The data for two editions of the Wilson New York City Business Directories, 1852-1853, and 1861-1862.
Processed using the NYPL Digital Collections Tools repo.
Each folder in this repository represents one volume of the business directories. Within each folder you'll find four things:
- A searchable PDF of the original volume;
- A
.txtfile that is the concatenated output of the 'txt' folder; - A
.pdffile that merges the OCRed output of page images in the directory with reduced images; - A 'txt' folder with all of the raw OCR txt for each page, with sequence and image ID information embedded in the filename;
- An 'hocr' folder with all of the coordinate hocr files for each page, with sequence and image ID information embedded in the filename
The images and the data that allowed me to pull down these volumes from The New York Public Library's Digital Collections are all contained in the Public Domain release NYPL put out in January 2016. (disclosure: I co-led that project as an NYPL staffer, and remain very proud of it!) If you want to play with the data and utilities yourself, there's a great NYPL Public Domain Github repo waiting for you.
All materials in these two volumes are in the public domain according to rights analysis by the NYPL Copyright and Information Policy group. As a result, all the data and PDFs in this repo are likewise in the public domain. A CC0 license has been applied to this repo -- in the off chance that someone believes new copyright could attach to these images or the files, they are hereby released CC0 (even though they don't need to be by virtue of being public domain in the first place).