One of the many great things I took away from the recent MWDL workshop on Linked Data was an introduction to OpenRefine. Aside from the great activities in using OpenRefine and Mulgara to clean up data, create URIs, and generate RDF files, OpenRefine looks like a great (and free) resource for most digital metadata librarians to use when faced with general metadata clean up issues.

Open Refine used to be known as Google Refine, so there you can find different information available under both names if you are searching for documentation.

Here are some resources I’ve been looking at recently:

Using OpenRefine to create clean-up scripts

Here’s an entertaining screencast from Free Your Metadata.

Resources listed on a Google Refine Blog 

There’s also an OpenRefine Google Group

The GitHub page for OpenRefine has a variety of resources, use cases, and tutorials listed.

You can easily export a CONTENTdm collection into an excel or .csv file and open it in Open Refine, but I’ve been curious about taking advantage of some of the harvested MWDL metadata that DPLA offers for download.

When will all our data look like this?

Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/