Bendigo Leads Regional Cities on Duplicate Image Problem — But the Race Is Far From Over

The City of Greater Bendigo has completed the first stage of a digital asset audit targeting duplicate and misattributed images across its public-facing platforms, confirming that roughly 340 photographs held in council's content management system were either exact copies or near-identical variants consuming storage and muddying the public record. The audit, finalised in late June 2026, was triggered partly by the rollout of the council's updated Open Data Policy, which requires clean, deduplicated records before any dataset can be published to the Victorian Government's data.vic.gov.au portal.

The timing matters. Across Victoria and internationally, councils managing digitised heritage collections are grappling with a surge in duplicate image files generated by successive platform migrations — from older SharePoint environments to newer cloud systems — that occurred rapidly between 2020 and 2024. Each migration tended to copy rather than consolidate, leaving institutions with ballooning libraries that are expensive to maintain and difficult to search. A 2025 OCLC Research report found that mid-sized public institutions globally carried an average of 18 per cent duplicate rate across their digital asset libraries, with regional councils tracking higher than metropolitan ones.

What Bendigo Is Actually Doing

The Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Pall Mall, which holds more than 60,000 digitised items relating to the goldfields era and Dja Dja Wurrung cultural heritage, began its own parallel deduplication process in March 2026 using open-source perceptual hashing software. Staff have been working through the collection in batches, cross-referencing against the Public Record Office Victoria's standards for image retention. The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street, which manages a separate digital catalogue of around 14,000 works, completed a similar exercise in February and found a 12 per cent duplication rate — lower than the national average for regional galleries, according to figures from the Australian Museums and Galleries Association published in April 2026.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus has also entered the conversation. The university's library services team has been consulting with council since May on a shared metadata framework that would allow both institutions to flag and suppress duplicate records before they appear in public search results. That framework is expected to be piloted by September 2026, with a formal review scheduled for December. The cost of the pilot sits at approximately $47,000, split between council and the university under a Regional Digital Infrastructure agreement signed in 2025.

How Bendigo Compares Globally

The honest comparison is mixed. Ballarat City Council, Bendigo's closest peer in central Victoria, finished a comparable audit in October 2025 and has already published a cleaned dataset — roughly six months ahead of Bendigo's projected completion date. Internationally, Olomouc in the Czech Republic, a mid-sized heritage city of about 100,000 people, partnered with Palacký University in 2024 to automate duplicate detection across all municipal digital assets, cutting its duplication rate from 22 per cent to under four per cent within eight months. Bendigo sits at a population of around 120,000 and faces comparable collection complexity, which makes the Olomouc timeline a useful — if uncomfortable — benchmark.

On the more encouraging side, Bendigo's approach to Aboriginal cultural heritage images is drawing specific attention. The council's Digital Custodianship Protocol, developed with the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation and formalised in 2023, requires that any duplicate or variant image of culturally sensitive material be reviewed by a designated community liaison before deletion or suppression. That step does not exist in most comparable councils' workflows, domestically or abroad, and has added time to the process — but community organisations say it is non-negotiable.

For residents and organisations wanting to engage, the council is running two public information sessions at the Bendigo Library on Hargreaves Street — on 22 July and 5 August 2026 — where staff will explain how to flag potentially duplicated images in the public-facing heritage database. Organisations that contribute images to the council's digital archive under the Community Collections Program should log into the council portal before 31 August to verify their own submissions, as the audit's second stage will begin clearing unverified records from 1 September. The library sessions are free and run for 90 minutes each.