BookReconciler: An Open-Source Tool for Metadata Enrichment and Work-Level Clustering

TL;DR

BookReconciler is an open-source tool that enriches and clusters book metadata, enabling better data integration and analysis across collections by adding identifiers and grouping related editions with human oversight.

Contribution

It introduces a human-in-the-loop approach for metadata enrichment and work-level clustering, integrated into OpenRefine, connecting to major bibliographic sources.

Findings

Achieves near-perfect accuracy for U.S. works

Lower performance on global texts due to bibliographic infrastructure issues

Supports reuse of bibliographic data across domains

Abstract

We present BookReconciler, an open-source tool for enhancing and clustering book data. BookReconciler allows users to take spreadsheets with minimal metadata, such as book title and author, and automatically 1) add authoritative, persistent identifiers like ISBNs 2) and cluster related Expressions and Manifestations of the same Work, e.g., different translations or editions. This enhancement makes it easier to combine related collections and analyze books at scale. The tool is currently designed as an extension for OpenRefine -- a popular software application -- and connects to major bibliographic services including the Library of Congress, VIAF, OCLC, HathiTrust, Google Books, and Wikidata. Our approach prioritizes human judgment. Through an interactive interface, users can manually evaluate matches and define the contours of a Work (e.g., to include translations or not). We evaluate reconciliation performance on datasets of U.S. prize-winning books and contemporary world fiction. BookReconciler achieves near-perfect accuracy for U.S. works but lower performance for global texts, reflecting structural weaknesses in bibliographic infrastructures for non-English and global literature. Overall, BookReconciler supports the reuse of bibliographic data across domains and applications, contributing to ongoing work in digital libraries and digital humanities.