NeuML/historical-english-books

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.