Van den Ende & Deitmers acquires stake in Pictura

Van den Ende & Deitmers is acquiring a 45% stake in Pictura, a leading, innovative company that is active in the digitisation, management and publication of cultural heritage. Pictura digitises collections for organisations including the National Archives of the Netherlands, the City Archives for Amsterdam, the World Press Photo archive, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the Van Gogh Museum and the Teylers Museum. The additional funds will be mainly used for Pictura’s international expansion.

The company, which was founded by current CEO Onno Zaman, generates a profitable turnover of over €5 million with around 50 FTEs. It helps the heritage sector (archives, museums, libraries, etc.) to open up collections in a professional manner. Thanks to the publication of digital reproductions using image banks and websites, the Netherlands’ cultural heritage is made accessible in a simple way to a wider audience. This means that the institutions responsible for preserving and managing cultural heritage can expect to receive a higher number of visitors than the visitors to their exhibitions alone. In addition, the Memorix Maior software system developed by Pictura makes it possible to manage collections more efficiently. It has been calculated for the European Commission that the overall budget required for digitising and opening up cultural heritage in Europe amounts to approximately € 100 billion. In the Netherlands, a front runner in this area, only 8% of the nation’s heritage has been digitised and made available online via Europeana, the portal for cultural heritage in Europe. This underlines the growth potential of Pictura, which has achieved growth percentages of more than 40% in recent years.

Onno Zaman, CEO of Pictura: In 2010, co-shareholder Mark Lindeman and I set Deloitte the task of finding the best party to help us achieve European expansion. Through acquisitions, takeovers and joint ventures we want to increase our strength so that we can offer an even better service to our clients. Other than in the library sector, there are no companies of the size required to be able to serve the large market currently developing in Europe. We decided on Van den Ende & Deitmers, who will provide the added value that Pictura needs.

Hubert Deitmers and his team have proven that they are able to help small Dutch companies to make the big leap into other European countries. For Pictura, Joop van den Ende epitomises Cultural Entrepreneurship. Flexible cooperation between the parties’ legal representatives (Lexence for Van den Ende & Deitmers and Corp Advocaten for Pictura) made it possible to achieve an excellent result. Initial discussions are now under way with a view to strengthening the new organisation; Pictura Erfgoed Teams (Pictura Heritage Teams).

Hubert Deitmers, Managing Partner at Van den Ende & Deitmers: “We are very impressed by Pictura’s creativity, technology, innovativeness and passion for ‘our’ cultural heritage. Pictura’s knowledge and experience will ensure that this is presented better and becomes more easily accessible. Joop van den Ende and I are, of course, strong advocates of capturing cultural heritage in the right way for both current and future generations. It is also great that in this way cultural heritage can be incorporated more easily into teaching packages in schools and made accessible to a wider audience via the internet.”

About Pictura (www.pictura-im.nl)

The mission: to make collections accessible in an inspirational way

Onno Zaman started the company in 1998 with a photo studio in Heiloo and was subsequently joined by Mark Lindeman (a software developer) to develop a system for managing the images in databases. They quickly decided in favour of a web-based solution built on open source software. Pictura was the first organisation to use zoomable images in full resolution for image banks. Its clients are collection managers who want to present their collections and allow them to be used in the best possible way online. The usual organisations to call on the company’s services are archives (National Archive of the Netherlands, Belgian State Archives, City Archives for Amsterdam), museums (Nederlands Fotomuseum [Netherlands Museum of Photography], Teylers Museum, Westfries Museum) and institutions involved in the protection of historic buildings and archaeology (Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed [Netherlands National Office for Cultural Heritage]). An independent and active client group brings new user requirements to the company’s attention. Pictura performs digitisation, supplies collection management software and takes care of the hosting and storage of digital assets, as well as creating public websites. Its main passions are photography, film, art, genealogy and historic maps. Innovation is the driving force behind the company. For this reason the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration recently granted Pictura a substantial tax reduction on the profits it generates from innovative activities. Over the coming years the company will be working on building a platform for all online heritage services. Users of the heritage sites will be involved in its further development.