nwokikeonyeka/british-museum-igbo-collection

British Museum (Igbo Collection) Dataset

This dataset is a curated collection of historical artifacts and photographs related to the Igbo people of Nigeria, sourced from the British Museum Collection.

⚠️ Data Quality & Limitations

• —Image Quality: The images in this dataset are "Preview" / Web-Resolution quality (sourced directly from the British Museum's public CSV export). While sufficient for digital archiving, web display, and research reference, they are not high-resolution archival masters suitable for large-format printing.
• —Source: Images were retrieved via the British Museum's public collection search export features.

💾 Dataset Structure

The dataset is organized as a standard ImageFolder with metadata stored in data.jsonl.

Schema (JSONL)

Each line in data.jsonl corresponds to a single museum object:

{
  "id": "Af1934,0308.1",
  "source_id": "british_museum",
  "source_url": "[https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection)",
  "metadata": {
    "title": "Mask / Helmet Mask",
    "idno": "Af1934,0308.1",
    "description": "Wooden helmet mask (magbo) for the Oro society...",
    "object_type": "mask",
    "production_date": "19thC(late)-20thC(early)",
    "production_place": "Africa: West Africa: Nigeria: Yorubaland",
    "materials": "wood; pigment",
    "curator_comments": "Register 1934: Wood helmet mask...",
    "copyright": "© The Trustees of the British Museum"
  },
  "images": [
    {
      "file_name": "bm_Af1934_0308_1.jpg",
      "original_url": "[https://media.britishmuseum.org/](https://media.britishmuseum.org/)..."
    }
  ]
}

⚠️ License and Legal Information

This dataset contains copyrighted material.

• —Content License: The images and data are provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license, courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum.
• —Attribution: You must attribute © The Trustees of the British Museum in any use of this data.
• —Commercial Use: This dataset is for Non-Commercial Use Only.

📚 Citing This Dataset

@dataset{nwokike_british_museum_igbo_2025,
  author    = {Nwokike, Onyeka},
  title     = {British Museum (Igbo Collection) Dataset},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  version   = {1.0},
  url       = "[https://huggingface.co/datasets/nwokikeonyeka/british-museum-igbo-collection](https://huggingface.co/datasets/nwokikeonyeka/british-museum-igbo-collection)"
}