Berlin State Library (2023). Fulltexts of the Digitized Collections of the Berlin State Library (SBB)

The motivation for creating this dataset was to enable research on the basis of fulltexts which are available in a cultural heritage institution on a large scale. Libraries such as the Berlin State Library (SBB) typically provide three kinds of data: Images (scans of books, illustrations contained in the scanned material, or else), metadata (descriptive data providing information on the digitized item) and texts. The latter are usually received via an implementation of optical character recognition (OCR) of the digitized books or manuscripts. In the digitized collections of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB), the fulltexts can be downloaded manually, item by item. The publication of a set of about 5 million OCR’d pages alleviates the accessibility of the fulltexts. The basic funding interest in this data publication is the stimulation of innovation.

The dataset consists of a single sqlite database containing ALL the fulltexts available in the digitized collections of the Berlin State Library as of August 21st, 2019, with information on languages and entropy added on March 1st, 2023. The size of the sqlite file is about 15.8 GB.