Councils, arts organisations and heritage bodies across central Victoria are being forced to confront a growing backlog of duplicated digital records — and the choices made in the next six months will shape how the region's visual history is stored, accessed and protected for decades.
4 min read
Thousands of duplicate digital images sit inside the servers of Bendigo's public institutions right now — redundant files eating storage budgets, confusing archivists and, in some cases, obscuring the authentic record of Aboriginal cultural sites across the Mount Alexander and Dja Dja Wurrung country corridor. The problem is not new, but the pressure to fix it has never been greater.
Regional bodies are converging on a decision point. The City of Greater Bendigo's digital asset management framework, under review since early 2025, is expected to reach a council vote before the end of the third quarter of this year. How that framework handles duplicate detection and replacement will set the template for smaller institutions that typically follow the council's lead on infrastructure standards.
Bendigo Health is midway through its capital expansion on Lucan Street, and the project has generated a substantial photographic record — construction progress shots, heritage documentation of the former Nurses' Quarters precinct, and community consultation imagery. Staff working on that documentation have flagged internally that version-control gaps mean multiple near-identical images of the same site are being stored under different file names, making retrieval unreliable. The hospital declined to comment on specifics, but the issue mirrors what archivists at the Bendigo Regional Archive Centre on Bull Street have described in broader terms when discussing collection management challenges with industry peers.
La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which anchors a significant slice of the city's knowledge economy, runs its own digital collections through the university's central library system in Melbourne. That arrangement means local decisions about duplicate replacement are largely made off-site — a structural quirk that frustrates Bendigo-based researchers who want faster access to corrected image sets tied to regional studies, particularly those touching on goldfields heritage along the Calder Highway corridor.
The financial stakes are concrete. Commercial cloud storage for large institutional image libraries typically costs between $80 and $200 per terabyte per month depending on redundancy tier — and duplicate files can inflate a collection's effective footprint by 30 to 60 percent, according to figures published by the Australian Digital Alliance in its 2024 sector benchmarking report. For a mid-sized regional institution carrying 50 terabytes of photographic material, that overhead is not trivial.
Three choices loom largest for Bendigo-based organisations over the coming months. First, whether to adopt automated deduplication software or rely on manual curation — automated tools are faster but carry a known risk of flagging distinct images as duplicates when shooting conditions were nearly identical, which is a particular concern for sequential archaeological documentation at protected sites under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 (Vic). Getting that wrong is not a filing error; it is potentially a compliance breach.
Second, who holds authority to approve a replacement once a duplicate is identified. At the Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street, curatorial staff and the registrar typically share that sign-off, but many smaller organisations in the region have no formal policy at all, leaving the call to whoever manages the shared drive on a given day.
Third, and most consequentially, whether replacement images are versioned and the originals retained in a cold-storage archive or simply deleted. The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation has been consistent in advocating — across multiple public forums — that no image potentially connected to cultural heritage documentation should be permanently destroyed without community consultation. Any framework that allows silent deletion without a retention check will face pushback from that quarter, and rightly so.
The City of Greater Bendigo's framework vote, expected by September 2026, is the most immediate lever. Organisations waiting on that outcome should use the interim period to audit their own collections, map the decision-making authority within their teams, and check their obligations under the Public Records Act 1973 (Vic) before any replacement process begins. The technology side of this problem is largely solved. The governance side is where the real work starts.
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Published by The Daily Bendigo
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