City Archivists and Tech Experts Sound the Alarm on Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Boston's Public Records

Boston's digital records system has a growing problem that officials and archivists say is harder to fix than it looks. Duplicate scanned images — the same document filed multiple times under different metadata tags — have accumulated across city databases managed by the Boston City Archives and several departments that report to City Hall, creating retrieval failures, storage bloat, and legal complications in at least three active permitting cases in East Boston and Dorchester.

The issue is not new, but pressure to resolve it has intensified this year. Mayor Michelle Wu's administration has made digital government transparency a centerpiece of its second-term agenda, and the Records Management Division has been tasked with auditing all scanned municipal documents dating back to a 2017 digitization push. That push, which converted roughly 4.2 million paper records into digital files, used three separate scanning contractors working under different file-naming conventions — a mismatch that specialists say is the direct source of today's duplication backlog.

What Officials and Experts Are Saying

Digital preservation professionals at Northeastern University's Library have been tracking the problem as part of a broader research collaboration with the city. Specialists in that program — which is based on the Columbus Avenue campus — describe the situation as a textbook case of what happens when large-scale digitization projects prioritize volume over metadata standards. The core issue, they argue, is that Boston never adopted a single controlled vocabulary for file tagging during the 2017 conversion, leaving the system unable to automatically flag when the same physical document had been scanned more than once.

At the Boston Public Library's Central Branch on Copley Square, reference staff have fielded a rising number of complaints from residents and attorneys who pull property records for Dorchester addresses only to receive multiple versions of the same deed with conflicting index dates. Librarians there say the problem makes it difficult to confirm which version of a document is authoritative — a question that has real consequences in ongoing zoning disputes along Blue Hill Avenue.

City Councillor At-Large Ruthzee Louijeune, whose district includes parts of Roxbury and Hyde Park, raised the duplication issue publicly during a Government Operations Committee hearing in May. Her office has been working with the Archives division to identify the scale of the backlog, though no final audit figure has been released. Independent records management consultants familiar with municipal systems say deduplication projects of this size typically cost between $180,000 and $400,000 depending on the number of records involved and whether artificial intelligence-assisted matching tools are deployed.

The MBTA is separately grappling with a version of the same problem in its capital project documentation. Contracts and engineering drawings tied to the Green Line Extension — the 4.7-mile expansion completed in 2022 — were stored in three separate systems during construction, and transit officials have acknowledged internal duplication that slows document retrieval during federal compliance reviews. Transit reform advocates who follow the T closely say cleaner record-keeping would reduce the time engineers spend hunting for authoritative drawings before maintenance decisions are made.

What Comes Next

The Wu administration has directed the Department of Innovation and Technology to present a deduplication framework to City Council by September 30, according to a memo circulated to relevant department heads in late June. That framework is expected to draw on standards published by the National Archives and Records Administration, which updated its guidance on electronic records management in January 2025.

For residents who regularly access public records — property owners in Jamaica Plain navigating the permitting process, historians researching the Charlestown Navy Yard, attorneys pulling chain-of-title documents — the practical advice from archivists is straightforward: always request a certified copy directly from the City Archives office at 201 Rivermoor Street in West Roxbury rather than relying on the public-facing online portal until the audit is complete. The certified-copy process, which costs $6 per document under current city fee schedules, draws from a subset of records that archivists have already manually verified.

The September deadline gives the city roughly three months to produce a plan. Whether the plan comes with a funded implementation budget attached is the question that archivists, librarians, and at least one city councillor are now pressing hard to answer.