A growing backlog of duplicated and mislabelled cultural images across Bendigo's public collections is forcing institutions to choose between costly manual review and unproven automated systems.
4 min read
Bendigo's major cultural institutions are facing a decision point over how to handle thousands of duplicate and incorrectly catalogued images sitting inside their digital archives — and the choices made in the next six months will determine whether a years-long cataloguing problem gets fixed or quietly compounds.
The issue has been building since at least 2021, when regional collections across Victoria began migrating physical photographic records into centralised digital repositories. For Bendigo, that process pulled together holdings from the Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street, the Goldfields Libraries network, and regional heritage programs linked to the City of Greater Bendigo. The digitisation push was well-intentioned. The execution left gaps that archivists are still mapping.
The core problem is straightforward, even if the solution is not. When analogue records are scanned and ingested into a digital system, duplicates are created — sometimes the same photograph appears under three or four different catalogue numbers with different metadata attached to each. For collections built around Bendigo's goldfields history and its significant Aboriginal cultural heritage, a mislabelled or duplicated image is not merely an administrative inconvenience. It can mean an item is effectively invisible to researchers, or worse, that sensitive cultural material is misattributed entirely.
Goldfields Libraries serves a catchment of roughly 120,000 people across the City of Greater Bendigo and neighbouring shires. Its digital holdings include photographic records donated by community members, local historians and organisations stretching back to the 1880s. Library staff working on heritage programs have flagged that the volume of duplicate entries makes it difficult to confidently present search results to the public through the catalogue interface.
La Trobe University's Bendigo campus on Edwards Road has a stake in this too. Researchers there working in regional history, Aboriginal studies and public health history rely on local collection access. When an archive returns duplicate hits or conflicting metadata, it erodes confidence in the source material — a problem that ripples out into academic work that cites those records.
Two broad paths are now on the table for Bendigo's institutions. The first is a manual audit — trained archivists work through the duplicate flagging queue record by record, checking original provenance and correcting metadata by hand. This approach is slow and expensive. A comparable manual remediation project completed by the Public Record Office Victoria in 2024 took eighteen months and required dedicated resourcing that smaller regional bodies would struggle to match.
The second option leans on automated deduplication tools, which use perceptual hashing and image-comparison algorithms to identify likely duplicates and propose merges. The technology has matured considerably and is in use at several state-level Australian institutions. But it carries its own risk: automated systems can incorrectly flag distinct images as duplicates if lighting, cropping or scanning conditions vary between versions. For Aboriginal cultural heritage material held under the auspices of programs like the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Register, a wrongly merged record is a serious problem — one with legal as well as cultural dimensions under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006.
The City of Greater Bendigo's cultural strategy, which runs through to 2027, commits to improving digital access to community heritage collections. That commitment is now being tested by the practicalities of what improved access actually requires. The Bendigo Art Gallery, which holds one of the largest regional collections in Victoria, is understood to be watching how peer institutions handle automated tools before committing to any single approach.
A hybrid model — automated flagging followed by human sign-off on sensitive categories — is emerging as the preferred framework in discussions at similar Victorian institutions. Whether Bendigo's collecting organisations have the staffing and budget to implement it is a separate question. State government creative and cultural funding rounds typically open in August, and applications that include digital preservation components have been eligible for support through Creative Victoria's Regional Arts Fund in previous years. That window matters. Institutions that move quickly to scope a remediation project and attach a funding application have a realistic path to resources by mid-2027. Those that wait will be dealing with a larger backlog and a tighter timeline.
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Published by The Daily Bendigo
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