Months after the cyber attack, the British Library is back online
The British Library on Monday began restoring its online catalogue, which contains details of books, magazines and music scores, the first step in the recovery from a brutal cyber attack in October, the library said.
“For the first time since the attack, the majority of the physical books, archives, maps and manuscripts housed in the cellars of our St. Pancras site will once again be discoverable and usable by our readers,” said Roly Keating, CEO of the British Library. said, referring to the library building in central London.
Access to the items would be “slower and more manual” for users than before the cyberattack, he added in a statement published last week. A full recovery may take several months. Other organizations that experienced similar attacks have taken more than a year to restore operations, the library said.
A criminal group attacked the British National Library at the end of October. disrupting online systems, including email, and stealing data, which the group later tried to auction online, the library said. Mr Keating apologized for being unable to protect some personal data of users and staff that was leaked in the attacks.
Cyber attacks targeting arts and cultural institutions are becoming increasingly common. Late last year, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas were among the institutions that experienced disruptions after a cyber attack. The attack targeted a service provider, Gallery Systems, used by hundreds of cultural organizations to display their work online.
The Metropolitan Opera in 2022 will hampered by a cyber attack that took its website offline and paralyzed the cash register. Last year, a cyber attack was carried out at the Philadelphia Orchestra and its home venue, the Kimmel Center.
Mr Keating said the full recovery of the catalog would be a gradual process. For now, the outage is still affecting the British Library website, online services and some on-site services. The catalog will be searchable online, the library said, but the process for checking book availability and ordering them would be different until the system is fully restored. Researchers will have to visit the library, which holds more than 170 million items, in person to access offline versions of specialized catalogues, Mr Keating said.
The British Library's collection includes two of the four surviving copies of Magna Carta, the world's largest surviving collection of Chaucer manuscripts, and five copies of Shakespeare's First Folio.