Early Dutch Books Online: Over Two Million Pages from 1781-1800

More than two million pages from 11,000 books printed in the Netherlands between 1781 and 1800. The collection originates from the Royal Library and the university libraries of Amsterdam and Leiden. Metadata is available under a CC0 license, while full-texts carry a Public Domain Mark.

Use Cases

• Historical linguistic analysis based on the 18th-century Dutch full-texts.
• Training optical character recognition (OCR) models on scanned page images implied by the page count.
• Studying cultural and intellectual trends based on the book collection from major Dutch libraries.
• Building topic models or named entity recognition systems for historical texts.

Strengths

• Contains over two million pages, providing substantial textual material.
• Includes 11,000 books, offering a broad sample of publications from the period.
• Clear licensing: metadata is CC0 and full-texts are marked Public Domain, facilitating reuse.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• A portion of the collection (the Leiden sub-collection) may have restrictions limiting reuse to non-commercial purposes.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Royal Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) and the libraries of the universities of Amsterdam and Leiden.

Collection Method

Digitization of historical book collections.

Time Range

1781 to 1800

Freshness

null

Geography

Netherlands