The Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group (DLF AIG), Content Reuse Working Group is excited to release D-CRAFT, the Digital Content Reuse Assessment Framework Toolkit. If you work with digital collections at galleries, libraries, archives, museums, or repositories and want to measure the impact of your collections, this toolkit is for you!
The result of an Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership grant (LG-36-19-0036-19), the D-CRAFT toolkit walks users through the methods and tools that are available to measure use and reuse of digital objects. The toolkit discusses the ethical considerations related to each method and tool, and also provides a set of overarching ethical guidelines related to undertaking such assessment.
The toolkit contains:
- How to use 10 different assessment methods for reuse assessment, information on tools that can be used for each method, and an interactive tutorial for each method
- Ethical Considerations and Guidelines for the Assessment of Use and Reuse of Digital Content
- Guidelines on how to tell stories of impact to communicate the results of your assessment
- Guidelines on how to write a takedown policy (including examples and a template)
- Definitions and a discussion of “use” and “reuse” in the context of digital objects
- Related resources for further learning
- Glossary of terms
Use the Toolkit now!
D-CRAFT fills an important gap in digital library management by providing practitioners with widely-available methods and tools that are repurposed to assist with a reuse assessment. This is important because traditional digital library assessment analytics focus almost entirely on usage statistics, which do not provide the information needed to develop a nuanced picture of how users engage with, repurpose, or transform unique materials and data from digital libraries, archives, and repositories.
This lack of distinction, combined with a lack of standardized assessment approaches for digital libraries, makes it difficult for practitioners to develop user-responsive collections and to highlight the value of their materials. This in turn presents significant challenges for developing the appropriate staffing, system infrastructure, and long-term funding models needed to support digital collections.
The D-CRAFT project team hopes that the toolkit can begin to bridge this gap. Let us know your feedback on D-CRAFT or any questions you may have by contacting us.
The project Team would like to thank IMLS, the Digital Library Federation, our grant consultants, our contributing experts, the advisory group, all the community contributors, and our home institutions for their generous support of our project.
