I worked in the British LIbrary for a few days last week. You may know that it was the victim of a massive cyber attack in the autumn and, for the time being, most of its services are suspended.
Thieves took control of its digital resources and demanded a ransom - in bitcoin - which the library refused to pay. It’s good that they didn’t pay up - but I don’t suppose the library will ever get its stuff back. The effort required to recover from this will be enormous and cost millions.
The National Library of Scotland has not been directly affected - you can still get access to all of their physical books, unlike the BL, where the whole system of ordering material is broken. However, I have been aware since the autumn that it is no longer possible to read most ebooks and other digital resources online, as the UK’s copyright libraries obviously share these.
The UK has six deposit libraries - the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, Cambridge University Library, and Trinity College Dublin Library. But I think a lot of authors are not aware that since about 2015 many publishers no longer hand over hard copies, but just make electronic versions available. The cyberattack has highlighted the fact that sharing these seems to have created a single point of failure in the system.
As they rebuild, here are three reasons why the deposit libraries could change their approach and value physical books more highly.
Firstly, real books are easier to keep safe. Security guards sit at desks in every one of the many reading rooms, carefully checking laptops and the transparent carrier bags that library users have to keep their belongings in. You would be hard-pressed to steal a bookmark out of any of them in real life - yet a couple of dodgy guys - who call themselves Rhysida after a creepy-crawly - were able to effectively make off with thousands of ebooks.
Secondly, it could create an opportunity to put more recent real books on the open shelves. The British Library has a series of reading halls devoted to different subject areas. These halls are lined with probably miles of open-access shelves and at the moment that is all that can easily be used. It is still possible to order up some of the real books using paper catalogues - I did see one person doing this - but it seems to be pretty hard. All of the desks where readers normally queue to collect their piles of tomes were deserted - though the library was still very busy with people working on laptops.
When I can’t concentrate, I like to wander around and do a little random, serendipitous reading and it was obvious that some of the books are a bit outdated - and have not yet become precious antiques. A Cambridge Atlas of the Middle East stopped last century, and I couldn’t see a more recent one. There wasn’t much recent work anywhere. That didn’t matter so much in the very small collection of Scottish History and I spent a half hour with a lovely leather-bound edition of Dunbar’s Chronology of Scottish Kings. (Donald Bane returned in 1094, a few short years after being kicked out - hmm, hope that doesn’t happen again!)
But the fact that the music stopped in 2015 was particularly evident in the social sciences section. Few things date faster than a sociology textbook or a political memoir. Current awareness on the open shelves ends with the coalition government taking power in Westminster in 2010 ‘Five Days In May’ by Andrew Adonis - remember that?
On this shelf, I found “More Scottish than British” looking back from 2011 at Scotland’s Holyrood election of 2007, the first ever SNP led administration. I am just going to digress for a moment about this - it was interesting to recall that it was the fact that the Lib Dems refused to vote with Labour that allowed the SNP to form a government back then - this was presumably because the LDs were in power with the Conservatives down south.
In his big speech before the vote that made him First Minister, Alex Salmond said: “This Parliament is a proportional Parliament. It is a Parliament of minorities where no one party rules without compromise or concession. The SNP believes that we have the moral authority to govern, but we have no arbitrary authority over the Parliament. The Parliament will be one in which the Scottish Government relies in the merits of its legislation, not the might of a parliamentary majority. The Parliament will be about compromise, concession, intelligent debate and mature discussion. That is no accident. If we look back, we see that it is precisely the Parliament that the consultative steering group - the founding fathers of this place - envisaged.”
Interesting - but not exactly current affairs.
Thirdly, real books are a pleasure to hold, to read and to recall. There is some evidence that people remember more of what they read in a printed book than they do of an online one.
Perhaps the UK’s deposit libraries, as they recover from this cyber attack and build resilience, will consider putting more emphasis on maintaining and updating their store of printed books.
(1) I also saw the Franz Hals exhibition at the National Gallery. The painting above, from 1620, was once called ‘Hamlet’, but that title has been altered on the grounds that the play was not performed in the Netherlands until later - but Hamlet was published in folio in 1603. People read plays as well as watch them surely?
I dumped my Kindle a few years ago, life is too short and physical books are beautiful
I would never get any proper work done if allowed access to the stacks....