The Upper Austrian Museum Association is also linked to the Institute by its history and through working cooperations. The Association of Upper Austrian Museums is a non-profit association founded in 2001 as a community of interest and service institution for the museums, collections and museum-like institutions of the state of Upper Austria. Members are museums such as local and regional museums, open-air museums and special museums, provincial museums and other museum institutions and collections as well as museum-like institutions in Upper Austria. The institute's emeritus professor, Roman Sandgruber, who curated a number of regional exhibitions in Upper Austria and Lower Austria, was and is the long-standing president of the Upper Austrian Museum Association. This cooperation also became effective in research and teaching. The Department has long been involved in the field of applied history (exhibitions, lecturing activities, teacher training, dissemination of social and economic history research results in the field of culture and popular education). Especially in the context of provincial exhibitions and special exhibitions, department employees were active as scientific curators or editors. In 1987 and 1998, the Upper Austrian regional exhibitions were mainly organized by the Department of Social and Economic History at the University of Linz.

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The Auschwitz Camp Community of Remembrance has also been closely linked to the Department for some time. Formerly supported exclusively by Austrian survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp, this is no longer possible on grounds of age. Starting in 1980, Rudolf Kropf from the Department of Social and Economic History participated in or led excursions to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial (Museum) in Poland. With the passing of a long-time cooperation partner of the Department, the camp community chairman and Auschwitz survivor Kurt Hacker, in 2001, the structure of the camp community changed. The Lagergemeinschaft now conducts its organizational work through the Department of Social and Economic History and sees itself as strictly non-partisan. The coordination between the Lagergemeinschaft and the historical community is supposed to safeguard the memories of the Auschwitz survivors. Rudolf Kropf was succeeded as chairman (2002) by Michael John in 2006, who also served as a board member of the Mauthausen Camp Community for over a decade. Herta Neiß has been a board member of the Auschwitz Camp Community since 2003. Both perform functions in the advisory boards set up by the Austrian National Fund for the redesign of the Austria exhibition in Oświęcim (Auschwitz); Herta Neiß is chairwoman of the social advisory board.

The commitment to the camp communities of former concentration camps was a complement to the scientific orientation of the department: From the late 1990s on, Department members were involved in commissions and research projects dealing with the Nazi past, in some cases in a leading role (Aryanization and Restitution, Art Theft, VÖEST Historical Commission, Forced Labor, etc.). From 2011/12 on, to the department participated in research on the hitherto suppressed history of institutionalized children in the Second Republic (Wilhelminenberg Commission of Inquiry, Hohe Warte Home, Vienna, Caritas Homes in Upper Austria, compensation for former institutionalized children - Commission for Institutionalized Children of the Ombudsman Board, etc.).