| --- |
| license: apache-2.0 |
| language: |
| - en |
| - fr |
| - es |
| - it |
| - ru |
| - nl |
| tags: |
| - books |
| - glam |
| - digital-humanities |
| pretty_name: 19th Century Digitised Books Collection Metadata |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| --- |
| |
| # 19th Century Digitised Books Collection: BLBooks Metadata |
|
|
| ## Dataset Summary |
| This dataset consists of structured metadata from the British Library [19th Century Digitised Books Collection](https://bl.iro.bl.uk/collections/b7fd2482-debd-4495-9494-72aa2ead00bb) (henceforth **blbooks**), a large collection of digitized books in the public domain. |
| It has been created from the [OCR derived text + metadata version](https://doi.org/10.23636/r7w6-zy15) (henceforth **blbooks_derived**) of the [original dataset](https://bl.iro.bl.uk/collections/b7fd2482-debd-4495-9494-72aa2ead00bb), which is released under CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain license. The complete implementation code is available at: [https://github.com/Text-Machine/data-processing-code](https://github.com/Text-Machine/data-processing-code). |
| We have processed the records to include a genre label (`fiction` or `non-fiction`) assigned by [Gemma4-31b-it](https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-31B-it) based on the title and the author. We also used the [`dedupe`](https://dedupe.io/) library to perform fuzzy string matching for duplicate detection. All duplicated records are grouped under the same `book_id`, and the one with the highest OCR quality is flagged as `best_version`. |
| |
| ## Languages and Periods |
| Records have been filtered to include only books tagged as written entirely in one of following languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Russian. |
| | Language | Number of records | |
| | :------- | :---------------- | |
| | English | 36924 | |
| | French | 3734 | |
| | Spanish | 742 | |
| | Italian | 643 | |
| | Russian | 564 | |
| | Dutch | 535 | |
| |
| Records per period (respecting original period split in *blbooks_derived*): |
| | Period | Number of records | |
| | :-------- | :---------------- | |
| | 1510_1699 | 680 | |
| | 1700_1799 | 1782 | |
| | 1800_1809 | 1062 | |
| | 1810_1819 | 1870 | |
| | 1820_1829 | 1847 | |
| | 1830_1839 | 1873 | |
| | 1840_1849 | 2815 | |
| | 1850_1859 | 3923 | |
| | 1860_1869 | 4439 | |
| | 1870_1879 | 5502 | |
| | 1880_1889 | 7248 | |
| | 1890_1899 | 10101 | |
| |
| The resulting metadata file consists of 43,142 entries. |
| |
| ## Structure |
| The dataset is provided as a tabular file with the following columns: |
| | Column | Description | |
| | :--- | :--- | |
| | `record_id` | The unique identifier (from *blbooks_derived*, field `record_id`). | |
| | `date` | The publication year of this specific edition (from *blbooks_derived*, field `date`). | |
| | `title` | The full title of the work (from *blbooks_derived*, field `title`). | |
| | `place` | The place of publication (from *blbooks_derived*, field `place`). | |
| | `mean_wc_ocr` | Word OCR quality averaged per record (from *blbooks_derived*, obtained by averaging the per-page mean word confidence values, field `mean_wc_ocr`). | |
| | `std_wc_ocr` | Standard deviation of the word confidence values averaged per record (from *blbooks_derived*, obtained by averaging the per-page standard deviation values, field `std_wc_ocr`). | |
| | `author` | Main author of the publication (from *blbooks_derived*, field `Name`). | |
| | `all_authors` | All names associated with the publication (from *blbooks_derived*, field `all names`). | |
| | `publisher` | Publisher of the work (from *blbooks_derived*, field `Publisher`). | |
| | `main_publication_country` | First country associated with publication (from *blbooks_derived*, field `Country of publication 1`). | |
| | `all_publication_countries` | A list of all associated countries of publication (from *blbooks_derived*, field `all Countries of publication`). | |
| | `main_language` | The primary language associated with the book (from *blbooks_derived*, field `Language_1`). | |
| | `number_of_pages` | Total page count. | |
| | `number_of_words` | Total word count (using `.split()`). | |
| | `path_to_json` | File path to the corresponding raw JSONL content (pointing to the corresponding content file in *blbooks_derived*, where each row corresponds with one page of the book). | |
| | `book_id` | Unique identifier for the work after deduplication. | |
| | `best_version` | Boolean: `1` if this is the highest quality OCR version, `0` otherwise. | |
| | `genre` | Genre classification (`fiction` or `non-fiction`) assigned by Gemma 4. | |
| |
| ### Data instance |
| An example data instance: |
| ```json |
| { |
| 'record_id': 3112351, |
| 'date': 1692, |
| 'title': 'The Traytor, a tragedy [in five acts and in verse] with alterations, amendments and additions. Written by Mr. Rivers', |
| 'place': 'London', |
| 'mean_wc_ocr': 0.4944406779661017, |
| 'std_wc_ocr': 0.1780338983050847, |
| 'author': nan, |
| 'all_authors': 'Shirley, James, 1596-1666 [person]', |
| 'publisher': nan, |
| 'main_publication_country': 'England', |
| 'all_publication_countries': 'England', |
| 'main_language': 'English', |
| 'number_of_pages': 59, |
| 'number_of_words': 18462, |
| 'path_to_json': '1510_1699/1692_003112351.jsonl.gz', |
| 'book_id': 37591, |
| 'best_version': 1, |
| 'genre': 'fiction' |
| } |
| ``` |
| |
| ### Duplicates and best version |
| An example of deduplication with best version selection: |
| ```python |
| import pandas as pd |
| df = pd.read_csv("metadata_blbooks.csv") |
| df[df["author"] == "Austen, Jane"][["title", "author", "date", "mean_wc_ocr", "book_id", "best_version", "genre"]] |
| ``` |
| | record_id | title | author | date | mean_wc_ocr | book_id | best_version | genre | |
| |-----------|------------------------------------|--------------|------|-------------|---------|--------------|---------| |
| | 144506 | Emma : a novel | Austen, Jane | 1870 | 0.830995 | 1195 | 1 | fiction | |
| | 144565 | Mansfield Park : a novel | Austen, Jane | 1875 | 0.706090 | 1192 | 0 | fiction | |
| | 144563 | Mansfield Park : a novel | Austen, Jane | 1870 | 0.850376 | 1192 | 1 | fiction | |
| | 144766 | Sense and sensibility | Austen, Jane | 1884 | 0.569446 | 1193 | 0 | fiction | |
| | 144597 | Northanger Abbey : and, Persuasion | Austen, Jane | 1897 | 0.810952 | 1197 | 1 | fiction | |
| | 144469 | The novels of Jane Austen | Austen, Jane | 1898 | 0.861404 | 1196 | 1 | fiction | |
| | 144559 | Mansfield Park, etc | Austen, Jane | 1898 | 0.788097 | 1192 | 0 | fiction | |
| | 144749 | Sense and sensibility | Austen, Jane | 1896 | 0.816648 | 1193 | 1 | fiction | |
| | 144509 | Emma | Austen, Jane | 1896 | 0.772656 | 1195 | 0 | fiction | |
| | 144558 | Mansfield Park | Austen, Jane | 1897 | 0.830825 | 1192 | 0 | fiction | |
| | 144653 | Pride and prejudice | Austen, Jane | 1895 | 0.823202 | 1194 | 1 | fiction | |
| |
| ## Additional information |
| For additional information on the original dataset, read the dataset card at https://huggingface.co/datasets/TheBritishLibrary/blbooks. |
