manuscript-dl

Collection of scripts to download digitized manuscripts from different online libraries.

Some online libraries provide convenient way to download complete manuscript as a PDF file. Some don't. Mad scripting skills to the resque!

Supported libraries

Nasjonalbiblioteket

To download a book:

1. Find out its ID, e.g.: https://www.nb.no/items/URN:NBN:no-nb_digibok_2008091504048?page=1
2. (optional) Copy curl command from the browser, so that you preserve cookies, and adjust it.
3. Run:

$ python ./nb.no.py -H 'cookie: something' URN:NBN:no-nb_digibok_2008091504048

e-codices - Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland

To download a book:

1. Go to book description page, e.g.: http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/csg/0369
2. Right click on the link "IIIF Manifest URL" and save it to file, e.g. manifest.json
3. Run

$ e-codices.sh manifest.json [size]

size is an optional argument. Original size of manuscripts on e-codices is usually way too big and needs to be reduced.

British Library Digitised Manuscripts

This downloader uses montage (imagemagick suite) program to convert images to PDFs and pdftk to concatenate PDFs together. You need to have pdftk and montage installed in your system.

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install pdftk imagemagick

To download a book you need to find out its short name:

1. Open manuscript description, e.g.: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_24686
2. In this case the name is "add_ms_24686" (notice lower case). But you can double check if you click any of the pictures below and open a new page: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_24686_f002r
3. Here, add_ms_24686_f002r is a manuscript name + page name. You only need manuscript name.
4. Run the bl.uk.py with manuscript name:

$ python3 bl.uk.py add_ms_24686 --resolution 12

This will grab all available pages with resolution 12. If you want specific pages, you can set page range using --pages A:B argument.

At some point the Library started replying with HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests). Faking user agent helped. If default user agent is not working for you, you can replace it using --user-agent option like this:

python3 bl.uk.py add_ms_24686 --user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; OpenBSD i386) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36'

Author

(c) 2015-2018 Yuri Bochkarev