The British Library on Monday began restoring its online catalogue, which contains details of books, magazines and musical scores, the first step in its recovery from a brazen cyberattack in October, the library said.
“For the first time since the attack, most of the physical books, archives, maps and manuscripts held in the basements of our St. Pancras site will once again be discovered and usable by our readers,” Roly Keating, chief executive of the British Library. , he said, referring to the library building in central London.
Access to items would be “slower and more manual” for users than before the cyberattack, he added in a statement published last week. A full recovery could take several more months. Other organizations that have experienced similar attacks took more than a year to restore operations, the library said.
A criminal group attacked Britain's national library in late October, disrupting online systems, including email, and stealing data, which the group then attempted to auction online, the library said. Keating apologized for failing to protect some personal data of users and staff members that was leaked in the attacks.
Cyberattacks targeting artistic and cultural institutions are increasingly common. Late last year, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas were among the institutions that suffered disruptions after a cyberattack. The attack targeted a service provider, Gallery Systems, used by hundreds of cultural organizations to display their work online.
The Metropolitan Opera in 2022 was hampered by a cyberattack that took its website offline and paralyzed its box office. Last year, a cyberattack was carried out against the Philadelphia Orchestra and its home, the Kimmel Center.
Keating said full restoration of the catalog would be a gradual process. For now, the outage continues to affect 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 need to personally visit the library, where more than 170 million items are held, to access offline versions of specialized catalogs, Keating said.
The British Library's collection includes two of the four surviving copies of Magna Carta, the world's largest collection of Chaucer manuscripts, and five copies of Shakespeare's First Folio.
