Conference Paper: “BookReconciler: An Open-Source Tool for Metadata Enrichment and Work-Level Clustering”

The conference paper linked below was shared on arXiv.

Title

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

Authors

Matt Miller
Library of Congress

Dan Sinykin
Emory University

Melanie Walsh
University of Washington Information School

Source

arXiv
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2512.10165
Published in the Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2025

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.

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