How Wollongong's Public Record Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and What It Will Take to Fix It

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library contains multiple versions of the same photograph. So does the University of Wollongong's media archive. So, according to records management professionals who work in the sector, do the internal systems of virtually every major institution in the Illawarra that went through a rapid digitisation push between 2015 and 2022. The duplicate image problem is not new, but pressure to clean it up has sharpened considerably this year.

The reason it matters now is largely financial and operational. Storage costs for cloud-based digital asset management systems have climbed steadily since 2023, and institutions managing bloated libraries are paying for capacity they do not need. More practically, staff searching for a current, approved image of — say, Port Kembla Harbour or the Gwynneville campus precinct — routinely pull outdated or low-resolution duplicates, sometimes sending them to print or to web. The reputational and factual consequences range from minor embarrassment to genuine public record errors.

How the Libraries Got This Way

The roots of the problem stretch back to the digitisation grants that flowed through the New South Wales State Archives and Records Authority program from roughly 2014 onward. Wollongong institutions, including Council, the Illawarra Historical Society on Market Street and the regional health networks operating from Wollongong Hospital on Crown Street, each received funding to scan physical collections and migrate legacy digital folders. The problem was that almost none of them migrated into the same system, and very few applied consistent file-naming or metadata tagging at the point of ingestion.

When staff turned over — as happened sharply during the COVID disruption years of 2020 and 2021 — institutional knowledge about which folder held the canonical version of an image evaporated. Replacements uploaded fresh copies rather than locating existing files. By the time organisations began auditing their libraries in late 2024 and into 2025, duplication rates in some collections were running at more than one-in-three files, according to general findings documented in the NSW Government's Digital Information Strategy review published in early 2025.

BlueScope Steel, whose Port Kembla operations generate a steady demand for media-ready imagery as the company advances its green steel transition, has been among the larger private-sector operators in the region grappling with the same issue. The company's communications function relies on approved site photography for everything from community updates to federal grant applications tied to the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund. Duplicate or outdated imagery in those submissions carries real risk.

The Push Toward a Cleaner System

The University of Wollongong took a concrete step in this direction in mid-2025, contracting a digital asset management overhaul as part of its broader ICT infrastructure refresh. The project, centred on the Northfields Avenue campus, involved deduplication software that cross-referenced file hash data to identify exact and near-exact image copies before a human review layer determined which version to retain. Results from comparable projects at other Australian universities suggest libraries can typically shed between 25 and 40 per cent of stored image volume through that kind of process alone.

Wollongong City Council, which administers image libraries covering everything from heritage streetscapes in Thirroul and Bulli to contemporary infrastructure photography of WIN Entertainment Centre, is understood to be in the planning phase of a similar review, though no formal tender has been publicly advertised as of today, July 4, 2026.

For smaller organisations in the region — community groups, local media outlets, the Wollongong Art Gallery on Kembla Street — the practical advice from records management practitioners is straightforward even without a large budget: establish a single designated folder as the master library, apply a consistent file-naming convention from a fixed date forward, and resist the habit of downloading and re-uploading images that already exist in the system. It sounds elementary. The documentary record of institutions across the Illawarra over the past decade suggests it is harder to sustain than it appears.

The broader lesson, as the region's institutions begin to address the backlog, is that digitisation funding without accompanying standards enforcement creates its own category of archival problem. The images exist. Finding the right one, reliably and quickly, is the part that was never properly resourced.