NationalLibraryOfScotland/encyclopaedia-britannica-lance

Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771-1860) - Lance Format

This dataset contains 155,388 digitized pages from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, spanning editions from 1771 to 1860. The data is stored in Lance format for efficient streaming and lazy image loading.

Dataset Details

• —Total Pages: 155,388
• —Total Volumes: 195
• —Format: Lance (columnar format with blob storage for images)
• —Source: National Library of Scotland (NLS)
• —License: Public Domain (CC0)

Loading the Dataset

import lance

# Load from Hugging Face Hub
ds = lance.dataset("hf://datasets/davanstrien/encyclopaedia-britannica-lance-test/data/train.lance")

# Check total rows
print(f"Total pages: {ds.count_rows()}")

# Sample a few rows (metadata only, images are lazy-loaded)
sample = ds.take([0, 100, 1000]).to_pydict()
for i, idx in enumerate([0, 100, 1000]):
    print(f"Page {idx}: {sample['volume_part'][i]}")

Schema

Editions Included

• —First edition (1771)
• —Second edition (1778-1783)
• —Third edition (1788-1797)
• —Fourth edition (1801-1810)
• —Fifth edition (1815-1817)
• —Sixth edition (1820-1823)
• —Seventh edition (1830-1842)
• —Supplement editions

Source

Original data from the National Library of Scotland Data Foundry.