Beyond Excel: how to start cleaning data with OpenRefine

Within our different roles as information professionals, we are all expected to handle larger and larger amounts of data, from the resources we manage to the analytics we collect. However as this data gets bigger it can become harder to analyse. Ham explains that this is often due to errors and inconsistencies in the collection and management of data (2013, p.233), not to mention the time involved in learning how to analyse all of this information, along with the analysis itself. The following guide hopes to address some of these issues by introducing readers to OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine), an open source piece of software that can help to remove some of the errors and inconsistencies in datasets, in a timely manner, without expert knowledge being required.