The British Library occupies a special place in the world of research, and for our many users across the UK and international academic community the past nine months since the cyber-attack of October 2023 have been a uniquely frustrating and sometimes upsetting time, as familiar services and resources have remained either limited or, in some cases, inaccessible. 

I can only apologise for the disruption that has been caused to so many of you. It is, I know, of little comfort to say that the sense of loss you feel is shared by every one of us here. 

As I described in my previous update on this blog, the time it is taking us to bring our services back is an exact measure of the destructiveness of the original attack, which directly targeted our core computing infrastructure.  Alongside the comprehensive rebuild of those systems – a process that would normally be scheduled over years rather than months – we have also been scanning our vast array of datasets to ensure that no malware or viruses have been left by the attackers.  

To date we have scanned more than 6 billion files and have, thankfully, been able to give all of them a clean bill of health. This painstaking process takes time, but we are continuing to follow a “safety first” approach – as you might expect after the experience of such a devastating attack.   

All our efforts are now focussed on the start of the new academic year and ensuring that the best achievable range of services is made available, even though in many cases the process of full restoration will still not be complete. I have summarised a few of the key areas in the update below. 

• Remote ordering 

• Online resources 

• Non-Print Legal Deposit (NPLD) content 

• Collection items held in Boston Spa 

• Looking further ahead 

Remote ordering

Earlier in the year we surveyed our users on their priorities for services they wished to see restored, and the overwhelming feedback was that the return of remote ordering for users of our Reading Rooms was number one on this list.  This is of especial importance for Readers who live some distance from our sites in London and Yorkshire and do not, of course, want to risk a wasted journey.   

Our ability to restore this vital element of our service has been hampered by the absence of a secure computing infrastructure, as any process needs to balance effectiveness as an ordering mechanism with the critical need for secure tracking of collection items as they move from the storage areas, through our buildings to the Reading Rooms – and back, once they have been used. 

In spite of these complexities, I am pleased to confirm that an interim remote ordering method will be in place by the start of the new academic year in September. As with other current workarounds currently in use, aspects of the process will remain semi-manual, but in terms of convenience for Readers it should be a useful step forward. We will share more details about this, including practical information about how to use the new process, as soon as it is finalised. 

Online resources

Also aiming for the start of the academic year will be two key resources for our audiences in research and learning. As mentioned in my previous update, an initial set of digitised manuscripts will become available again – restoring access to fully digitised versions of some of our most iconic manuscript treasures. Our curatorial teams have compiled a prioritised list of manuscripts based on criteria including the items that were most requested prior to the cyber-attack and items to which Reading Room access is restricted. 

The first tranche of items from this list will become available in September, with our aim being to gradually increase the numbers of items that are back online from that point forward. Although it isn’t possible for us to restore the Digitised Manuscripts website in its previous form, the access solution we are putting in place this autumn will begin to address the absence of our digital collections from the web. We will be sharing more information about items included in the initial release, as they are confirmed, via our Medieval Manuscripts blog and social feed.   

As the school year begins, selected resources from our learning websites will also start to return online, starting with a number of the most-viewed items from our hugely popular Discovering Literature web resource. These will be gradually augmented by items from Discovering Sacred Texts and other sites that were available prior to the cyber-attack. Again, this will be an initially small proportion of what was previously online, but will, I hope, represent a welcome return of some of our most sorely-missed content. 

Non-Print Legal Deposit (NPLD) content

I am pleased to confirm that a solution has now been developed to enable the restoration of access to Non-Print Legal Deposit content to 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. The technical solution will be in place by early September, after which each library in the network will restore access arrangements in their own reading rooms, once they have the capacity to do so.   

As previously mentioned, 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.  Because of the importance of NPLD for university users, we have prioritised access to our partner libraries: for technical reasons access within our own Reading Rooms will take a little longer. We’ll share more on this soon. 

Collection items held in Boston Spa

As regular users of our Reading Rooms will know, there are still two important parts of our physical collection at Boston Spa that have not yet been restored to use, both of which are held in automated storage facilities whose systems were affected by the attack: the 262 kilometres of books held in our Automated Storage Building (ASB), and our physical newspaper collection housed in the National Newspaper Building.  

Work to restore access to ASB content is now nearly complete, although availability in our Reading Rooms is now expected to re-commence in August, rather than July as previously reported.  

In my last blog I was more cautious about the timetable for restoration of access to the National Newspaper Building, but I’m pleased to report that since then, significant progress has been made in restoring the automated system that enables access to this vast collection. We are, therefore, proceeding with work to restore the service, and will provide a timetable for availability as soon as this is confirmed.

Once both of these collections are opened up, the entirety of our physical collection, with only very few exceptions, will once again be available to Readers in Boston Spa and St Pancras. 

Looking further ahead

The service restorations described above are just the next stage in a continuing process: looking further ahead, we will continue to increase the range and scale of the materials available, while also looking to lay the foundations of a comprehensive longer-term service offering, including a full-scale website and a brand-new library services platform. 

Once again I would like to thank all of our users across the academic community and beyond for the patience and understanding you have shown us on our journey so far along the complex and sometimes bumpy road to recovery from the cyber-attack.  We are working hard to deliver both the access that you require, and the secure and resilient service you deserve. 

Sir Roly Keating 

Chief Executive 

Mokhi is a teacher and Miz is an IT consultant. They bring their children Zachariah (13) and Sulaiman (11) to the British Library on its programmed family days. 

 

Mokhi 

I like to get the kids out and about and go to places that have activities. Obviously, if venues are welcoming of children with special needs, all the better. We first visited the Library a few years ago, just after lockdown. We found out that it was holding events through a charity called Sense, which we know about because of Zachariah’s multi-sensory needs – he has vision and hearing impairments. 

I didn’t realise before that you could go to the Library and do family activities. I thought you would only go if you needed to study or wanted access to books. It’s so much more than that – it’s almost like a museum or a gallery, and it’s very inclusive of families and children. The spaces are for everyone, not just for those who are studying or researching, which is lovely. I regularly check on the website to see what’s happening, because they always have something going on and a lot of things are free for families, which I think is really good. 

 

I always put the Library’s workshops in the diary

We come from North London, so we just make a day of it. We go somewhere nice for lunch, look around London if we want to, and then come home. The location is convenient, right next to King’s Cross station. 

I always make an effort to put the Library’s workshops and activities in the diary, because the boys like to have structure. Zachariah needs to know what he’s going to do and what the timings will be, since he has autism and ADHD. So when you tell him something’s going to be finished by three, he’s literally checking the phone. 

A couple of times, the Library has had this amazing storyteller who sings and uses props and does acting, and Zachariah loves it. At another event, the kids saw a real-life illustrator who showed them the tricks of the trade. There was an Open Day during the school holidays with professors and students from different universities doing logic games. They were inviting youngsters to try to complete the challenges. Sulaiman, in particular, enjoyed it.

 

I could live in the Library

There’s a restaurant at the Library, and a cafe. The toilets are nice and spacious, which is important for people with access needs. There are ramps and lifts, too. Whenever we go to any events, I always like to talk to other parents. I think it’s good for Zachariah and Sulaiman to meet other families. No two families are the same. 

Libraries are an amazing free resource: they belong to all of us. I think it’s a shame that so many of our local libraries have closed down, especially since lockdown. When our boys were babies, I used to go to my local library every week. They used to have baby rhyme time, with storytelling and songs. It meant that I could get out of the house and meet other parents. 

I could live in the Library. I love books. I think they just open you up to a new world. 

 

Miz

I especially enjoyed the storytelling event that we went to at the Library, and a talk with an author and illustrator about her book. It was interesting to find out how she developed her story, and it showed the kids how a book is put together. But you’re not just sitting there and listening; in between sessions, we got up and did activities.

They have exhibitions: we got tickets to the one about Paddington. We went to an open day where you could try different things at stalls throughout the building. One thing we learned is that the Library building was designed by an architect who wanted it to look like a ship. 

 

You can spend a whole day at the Library

Lots of families from different backgrounds can come to the Library, and all these events are put on that they don’t have to pay for. This, for me, is the key thing about libraries: they’re a communal, safe place for people to go. At the library near our house, I once saw a man who didn’t have English as his first language come in with an application that needed to be filled in, and the member of staff at the counter took the time to help him with it. Youngsters use the computers to do their homework. 

You can spend a whole day at the Library and time will just fly by. There’s that amazing glass section with all the old books – I love that. 

 

Zachariah

I was a bit nervous about going to the Library, but I got used to it. I went to family days there and did activities. I like reading about sport, especially football and boxing. I support Liverpool, and my favourite boxer is Anthony Joshua. The last book I read was about Muhammed Ali, and I dressed up as him for World Book Day. 

 

Sulaiman

I like to read manga, especially Naruto. Art is my favourite subject at school, and at home I like to draw manga characters. I used some of the art materials at the Library to make a dragon, and a mask, which I really enjoyed. And there was an activity where we had to find stuff in the Library. I made posters at the Library to get people to visit. I wrote, ‘Lose your mind in a book.’

 

As told to Lucy Peters

Readers of this blog will be aware that in March we published a detailed paper on the cyber-attack that the Library suffered in late October last year. The report’s primary purpose was to share lessons from our experience, so that other organisations can be better protected from similar attacks in the future.

But it also laid bare, as candidly as we could, the scale and destructive impact of the attack. The damage we experienced was substantial and will be complex and challenging to repair. Although we are confident that our data, digital holdings and digitised collections are safe and intact – either through back-ups or because they were not targeted in the attack – many of our legacy IT systems were encrypted, damaged or deleted.

The sheer complexity of rebuilding these systems (or workable versions of them) has meant that for the researchers who depend on our resources the months since the attack have been deeply unsettling and frustrating – not least because of the inevitable uncertainties over the exact timetable for restoration of different Library services.

With that in mind, I thought it would be useful to provide an update on the service improvements users can expect to see over the next few months, as well as some context on the process that lies behind the work of recovery.

Access to more collection items held in Boston Spa – July

Work is currently underway to restore access to the collections held in our large automated storage facilities at Boston Spa, which will result in the vast majority of our collection becoming available to users once again. The work to restore access to the items held in the Additional Storage Building is advancing well, and this collection – comprising some 262 linear kilometres of books and other items – should become available again for use by Readers in both St Pancras and Boston Spa by the end of July.

The work to restore access to materials held in the National Newspaper Building is more complex and is likely to take longer. In the meantime, however, users can find a wide range of newspaper titles available in microform in the Newsroom at St Pancras.

Digital collections acquired through Non-Print Legal Deposit (NPLD) – August

Another of our priorities is to restore onsite access to digital collections that we have acquired through Non-Print Legal Deposit (NPLD), including e-journals and e-publications. Our loss of access to these collections has also affected the other Legal Deposit Libraries (the National Library of Wales, the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin) as their access systems depended upon our own, which has been offline since the cyber-attack.

We have been working with our Legal Deposit Library partners to restore access to NPLD materials that were deposited prior to the cyber-attack (October 2023) and we now expect this to be available, in some form, by August. We are continuing to explore different options for collecting and storing items deposited after October 2023, and will share more details about these arrangements as they are confirmed.

Learning websites and digitised manuscripts – September

For the Library’s global community of users on the web, the absence of our online and digitised resources has been keenly felt. Two early priorities for restoration are the web pages providing access to the Library’s unique collection of digitised manuscripts, and our popular Learning resources, including Discovering Literature. Work is under way on both of these, with the aim of getting them online again by September, in time for the start of the new academic year.

The complex work of recovery

Understandably, some users have asked why it was not possible for services such as these to be simply ‘switched back on’ following the attack.

The answer is that it’s because of the particularly destructive nature of this attack: all of these service restorations, and those to come further down the line, are dependent on the successful installation of a completely new computing infrastructure for the entire Library, to replace the servers destroyed by the attackers – a major operation which began soon after the attack and will complete next month.

Once that is in place, the reloading of all the Library’s data can finally begin – a painstaking process which involves the sampling and checking of each dataset to ensure that no malware has been left by the attackers that could be reactivated once a file or drive is accessed. We are as eager as all our users to see these vital resources returned to use, but I hope you’ll understand that we must take a ‘safety first’ approach to the process of restoration.

Please do keep an eye on this blog for future updates as the Library’s journey of recovery continues. For now, I would like to thank you once again for your patience and understanding as we recover from this dreadful attack, and to bear with us as we restore more and more of our physical and online resources over the course of the next few months.

Sir Roly Keating
Chief Executive