The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care?
The widespread indifference to the British Library’s crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity, says Hetan Shah
The head of a critical British information body has resigned. No, not the BBC. At the start of this month the chief executive of the British Library, the UK’s national library based in Kings Cross, left her role after less than a year in post. And virtually no one noticed.
The media’s near-silence parallels the national reaction to the major cyberattack the Library suffered two years ago. So limited was the coverage that even parliament was oblivious. Around six months after the cyber incident I talked to the then chair of the science select committee, who was not aware of this incident that was having such a profound impact on the research community.
Why the lack of interest? Contrast this with the fascination in the leadership travails of the Turing Institute, an artificial intelligence body (ironically enough physically housed in the British Library) which has had sustained coverage across the media. The nation rightly values scientific infrastructure, but it pays extraordinarily little attention to what is happening at our national library.
Disaster
Few people are aware that the Library has not yet recovered from the cyberattack and the impact this has had on the research community. The archives and manuscripts online catalogue is still not available, as well as various other catalogues such as those for photographically illustrated books. This has been disastrous for university teaching, research and publication in many humanities disciplines. Students who began their doctorates in September 2023 have now entered their final year of funding without access to British Library digitisations and, for long periods, without access to British Library manuscripts.
The recent Nobel Prize was awarded to three economists (two of whom are Fellows of the British Academy) whose work shows the importance of ideas, research and development to innovation and growth. Their work showed that we should care about the research infrastructures if we care about prosperity. And the Nobel award makes the case for these infrastructures in a second, more subtle way. One of the three recipients was Professor Joel Mokyr FBA, an economic historian. Libraries and archives are the labs of humanities and social science scholars, and history is not possible without them. But increasingly they are not prioritised – for example the BBC Written Archives Centre, paid for by public money, is moving to restrict responding to researcher queries, making exploratory research extremely difficult.
What is to be done? The British Library’s new interim chief executive must focus on restoring access to the Library’s collections. He needs to build a top team and board who have a greater understanding of its academic users – knowledge that is currently held by specialist staff rather than the leadership.
The science select committee should recognise that its remit covers all of research, and conduct an inquiry into the Library, with a view to helping it recover. It could quantify the funding that is needed to properly rebuild the Library’s digital infrastructure, so that an independent case can be made to the government.
More widely, the government should treat the UK’s major manuscript collections as an important national and international resource and organise funding for digitising manuscripts and catalogues and for security for the digitised images. In an AI world this should be obvious. Technology companies might be brought in for philanthropic support.
After a decade and a half of low growth, we must remember that ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation. We ignore research infrastructures at our peril.
Hetan Shah is chief executive of The British Academy, the UK’s national academy for humanities and social sciences