In partnership with Microsoft, the British Library has digitised, and made freely available under Public Domain Mark, over 60,000 volumes (around 25 million pages) of out of copyright 18th & 19th century texts. Items within this collection cover a wide range of subject areas including geography, philosophy, history, poetry and literature and are published in a variety of languages.

This collection, sometimes referred to as the Microsoft Books/BL 19th Century collection, and its derived datasets have been made available on various platforms under an open license.

All volumes are available for view, download and full-text search from the British Library Catalogue - https://explore.bl.uk - via the Library’s IIIF standard enabled Universal Viewer. Use the search term “blmsd” in Explore to limit results to this specific collection.

Over 1 million images extracted from the book pages programmatically can be found on British Library’s Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/

The Flickr API can be used to directly download large sets of these images, and other metadata such as user-generated tag information: https://www.flickr.com/services/developer/

JISC Historic Texts holds a full copy of this collection: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/historical-texts

Wikimedia Commons offers a useful introduction to the collection, including a Synoptic Index, as well as projects to georeference maps found in the texts: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curator_collection