Of the 9,808 objects catalogued in this archive, 3,109 — 31.7 percent — belong to a cluster of two or more copies of the same image: 1,425 such clusters in all. Hold one canonical copy back from each and 1,684 objects remain as duplicates proper — the extra copies, 17.2 percent of the archive, each the same image recovered again under a different accession number. This exhibit shows the twelve most duplicated of them, the images the 1990s clip-art trade resold most often.

The duplication is not error; it is the business model. Clip-art libraries were assembled by consolidation and moved from product to product as their corporate owners merged. The SoftKey estate is the clearest case in these holdings: its 1996 "ClipArt Ultimate Collection" survives canonicalization at just over half its catalogued size, padded with images already issued on the 1994 PC Paintbrush disc from the same lineage — a button drawn once for one product and sold again, unaltered, in the next. One image in this show appears eighty-two times across all four live collections, from 1994 to 1996; a single graphic resold, at the extreme, through every publisher in the archive.

Recording all of it is the point. Most of these most-duplicated objects are not artwork but interface furniture — number cards, blank signs, plain buttons, boxes — the generic parts a clip-art house could resell without anyone noticing. Cataloguing each copy and marking exactly one canonical is ordinary bibliographic method: the same discipline a library applies to reprintings and reissues, turned on graphics that were built to be disposable. The archive does not delete a duplicate. It catalogues it, and names what it is also catalogued as.