DPLA hosts introduction to OpenRefine

Last week, the Outreach and Assessment and Metadata Working Groups presented “Introduction to OpenRefine,” a well-attended webinar led by Helen Baer, Digital Projects Librarian at Colorado State University. We are grateful to Helen for giving tips on how to get started with OpenRefine, a powerful metadata cleaning tool that can transform your DPLA metadata workflows, and for demonstrating many of the software’s most useful and relevant functions in an accessible manner.

In addition to the basics such as faceting, filtering, find/replace, split/join, the webinar walked through a more advanced procedure: adding URIs for Library of Congress Subject Headings to your metadata. Subject URIs are relatively new to DPLA, and offer the possibility of making our metadata more interoperable and discoverable.

We are pleased that so many folks joined us for this session, and we are in the midst of planning an in-depth follow-up session. We welcome your thoughts on case studies (i.e. common problems) that you would like us to cover next time!

In case you missed it, a recording of Wednesday’s event is available here and the slides from the presentation are available here. Additionally, the OpenRefine “Cheat Sheet” mentioned in the presentation is available here, courtesy of author Arcadia Falcone.