Data Export

The Shakespeare and Company Project publishes five datasets that can be downloaded in CSV and JSON formats. The datasets provide information about lending library members and their addresses; books that circulated in the lending library and their authors; and lending library events, including borrows, purchases, memberships, and renewals. The datasets may be used individually or in combination—the site URLs are consistent identifiers for members and books across all datasets.

To access the datasets, visit Princeton Data Commons.

To cite the current version of the datasets:

Kotin, Joshua, and Rebecca Sutton Koeser. Shakespeare and Company Project Datasets. Version 2.0. January 2025. Data Commons, Princeton University. https://doi.org/10.34770/kf6c-b079

To learn more about the datasets, and their history, read "The Shakespeare and Company Project Data Sets" published by the Journal of Cultural Analytics in 2022. Contact us with additional questions.

Version 1.0 of the datasets was published in 2020; version 1.1 in 2021; version 1.2 in 2022; and version 2.0 in 2025. Each version refines and augments data in earlier versions. Version 2.0 augments the datasets with information on book creators and member addresses. A summary of changes can be found on the Project’s Data Commons page.

The Project is committed to supporting new research. Please contact us to share your ideas and work. The datasets are released under the Creative Commons attribution 4.0 license (CC-BY-4.0).