Datasets:

TextMachineProject
/

blbooks_metadata

 ---
 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. 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 books   |
+| :------- | :---------------- |
+| English  | 36924             |
+| French   | 3734              |
+| Spanish  | 742               |
+| Italian  | 643               |
+| Russian  | 564               |
+| Dutch    | 535               |
+The resulting metadata file consists of 43,142 entries.
+Books per period (respecting original period split in *blbooks_derived*):
+| Period    | Number of books   |
+| :-------- | :---------------- |
+| 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             |
+## 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"]]
+```
+Returns:
+| 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.