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

TL;DR

Problem: enriching sparse bibliographic records and enabling Work-level clustering across editions and translations. Approach: an OpenRefine extension, BookReconciler, that reconciles against LOC, VIAF, OCLC, HathiTrust, Google Books, and Wikidata, then presents a human-in-the-loop interface to define Work clusters. Findings: very high accuracy for U.S. prize-winning works, but reduced accuracy for contemporary world fiction due to multilingual and regional data gaps. Significance: facilitates interoperability and reuse of bibliographic data for digital libraries and digital humanities, while outlining future directions to broaden multilingual coverage and integrate additional data sources and human-guided LL model assistance.

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.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: A conceptual demonstration of the BookReconciler workflow. A user can submit a dataset with minimal bibliographic metadata, such as book title and author, and enrich the data with ISBNs, subject headings, VIAF identifiers, and more for related editions and formats—what we call a Work cluster. The tool can be used to reconcile sources from the Library of Congress, Google Books, OCLC, HathiTrust, Wikidata, and VIAF.
• Figure 2: This diagram shows how the BookReconciler tool, supported by the Post45 Data Collective, interacts with a user's spreadsheet, the OpenRefine software, and six distinct bibliographic services/sources: VIAF, Library of Congress, OCLC, Wikidata, and the HathiTrust Digital Library.
• Figure 3: Additional metadata improves matches. This screenshot shows a user reconciling titles with HathiTrust and passing the additional column "author" (selected as "Contributor Uncontrolled 'First Last"') as an additional property. Users can pass additional metadata, such as author or book publication year, to increase accuracy of matches.
• Figure 4: The interactive Work cluster review interface. This screenshot shows the Work cluster for Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. The user can select or de-select matched manifestations based on their goals. For example, they may want to include or exclude translations.