Santiago Officials Tackle Digital Archives Crisis Threatening Public Records

Santiago's public sector has a data-hoarding problem. Across at least a dozen municipal and central government agencies, digitisation drives launched between 2019 and 2023 left behind massive repositories full of redundant, mislabelled and duplicate image files, documents that cost real money to store and that are increasingly difficult to navigate. Now the pressure to clean house is mounting, and the people responsible for those systems are finally being asked to explain how things got this bad.

The issue gained sharper urgency this year after the Contraloría General de la República flagged digital asset management as an area of concern during its annual review of public administration infrastructure. Agencies from the Municipalidad de Santiago to the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile on Avenida Libertador Bernardo O'Higgins are sitting on image databases that, in some cases, have grown by more than 40 percent in raw file volume since 2021, without a corresponding increase in the number of unique documents actually catalogued. The problem, specialists say, is not storage capacity alone. It is the institutional habit of scanning the same documents multiple times, across multiple departments, with no single system to detect and remove duplicates before they accumulate.

Why the Problem Has Resisted Easy Fixes

Specialists in digital records management point to the fragmented rollout of digitisation under the Mesa Digital del Estado, the government's e-government coordination body, as a root cause. Each agency was given latitude to choose its own scanning software and file-naming conventions between 2020 and 2022. The result is a patchwork of incompatible formats, TIFF, JPEG, PDF/A, that makes automated deduplication technically difficult without first standardising metadata across platforms.

The Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile's School of Library Science and Information Management, based on Avenida Vicuña Mackenna in Macul, has been running a research project since March 2025 documenting exactly this kind of institutional fragmentation in three Santiago boroughs: Providencia, La Florida and Estación Central. The project found that in those three municipalities alone, an estimated 28 percent of scanned archival images were exact or near-exact duplicates, based on a sample of roughly 600,000 files reviewed between April and December 2025. That figure has circulated widely in policy circles this year.

At the Archivo Nacional, housed near the Plaza de Armas in the historic centre, administrators have been piloting a hash-based deduplication protocol since January 2026, a system that assigns each image file a unique digital fingerprint and automatically flags files that share identical fingerprints for review before deletion. Staff there have described the workload involved in verifying flagged files as considerable, requiring dedicated personnel that smaller municipal archives simply do not have.

What Comes Next for Agencies and Institutions

The Ministerio Secretaría General de Gobierno has indicated that updated guidelines on digital asset management are expected before the end of the third quarter of 2026, a timeline that advocacy groups within the public administration sector say is already slipping. The proposed framework would require all central government agencies to adopt a single metadata standard by mid-2027 and to conduct an internal audit of duplicate image files before December 31 of this year.

For heritage institutions, the stakes are particularly high. The Museo Histórico Nacional on Plaza de Armas digitised roughly 120,000 catalogue items between 2020 and 2024 as part of a Cultural Heritage Digitalisation Fund project. Whether those records will need to be reworked under any new standard is a question the museum's technical staff are watching closely.

Smaller boroughs face the steepest climb. Municipalities like Pudahuel and Cerro Navia lack the technical staff to run even basic deduplication checks without external support. Civil society groups working on government transparency, including Datos Públicos Chile, which monitors open data compliance, have urged the government to fund a centralised technical assistance unit rather than leaving each agency to solve the problem independently.

The practical advice from specialists converges on one point: agencies should stop all non-essential scanning until the metadata standards question is resolved, to avoid compounding a problem that is already expensive and time-consuming to unwind.