| --- |
| pretty_name: NYC September 11 Document Release |
| license: other |
| license_name: nyc-public-records |
| license_details: >- |
| Public records released by the City of New York through its September 11 |
| document release portal (https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/). No |
| additional license is asserted by the dataset maintainers. |
| language: |
| - en |
| task_categories: |
| - document-question-answering |
| - text-retrieval |
| tags: |
| - september-11 |
| - 9/11 |
| - nyc |
| - government-records |
| - pdf |
| - archives |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| configs: |
| - config_name: default |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: data/train-* |
| dataset_info: |
| features: |
| - name: doc_id |
| dtype: string |
| - name: pdf_url |
| dtype: string |
| - name: location_tag |
| dtype: string |
| - name: pdf_path |
| dtype: string |
| - name: pdf_content |
| dtype: pdf |
| splits: |
| - name: train |
| num_examples: 24441 |
| num_bytes: 36604656024 |
| download_size: 36607511743 |
| dataset_size: 36604656024 |
| --- |
| |
| # NYC September 11 Document Release |
|
|
| This dataset is a snapshot of the PDF documents published by the City of New York |
| on its September 11 document release portal: |
|
|
| **https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/** |
|
|
| It contains 24441 PDF files (36.6 GB) exactly as they were served by the |
| portal, together with the URL each file was fetched from and the archival location |
| (agency, box, folder) the portal lists for it. |
|
|
| ## What is in the data |
|
|
| | Column | Type | Description | |
| |---|---|---| |
| | `doc_id` | string | Document identifier, the PDF filename without the `.pdf` extension (for example `NYC-WTC_000000001`). Unique per row. | |
| | `pdf_url` | string | The portal URL the PDF was downloaded from. | |
| | `location_tag` | string | Archival location as shown on the portal, with levels separated by `›` (for example `Environmental Protection, Dept. of › DEP Box 04 › 524`). | |
| | `pdf_path` | string | Relative path of the file in the original download tree (`pdfs/<bucket>/<doc_id>.pdf`). Kept for provenance and for joining with local copies. | |
| | `pdf_content` | pdf | The PDF file itself, stored as bytes. Rendered with thumbnails in the Dataset Viewer and decoded to a `pdfplumber` object by the `datasets` library. | |
|
|
| There is a single `train` split. The data is stored as 36 Parquet shards under `data/`. |
|
|
| ## Where it came from and when |
|
|
| The documents were made public by the City of New York under the administration of |
| Mayor Zohran Mamdani through the September 11 document release portal. The City |
| built and maintains the portal; this dataset simply mirrors what it published. |
|
|
| All files were downloaded from https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/ on |
| **2026-09-09**. The list of document URLs and their location tags was |
| collected from the portal's public listing on the same day. |
|
|
| ## This is a snapshot |
|
|
| The City of New York may add, replace, or remove documents on the portal after this |
| initial tranche was collected. This dataset reflects only what was available on |
| 2026-09-09 and will not track later changes automatically. |
|
|
| The intent of publishing it here is to make large scale processing, search, and |
| study of the collection easier than fetching tens of thousands of individual files |
| from the portal. If a specific document matters to your work, please verify it |
| against the live copy on the portal, which is the authoritative source. |
|
|
| ## Disclaimer |
|
|
| Our interest is in making these records widely accessible given their national |
| importance. We have not processed, filtered, redacted, OCRed, or otherwise altered |
| the documents in any way. Each file is byte for byte what the portal served at |
| download time. Any text, metadata, or redactions inside the PDFs come from the |
| City's release, not from us. |
|
|
| The records were released by the City of New York. If you notice personally |
| identifiable information (PII) or other content that you believe should not be |
| public, please contact the City through the document release portal at |
| https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/ rather than the dataset maintainers, since |
| only the City can correct the source release. |
|
|
| ## Loading |
|
|
| ```python |
| from datasets import load_dataset |
| |
| ds = load_dataset("delip/sep11docs", split="train") |
| row = ds[0] |
| print(row["doc_id"], row["location_tag"]) |
| pdf = row["pdf_content"] # pdfplumber.pdf.PDF |
| print(pdf.pages[0].extract_text()) |
| ``` |
|
|
| To skip decoding and work with raw bytes: |
|
|
| ```python |
| from datasets import Pdf |
| ds = ds.cast_column("pdf_content", Pdf(decode=False)) |
| raw = ds[0]["pdf_content"]["bytes"] |
| ``` |
|
|
| To stream without downloading everything: |
|
|
| ```python |
| ds = load_dataset("delip/sep11docs", split="train", streaming=True) |
| for row in ds.take(5): |
| print(row["doc_id"]) |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Acknowledgements |
|
|
| We thank the City of New York ([@nycgov](https://x.com/nycgov)) and the Office of |
| the Mayor of New York City ([@NYCMayor](https://x.com/NYCMayor)) for making these |
| records publicly available through the September 11 document release portal. |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| If you use this dataset, please cite it as: |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @misc{rao2026sep11docs, |
| author = {Rao, Delip}, |
| title = {NYC September 11 Document Release: A Snapshot of the City of New York's September 11 Document Portal}, |
| year = {2026}, |
| publisher = {Hugging Face}, |
| howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/delip/sep11docs}}, |
| note = {Snapshot of https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/ taken on 2026-09-09} |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
