Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Communication

Description: Presented at Charleston Conference 2019. We measure the ‘use’ of assets in our digital collections. But we rarely measure their ‘reuse’ in social media contexts, digital exhibits, virtual reality environments, and marketing materials. What are we missing when we do not utilize all the metrics available to us? How can be demonstrate value and impact of our collections if we cannot showcase all aspects of usage of our assets? And what are the definitions of ‘use’ and ‘reuse’ in this new context?In 2017, the Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group (DLF-AIG) sought to define the concept of ‘reuse’ through an IMLS- grant funded project (LG-73-17-0002-17) titled Developing a Framework for Measuring Reuse of Digital Objects. The goal of the grant was to provide an in-depth needs assessment of cultural heritage knowledge organizations (CHKO) to determine functional requirements and use cases for the development of a reuse assessment toolkit as defined by the community itself. In short, the time arrived to interrogate the myriad ways in which users interact with our resources and offer opportunities to move beyond traditional library metrics and focus on transformational use.Since the original grant, in 2019, the same Project Team received a second IMLS-grant (LG-36-19-0036-19) titled “Digital Content Reuse Assessment Framework Toolkit (D-CRAFT) with a goal of developing the toolkit for which we gathered functional requirements, provide resources, recommended practices, and use cases for sustainably measuring and evaluating the reuse of digital assets held by CHKOs. D-CRAFT will support the use of evidence-based approaches to build and improve on inclusive, user-centered platforms, systems, and collections. In the digital library environment, we talk about and measure many things. However, ‘reuse’ of assets is not often part of the conversation. These grants demonstrate that these metrics are imperative to cultivating a compelling story of enduring value.