An Empirically Grounded Framework for Documenting Digital Cultural Heritage Use/Reuse

Over several decades, digital cultural heritage has been increasingly reused across research, education, creative practice and through public community engagement. However, these activities remain undescribed or inconsistently documented and difficult to compare. Organisations typically rely on ‘proxy metrics’ such as downloads, page views or reverse searches to assess use/reuse. However, these metrics reveal little about how materials were transformed, interpreted, or how they generated value and impact. GLAMs often rely on unstructured anecdotes to capture/trace reuse, as it is difficult to retrospectively document reuse when GLAMs publish cultural heritage data openly without the expectation of users to tell the organisation what they did with the digital cultural heritage they accessed and used. Documenting reuse approaches often focuses on single dimensions or factors such as sector, content type, audience or impact. This has resulted in fragmented knowledge about digital cultural heritage reuse, which has created limitations in carrying out evaluations across examples, learning from good practice and planning digital cultural heritage initiatives. This article introduces and empirically grounds a flexible, multi-dimensional schema for documenting and planning digital cultural heritage reuse. Using an abductive methodology that combines literature analysis and synthesis, practitioner interviews, user-journey examinations and iterative prototyping, we developed a six-category framework capturing (1) organisation and context, (2) heritage assets and technologies, (3) purpose and process, (4) users and engagement modes, (5) nature of use and availability, and (6) impact and sustainability. Applied across real-world examples, this framework can reveal forms of value, dependency and risk, often absent from conventional reporting in the reuse of digital cultural heritage. We argue that reuse documentation functions as a form of socio-technical infrastructure, enabling a shared vocabulary and understanding for cross-case comparison, cumulative learning and strategic design of digital heritage initiatives. By shifting categorisation from retrospective description to include prospective planning, the framework supports a more meaningful impact assessment and sustainable reuse of digital cultural heritage as a societal resource.