Read about the creation of the curated Estonian National Bibliography in the article Curated Bibliographic Data: The Case of the Estonian National Bibliography, published in the Journal of Open Humanities Data.

The Estonian National Bibliography (ENB) collects information on works in Estonian, published in Estonia, created by Estonian authors, or about Estonia and Estonians. Details regarding the compilation of the ENB are described on the library's website (in Estonian).

The metadata of the ENB is published by publication type (books, newspapers, audio recordings, etc.) in the MARC21XML format. MARC21 is a file format used in libraries for cataloging information, however, it is not intended for data processing or analysis. With the launch of the Digilab platform, it became possible to download ENB metadata in table format, containing the most commonly filled columns and including initial data cleaning. ENB metadata sets can be found in the Digilab datasets section.

An open-source workflow has now been developed, which converts the original MARC21XML files into curated datasets in table format. The curation is demonstrated in the cleaning and customisation of the datasets, based on user preferences and the specifics of digital humanities research methods. Currently, the curation process is focused on datasets for books and persons. More information on the creation of the curated ENB will be available in an research article, titled "Curated Bibliographic Data: the Case of Estonian National Bibliography", as well as in the documentation for the workflow's source code. The datasets obtained through the workflow have been uploaded as TSV files to the Zenodo repository.

The source code of the ENB Curator workflow on GitHub: https://github.com/RaRa-digiLab/enb-curator 

Curated ENB book metadata in the Zenodo repository:

Examples of information included in the dataset:

• Book title and subtitle(s)
• Contributors to the work
• Publisher and printing press or printer
• Year and decade of publication
• Place of publication and its coordinates
• Language information, including the original language of the book in the case of translated works
• Subject and genre keywords
• Keywords referring to geographical areas, time periods, organisations, or individuals
• Book dimensions and page count
• Digitisation status, including references to the digital version(s) of the book, if available

How to cite the dataset:

Kruusmaa, K., Tinits, P., & Nemvalts, L. (2025). Curated Estonian National Bibliography - books [Dataset]. National Library of Estonia. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14708287

Curated ENB persons metadata in the Zenodo repository:

Examples of information included in the dataset:

• Person's name and its various spellings
• Year of birth, and year of death, if applicable
• Occupation
• Gender
• Geographical area of activity
• Short biography
• VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) identifier
• Wikidata identifier

How to cite the dataset:

Kruusmaa, K., Tinits, P., & Nemvalts, L. (2025). Curated Estonian National Bibliography - persons. [Dataset]. National Library of Estonia. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14675761

We encourage the exploration and analysis of the datasets! Any questions or suggestions can be sent to the email address digilab@rara.ee. We also welcome data stories based on the datasets for the Digilab blog.

The thumbnail introducing the curated ENB is from the National Archives photo collection (RA, EAA.2111.1.14967).

Over the years, nearly 500 users have contributed to correcting the texts in DIGAR, and as a result of their efforts, more than 800,000 lines have been corrected. This dataset contains a selection of pairs of original texts and their corrections.

The dataset, along with its documentation, can be found here: https://zenodo.org/records/13325713

Quality Assessment

Since the corrections are the result of collaborative creation, they may contain errors and should not be considered the final truth. To provide a rough overview of the quality of the corrected texts, both the original and corrected texts have been processed through GPT-4o mini, which assigned them a readability score ranging from 1 to 5. The following scale was used for this assessment:

The following is the OCR output from a digitized historical Estonian newspaper from {year}. Analyze the text placed after "TEXT" and decide if it is reasonably free of OCR errors. Return a rating on the scale of 1 to 5.

5 - The text is clear and readable. It may contain unusual spellings and use of punctuation throughout, but there are no distorted words.
4 - The text is readable, but contains some distortions of alphabetical characters. These distortions do not impede understanding the text at any given point.
3 - The text is readable with minor difficulties. Words and phrases may be noticeably distorted.
2 - The text is only readable with great difficulties. All or almost all sentences contain severe errors that make it very hard to understand.
1 - The text is unreadable. It contains mostly gibberish and random symbols, almost no words are recognizable.

If you are hesitating between 4 and 5, it is probably a 5. If you are hesitating between 2 and 3, it is probably a 2.

Note: the use of "w" instead of "v" and "=" instead of "-" are elements of historical orthography an do not count as errors.

Do not reply anything else than a number from 1 to 5, unless explicitly asked to do so.

TEXT:
{ocr_transcription}