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

Melbourne's major cultural institutions are sitting on hundreds of thousands of digitised collection items, and a significant portion of them appear more than once. The State Library Victoria, which holds more than 1.5 million digital objects accessible through its online catalogue on La Trobe Street, acknowledged earlier this year that duplicate image records remain one of the most persistent data-quality problems in large-scale digitisation programs. The issue is not unique to Melbourne, but how the city's institutions are responding — and how that compares to peers in Amsterdam, Toronto and Singapore — reveals a sharper divide than many administrators would prefer to admit.

The problem matters now because Victoria's government has pushed hard since 2023 to expand public access to digitised collections as part of its broader Creative State strategy. When duplicate records proliferate, search results degrade, metadata becomes unreliable, and the cost of ongoing collection management rises. For a city that positions itself as Australia's arts capital, messy digital infrastructure undercuts the investment case for the whole exercise.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The State Library Victoria has been working with the Atlas of Living Australia's data-cleaning frameworks — originally built for biodiversity records — and adapting those tools for photographic and archival image collections. The library's Swanston Street reading rooms have hosted internal workshops this year bringing together cataloguers and software engineers to map where duplicate records cluster most heavily, particularly in the post-1900 photographic holdings. Museums Victoria, based at Carlton's Museum Victoria complex on Carlton Street, is separately piloting a perceptual hashing system — software that assigns a numerical fingerprint to each image and flags near-identical files — across its natural history photography archive. Staff there have indicated the trial began in February 2026, though no formal public report on outcomes has been released.

The City of Melbourne's own digital archive, administered through the City Library on Flinders Lane, faces a smaller but structurally similar problem with civic photography collections going back to the 1950s. The council allocated funds in its 2025–26 budget cycle toward collection management software upgrades, though the specific figure was not itemised in documents reviewed for this article.

How That Compares Globally

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum completed a bulk deduplication project across its Rijksstudio platform in 2024, processing roughly 900,000 objects and reducing its duplicate image rate from an estimated 12 per cent to below 3 per cent, according to figures the museum published in its annual report. The Rijksmuseum used a combination of automated hashing and a dedicated team of eight data curators working over 14 months — a resourcing level that would be difficult to replicate at Melbourne's institutions given current staffing.

Toronto Public Library took a different route. Its digitisation partnership with the Internet Archive, formalised in 2022, effectively outsourced deduplication to the Archive's own systems, reducing in-house labour costs but ceding some control over metadata standards. Singapore's National Heritage Board went further still, contracting a private technology firm to rebuild its entire collection management system in 2023 at a cost the board publicly reported as SGD $4.2 million — roughly AUD $4.8 million at current exchange rates. The result is a unified platform across nine heritage institutions that flags duplicates in real time as new records are ingested.

Melbourne's piecemeal, institution-by-institution approach looks cautious by comparison. There is no single cross-institutional deduplication framework across State Library Victoria, Museums Victoria, and the City of Melbourne archive. Each is solving the same problem independently, which means duplicated effort as well as duplicated images.

For researchers, students, and the growing number of local history groups — including the Fitzroy History Society and the Footscray Community Arts collective, both of which draw heavily on digitised municipal records — the practical consequence is wasted time navigating search results cluttered with identical or near-identical files. A unified Victorian approach, modelled loosely on what Singapore built but at a scale appropriate to local budgets, is the direction several collection managers are understood to be advocating for internally. Whether the state government's next Creative State budget round addresses it will be one measure of how seriously the policy rhetoric translates into operational funding.