Selected Digitized Books (Library of Congress)

Summary

The Selected Digitized Books collection is a digital collection from the Library of Congress General Collections comprising 90,414 books and other materials that can be openly accessed and downloaded. Most materials were published in the United States (primarily prior to the 1930s) and are in English, covering fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children's literature, American history, travel, sports, cooking, agriculture, philosophy, government publications, and more. A data package provides 84,058 OCR text files extracted from these books, available for bulk download and computational analysis. All works are in the public domain and free to use and reuse.

Keywords

public-domain books library-of-congress digitized ocr historical english full-text digital-humanities

Topics

Public Domain Books / Multi-domain

Research notes

• The loc.gov collection page was accessible via search. A structured data package with metadata (CSV/JSON) and full text files is available at data.labs.loc.gov/digitized-books/. The dataset was created 2022-09-27, updated 2024-04-03. The collection continues to grow.