The datasets in this collection were produced as part of a research project entitled “Legacies of curatorial voice in the descriptions of incunabula collections at the British Library and their future reuse”. This research was funded under the 2022 Arts and Humanities Research Council and Research Libraries UK Professional Practice Fellowship Scheme and conducted in collaboration with the University of Southampton. The project’s aim is to show how we can use the free corpus analysis software AntConc and approaches from computational linguistic for the purposes of examining catalogue data to study curatorial and cataloguing practice.