Tsiolkovsky Papers: a machine-readable catalogue of fond 555, Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences

The personal archive of Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) is held as fond 555 of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It has been scanned and put online, but without a queryable catalogue, full-text search or dataset. This record contains a machine-readable catalogue of all 2,019 files of the fond across its five inventories, covering 51,008 scans, with the real archival inventory and file numbers, so that each row is a citable archival reference. It also contains the retrieval and measurement pipeline that produced it: a resumable downloader that resolves each file's inventory and number from the scan paths, a page classifier that separates handwriting from typescript without a neural network, and a tool that scores transcriptions against published texts on Russian Wikisource. Measured over the whole fond: 51,008 scans retrieved and structurally verified with none corrupt; 68% handwritten, 29% typewritten or printed, 3% notes and covers. The catalogue is released under CC0. The code in the repository is MIT. This release also contains transcriptions: 98 archival files, 4,066 scans, with uncertainty and authorial deletions marked explicitly. Accuracy measured against published editions is 98.3% of characters on typescript and 81.1% on handwriting.