Melanie WalshVery happy to introduce a new tool, BookReconciler!
You can take spreadsheets with book data and add subject headings, descriptions, ISBNs, HathiTrust IDs, & more. You can also cluster editions & variations of the same "Work."
Led by @[email protected] and supported by @[email protected].
BookReconciler is designed as an extension of OpenRefine, so anybody can use it. No computational experience required.
It currently connects to Library of Congress, Google Books, Wikidata, HathiTrust, OCLC, VIAF, & Open Library.
Tool: github.com/Post45-Data-...
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.10165
The BookReconciler project—with @[email protected] and @[email protected]—was accepted at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
If you're attending, you can catch Matt's presentation tomorrow at 8am Central: event65692c7b4e76f09.sched.com/event/2CdM7/...
#JCDL2025
JCDL 2025: Resource Track
JCDL 2025: Resource Track
This project has been supported by the @[email protected].
It was initially funded by an NEH grant led by @[email protected] and me. Then our NEH got cancelled. But we persisted!
Matt, Dan, and I have been working on this project for years at this point.
Here's a great example of BookReconciler in action by @[email protected].
He took PEN America’s banned book data and enhanced it with descriptions, subjects, covers, & persistent IDs.
This makes it easier to understand banned book trends and fight back.
thisismattmiller.com/post/book-ba...
Most of all, we hope this tool can spark renewed conversations about book data challenges, especially related to Works and reconciliation.
These questions often seem boring and abstract… but they’re actually really important! We hope this tool can help make these issues more clear and concrete.
James TauberLooking forward to diving into this given the bibliographic modeling work I’ve been doing for @[email protected]. Different problem but some overlap.
Oh, great! I’m eager to hear more. Now I’m too obsessed with bibliographic modeling.
Modelling Tolkien Bibliographic Information: FRBR and Beyond
This is a great video, James! I feel like this would teach well. You really highlight the many open questions in bibliographic modeling, and how much room for interpretation and creativity there is.
Aww, thank you!
It one of those lovely things where different groups will come at different parts of the elephant.
I've now spent enough time trying to capture things that I've started to get a sense of different whims different publishers had at different times.