13 April 2026  I How do we talk about our world? Who determines the terms, meanings and relationships? And how are our notions of culture and cultural heritage changing through the use of new digital technologies? The Kulturpool Stakeholder Forum 2026 will take place on 5 and 6 May at the kärnten.museum (Klagenfurt) and will explore the tension between language, power and data in the digital cultural sphere.

The Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture (BMWKMS), together with Kulturpool, the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), the Topothek and the kärnten.museum, invites experts, academics and practitioners to discuss the quality of digital data, interdisciplinary research and responsible communication.

Following Vienna (2024) and Linz (2025), one of the most important gatherings of the digital community of Austrian museums, archives and libraries is taking place in the south of the country for the first time this year.

“Sharing cultural experiences is fundamental to democracy,” said Vice-Chancellor and Minister for Culture Andreas Babler. “Extending cultural participation into the digital sphere offers unique, low-threshold access to culture. The Kulturpool provides reliable data that encourages critical reflection and helps shape the lives of every single individual in innovative ways.”

For Carinthia’s Minister for Culture, Deputy Governor Gaby Schaunig, one thing is clear: “In the digital sphere in particular, the quality of networking influences how knowledge is created and shared. When data from museums, archives and libraries is brought together and made accessible, it creates a shared knowledge space that extends far beyond individual institutions – thereby it facilitates people’s access to reliable knowledge, expands educational opportunities and strengthens social participation.”

Those who collect, store and model data sometimes influence how knowledge is generated and which perspectives are visible to the public. In light of deepfakes, cyberattacks and attempts to exert political influence on research and cultural data, there is a growing need in Europe for authentic and verified data and sustainable infrastructures.

“Educational institutions such as museums, archives and libraries must pay greater attention to how they handle their data in an ethically and legally responsible manner, where they store it and how they protect it,” says Katrin Vohland, Director General of the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHMW). “At the same time, the growing volumes of data and new technologies open up tremendous opportunities for cataloguing, research and outreach. This year’s Stakeholder Forum helps us to effectively balance these opportunities and risks and to jointly create the conditions for handling data with confidence.”

The two-day forum begins on 5 May with opening remarks from Carinthia’s Minister for Culture, Deputy Governor Gaby Schaunig, and a welcome address by Wolfgang Muchitsch, Scientific Director of the kärnten.museum.

The forum will be opened by the museologist from New Zealand Sarah Kenderdine, who will outline in her keynote address how institutions can use new technologies to communicate responsibly with diverse audiences. Kenderdine is a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where she heads the Laboratory of Experimental Museology (eM+). Research there explores how technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and data visualisation are transforming museum education.

Clemens Apprich, Vice-Rector of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, will focus his keynote address on how digitalisation shapes our thinking. The media scholar will discuss the impact of digital infrastructures and networks on power relations and cultural practices. In his talk, he will argue for a new form of critique in which data is viewed not as intangible, but as a malleable foundation for public engagement.

Sören Auer, Director of the TIB – the world’s largest specialist library for technology and the natural sciences and a university library – at Leibniz University Hannover, explains which technical infrastructures, methods and applications are necessary to interlink data and thus make it usable in the long term. In his keynote speech on the topic of ‘Linked Open Data’, he highlights the benefits that open, standardised, linked and machine-readable data bring to a digitised object. In short: the better the so-called ‘metadata’ of an object, the easier it is to use for research, education or outreach. In practice, for example, an artist’s name is linked to a controlled vocabulary. This allows the work to be unambiguously attributed to a specific person – by both humans and machines (e.g. algorithms). In this way, the digitised image from the Roman Museum in Tulln, for instance, also becomes accessible to researchers in Trento. Several lightning talks at the Stakeholder Forum will demonstrate how “Linked Open Data” is implemented in practice.

Together with its partners, the Stakeholder Forum offers participants additional input and opportunities for discussion: for instance, an introductory workshop organised by the FFG will examine how digital cultural heritage is conceptualised within the EU’s Horizon Europe programme and what principles – such as Open Science, FAIR Data and participation – play a role in this context. Using the MEMORISE project as an example, the workshop will discuss how data collection and modelling shape historical perspectives, what challenges arise, and how data can be contextualised in such a way as to enable new approaches to collective memory.

For the first time, the invitation to Klagenfurt is also being accepted by representatives from over 300 local online archives, known as ‘Topotheken’, which are operated under the auspices of the ICARUS association. What is needed to network this valuable local knowledge for the benefit of all? How can voluntary work be successfully combined with institutional research and outreach? And what guidance can academia provide to ensure the results are utilised to the fullest extent? These and other questions will be the focus of the supra-regional networking meeting.

Dr. Daniela Apaydin, Communications

Mag. Irina Kubadinow, Head of Press & Public Relations & press spokesperson