README.md

metadata

language:
  - multilingual
tags:
  - newspapers
  - historical-documents
  - ocr
  - iiif
  - europeana
size_categories:
  - n<1K

Europeana Newspapers Sample Dataset

Dataset Description

This is a curated sample from the Europeana newspapers dataset, prepared for Vision-Language Model (VLM) experiments.

Dataset Sources

• Original Dataset: biglam/europeana_newspapers
• Source: Europeana digital library
• License: See original dataset

Dataset Structure

Each sample contains a newspaper page image downloaded via IIIF along with associated metadata.

Data Fields

• image: The newspaper page image (PIL Image)
• date: Publication date (ground truth for extraction tasks)
• title: Newspaper title
• issue: Issue number
• iiif_url: Original IIIF image URL
• text: OCR text content
• mean_ocr: OCR quality score (0-1)
• language: Document language
• issue_uri: Unique identifier
• download_status: Status of image download
• download_retries: Number of retry attempts needed

Processing Notes

• Images were downloaded using IIIF protocol with automatic fallback to lower resolutions
• Failed downloads were excluded from the final dataset
• All images are converted to RGB format
• Dataset was created using async downloading for efficiency