biglam/british-library-book-images

British Library Book Images

1,080,814 images cut out of 49,455 digitised books (65,227 volumes, ~25 million pages) published between c. 1510 and c. 1900, digitised by the British Library in partnership with Microsoft and released by British Library Labs on Flickr Commons as the "1 Million Images from Scanned Books" release. The books cover geography, philosophy, history, poetry and literature, in several languages.

The four image types

British Library Labs deposited these as four separate records, split by an algorithmic estimate of what each cut-out region is. Each is a config here:

config	images	earliest date
embellishments	416,935	1510
plates	385,231	1528
medium	217,100	1567
covers	61,548	1510

The type labels are algorithmic, not curatorial. The deposit states the images were "algorithmically gathered" but does not state the method, so plates / medium / embellishments are best read as size-and-position heuristics over the page, not as an art-historical taxonomy. Expect the boundary between medium and plates in particular to be fuzzy. Filter on your own classifier if the distinction matters to your task.

from datasets import load_dataset

# pick a config — the whole thing is ~621 GB, so stream unless you mean it
ds = load_dataset("biglam/british-library-book-images", "covers", split="train", streaming=True)
print(next(iter(ds)))

Images per decade

decade	embellishments	plates	medium	covers	total
1510s	6	0	0	1	7
1520s	3	2	0	1	6
1540s	11	0	0	0	11
1550s	4	2	0	1	7
1560s	6	0	2	1	9
1570s	0	0	0	1	1
1580s	1	0	1	1	3
1590s	185	4	0	4	193
1600s	47	4	6	11	68
1610s	42	2	0	12	56
1620s	49	0	1	9	59
1630s	783	13	2	100	898
1640s	282	6	1	45	334
1650s	170	2	0	39	211
1660s	220	10	13	70	313
1670s	257	12	2	118	389
1680s	228	27	19	95	369
1690s	33	86	1	144	264
1700s	32	39	3	83	157
1710s	776	50	74	95	995
1720s	1,663	57	106	63	1,889
1730s	1,644	34	88	133	1,899
1740s	968	66	63	94	1,191
1750s	768	20	28	135	951
1760s	1,044	133	55	187	1,419
1770s	1,138	75	51	281	1,545
1780s	1,278	127	65	321	1,791
1790s	648	89	69	426	1,232
1800s	1,924	4,682	1,282	1,390	9,278
1810s	1,843	5,138	1,671	2,183	10,835
1820s	3,585	5,183	1,701	2,343	12,812
1830s	6,129	11,836	3,982	2,396	24,343
1840s	17,819	19,664	10,194	3,672	51,349
1850s	28,868	31,493	15,459	5,692	81,512
1860s	40,035	31,234	17,347	7,280	95,896
1870s	70,752	55,665	31,857	8,607	166,881
1880s	102,320	93,515	49,209	10,853	255,897
1890s	128,075	123,454	82,637	14,136	348,302

The 1890s alone hold a third of the corpus, and everything before 1800 together holds about 1.6% of it. Anything trained on the whole set is overwhelmingly a model of late-Victorian book illustration.

Note the plates column before and after 1800: 86 images in the entire 1690s against 4,682 in the 1800s. Full-page plates are a 19th-century printing phenomenon here, not an even feature of the date range.

Data fields

• image — the JPEG, at source resolution
• date — publication year as a string, not an integer. 5,291 rows (0.5%) carry "Unknown", and 2,151 rows carry a date after 1900 — up to 1946 — which the deposit's own c. 1510–c. 1900 framing marks as catalogue errors rather than genuinely 20th-century books. Cast and filter before doing anything arithmetic with it.
• fname — the original filename. The leading digits are the British Library system number (see below), and the rest encodes volume/page position plus the book title. The exact layout differs between image types, so parse defensively.
• image_type — one of the four above, redundant with the config but kept so the configs can be concatenated.

Joining images to their page text

The leading digits of fname are the British Library system number, which is the record_id in biglam/blbooks-parquet — the OCR text from the same digitisation programme. In a 20,000-row sample, 8,497 of 8,846 distinct system numbers (96%) matched a record there, so most images can be traced back to the book they were cut from and its text.

# system number -> the book this image came from
fname = "002543810_3_Dzieje Narodu Polskiego...jpg"
record_id = fname.split("_")[0]   # "002543810"

The 4% that don't match are books present in the image deposit but absent from the OCR release. The join is at book level, not page level — fname encodes a page position, but it is not guaranteed to align with the pg column in the OCR corpus, so treat page-level alignment as something to verify rather than assume.

What was selected, and by whom

The date range is not a sampling frame. The corpus is what the British Library and Microsoft chose to digitise from what the Library had acquired from what happened to survive — three selection layers stacked before any image reached this dataset — and digitisation programmes of this era were driven partly by preservation priorities and out-of-copyright status rather than by any attempt at representativeness. The 19th century dominates. Treat the collection as a record of what a large British institution digitised in the early 2010s, not as a sample of printed illustration.

Colonial-era publishing is heavily represented, and images carry the depictions, captions and categories of their period. Nothing here has been reviewed for offensive content.

Related datasets

The OCR text from the same digitisation programme is biglam/blbooks-parquet (14,011,953 pages).

Licensing

The images were published on Flickr Commons under no known copyright restrictions — the British Library placed them in the public domain, and the underlying works are out of copyright. Tagged cc0-1.0 here for machine-readability; the deposit's own statement is the Public Domain Mark.

No licence attaches to the images themselves that would restrict reuse. Attribution to the British Library is expected practice rather than a legal condition.

Credit

Mirrored and repackaged by Daniel van Strien (Machine Learning Librarian, Hugging Face); all source data created by the British Library, digitised in partnership with Microsoft and released by British Library Labs.

The four image types were deposited as four separate records on the British Library Research Repository (bl.iro.bl.uk), which is intermittently unavailable — this dataset is the more reliable route to the images.

Against the counts those deposits state, this dataset is a handful of images short: 6 fewer plates, 1 fewer medium, 13 fewer covers. The shortfall predates this repackaging and no cause has been established for it.

Point of contact for the original deposit: labs@bl.uk

Maintenance: Limited Maintenance — this is a mirror of a static 2014 deposit and is not expected to change.

Citation

@misc{bl_labs_book_images,
  title  = {Digitised Books. c. 1510 - c. 1900. JPG},
  author = {{British Library Labs}},
  year   = {2014},
  publisher = {British Library},
  howpublished = {\url{https://bl.iro.bl.uk/}}
}