---
task_categories:
- image-to-text
- text-extraction
- document-understanding
language:
- multilingual
tags:
- newspapers
- historical-documents
- ocr
- iiif
- europeana
size_categories:
- n<1K
source_datasets:
- biglam/europeana_newspapers
---

# Europeana Newspapers Sample Dataset

## Dataset Description

This is a curated sample from the Europeana newspapers dataset, prepared for Vision-Language Model (VLM) experiments, particularly for testing structured metadata extraction from historical newspaper pages.

### Dataset Sources

- **Original Dataset:** [biglam/europeana_newspapers](https://huggingface.co/datasets/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

## Use Cases

This dataset is ideal for:
- Testing VLM metadata extraction capabilities
- Training models with GRPO for structured information extraction
- Evaluating OCR and document understanding models
- Benchmarking on historical newspaper understanding

## Example Usage

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

# Load the dataset
dataset = load_dataset("your-username/europeana-newspapers-sample")

# Access a sample
sample = dataset['train'][0]
image = sample['image']  # PIL Image
date = sample['date']     # Ground truth date
title = sample['title']   # Ground truth title
```

## 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

## Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the original Europeana newspapers dataset:

```bibtex
@dataset{europeana_newspapers,
  title={Europeana Newspapers Dataset},
  author={BigLAM},
  year={2024},
  publisher={Hugging Face}
}
```