Datasets is a lightweight library providing two main features:

one-line dataloaders for many public datasets: one-liners to download and pre-process any of the number of datasets major public datasets (text datasets in 467 languages and dialects, image datasets, audio datasets, etc.) provided on the HuggingFace Datasets Hub. With a simple command like squaddataset = loaddataset("squad"), get any of these datasets ready to use in a dataloader for training/evaluating a ML model (Numpy/Pandas/PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX),
efficient data pre-processing: simple, fast and reproducible data pre-processing for the above public datasets as well as your own local datasets in CSV/JSON/text/PNG/JPEG/etc. With simple commands like processed_dataset = dataset.map(process_example), efficiently prepare the dataset for inspection and ML model evaluation and training.