I'm not sure about modules for the data reduction phase, but here are a some hints to head you along the way:
- Create a hash by year of lists of item id and count pairs (perlref and perllol may help)
- for each year sort the appropriate list by count (see sort for help)
- Use an array slice to pick off the top 10 items (see the slices section in perldata)
DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel