--- license: cc0-1.0 pretty_name: BL Books Genre language: - en task_categories: - text-classification task_ids: - multi-class-classification tags: - lam - GLAM - 19th-century - books - british-library - living-with-machines dataset_info: - config_name: annotated_raw features: - name: BL record ID dtype: string - name: Name dtype: string - name: Dates associated with name dtype: string - name: Type of name dtype: string - name: Role dtype: string - name: All names list: string - name: Title dtype: string - name: Variant titles dtype: string - name: Series title dtype: string - name: Number within series dtype: string - name: Country of publication list: string - name: Place of publication list: string - name: Publisher dtype: string - name: Date of publication dtype: string - name: Edition dtype: string - name: Physical description dtype: string - name: Dewey classification dtype: string - name: BL shelfmark dtype: string - name: Topics dtype: string - name: Genre dtype: string - name: Languages list: string - name: Notes dtype: string - name: BL record ID for physical resource dtype: string - name: classification_id dtype: string - name: user_id dtype: string - name: subject_ids dtype: string - name: annotator_date_pub dtype: string - name: annotator_normalised_date_pub dtype: string - name: annotator_edition_statement dtype: string - name: annotator_FAST_genre_terms dtype: string - name: annotator_FAST_subject_terms dtype: string - name: annotator_comments dtype: string - name: annotator_main_language dtype: string - name: annotator_other_languages_summaries dtype: string - name: annotator_summaries_language dtype: string - name: annotator_translation dtype: string - name: annotator_original_language dtype: string - name: annotator_publisher dtype: string - name: annotator_place_pub dtype: string - name: annotator_country dtype: string - name: annotator_title dtype: string - name: Link to digitised book dtype: string - name: annotated dtype: bool - name: Type of resource dtype: class_label: names: '0': Monograph '1': Serial - name: created_at dtype: timestamp[s] - name: annotator_genre dtype: class_label: names: '0': Fiction '1': Can't tell '2': Non-fiction '3': The book contains both Fiction and Non-Fiction splits: - name: train num_bytes: 3582954 num_examples: 4398 download_size: 985607 dataset_size: 3582954 - config_name: raw features: - name: BL record ID dtype: string - name: Name dtype: string - name: Dates associated with name dtype: string - name: Type of name dtype: string - name: Role dtype: string - name: All names list: string - name: Title dtype: string - name: Variant titles dtype: string - name: Series title dtype: string - name: Number within series dtype: string - name: Country of publication list: string - name: Place of publication list: string - name: Publisher dtype: string - name: Date of publication dtype: string - name: Edition dtype: string - name: Physical description dtype: string - name: Dewey classification dtype: string - name: BL shelfmark dtype: string - name: Topics dtype: string - name: Genre dtype: string - name: Languages list: string - name: Notes dtype: string - name: BL record ID for physical resource dtype: string - name: classification_id dtype: string - name: user_id dtype: string - name: subject_ids dtype: string - name: annotator_date_pub dtype: string - name: annotator_normalised_date_pub dtype: string - name: annotator_edition_statement dtype: string - name: annotator_FAST_genre_terms dtype: string - name: annotator_FAST_subject_terms dtype: string - name: annotator_comments dtype: string - name: annotator_main_language dtype: string - name: annotator_other_languages_summaries dtype: string - name: annotator_summaries_language dtype: string - name: annotator_translation dtype: string - name: annotator_original_language dtype: string - name: annotator_publisher dtype: string - name: annotator_place_pub dtype: string - name: annotator_country dtype: string - name: annotator_title dtype: string - name: Link to digitised book dtype: string - name: annotated dtype: bool - name: Type of resource dtype: class_label: names: '0': Monograph '1': Serial '2': Monographic component part - name: created_at dtype: string - name: annotator_genre dtype: string splits: - name: train num_bytes: 27517664 num_examples: 55343 download_size: 10767714 dataset_size: 27517664 - config_name: title_genre_classifiction features: - name: BL record ID dtype: string - name: title dtype: string - name: label dtype: class_label: names: '0': Fiction '1': Non-fiction splits: - name: train num_bytes: 187592 num_examples: 1736 download_size: 116943 dataset_size: 187592 configs: - config_name: annotated_raw data_files: - split: train path: annotated_raw/train-* - config_name: raw data_files: - split: train path: raw/train-* - config_name: title_genre_classifiction data_files: - split: train path: title_genre_classifiction/train-* --- # BL Books Genre A dataset of metadata records for British Library digitised books with crowdsourced genre annotations (fiction / non-fiction). Created as part of the [Living with Machines](https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk/) project. A model trained on this dataset is available at [`TheBritishLibrary/bl-books-genre`](https://huggingface.co/TheBritishLibrary/bl-books-genre) (DistilBERT, ~0.94 accuracy on the held-out test set). ## Subsets This dataset has three configurations: | Config | Rows | Use | |---|---|---| | `title_genre_classifiction` | 1,736 | Curated `title → fiction/non-fiction` training set used to train [`TheBritishLibrary/bl-books-genre`](https://huggingface.co/TheBritishLibrary/bl-books-genre). **Start here** for classification tasks. | | `annotated_raw` | 4,398 | All Zooniverse-annotated records, including ambiguous cases (`Can't tell`, `both fiction and non-fiction`). Useful for reproducing annotation analysis. | | `raw` | 55,343 | The full set of BL digitised book metadata records (annotated and unannotated). Useful for inference at scale or for sampling additional candidates. | ## Source materials - **Records**: British Library catalogue metadata for digitised 18th–19th century books - **Annotations**: Volunteer labels gathered through [Zooniverse](https://www.zooniverse.org/) crowdsourcing, curated by the Living with Machines team - **Tutorial / replication notebook**: [Living with Machines genre-classification tutorial](https://living-with-machines.github.io/genre-classification/01_BL_fiction_non_fiction.html) ## Limitations & caveats - **Time period bias**: heavily weighted toward the later 19th century (mean publication year ~1864, median ~1877; range covers 16th–early 20th century but mostly 19th) - **Language bias**: ~22,987 English-language titles vs. <500 titles in any single other language. Non-English performance is unreliable. - **Cataloguing conventions**: titles follow British Library cataloguing standards; titles from other catalogues may behave differently - **Annotation provenance**: a portion of the curated training subset uses [Snorkel](https://github.com/snorkel-team/snorkel) weak labels rather than human annotation alone Validate on your own corpus before relying on a trained model. ## Citation If you use this dataset, please cite the Living with Machines project: ```bibtex @misc{vanstrien_lwm_genre, author = {van Strien, Daniel and Tolfo, Giorgia and Morris, Victoria and Beelen, Kaspar}, title = {Genre Classification of British Library 19th-Century Books}, publisher = {Living with Machines / The Alan Turing Institute / British Library}, url = {https://living-with-machines.github.io/genre-classification/} } ``` ## Related - **Trained model**: [`TheBritishLibrary/bl-books-genre`](https://huggingface.co/TheBritishLibrary/bl-books-genre) - **Project**: [Living with Machines](https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk/) - **British Library digitised collections**: ## License CC0-1.0 — the metadata is in the public domain. See the British Library's [open metadata strategy](https://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html).