Following on from my previous blog at the end of July, I’m pleased to be able to confirm dates for restoration of some of our key services in the coming weeks. Our priorities have been very much driven by the needs of our users, who we hope will notice a substantial improvement in our offer over the next month or so – although we continue to have a long journey to full recovery following last year’s cyber-attack.  

• Collection items held in Boston Spa  

• Online learning resources 

• Remote ordering  

• Digitised manuscripts  

• Non-Print Legal Deposit (NPLD) content  

• Next steps and thank you 

Collection items held in Boston Spa 

More than 262 kilometres of items held in our Additional Storage Building in Boston Spa will be available to order once again as of 2 September. Initially, ordering will be via the manual process that is currently in place for ordering items held at St Pancras or in the non-automated storage areas of Boston Spa – but will subsequently be possible through the interim remote ordering system (described below) as of 30 September. 

As mentioned previously, it will take a little longer to restore access to the newspaper collections held in automated storage at Boston Spa, but we should be able to provide a date for this soon. 

Online learning resources 

With the new school term starting I am pleased to confirm that from 9 September we will be restoring access to selected resources from our learning websites, starting with the 100 most-used articles from our Discovering Literature site. These will be gradually added to, and will be a welcome return for some of the resources most sorely missed by teachers and young learners. 

Remote ordering  

Remote ordering of collection items – without the need to make a journey to our sites in London and Yorkshire in order to request an item – has been one of the key things that researchers have fed back to us as a priority for reinstatement. This work has proven especially challenging bearing in mind the need to rebuild completely our technology infrastructure, while also ensuring that items can be securely tracked as they move from storage areas to Reading Rooms and back again. 

I can now confirm that we will be launching a new interim system from 30 September, and that this can be used to request items up to 28 days in advance, and from wherever you are. We’ll be sharing more details soon about the interim process for requesting an item, but this will be a big step forward in terms of making researchers’ lives easier – eliminating the risk of a wasted journey and ensuring that the time you do spend at our sites is much more productive. 

You will need a Reader Pass that has been issued or renewed since 21 March 2024 to use the new service – and you can renew by bringing a state-issued ID, with your photo, name and address to Reader Registration in London or Yorkshire. Further updates, with more details about this new system, will be issued in the coming weeks via email, our social channels and on our website.   

Digitised manuscripts  

On the same date we will be restoring access to around 1,000 of our digitised manuscripts.  This will be the first tranche of a restored resource that will include a range of our most-viewed digitised manuscripts, making them available once again for the first time since the cyber-attack.  

Non-Print Legal Deposit (NPLD) content  

At around the same time we aim to have completed the complex process of restoring the core dataset of Non-Print Legal Deposit (NPLD) content. Once this is complete, our partner libraries in the Legal Deposit network (the National Library of Wales, the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and the library of Trinity College Dublin) will each separately communicate with their users a timeline for restoring access to this content in their own reading rooms. Please note that this may be slightly different for each institution. 

As I mentioned last month, this tranche of restored NPLD content will consist of e-journals and e-publications deposited prior to October 2023, and won’t for the time being include the UK Web Archive, for which a different technical solution is required.  As previously mentioned, we have prioritised the provision of NPLD access in our partner libraries: for technical reasons access within our own Reading Rooms will take a little longer. 

Next steps and thank you 

In the next few weeks we’ll be sharing more details of the practicalities involved in using these services, which remain interim workarounds rather than the permanent solutions we will ultimately put in place. In the meantime, I would like once again to thank all of our users for bearing with us so faithfully during the course of this long and challenging recovery.  

As the latest round of improvements are delivered we will start to share our medium and longer-term plans for the restoration of our services to researchers, learners and everyone else who uses the Library. 

Sir Roly Keating 

Chief Executive