metadata
language: en
license: apache-2.0
viewer: false
Dataset card for Historical English Books
This dataset is a collection of historical English books from before 1919. It aggregates books from the following datasets into a single dataset.
- British Library Books
- Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Library of Congress "Selected Digitized Books"
- Project Gutenberg PG19
A blend of each of the datasets was selected using the following rules.
- Language = "English"
- Limit natural science to most popular publications (>1 edition) from Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Select only science subjects from Library of Congress collection given good general literature coverage from other sources
Fields
The following fields are available.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| id | Book id |
| source | Source collection (blbooks, bhl, loc, pg19) |
| year | Publication year |
| title | Book title |
| abstract | LLM-generated abstract written in prose of 1800s |
| label | Domain category applied to book |
| quality | OCR quality (0.0 - 1.0) |
| text | Full text of the book |
Disclaimer
Note that these books represent cultural values at the time of publishing which are often not in line with our modern values.