---
license: cc0-1.0
task_categories:
- image-to-text
- text-retrieval
- text-generation
language:
- es
tags:
- historical
- magazines
- spain
- cultural-heritage
- hemeroteca
- archive
- bne
- ocr
- 19th-century
- pretraining
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
---

# BNE Hemeroteca OCR Dataset (19th Century)

This dataset provides full-text OCR and high-resolution page images for 19th-century Spanish publications sourced from the [Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) - Hemeroteca Digital](https://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/). It consists of over **830,000 pages** from approximately **40,000 documents**, totaling roughly **800 million text tokens**.

**Note on Temporal Coverage:** Although the selected publications originated in the 19th century, some long-running titles extend into the early 20th century. To apply a strict temporal filter, please use the `date` column.

## Methodology

This dataset was built starting from the [bne-hemeroteca-publications](https://huggingface.co/datasets/ferjorosa/bne-hemeroteca-publications) dataset. We filtered publications using the `date` column to focus on those from the 19th century, and selected 20 thematic collections (see full list below). Newspapers were intentionally excluded as their multi-column layouts did not perform well in manual OCR tests.

For each selected publication, we downloaded the corresponding issue PDFs from BNE, converted pages to images, and processed them with [allenai/olmOCR-2-7B-1025-FP8](https://huggingface.co/allenai/olmOCR-2-7B-1025-FP8) to extract text in markdown format.

<details>
<summary>Full list of collections included (20 collections)</summary>

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Collection</th>
<th>Split</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Agricultura y ganadería</td>
<td>agricultura_y_ganaderia</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Ciencias</td>
<td>ciencias</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Cultura</td>
<td>cultura</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Deportes</td>
<td>deportes</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Derecho</td>
<td>derecho</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Economía</td>
<td>economia</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Educación</td>
<td>educacion</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Fuerzas armadas</td>
<td>fuerzas_armadas</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Historia</td>
<td>historia</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Industria</td>
<td>industria</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Literatura</td>
<td>literatura</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Medicina</td>
<td>medicina</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Minería</td>
<td>mineria</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Música</td>
<td>musica</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Navegación</td>
<td>navegacion</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Política</td>
<td>politica</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Relaciones internacionales</td>
<td>relaciones_internacionales</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Religión</td>
<td>religion</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Revistas femeninas</td>
<td>revistas_femeninas</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Teatro</td>
<td>teatro</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

</details>

## Use Cases

- **OCR benchmarking and fine-tuning**: Use the existing OCR output as a baseline. Review and correct samples to generate ground truth for training improved OCR models on historical Spanish documents.

- **Text retrieval and RAG**: Since the original PDFs are scanned images, this dataset unlocks full-text search. Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems to query historical Spanish press.

- **LLM pretraining**: Use the generated text for general pretraining or to build time-capsule language models trained exclusively on 19th century text, capturing the language, topics, and worldview of that era.

## Efficient Data Loading

If you are only interested in the text or metadata for early exploration (skipping the large images), we provide a script to download only specific columns efficiently.

- [**download_dataset.py**](https://github.com/ferjorosa/bne-hemeroteca-data/blob/main/ocr/download_dataset.py)

## Fields

### Page Data

| Field | Description |
|-------|-------------|
| `image` | Page image |
| `text` | Full OCR text (Markdown format) |
| `issue_uuid` | Unique identifier for the issue |
| `issue_name` | Name/Title of the issue |
| `page` | Page number |
| `publication_issn` | ISSN of the publication |
| `date` | Publication date |
| `issue_link` | Link to the original issue on BNE website |
| `model_id` | OCR model used ([allenai/olmOCR-2-7B-1025-FP8](https://huggingface.co/allenai/olmOCR-2-7B-1025-FP8))|

### OCR Metadata 

| Field | Description |
|-------|-------------|
| `primary_language` | Primary language detected on page |
| `is_table` | Whether the page contains tables |
| `is_diagram` | Whether the page contains diagrams |
| `is_rotation_valid` | Whether page rotation was valid |
| `rotation_correction` | Degrees of rotation correction applied |
| `total_input_tokens` | Token count (input) |
| `total_output_tokens` | Token count (output) |


## Citation

```bibtex
@dataset{bne_hemeroteca_ocr_xix,
  title={BNE Hemeroteca OCR Dataset (19th Century)},
  author={Fernando Rodriguez},
  year={2025},
  url={https://huggingface.co/datasets/ferjorosa/bne-hemeroteca-ocr-xix},
  note={Processed with olmOCR from Hemeroteca Digital (BNE) archives}
}
```

## License

CC0 1.0 (Public Domain). Original content provided by the [Biblioteca Nacional de España](https://www.bne.es/).