Bendigo's digital archive push hits a snag as duplicate image problem surfaces this week

Staff at the Bendigo Library on Hargreaves Street spent much of this week isolating and flagging hundreds of duplicate digital images that had accumulated across two separate cataloguing systems, a problem that has slowed a broader digitisation project the library had hoped to complete before the end of the 2025-26 financial year.

The issue matters right now because the library, operating under the City of Greater Bendigo, is midway through a project to make its historical photographic collection — estimated at more than 14,000 images — fully searchable online. Duplicate entries clog search results, mislabel records, and in some cases have caused the same image to be assigned conflicting dates and subject tags, undermining the reliability of the entire archive for researchers, schools, and community groups.

Two systems, one mess

The core problem traces back to a 2023 decision to migrate part of the existing catalogue into a newer content management platform while keeping the legacy system running in parallel. Over roughly 18 months, images were uploaded into both environments without a consistent deduplication process in place. By the time staff ran a reconciliation check in late June 2026, the mismatch had grown to a scale that required dedicated remediation time rather than a quick fix.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus on Edwards Road has a direct stake in the collection's accuracy. Its humanities and education students regularly access the library's local history holdings for research projects, and the campus library team has a standing referral arrangement with the Hargreaves Street branch for digitised regional content. According to City of Greater Bendigo's published library services documentation, the digitisation project received a $47,000 allocation in the 2025-26 municipal budget, earmarked specifically for scanning, metadata tagging, and platform development.

The Bendigo Historical Society, which holds its own parallel collection at the former Bendigo Pottery precinct in Epsom, flagged a related concern earlier this year when volunteers noticed that several images they had contributed to a joint local heritage initiative appeared under duplicate records in the online portal. The society has been in contact with library staff about a coordinated cleanup, though no formal joint remediation plan has been publicly announced as of this week.

What a fix actually looks like

Deduplication at this scale is not simply a matter of deleting obvious copies. Each record has to be checked for unique metadata — a photograph might appear twice but carry different provenance notes, donor attributions, or conservation flags on each entry. Discarding the wrong version risks losing that supplementary information permanently. Library technicians are working through a triage protocol that prioritises records flagged most frequently by public users, beginning with the collection's pre-1950 Bendigo streetscape images, which draw the heaviest search traffic.

The remediation is expected to run through July and into early August. Once the duplicate records are resolved, staff plan to implement an automated hash-matching tool on ingest, meaning any future upload will be checked against existing files before it enters the catalogue. That kind of system-level fix was available in 2023 but was not configured during the original migration — a gap that library management has since acknowledged in internal planning documents cited by councillors at a June 17 ordinary council meeting.

For Bendigo residents and researchers wanting to access the collection in the meantime, the library recommends using the physical reference desk on Hargreaves Street rather than relying solely on the online portal until the cleanup is complete. Staff can cross-check both systems manually and pull accurate records on request. The State Library of Victoria's Digitisation Program Office has also been contacted for technical advice, as several regional libraries across Victoria are navigating similar legacy migration issues following a wave of digitisation funding that flowed through councils between 2021 and 2024.