A management system and method for usage data from usage logs of works of authorship is characterized by the comparison of data components from the usage logs to similar data components for works of authorship stored in a database. The usage data is normalized and cleaned prior to comparison, and additional information from the usage data can be extracted for later use in the comparison. False positive matches are eliminated from the comparison so that incompatible potential candidate matches are eliminated. In addition, the best match from a group of multiple matches is determined for a particular work from a usage log.