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README.md

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+**French-Public Domain-Book** or **French-PD-Books** is a large collection aiming to agregate all the French monographies in the public domain. 
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+The collection has been curated and created by Benoît de Courson, Benjamin Azoulay and Pierre-Carl Langlais.
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+As of January 2024, the collection contains 289,000 books from the French National Library (Gallica). Each parquet file has the full text of 2,000 books selected at random and few core metadatas.
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+This initial agregation was made possible thanks to the open data program of the French National Library and the consolidation of public domain status for cultural heritage works in the EU with the 2019 Copyright Directive (art. 14)
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+The composition of the dataset aims to adhere to the criteria for public domain works in the EU and, consequently, all Berne-countries for EU authors: any publication whose author is dead for more than 70 years.
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+## Uses
+The primary use of the collection is for cultural analytics project on a wide scale. It is already in use by the Gallicagram project, an open and significantly enhanced version of ngram viewer.
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+The collection also aims to expand the availability of open works for the training of Large Language Models. The text can be used for model training and republished without restriction for reproducibility purposes.
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+## Future developments
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+This dataset is not a one time work but will continue to evolve significantly on two directions:
+* Enhancement of the available full text.
+* Expansion of the collection to other cultural heritage holdings, especially coming from Hathi Trust, Internet Archive and Google Books. Despite the application of restrictions