Berlin State Library (2023). Metadata of the Digitized Collections of the Berlin State Library (SBB)

The motivation for creating this dataset was to enable research on the basis of metadata which are available in a cultural heritage institution on a large scale. Libraries such as the Berlin State Library (SBB) typically provide three kinds of data: Images (scans of books, illustrations contained in the scanned material, or else), texts (OCR’d from digitized books or manuscripts), and metadata. However, metadata form an underresearched resource, which is lamentable: These metadata are of a high quality since they have been established by trained librarians, archivists, or other cultural heritage practitioners. The publication of a set of more than 200.000 rows containing metadata aims therefore at using an underresearched high-quality type of data. The basic funding interest in this data publication is the stimulation of innovation.

The dataset consists of a single table containing ALL the metadata of all 206.411 works available in the digitized collections of the Berlin State Library (SBB) on January 23rd, 2023. The size of the .csv file is about 205 MB.