By chance, I was the first in the queue for manuscripts on November 6th., the day the British Library closed down all services apart from its café and ordering books published before 1972. I was hoping to be first in the queue tomorrow when some level of service is set to resume, but can’t make it.
The article below is a good summary of the issues: the strangeness that so little attention has been paid to a Russian cyber attack on a major national institution, including the theft and publication of confidential information; and the tendency, as probably was inevitable in the current climate of disinformation, for the British Library itself not to have made clear at once the full gravity of the situation, somehow suggesting that it remained open, in spite of its core functions having been totally shut down.
I have some sympathy for the hard-pressed staff, but it would be interesting to know what their disaster plan recommended and it doesn’t seem particularly sensible to have kept the staff in the dark, not to mention readers.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
It’s a great problem for those of us who have to plan expensive trips to London in order to make the most of the time which can be spent physically in the BL. The National Library of Scotland is a Legal Deposit Library but all new acquisitions appear to be electronic. Electronic Legal Deposit is shared with the BL so we have lost access. Those of us who have published books since the outage – you expressed some interest in my “10 Scotland Street” published 1 December 2023, there is no opportunity to register for PLO. Perhaps not the most obvious losses but significant for many.
Yes, no access to dissertations online either. Charles