contact the Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Mundy Street directly if you are uncertain about material you hold.