This data is a simplified set of metadata for digitised historical British newspaper collections held at the British Library, as shared with the Living with Machines project (2019-2023), based on the full data, schema, and data dictionary available at https://zenodo.org/records/14389180. The .sql files contain the queries of the full database used to create the .csv files. This data is a supplementary file for [add citation to JODH paper].