Melbourne's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against Amsterdam, Toronto and Seoul

Melbourne's public cultural collections contain tens of thousands of duplicate digital images — the same photograph, artwork scan or archival document filed under different identifiers across multiple databases. The problem is not unique to Melbourne, but how the city resolves it will determine whether its $40 million-plus investment in digitisation over the past decade actually delivers the searchable, accessible public record it promised.

The issue has come into sharper focus in mid-2026 as institutions including the State Library Victoria on Swanston Street and the City of Melbourne's own archive service have begun reconciling records ahead of a planned migration to a unified collections management platform. Duplicate records inflate storage costs, confuse researchers, and — critically — mask gaps in provenance documentation, a concern that carries particular weight for collections that include materials from First Nations communities.

What Other Cities Have Done

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum completed a major deduplication exercise across its online database, Rijksstudio, in 2023, reducing its publicly listed object records by roughly 12 per cent after automated matching tools identified redundant entries created during successive digitisation rounds. Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario tackled a similar problem through a two-year project concluded in late 2024, partnering with the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information to train machine-learning classifiers on its existing catalogue. Seoul's National Museum of Korea, which manages one of the largest digital collections in Asia, embedded deduplication protocols directly into its ingest workflow by 2022, meaning duplicates are flagged before they enter the live database rather than cleaned up retroactively.

Melbourne is, bluntly, behind that curve. Institutions here have largely addressed duplication reactively — when a researcher or curator notices the problem — rather than through systematic, preventive tooling. The State Library Victoria, which holds more than two million digitised items through its Pictures Collection, has acknowledged the challenge in internal planning documents, though no public remediation timeline has been confirmed. Museum Victoria, which operates Melbourne Museum in Carlton and Immigration Museum on Flinders Street, has its own collections database, Collections Online, that researchers have long noted contains overlapping entries for items transferred between the organisation's sites.

Why Melbourne's Approach Is More Complicated

Unlike Amsterdam or Seoul, Melbourne's cultural collections are distributed across institutions that report to different levels of government. State-funded bodies answer to the Department of Creative Industries, Tourism, Hospitality and Sport, while the City of Melbourne funds its own Heritage Collections unit separately. That jurisdictional split means there is no single body with the mandate — or budget — to run a city-wide deduplication program.

The practical cost is measurable. Cloud storage for cultural institutions running redundant image files at scale typically adds between 15 and 25 per cent to annual storage expenditure, according to sector benchmarking published by the Digital Preservation Coalition in its 2025 annual report. For an institution holding two million-plus items, that overhead is not trivial.

Toronto's AGO project, which cost approximately CAD $1.1 million over two years, is frequently cited in Australian museum sector circles as a model worth adapting. The key lesson from that project was staffing: automated tools caught roughly 70 per cent of duplicates, but human review remained essential for images where metadata had degraded or been entered inconsistently across digitisation eras.

Closer to home, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra introduced a deduplication review layer into its Ara Irititja repatriation project, a process that has direct relevance for Melbourne institutions holding sensitive community materials.

For Melbourne to close the gap on its international peers, the most practical near-term step is a joint working group between State Library Victoria, Museum Victoria and the City of Melbourne Heritage Collections — the three largest holders — to agree on common metadata standards before any new platform migration begins. Without that foundation, a new system will simply inherit the old disorder. The State Library's planned platform upgrade, flagged for the 2026-27 financial year, is the most immediate deadline driving that conversation.