Books as Data
140 Million Pages of Intellectual History
The Books as Data platform offers an extensive collection of digitized books from the years 1700 to 1900 for research and exploration. Approximately 450,000 volumes, totaling 140 million pages, can be searched in full text, browsed, downloaded, and processed for research purposes.
The collection includes scholarly literature, journals, and fiction from Switzerland, Europe, and around the world. It thus makes a significant portion of Switzerland’s historical body of knowledge digitally accessible.
The project is supported by the University Libraries of Bern and Basel, the Zurich Central Library, and the Lucerne Central and University Library.
For Research: Transparent and Reusable
“Books as Data” is a research portal designed to ensure transparency and the reusability of data for scholarly purposes. The origin and quality of the data are documented, digital objects can be permanently accessed via persistent links, and the license terms are specified for each object.
The OCR full-text versions also include quality information. Detailed documentation provides information about the collection, its data, and the technical foundations. Any gaps in the digitization process are clearly identified.
Data for Data-Intensive Research
The raw data for individual volumes can be downloaded directly from the platform. For research projects involving large amounts of data, extensive data dumps are available through the University Library of Basel’s high-performance computing infrastructure, sciCORE. These will be made accessible and citable in various versions over the long term.
A unique feature is the collection of approximately 180,000 fold-out charts that can be searched individually. Their metadata has been supplemented with image descriptions in natural language using large language models. This allows users to perform targeted searches even for historical graphics, maps, and sketches.
Discovering Historical Worlds
“Books as Data” also invites you to explore the worlds of knowledge and daily life from past centuries on your own. As you browse through the digitized books, you’ll discover historical illustrations, maps, curiosities, and texts in numerous languages.
It’s particularly exciting to search for terms that can open up an unexpected path through the collection. A search term like “guidebook,” for example, leads to historical guidebooks for teachers, families, or beekeeping. If you search for “superstition,” you’ll come across writings on folk beliefs, witch hunts, and ghostly apparitions, among other topics.
If you want to conduct a targeted search, you can filter your results by language, publication year, subject, and other criteria. And if you’d like to see a book in its original form, the platform will tell you which library holds a physical copy.
Discover it now on Books as Data.