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Data Packages

Stereograph Cards Data Package

The image files in this dataset are derived from the the Stereograph Cards digital collection on loc.gov.

historic stereograph image of woman peering through stereoview

About this dataset

About: The Stereograph Card dataset consists of 39,526 stereograph card images from the 1850s through 1924, a subset of what was available online in the collection on loc.gov in August 2022.

Source collection: The image files in this dataset are derived from the Stereograph Cards collection on loc.gov.

Stereographs consist of two nearly identical photographs or photomechanical prints, paired to produce the illusion of a single three-dimensional image, usually when viewed through a stereoscope. The Prints & Photographs Division's holdings include images produced from the 1850s to the 1940s, with the bulk of the collection dating between 1870 and 1920.

Please note that terminology in historical materials and in Library descriptions does not always match the language preferred by members of the communities depicted, and may include negative stereotypes or words that offend.

For questions or more information about this material, please contact Prints and Photographs Division staff through the Ask a Librarian service.

Link to image on the right: https://www.loc.gov/item/2003674057/

What's included?

The data package includes:

  • A folder containing 39,526 stereograph image (.JPG) files pulled from P&P Stereograph Cards collection (There are some known duplicate images--the same hash but different LOC item ID's)
  • metadata.json : a JSON file containing the metadata for all 39,526 images in the data set 
  • metadata.csv: a CSV transformation of the original JSON metadata
  • manifest.txt : a text file listing the id (combination of the image ID and image file name), MD5 hash, and location of the images in the data set
  • README.md : technical overview of how the data set was created 
  • Data cover sheet: a more substantive overview of the data and the collection from which it is derived
  • sample data: 1,000 randomly selected items from the 39,526 set with their corresponding image files have been provided as sample data. Included with this are a metadata.csv metadata.json, and manifest.txt.

Rights Statement

The Library's stereograph collection includes thousands of photographs submitted for copyright protection. Those that were copyrighted or published in the U.S. more than 95 years ago are in the public domain because the copyright has expired. The collection also includes images not submitted for copyright that may not have been published. The term of copyright for unpublished images is the life of the creator plus 70 years. For unpublished anonymous works and works where the death date of the creator is not known, the copyright term is 120 years from the date of creation.

Creator and Contributor Information

Dataset creator: Chase Dooley

README and Cover sheet creators and contributors: Eileen J. Manchester, Phil Michel, Dave Woodward, Patrick Rourke, Meghan Ferriter, Alice Goldfarb

Download the data

Sample the data

Get a sense of the corpus by downloading 1,000 digitized stereographs randomly selected from the total 38,526 images comprising this dataset.

Download the digitized stereographs

  • To bulk download 39,526 stereograph images (JPG format, 3.8 GB), please email [email protected] or consult the the dataset's manifest.

Download the documentation

Download the metadata

Questions and Feedback

For curatorial questions about the content of the collection or technical questions about the dataset formats and composition, please contact the Prints and Photographs Division via the Library's Ask a Librarian service at https://ask.loc.gov/prints-photographs.

For questions about download and access, please email the LC Labs Team at [email protected].