pretty_name: Malayalam Books from Granthappura (File Dataset) language: - ml tags: - malayalam - books - literature - kerala - digital-archive - historical-texts - pdf - scanned license: cc-by-4.0 size_categories: - 1K<n<10K # This card documents a file-based dataset (PDFs in LFS + compact index)

Malayalam Books from Granthappura Digital Archive

⚠️ Important Notice

Full credit to Granthappura Digital Archive (https://gpura.org). This collection mirrors their publicly available scans for research/education.
Content removal policy: If Granthappura or any rightsholder requests removal, the dataset will be taken down immediately.
Rights: The dataset card and index are shared under CC BY 4.0; PDF content rights remain with Granthappura and/or original publishers/authors.

Overview

Historical Malayalam books and documents from the Granthappura Digital Archive. Items span the late 1800s–1900s and include classical literature, religious works, cinema song books, and other culturally significant texts.

This repository is a file-based dataset:

PDFs are stored directly in the repo (Git LFS).
A compact index (CSV and Parquet) provides metadata and paths.
No PDF bytes are embedded inside Parquet to avoid massive shards.

Estimated size: ~89 GB of PDFs (will vary as the collection grows). Number of items is in the low-thousands.

Repository Layout

pdfs/ — All PDF files (Git LFS)
index/index.csv — Compact index (CSV)
index/index.parquet — Compact index (Parquet)
README.md — This dataset card

Index Schema

Each row corresponds to one PDF:

filename: PDF file name
path_in_repo: Relative path to the file in this repo (e.g., pdfs/<file>.pdf)
size_bytes: File size in bytes
title: Title parsed from filename (best-effort)
year: Publication year (best-effort)
author: Author (if parsable)
publisher: Usually "Granthappura"
language: Malayalam (ml)
type: e.g., book

Notes:

Metadata is extracted heuristically from filenames and may be incomplete or noisy.
Users should validate/augment metadata as needed for their research.

How to Use

Option A: Download index + PDFs locally

from pathlib import Path
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
import pandas as pd

repo_id = "cazzz307/Malayalam-books-granthappura-new"
local_dir = snapshot_download(
    repo_id=repo_id,
    repo_type="dataset",
    allow_patterns=["index/*", "pdfs/*.pdf"], 
)

index_path = Path(local_dir) / "index/index.parquet"
df = pd.read_parquet(index_path)
print(len(df), "rows")


pdf_path = Path(local_dir) / df.loc[0, "path_in_repo"]
print(pdf_path.exists())

This will download many GBs. Ensure sufficient disk and bandwidth.

Option B: Read the index only (remote)

import pandas as pd
repo_id = "cazzz307/Malayalam-books-granthappura-new"
base = f"https://huggingface.co/datasets/{repo_id}/resolve/main/index"
index_url = f"{base}/index.csv"  

df = pd.read_csv(index_url)
print(df.head())


import requests
pdf_url = f"https://huggingface.co/datasets/{repo_id}/resolve/main/" + df.loc[0, "path_in_repo"]
r = requests.get(pdf_url)
open("sample.pdf", "wb").write(r.content)

Use Cases

OCR benchmarking and training (Malayalam)
Historical text analysis / digital humanities
Document layout/vision tasks on scanned material
Retrieval and indexing research on PDFs

Ethical Use and Rights

Attribution: Please cite and credit the original source — Granthappura Digital Archive (https://gpura.org).
Rights: The PDFs are historical scans from the archive; rights remain with Granthappura and/or original publishers.
License: This dataset’s index and card are under CC BY 4.0. Do not assume this license applies to the PDF contents.
Removal: Contact via the dataset page for immediate takedown requests.

Citation

Primary attribution:

Original Source: Granthappura Digital Archive (https://gpura.org)
Kerala Digital Heritage Collection

Dataset citation:

Malayalam Historical Books (File Dataset)
Aggregated from: Granthappura Digital Archive (https://gpura.org)
Accessed: August 2025
Note: All rights remain with original source and rightsholders.

Limitations

Metadata is best-effort and may be incomplete.
PDFs are large; downloading the entire set requires significant bandwidth and storage.
No OCR text is provided in this dataset; PDFs are scans.

Changelog

2025-08: Initial release as a file-based dataset with compact index (no PDFs embedded in Parquet).

Datasets:

cazzz307
/

Malayalam-books-granthappura-large

Access Request for Malayalam Books Dataset