Melbourne's War on Duplicate Images Online: How the City Stacks Up Against London, Amsterdam and Seoul

Melbourne's public cultural institutions are accelerating efforts to purge duplicate and mislabelled images from their digital collections, a problem that archivists say has grown significantly since mass digitisation programs began in earnest around 2019. The State Library Victoria, which holds more than 2.5 million digitised items accessible via its catalogue on La Trobe Street, confirmed this year that a systematic audit of its image holdings is underway — part of a broader push to clean up metadata errors that compound whenever duplicates circulate across platforms.

The timing matters. Australian cultural institutions are competing for federal infrastructure funding tied to the National Cultural Policy, Revive, which the federal government released in January 2023. One criterion for capital grants involves demonstrable data integrity across digital collections. Organisations with bloated, duplicated image archives risk scoring lower on those assessments. That financial pressure, more than any abstract commitment to tidiness, is what has pushed the issue up the agenda in Melbourne in mid-2026.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The City of Melbourne's Creative Victoria digital team has been running a deduplication project since late 2025, cross-referencing image assets held in its public art register — which tracks works across Southbank, Federation Square precinct and the CBD laneway network — against images lodged with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. The aim is to eliminate cases where a single mural or installation appears under multiple file names, attributed inconsistently or dated incorrectly. According to the City of Melbourne's 2025–26 budget documentation, the Creative Industries portfolio received $4.2 million for digital infrastructure work, though the council has not publicly broken out what portion applies specifically to collection management.

Museum Victoria, which operates Melbourne Museum in Carlton Gardens and Immigration Museum on Flinders Street, has been using open-source perceptual hashing tools — software that generates a fingerprint for each image and flags near-identical copies — since a pilot began in February 2025. The approach lets staff identify duplicates without manually reviewing every file. A museum digital strategy paper published on its website in March 2026 described the pilot as covering approximately 180,000 image records in the first phase.

How Melbourne Compares to Peers Globally

London's Victoria and Albert Museum has publicly documented its own deduplication work, publishing technical notes through the Collections Trust as far back as 2021. The V&A's approach integrates commercial metadata software alongside internal tools and operates at a scale — the museum holds around 1.2 million object records — that dwarfs anything Melbourne manages individually, though the combined holdings of Victoria's state institutions are not trivial.

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum is frequently cited as the benchmark. Its Rijksstudio platform, which allows users to download and remix high-resolution images, was only viable after the museum spent several years between 2012 and 2014 standardising and deduplicating its digital image files. That groundwork made open access commercially and legally defensible. Melbourne institutions are roughly a decade behind that curve, though the gap is narrowing.

Seoul's National Museum of Korea undertook a national-scale deduplication exercise between 2020 and 2022, consolidating image records across 40 regional museums onto a single government platform. The project reportedly reduced redundant image files by around 30 percent across the network — a figure cited in a 2023 ICOM working paper on digital collection standards, though that paper has not been independently verified by this masthead.

What separates Melbourne from both Amsterdam and Seoul is the fragmentation of responsibility. Victoria has no single body coordinating deduplication across all public cultural institutions. The State Library, Museum Victoria and the National Gallery of Victoria each run separate systems, procure different tools and report to different ministerial portfolios. Creative Victoria sits under the Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions, while the NGL's digital infrastructure falls under Arts Victoria. That structural split means even well-intentioned projects can produce incompatible outcomes.

Archivists and collection managers working in Melbourne's sector have until 30 September 2026 to submit expressions of interest for the next round of Revive digital capability grants. For institutions that have not yet started deduplication work, the practical advice from sector bodies is blunt: begin with perceptual hashing on your highest-traffic image collections first, document the methodology, and build that documentation into the grant application. The funding window will not wait for a perfect system.