Coventry's Digital Archive Reckoning: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying About Duplicate Image Replacement

Coventry City Council is under growing pressure to address a backlog of duplicate and low-quality images embedded across its public-facing digital platforms, with heritage bodies, digital archivists and local councillors now openly disagreeing over how fast the clean-up should move and who should pay for it.

The issue has gained urgency this summer after the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum on Jordan Well flagged that its online collections portal — accessible to schools, researchers and the general public — contains an estimated 3,400 duplicate image entries, some dating back to digitisation drives carried out before 2015. Staff at the gallery raised concerns internally in late May 2026, according to a council agenda document circulated ahead of the June full council meeting.

Why It Matters Beyond the Archive Room

The problem is not merely aesthetic. Duplicate records inflate storage costs, confuse search results and — critically — risk preserving lower-resolution or incorrectly captioned versions of images while the originals become harder to locate. For a city that holds the UK City of Culture 2021 legacy at the heart of its cultural identity, the integrity of digital collections carries real reputational weight.

Coventry City of Culture Trust, which wound down its formal programme delivery after 2022 but continues to oversee a digital legacy archive, has acknowledged that content migrated during the City of Culture year was done under significant time pressure. The trust's archive now sits partly with the council's own digital services team and partly with external hosting providers, a split arrangement that archivists say has compounded the duplication problem.

Digital preservation specialists from Coventry University's Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations have previously published research on the risks of unmanaged digital migration in public sector collections, though the university has not been formally commissioned by the council to advise on this specific project. Warwick Arts Centre, which holds its own digital image library linked to historic productions at its Gibbet Hill Road venue, has separately told council officers it would welcome a shared deduplication framework rather than each institution working independently.

The Debate Over Speed, Cost and Standards

Council officers presented three options to the Economy and Culture Scrutiny Board in June: a manual review process estimated to take 18 months and cost approximately £85,000 in staff time; a semi-automated software solution priced at around £42,000 in licensing fees for a two-year contract; or a phased hybrid approach that would begin with the Herbert's collections before expanding city-wide. No formal decision has been taken yet.

Labour councillors on the scrutiny board pushed for the faster automated route, citing the cost savings over time. Conservative members questioned whether off-the-shelf deduplication software could handle the metadata complexity of heritage images — a legitimate technical concern that archivists at the Coventry History Centre on Mandela Avenue have also raised informally in written submissions to officers.

The Coventry History Centre holds physical and digital records stretching back centuries, including maps, photographs and planning documents. Staff there have argued in their submission that any replacement of duplicate images must prioritise provenance — knowing which version of an image is the authoritative original — over simple file-size comparisons, which is how most standard deduplication tools operate.

Outside the council chamber, the West Midlands Combined Authority has been developing a regional cultural data strategy that could eventually provide shared infrastructure for exactly this kind of problem. Whether Coventry chooses to wait for that regional framework or proceed independently is likely to define the timeline. The WMCA's digital culture workstream is expected to publish draft proposals before the end of 2026.

For now, the Heritage Lottery Fund — which has previously supported digitisation work at Coventry institutions — does not fund retrospective data cleaning as a standalone project, according to guidance on its website updated in April 2026. That leaves the council carrying the cost alone unless a broader grant application can reframe the work as part of a wider public access project.

The scrutiny board is expected to return to the item at its September 2026 meeting, with officers tasked to bring a costed recommendation. Anyone with an interest in the collections — schools, community groups, researchers — can submit views to the council's culture team via the standard public consultation portal before 31 August.