With the relaunch in March 2024, over one million digital objects of Austrian cultural heritage were available. Over the course of the year, almost half a million digitised items were added and a further 500,000 are currently about to be made available. Objects from 94 institutions can currently be found in the Kulturpool, which are provided by 25 partner institutions.

By the end of 2025, a total of at least 2.5 million objects are expected to be made accessible through cooperation with over 100 art and cultural institutions. In addition to image, text, video and audio files, the number of 3D objects is also growing continuously, with around 150 objects currently available.

An important focus was on dialogue with the community. The Stakeholder Forum in April at the Natural History Museum Vienna offered over 100 participants from museums, archives, libraries, galleries and research institutions the opportunity to discuss topics such as data quality, sustainable archiving and the contextualisation of problematic content.

The Provider Forum in October was dedicated to the further development of technical services and infrastructure, the optimisation of metadata quality and the possibilities for contextualising difficult objects in the Kulturpool. These events emphasised the growing importance of Kulturpool as a hub for digital cultural data.

Knowledge transfer was expanded on wissen.kulturpool.at, where interactive guidelines, training materials and practical application examples are now available to interested institutions. In addition, webinars, workshops and online cafés offered valuable insights into metadata management, rights clearance and digitisation techniques. The high level of participation in the offerings showed that Kulturpool has already established itself as a central platform for digital cultural dialogue in the first year of its relaunch.

The visibility of Kulturpool was increased through initial targeted public relations work. Editorial contributions, social media activities and networking with partner institutions increased its reach. The Instagram channel regularly presented new content, while editorial articles highlighting special collections, projects and the partner institutions were published on kulturpool.at. Participation in the ‘Twin it!’ campaign, in which the Heidentor of Carnuntum was digitised as a 3D model by the State Collections of Lower Austria, underlined the importance of digitally preserving cultural heritage.

With almost 43,000 visits and around 450,000 clicks since going live, the relaunch of Kulturpool is proving to be a success. The number of visitors is rising steadily: on average, 17 new users join every week, rising to 28 in the second half of the year. This indicates that the search portal is being used increasingly and is gaining in importance.

Based on this development, the total number of visits is expected to rise to around 87,000 in the coming year. Particularly noteworthy is the remarkably long time spent on the site by visitors, which more than tripled from the first to the second half of the year to an average of around 10 minutes. The majority of visits come from Austria, followed by Germany.

The successful relaunch has created a solid foundation for the future. In 2025, the focus will be on further developing the portal, strengthening the knowledge platform and public relations work, and increasing the use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence.