Britannica Illustrated Pages is published by BigLAM for researching the distribution of illustrations and image content across editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, offering a large-scale resource of annotated images.

The data is sourced from scanned volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from the 1st edition (1768–1771) to the 14th edition (1929). Through a page classifier, 115,293 pages containing illustrations were selected from 975,345 pages of raw material.

Dataset Composition

• pages subset: Contains 115,293 entries, storing scaled 600 px JPEG illustration pages along with complete metadata.
• manifest subset: Covers all 975,345 pages of the original volumes, recording classifier scores, OCR text statistics, and source provenance information, without images.
• crop_masks subset: Generated based on RF‑DETR Seg model predictions, including 115,293 pages with a total of 700,480 illustration instances (confidence ≥ 0.10), providing bounding boxes and segmentation masks for illustration instances.

Core fields:

• ia_id
• volume
• page (source volume location identifier)
• p_illustrated: probability of illustration detection
• words: number of OCR-recognized words
• stratum: page type
• tier
• bucket_url
• file_key

Citation

When using this dataset, please cite the Internet Archive source of the corresponding page (ia_url) and the contributing institution of the scanned copy (if applicable). Training labels were provided by the National Library of Scotland; the classifier, scanning, and data curation work was carried out by Daniel van Strien, and the dataset is published through BigLAM.