Gutenberg metadata about each work

Selected fields of metadata about each of the Project Gutenberg works. These were collected using the gitenberg Python package, particularly the pg_rdf_to_json function.

Usage

gutenberg_metadata

Format

A tbl_df (see tibble or dplyr) with one row for each work in Project Gutenberg and the following columns:

gutenberg_id

Numeric ID, used to retrieve works from Project Gutenberg

title

Title

author

Author, if a single one given. Given as last name first (e.g. "Doyle, Arthur Conan")

author_id

Project Gutenberg author ID

language

Language ISO 639 code, separated by / if multiple. Two letter code if one exists, otherwise three letter. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-2_codes

gutenberg_bookshelf

Which collection or collections this is found in, separated by / if multiple

rights

Generally one of three options: "Public domain in the USA." (the most common by far), "Copyrighted. Read the copyright notice inside this book for details.", or "None"

has_text

Whether there is a file containing digits followed by .txt in Project Gutenberg for this record (as opposed to, for example, audiobooks). If not, cannot be retrieved with gutenberg_download

Details

To find the date on which this metadata was last updated, run attr(gutenberg_metadata, "date_updated").

See also

gutenberg_works, gutenberg_authors, gutenberg_subjects

Examples

if (FALSE) { # interactive()

library(dplyr)
library(stringr)

gutenberg_metadata

gutenberg_metadata |>
  count(author, sort = TRUE)

# look for Shakespeare, excluding collections (containing "Works") and
# translations
shakespeare_metadata <- gutenberg_metadata |>
  filter(
    author == "Shakespeare, William",
    language == "en",
    !str_detect(title, "Works"),
    has_text,
    !str_detect(rights, "Copyright")
  ) |>
  distinct(title)

# \donttest{
shakespeare_works <- gutenberg_download(shakespeare_metadata$gutenberg_id)
# }

# note that the gutenberg_works() function filters for English
# non-copyrighted works and does de-duplication by default:

shakespeare_metadata2 <- gutenberg_works(
  author == "Shakespeare, William",
  !str_detect(title, "Works")
)

# date last updated
attr(gutenberg_metadata, "date_updated")
}