metadata

annotations_creators:
  - expert-generated
language:
  - en
  - fr
  - de
language_creators:
  - expert-generated
license:
  - cc-by-nc-4.0
multilinguality:
  - multilingual
pretty_name: Old Book Illustrations
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K
source_datasets:
  - original
tags:
  - lam
  - 1800-1900
task_categories:
  - text-to-image
  - image-to-text
  - image-to-image
task_ids:
  - image-captioning

Dataset Card for Old Book Illustrations

Table of Contents
Dataset Description
- Dataset Summary
- Languages
Dataset Structure
- Data Instances
- Data Fields
Dataset Creation
Considerations for Using the Data
- Discussion of Biases
Additional Information

Dataset Description

Homepage

Dataset Summary

The Old Book Illustrations contains 4172 illustrations scanned from old books, this collection was collected & curated by the team of the website Old Book Illustrations. The webmaster of Old Book Illustrations kindly allowed us to scrap these information in order to create this dataset for the BigLAM initiative.

Languages

The captions and descriptions are mostly in English but can contain some sentences from other languages such as French or German. For instance you can find this description that contains a French sentence:

The caption reads in the original French: Vue de l’aqueduc de Salones qui conduisait l’eau à Spalatro.

Dataset Structure

Each row contains information gathered from the page of an illustration on the website Old Book Illustrations. As of July 2022, there are 4172 illustrations in this dataset.

Data Fields

rawscan: the image as originally scanned from the book, without further processing
1600px: the cleaned image, resized to a width of 1600 pixels (height can vary)
info_url: URL to the illustration page on oldbookillustrations.com
ìnfo_src: URL to an icon-sized version of the image
info_alt: short description of the image
artist_name: artist name
artist_date: birth date of the artist
artist_countries: list of the countries the artist is from
book_title: original title of the book the illustration is extracted from
book_authors: list of the authors of the book
book_publishers: list of the publishers of the book
openlibrary-url: URL to the openlibrary entry for the book
tags: list of keywords for this illustration on oldbookillustrations.com
illustration_source_name: list of the sources for this illustration
illustration_source_url: list of the URL for these sources
illustration_subject: category of the subject represented in the illustration
illustration_format: category of the format of the illustration
image_title: title of the image
image_caption: caption of the image. Seems to be the caption that appears next to the image in the book, translated to English if in another language
image_description: longer description of the image. If there is one, it also quotes the caption in the original language
rawscan_url: URL to the rawscan image on oldbookillustration.com
1600px_url: URL to the cleaned image on oldbookillustration.com

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

This collection was collected & curated by the team of the website Old Book Illustrations. This version contains all the data that was available on the website as of July 2022, but the website is being actively maintained so if you want more old book illustrations, make sure to check Old Book Illustrations.

Source Data

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

Initial data is gathered from the website Old Book Illustrations. The sources of the illustration scans are specified for each entry in the columns illustration_source_name and illustration_source_url.

Personal and Sensitive Information

The Old Book Illustrations' Terms and conditions reads:

OBI [Old Book Illustrations] explores the art of book illustrations within boundaries defined by time and age, not by subject, treatment, or intent. This means that some illustrations might be deemed offensive, disturbing, misleading, or otherwise objectionable. We do not endorse views or opinions the Illustrations may express, neither do we guarantee that the information conveyed by any Illustration is accurate.

Considerations for Using the Data

Discussion of Biases

The Old Book Illustrations' Terms and conditions reads:

OBI [Old Book Illustrations] explores the art of book illustrations within boundaries defined by time and age, not by subject, treatment, or intent. This means that some illustrations might be deemed offensive, disturbing, misleading, or otherwise objectionable. We do not endorse views or opinions the Illustrations may express, neither do we guarantee that the information conveyed by any Illustration is accurate.

Additional Information

Dataset Curators

The Old Book Illustrations collection is curated and maintained by the team of the Old Book Illustrations website.

Licensing Information

Old Book Illustrations website reads:

We don’t limit the use of the illustrations available on our site, but we accept no responsibility regarding any problem, legal or otherwise, which might result from such use. More specifically, we leave it up to users to make sure that their project complies with the copyright laws of their country of residence. Text content (descriptions, translations, etc.) is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Old Book Illustrations webmaster mentioned that most images are public domain in the US and Europe, but there can be some exceptions. An example are the illustrations from Early poems of William Morris as the illustrator died 1955, so her work is not public domain in Europe as of 2022, or Under the hill which was published in the US in 1928 and therefore is not public domain there.

Citation Information

@misc{old book illustrations_2007,
url={https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/},
journal={Old Book Illustrations}, year={2007}}

Contributions

Thanks to @gigant (@giganttheo) for adding this dataset.