A single publisher's name is often written in a variety of ways, making it hard to review aggregate data on purchasing or circulation. For instance, HarperCollins, HarperCollins Publishers, HarperCollins Publishers Inc. The attached spreadsheet can help you clean up the data so that publishers' names are written in a standardized format.
The instructions below assume that you have a spreadsheet of some sort that contains a column with publisher names in it. This column (also called a field) should not contain the entire 260 field (i.e. City: Publisher, Year), just the publisher name.
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Software that allows relational databases includes Access, PowerBI, and Tableau. What this means is you will import multiple tables from Excel into the software and then create a relationship between the two tables. You can then create a query that draws some information from the main table (e.g., circulation, the cost of a book) and some from the Publisher Standardization table (the standardized name of the publisher).
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Created by Karen Kohn, Temple University 2017.