Update README.md

README.md

@@ -10,5 +10,16 @@ tags:
 - open culture
 - internet archive
 - openlibrary
-pretty_name: OpenLibrary.org Public Domain Books (English)
----
+pretty_name: Open Library Public Domain Books (English)
+---
+## Open Library Public Domain Books (English)
+
+This dataset contains more than 650,000 public domain books in English digitized by the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/books) as part of the [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/) project. The dataset was compiled by [Sebastian Majstorovic](https://www.storytracer.org).
+
+### Dataset summary
+
+The dataset contains 653,983 texts (~ 200 million pages) from various collections of the Internet Archive (IA). Texts stored in the Internet Archive that are considered to be books have an associated record in the Open Library catalogue. Only texts with an OL record have been included in this dataset.
+
+In order to find public domain books, the dataset was curated using two approaches:
+1. Identify and download IA collections that are specified to be entirely in the public domain, e.g. the [Cornell University Library](https://archive.org/details/cornell/about?tab=about) collection.
+2. Use the `possible-copyright-status` query parameter to search for the status `NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT` using the IA [Search API](https://archive.org/help/aboutsearch.htm).