Cultural heritage as data and datasets

View selected datasets with tutorials and code examples

View all datasets in our Open Access Repository, LOAR

Access to digitalized physical materials for your research project

Selected datasets from Royal Danish Library

We have selected a number of datasets for research or study with good descriptions, guides, and code examples, so they are ready to use, and we have made them available to you.

Archive of Danish Literature

Maleri af Erik Henningsen: Et møde i foreningen Bogstaveligheden 1. marts 1882.

The dataset is a subset of the texts in Archive of Danish Literature. The dataset is free of copyright and provides quick access to a well-structured text corpus for digital analysis.

Carl Nielsen's works

The dataset contains indexes for the works of several Danish composers. The guide focuses on the index for Carl Nielsen's works and analysis of these with R.

Denmark's Letters

The digitiation of Denmarks Letters makes it possible to search across publications of letters. You can find letters from the same sender across all publications, for example.

Flora Danica

See the Flora Danica dataset, which contains several thousand digitised images of coloured copperplate engravings of wild plants from Denmark, Norway, and Schleswig-Holstein.

Copenhagen Diplomatarium

A series of books from the Copenhagen collection of documents

A comprehensive collection of transcribed sources and register descriptions which illuminate the history of Copenhagen from the end of the 12th century until the first quarter of the 18th century.

Freedom of the Press Writings

The title page of MG Birckner's "On Freedom of the Press and its Laws." 1797

From 1770-73 there was freedom of the press in Denmark, and around 1,000 very diverse “freedom of the press writings” were published. The dataset contains the raw digital text from these writings.

Important information when using our digital collections for research

Royal Danish Library has worked purposefully for many years to digitise the library's extensive cultural heritage collections. Digitisation has made many collections and types of material easily accessible and opened up new opportunities to use the collections as data - for example through OCR and HTR processing. Digitisation of the collections has, however, been carried out over a many years, and with different selection criteria and purposes. Some have been digitised for preservation reasons, others are the result of user-initiated digitisation, and yet others in connection with foundation-funded digitisation projects. At the same time, in many cases, digitisation has only taken place for parts of collections, which means that the digital content does not represent the entire collection or type of material.

It is therefore important to have a source-critical approach to the library's digital materials.

Royal Danish Library is working to create greater transparency about the library's digitisation and content in digital collections. In the library's Digitisation Strategy you can read more about how we work with digitisation of cultural heritage collections, and in the research program Cultural Heritage and Memory Technology you can follow how the library's researchers are investigating what digital transformation means for the collection, preservation, and dissemination of the library's cultural heritage collections.