README.md

---
tags:
  - glam
  - libraries
  - archival-index-cards
  - boston-public-library
  - ocr
pretty_name: "BPL Rare Books Card Catalog (raw IA mirror)"
source_ia_collection: bplrbcatalog
---

# BPL Rare Books Card Catalog — raw Internet Archive mirror

Raw mirror of the Boston Public Library **Rare Books Department Card Catalog (main entry / alphabetical)** card collection from the
Internet Archive. Mirrored for the FineBooks / FineCollections pipeline (archival
index cards as a source of structured catalog data + OCR-difficulty material).

- **Source collection**: https://archive.org/details/bplrbcatalog
- **Items**: 386 (each IA item ≈ one drawer/box of cards; ~191 MB of images on average)
- **Approx. size**: ~73.6 GB
- **License**: [Public Domain Mark 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/) (per Internet Archive item metadata)
- **Uploaded to IA by**: Boston Public Library
- **OCR**: Tesseract (hOCR), as produced by the Internet Archive

## What's in here

Each IA item is mirrored under `raw/{ia_item_id}/`:

- `{item}_jp2.zip` — page images (JP2), zipped
- `{item}_hocr.html` — Tesseract hOCR (word-level OCR text + bounding boxes)

This is a **raw** mirror — the zipped JP2 + hOCR exactly as held on the Internet
Archive. It is **not** yet unpacked into per-card images or a parquet dataset;
those are downstream steps.

## Provenance

Mirrored from the Internet Archive (2026-06-27) with `download_to_bucket.py`,
which streams one item at a time: download from IA → `sync_bucket` to this bucket
→ delete the local copy. Re-running resumes from whatever is already present, so
the mirror is idempotent.

## Related BPL index-card buckets

| Collection | IA collection | Bucket |
|---|---|---|
| FRC shelf list cards | [`bplfrcshelflistcards`](https://archive.org/details/bplfrcshelflistcards) | `davanstrien/bpl-shelf-list-raw` |
| Rare Books card catalog **(this bucket)** | [`bplrbcatalog`](https://archive.org/details/bplrbcatalog) | `davanstrien/bpl-rb-catalog-raw` |
| Rare Books shelf list | [`bplrbshelflist`](https://archive.org/details/bplrbshelflist) | `davanstrien/bpl-rb-shelflist-raw` |
| Manuscript catalog | [`bplmanuscriptcatalog`](https://archive.org/details/bplmanuscriptcatalog) | `davanstrien/bpl-manuscript-catalog-raw` |
| Rare Books geographic file | [`bplrbgeofile`](https://archive.org/details/bplrbgeofile) | `davanstrien/bpl-rb-geofile-raw` |
| Rare Books chronological file | [`bplrbchronofile`](https://archive.org/details/bplrbchronofile) | `davanstrien/bpl-rb-chronofile-raw` |

---

*Part of the Boston Public Library × Hugging Face index-card mirroring effort.
See also the [shelf list cards]( https://huggingface.co/buckets/davanstrien/bpl-shelf-list-raw ) mirror.*