Data wangling in Libraries: the power of OpenRefine software

OpenRefine is super important for our data publishing workflow with Open Context, and many of you will find it a great way to reduce the tedium in cleaning data. A few dimensions of data quality are accuracy or correctness, comparability, consistency, coherence or clarity, completeness, credibility, reliability, or usefulness, timeliness or latency, uniqueness, validity or reasonableness. OpenRefine is a software program that installs on your own computer. It uses Java to power a web server, and even through open refine runs as a web server, you interact with the application through a web browser like Safari, Chrome, or Firefox. But even though OpenRefine runs as a web server, it is running on your own computer, not on the internet. For that reason, it is important to use private or sensitive information securely, like on your own computer. Because it runs on its own device, it is not like Google Drive, Google spreadsheets, or other computing services.