Good, clean data from disparate digitization efforts at the M. T. James Museum

The M. T. James Museum at Washington State University employs undergraduate and graduate students to digitize different taxa, either as class projects or as supplementary employment during a degree program. While we strive for consistency, this inevitably results in different interpretations of the same data and varying levels of quality. Before any data goes live on our Ecdysis portal, it goes through a cleaning process to ensure consistency and a high standard of quality. Here I describe our cleaning process, which relies on some very useful features of OpenRefine, a free and powerful tool for working with large, messy datasets.