The Royal Museum for Central Africa is housed in the Palace of the Colonies, only half an hour outside the center of Brussels. The palace was built for the World Fair of 1897 by king Leopold II as a showcase for Congo. It was extended a year later and renamed the Congo Museum. In 1910 the museum was renamed the Museum of the Belgian Congo following the transformation of the colony. In 1960, after Belgian Congo became an independent state, the museum was renamed the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Ever since, it covered a much larger field than Congo alone.

The museum possesses the world’s richest collection of ethnographic objects from Central Africa and is the leading institute for scientific research about Africa. The museum wants to rejuvenate and actualize itself and wants to make her collections more accessible through digitization.

The collection that Pictura will be digitizing for the RMCA and will place into a database exists of around 190,000 photographs and index cards of, among other things, the Museum of the Belgian Congo, the mining company Union Minière, nowadays the Belgian materials technology group Umicore, and Inforcongo, the colonial press agency that later became Congopresse.

Pictura was awarded the contract thanks to its transparent and efficient organization. Thanks to Pictura’s years-long experience and her pioneering role in the world of digitization, the company has a distilled workflow for which all the processes have been worked out and documented in detail.

Although we could and would have adhered to the guidelines of the RMCA, Pictura also provided additional advice to make the processes even more efficient. Now Pictura can start without having to create new processes, allowing us to adjust our workflow to the digitization and input. As a consequence, we will supply the RMCA with precise and effective made to measure work.