common-pile/library_of_congress

---
language:
- en
task_categories:
- text-generation
pretty_name: Library of Congress (subset of Common Pile)
license: cc-by-4.0
---

# Library of Congress (subset of Common Pile)

## Description
The Library of Congress (LoC) curates a collection of public domain books called ["Selected Digitized Books"](https://www.loc.gov/collections/selected-digitized-books/).
We have downloaded over 130,000 English-language books from this public domain collection as OCR plain text files using the [LoC APIs](https://www.loc.gov/apis/).
This dataset is a subset of the Common Pile v0.1. For more information, see [The Common Pile v0.1 paper](https://huggingface.co/papers/2506.05209).

## Dataset Statistics
| Documents | UTF-8 GB |
|-----------|----------|
| 135,500 | 47.8 |

## License Issues
While we aim to produce datasets with completely accurate licensing information, license laundering and inaccurate metadata can cause us to erroneously assign the incorrect license to some documents (for further discussion of this limitation, please see [our paper](https://huggingface.co/papers/2506.05209)). If you believe you have found an instance of incorrect licensing in this dataset, please [start a discussion](https://github.com/r-three/common-pile/discussions/new) on this repository.
The overall license for this dataset is intended to be CC-BY-4.0, but this is not a guarantee for individual documents within the dataset.

Github: https://github.com/r-three/common-pile

## Other Versions
This is the "raw" version of the Library of Congress dataset.
If you are looking for the filtered version used to train [Comma v0.1](https://huggingface.co/common-pile/comma-v0.1), you can find it [here](https://huggingface.co/datasets/common-pile/library_of_congress_filtered).

## Citation
If you use this dataset, please cite:
```bibtex
@article{kandpal2025common,
title={{The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text}},
author={Nikhil Kandpal and Brian Lester and Colin Raffel and Sebastian Majstorovic and Stella Biderman and Baber Abbasi and Luca Soldaini and Enrico Shippole and A. Feder Cooper and Aviya Skowron and Shayne Longpre and Lintang Sutawika and Alon Albalak and Zhenlin Xu and Guilherme Penedo and Loubna Ben and Elie Bakouch and John David and Honglu Fan and Dashiell Stander and Guangyu Song and Aaron Gokaslan and John Kirchenbauer and Tom Goldstein and Brian R and Bhavya Kailkhura and Tyler Murray},
journal={arXiv preprint},
year={2025}
}
```