The dataset comprises ~2.5 billion 200 OK responses in the 1996 - 2010 tranche of the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset Dataset which have been scanned for geographic references - specifically postcodes. This set of postcode citations, found at particular URLs and crawled at particular times, forms an historical geoindex of the UK web. In partnership with the Internet Archive and JISC, UKWA had obtained access to the subset of the Internet Archive’s web collection...

A dataset derived from the Digitised 19th Century Books dataset which contains books related to 19th Century British Colonies. The dataset of 1288 items was created using filtering by keywords of locations and then manually checked for accuracy. The data was augmented with additional columns including 'City', 'Colony Name' and 'Continent'. The exisiting metadta was also analysed to augment gaps within the existing data including 'Place of Publication'. This dataset was curated by students at...

A wooden writing desk used by Jane Austen which was given to her by her father in 1794. This portable ‘writing-box’ opens to provide a slope on which to write. It has various compartments, including a space for an ink pot and a lockable drawer for paper and valuables. When Austen died in 1817, aged 41, the desk was inherited by her sister Cassandra. It was later passed down through her eldest brother’s family. In...

An inscribed oracle bone (jia gu 甲骨) from the Couling-Chalfant collection at the British Library. Oracle bones were animal bones, usually ox shoulder bones or the underside of turtle shells, used for divination rituals in ancient China. Dating to the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 – 1050 BC), they bear the earliest extant form of Chinese writing and are the oldest items held in the British Library. This model was created for a British Library project...

The dataset comprises original compound index (CDX) files that have been re-assembled into 18 separate CDX files for each year of crawling activity represented (1996 - 2013). Please note that the individual CDX files are not sorted. In order to enable access to web archives, UKWA uses CDX files to act as indexes so that it is possible to look up which ARC or WARC files contain which URLs and responses. In partnership with the...

The Living Knowledge vision of the British Library is to make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone, for research, inspiration and enjoyment. An important element of this heritage is the research output of staff of the British Library. Therefore, the aim of this policy is to ensure the wider dissemination and long-term preservation of research outputs produced by British Library staff. This will improve discoverability and in turn raise the research profile of the British...

The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser (1832-1856, with two changes of title) was a Conservative newspaper established by local politicians to counter the rise of Radicalism and promote “Church and State” ideology.

The files in this dataset are derived from microfilm copies of the original library catalogue of Sir Hans Sloane, now presented across 9 volumes, Sloane MS 3972 C 1-8, and the name index to the Sloane library catalogue, Sloane MS 3972 D. The catalogues are crucial for understanding the development of Sloane's collections, the present-day collections of the British Library, British Museum and Natural History Museum, and to identifying collection items which are now dispersed...

Dispersed along the shelves of the British Library today are many volumes that once stood side by side in private libraries. These essays explore some of the most important printed collections which were brought together to form the British Museum Library and cast new light on the individuals whose personal interests and taste they reflect.

This dataset comprises 81 digitised images (TIFF files) drawn from a selection of early printed Bengali books (1713-1914) digitised through the Two Centuries of Indian Print project (https://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print). Also contained are ground truth transcriptions (XML) for each page that can be used for training optical character recognition software on historical Bengali printed text. The folder contains the images and ground truth used for the REID2019 competition (https://www.primaresearch.org/REID2019/), part of ICDAR 2019 (https://icdar2019.org/competitions-2/). The images are...

EThOS (https://ethos.bl.uk) is the UK's national thesis service listing over 500,000 doctoral theses and providing immediate access to over 300,000 digital theses. In 2014 a new copyright exception for non-commercial text and data mining (TDM) came into force permitting certain acts of copying that would otherwise constitute copyright infringement, in particular the copying of an entire work and not just for fair dealing with the work. This report explores the opportunities, challenges, risks and workflows...

A selection of files of the EThOS metadata augmented by the organisational identifiers listed below. These files were created to inform a deliverable which is part of the FREYA project which aims to gather enhanced provenance information in the EThOS metadata. The ReadMe file contains full details of the files,their creation and potential uses for them. These files are best used in conjunction with the 'UK Doctoral Thesis Metadata from EThOS' dataset, which is regularly...

The dataset comprises ~2.5 billion 200 OK responses from the 1996 - 2010 tranche of the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset which have been scanned for hyperlinks. For each link, UKWA extracts the host that the link targets, and uses this to build up a picture of which hosts have linked to which other hosts, over time. In partnership with the Internet Archive and JISC, UKWA had obtained access to the subset of the Internet...

Creative and cultural organisations require repositories that look good, are attractive to users and support a wide range of non-text research outputs. Join us to learn more about our shared repository for UK cultural heritage organisations.

A dataset which is a subset of the Digitised 19th Century books dataset comprising Russian Language books. The spreadsheet contains metadata of 585 books in Russian. This dataset was compiled by Nadya Miryanova a student at Lady Eleanor Holles who completed work experience at British Library Labs in 2017.

This dataset comprises an Excel spreadsheet of text extracted from almost 2,000 digital images of maps and documents held in the War Office Archive, covering a large part of eastern Africa between c.1880 and 1940. The items were catalogued and digitised with generous funding from Indigo Trust. The harvested text includes names of historical settlements and ethnic regions in eastern Africa, descriptions of historical land use, topography and vegetation, and notes of ethnographic, military or...

Printed in Southern Germany c. 1473, the ‘Constance’ Graduale (IB. 15154) is the earliest extant book of printed music using moveable type. The copy in the British Library’s music collection is the only known surviving copy that is complete.

Menak, Javanese manuscript containing stories of Amir Hamza, uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, written in Javanese in Arabic script, written between 1792 and 1812. 1,450 folios of Javanese paper. http://searcharchives.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=detailsTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=IAMS040-002042067&indx=1&recIds=IAMS040-002042067&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&dscnt=0&frbg=&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BL%29&tab=local&dstmp=1526286592148&srt=rank&mode=Basic&&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=menak&vid=IAMS_VU2

An inscribed oracle bone (jia gu 甲骨) from the Couling-Chalfant collection at the British Library. Oracle bones were animal bones, usually ox shoulder bones or the underside of turtle shells, used for divination rituals in ancient China. Dating to the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 – 1050 BC), they bear the earliest extant form of Chinese writing and are the oldest items held in the British Library. This model was created for a British Library project...

This dataset has been superseded by a more recent version: https://doi.org/10.23636/1188 If you require access to an earlier version, please email openaccess@bl.uk, including the dataset title, date, and DOI in your request. The data in this collection comprises the bibliographic metadata for all UK doctoral theses listed in EThOS, the UK's national thesis service. We estimate the data covers around 98% of all PhDs ever awarded by UK Higher Education institutions, dating back to 1787....

FOR an author who was at once both lionized in some quarters, and despised in others, it is remarkable that descriptions of George Eliot's appearance are so much at variance. On one hand is the unkind, but memorable yet still unattributed line, 'Have you seen a horse, sir? Then you have seen George Eliot!' In contrast are the words of John Fiske, an American admirer, who wrote to his wife, 'She is much better looking...

IN the sad history of crimes against books, British Library Add. MS. 28784 must be placed high on the list of scrapbooks headed by the Carmelite Missal, Add. MSS. 29704-29705. When acquired by the British Museum in 1871 Add. MS. 28784 was composed of a complete late fifteenth-century book of hours' embellished with sixteen inserted full page miniatures from an earlier fifteenth-century book of hours and with over 400 bits and pieces cut from a...

THE condition of the miniatures in the Psalter of Henry of Blois, British Library MS. Cotton Nero C. IV, has long been a subject of interest to students of Romanesque illumination. Those who have commented upon this problem agreed that originally the miniatures were fully painted. At some point, the paint flaked away, leaving traces of color on some of the figures. It was also suggested that the lapus lazuli of the backgrounds was deliberately...

Four incunables, undated and anonymous as to place and printer, have for many generations been assigned to the Nuremberg press of Anton Koberger, and have in fact been classed as his very earliest productions. 1. Johannes Nider, Manuale confessorum. fol.: a-e10 f8, 58 leaves. Hain, *11834; Goff, N-178; Proctor, 1961; B.M.C. ii, 411 (IB. 7103). 2. Johannes Nider, De morali lepra. fol.: a-e10 f g8 h10, 76 leaves. Hain, *11813; Goff, N-I89; Proctor, 1960; B.M.C....