Colibri: Illustrations in 19th Century Children's and Youth Books

This data publication was created with the intent to provide a single large annotated computer vision dataset for research purposes and the development of AI applications. This data publication comprises 53,533 illustrations extracted from 3,412 children's and youth books published between 1800 and 1925. The primary intention for this data publication was the provision of a large computationally amenable dataset exclusively consisting of image files to stimulate research and development of AI applications. In 2025, large (meta-)datasets from the field of historical cultural data are still missing. In this respect, the data publication provided here aims to fill a gap. The files are suitable for the computational use of digitised collections according to the Collections as Data principles. The data publication was created by two librarians who participated in the project “Digitization of 19th Century Children’s and Youth Literature”, and a member of the team of the research project “Mensch.Maschine.Kultur – Künstliche Intelligenz für das Digitale Kulturelle Erbe” at Berlin State Library (SBB). The digitization project was funded by the German Research Foundation, project grant no. 456696637, the research project was funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), project grant no. 2522DIG002. The Minister of State for Culture and the Media is part of the German Federal Government.