Istanbul Archivists Combat Wave of Corrupted Digital Heritage Records

Turkey's cultural archivists have a problem they can see but struggle to quantify. Across Istanbul's major digital repositories, thousands of catalogue entries carry placeholder images, corrupted thumbnails, or the same stock photograph duplicated hundreds of times across unrelated records, a technical failure that has accumulated quietly over years of rushed digitisation and now threatens the integrity of some of the city's most important historical collections.

This week, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Atatürk Library in Beyoğlu confirmed it is running a structured audit of its online catalogue, targeting what librarians describe internally as a duplicate image replacement backlog. The problem is not unique to Istanbul, institutions from the Vatican Library to the British Museum have faced similar issues, but the scale here is magnified by the speed at which Turkish cultural bodies digitised physical collections in the years following the devastating February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, when remote access to records suddenly became an urgent civic priority rather than a long-term aspiration.

How the Backlog Built Up

The mechanics are straightforward. When archivists upload physical documents, photographs, or artefacts in bulk, automated systems sometimes assign a default or previously used image file to new catalogue entries rather than the correct one. The result: a 19th-century Ottoman land deed in the Atatürk Library system might display the thumbnail of a 1950s Beyazıt Square photograph. A researcher in Üsküdar trying to access records remotely gets the wrong image, frequently does not report the error, and the bad data compounds.

The Atatürk Library's digital holdings currently include more than 280,000 items across its public-facing portal, according to figures the municipality published in its 2025 annual culture report. Librarians working on the audit this week did not specify publicly how many entries are affected, but staff communications reviewed by The Daily Istanbul indicate that the review is focused on items ingested during a bulk digitisation push between March 2023 and December 2024.

A separate issue has surfaced at the Istanbul Research Institute, known by its Turkish acronym İAE, on İstiklal Caddesi in Beyoğlu. The institute, which holds one of the city's most comprehensive collections of photographs of historical Istanbul neighbourhoods including Balat, Pera, and Kadıköy, updated its digital access platform in April 2026. The migration imported a batch of images with mismatched metadata, according to a public notice the institute posted on its website in late June. The institute said it expects to resolve the discrepancies by the end of July 2026.

What the Fix Looks Like, and What It Costs

Correcting duplicate or misassigned images is labour-intensive work. Each flagged record must be matched manually against a physical original or a verified scan, the wrong file deleted from the content management system, and the correct image re-uploaded, tagged, and cross-referenced. For large collections, institutions typically contract specialist digital asset management firms. In Istanbul's current inflation environment, where the Turkish lira has lost significant purchasing power over the past three years, technology procurement costs in foreign-currency-denominated software licenses have risen sharply. That financial pressure means most institutions are doing the remediation work in-house, using existing staff.

The Atatürk Library audit, for example, is being conducted by a team drawn from the library's existing cataloguing department rather than outside contractors, a slower approach but one that does not require budget approval from the municipality's finance directorate at a time when the CHP-led municipal government under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu is managing tight discretionary spending across multiple departments.

For researchers and members of the public who rely on these databases, students at Istanbul University's Süleymaniye campus, genealogists tracing Ottoman-era family records, architects working on earthquake-resilience projects in the historic peninsula, the practical advice this week is simple: if an image in a digitised record looks wrong, use the catalogue's built-in error-reporting function, or contact the holding institution directly. Both the Atatürk Library and the İAE have active email addresses for exactly this purpose listed on their official sites. Flagged errors, librarians say, get prioritised in the review queue. The audit is underway. The backlog is large. Every flag helps.