You ask, we answer
Here you will find answers to frequently asked questions about the Kulturpool and kulturpool.at - the central search portal for digital cultural heritage in Austria.
Kulturpool, what is that?
With kulturpool.at, Kulturpool offers a central search portal for access to digital collections of Austrian museums, libraries, galleries and archives. Kulturpool combines a fascinating variety of digital and digitised objects, including images, video, text, audio and 3D, and makes them publicly searchable.
The search portal enables not only research, but also browsing through historical documents, photos, paintings and sound recordings.
The Kulturpool also acts as a service point for the transfer of knowledge and expertise on digitised cultural heritage and offers resources and advice for institutions that already make digitised material available in the Kulturpool or are planning to do so.
What is the idea behind it?
The basic idea is to make Austria's cultural heritage digitally accessible and findable for everyone. The Kulturpool provides an insight into the diversity of the various collections, networks knowledge and thus contributes to cultural participation.
Why the name 'Kulturpool'?
In the culture pool, the name says it all. Because everyone is equal in the pool: the oil painting by the well-known painter meets the porcelain figurine by ‘anonymous’, the clay shard from the Celtic tomb runs its course next to the 3D model of the Heidentor, the Parisian fashion picture for ladies' hats from the 18th century is just a click away from the Prater postcard from 1910. In short: the Kulturpool is the centrally accessible springboard into the unique diversity of cultural heritage. Have fun browsing!
‘Reconstruction of the Pagan Gate’ (351-361 AD), Archaeological Park Carnuntum/Petronell, Provincial Collections of Lower Austria; licence: CC BY-NC.
The kulturpool.at search portal is part of the ‘Cultural Heritage Digital’ strategy of the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (since April 2025: Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport - BMWKMS) and is being implemented at the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM Vienna). Behind this are numerous digitisation projects in the individual partner institutions, which are opening up their collections digitally. They are digitising object by object with great effort and dedication. Digitisation means selecting objects from collections, preparing and, if necessary, restoring them, scanning them, recording the objects' metadata - by which we mean additional information such as the year of publication or the name of the copyright holder - and entering it into a database. And we often do this many thousands of times. Thanks to this work by the partner institutions, the culture pool fills up day by day.