Ali Shiri – University of Alberta, Canada Elizabeth Joan Kelly – Loyola University New Orleans, USA Ayla Stein Kenfield – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Kinza Masood – Mountain West Digital Library, USA Caroline Muglia – University of Southern California, USA Santi Thompson – University of Houston, USA Liz Woolcott – Utah State University, USA A Faceted Conceptualization of Digital Object Reuse in Digital Repositories Abstract: In this paper, we provide an introduction to the concept of digital object reuse and its various connotations in the context of current digital libraries, archives, and repositories. We will then propose a faceted categorization of the various types, contexts, and cases for digital object reuse in order to facilitate understanding and com- munication and to provide a conceptual framework for the assessment of digital object reuse by various cul- tural heritage and cultural memory organizations. 1.0 Introduction The emergence of large scale digital libraries and repositories such as HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, Europeana, and the Digital Public Library of America provides new opportunities for digital information users to openly and freely interact with, use and reuse a broad range of digital objects. The unprecedented availability of massive digital collections of books, manuscripts, images, photos, and maps offers new, individual and collective ways of making sense of information and of creating digital content. The im- plications of using, reusing, and repurposing digital content and collections, in this open and information-rich environment, are profound and multifaceted, cutting across many different institutional contexts such as libraries, archives and museums, as well as nu- merous disciplines and a wide range of user communities and audience types. Access to digital libraries, in particular, has been closely associated with and discussed in regards to such measures of impact, value, and usefulness. In fact, a cursory glance at many digital library evaluation models that have been developed in the past two decades, demonstrates the importance of impact assessment and usability of digital libraries. In today’s world, digital information users, academic as well as the general public, are able to make use of digital libraries to read, explore, entertain, write, research, create, and contextualize. Users engage in a diverse range of information practices and tasks, in- cluding searching, retrieving, using, learning, conceptualizing, synthesizing, presenting and disseminating. The reuse of digital objects can, for instance, be imagined in the context of educational, cultural, artistic, historical, geographical, and genealogical re- search and exploration. Recent research stressed the importance of and the need for developing a digital object reuse assessment framework that would support the digital library community in understanding, identifying, and categorizing digital object reuse cases and contexts to assist in measuring the value and impact of digital objects, not only for academic communities, but also for the general public (O’Gara, 2018). Such a framework needs to provide a clear understanding of the nature, type, contexts, and © Ergon - ein Verlag in der Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft