Kulturpool is the central search portal for digitised cultural heritage from Austrian museums, archives, and libraries. The comprehensive search makes the digital objects in image, text, sound, video, and 3D formats from the various institutions searchable, displaying them with additional information, e.g. title, artist, type of medium or subject.

Information on the content and the licence details for further use are provided for each digitised item. This means that you can immediately see whether a digital object may be used, modified, or shared. Each digitised item is always linked to the original in the institution’s online collection. From there, users can download the digitised material (if permitted) and view more detailed information.

Kulturpool is made possible by digitisation projects in the individual partner institutions, which are contributing digital objects from their collections. With a great deal of effort and dedication, they are digitising each object step by step. Digitising, that means selecting objects from collections, preparing and, if necessary, restoring them, scanning them, recording the metadata associated with the individual objects and entering them into a database. This is often done several thousand times. This work by the partner institutions means that Kulturpool is growing day by day.

Kulturpool is supported by an advisory board that advises on strategic, ethical, technical, and legal issues. The members come from the fields of law, ethics, collections, science, information technology, art, and culture.

In Kulturpool, a dedicated team is working on the technology and communication aspects of the preparation and implementation of the project, including the complex technical process of aggregating new institutions and rapidly and continuously improving Kulturpool.

The Kulturpool portal is part of the digital cultural heritage strategy "Kulturerbe Digital" carried out by Austria's Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (BMKÖS) and is being implemented at the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM). The development of Kulturpool is financed by the EU fund NextGenerationEU.