Andrea Mayer, State Secretary for Art and Culture, together with Katrin Vohland, Director General and Scientific Director of the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM), presented the complete reorganisation of the Kulturpool online portal at a press conference today.
Kulturpool is the central research and information platform for Austria's cultural heritage. The BMKÖS commissioned the Natural History Museum Vienna, headed by Director General Katrin Vohland, with the content, technical and visual relaunch of the portal. The budget of 1.5 million euros is being financed by the European Union's Recovery and Resilience Fund - NextGenerationEU.

"The online portal Kulturpool opens a window into a large, fascinating and exciting virtual world of art and culture, as well as science. It enables people to immerse themselves in, explore and experience art across geographical distances. After all, cultural heritage belongs to all of us and should be made as accessible as possible to everyone," says Andrea Mayer, State Secretary for Art and Culture. "Kulturpool will become an Austria-wide, cross-border museum that makes our cultural heritage visible and tangible and inspires a broad public."
"The Kulturpool facilitates access to digitally available collections from museums, archives and libraries. This enriches science, art and culture. We at the Natural History Museum Vienna are delighted to be able to support the process of digital transformation with all its facets, ranging from technical to communicative and ethical issues," says Katrin Vohland, Director General of the Natural History Museum Vienna.

The Kulturpool service offers not only a search and research platform for the public, but also a state-of-the-art technical infrastructure with uniform archiving standards and, above all, a central competence centre at the NHM that provides specialist support, advice and networking for other institutions on their path to digital transformation. Kulturpool will thus become the central hub for Austria's cultural heritage institutions.

Kulturpool - Central online portal for cultural heritage
Kulturpool (www.kulturpool.at) is a centralised search and service portal that offers a broad and diverse public access to Austria's cultural heritage. The research infrastructure can be used to search the holdings of museums, archives, collections, libraries, catalogues and humanities and cultural studies databases across the board.
The Kulturpool currently contains around 1.1 million digital objects from 13 institutions, including the collections of the Albertina, the Belvedere, the MAK, the Natural History Museum, the Austrian National Library and many more.

By 2026, around three million digitised cultural assets from over 100 institutions are to flow into the search portal as images, text, sound, video and/or 3D objects.
The national competence centre for the digital transformation and documentation of cultural heritage as part of Kulturpool is being successively expanded. It consists of an interdisciplinary team of programmers, designers, researchers and cultural specialists and supports the cultural heritage sector in the digital transformation, promotes Austria-wide networking and cooperation between cultural institutions and supports common standards for digital cultural heritage as an interface to the European Digital Library "Europeana".
16.5 million was or is available for digitisation from the European Union's Recovery and Resilience Fund - NextGenerationEU: €15 million for the "Cultural Heritage Digital" funding call and €1.5 million for the Culture Pool.

Queries & contact:
Bundesministerium für Kunst, Kultur, öffentlichen Dienst und Sport
Mag. Ina Gayed, MA
Pressesprecherin der Staatssekretärin für Kunst und Kultur
+4366478028677
ina.gayed@bmkoes.gv.at
www.bmkoes.gv.at

Mag. Irina Kubadinow
Head of Press & Public Relations, Press spokesperson, NHM Vienna
https://www.nhm.at/irina_kubadinow
Tel.: + 43 (1) 521 77 – 410
irina.kubadinow@nhm.at

Mag. Nikolett Kertész-Schenk, Bakk. BA MAS
Press Department, NHM Vienna
https://www.nhm.at/nikolett_kertesz
Tel.: + 43 (1) 521 77 – 626
nikolett.kertesz@nhm.at