Months after a cyber attack, the British Library is back online

The British Library began rebuilding its online catalog on Monday, which stores detailed information about books, magazines and works of music, the first step in its recovery after a brazen cyber attack in October, the library said.

“For the first time since the attack, most of the physical books, archives, maps and manuscripts stored in the vaults at our St Pancras site will once again be available for discovery and use by our readers,” Roly Keating, chief executive of the British Library. , said, referring to the library building in central London.

Accessing the items would be “slower and more manual” for users than a cyber attack, he added. in a statement released last week. Full recovery may take several more months. Other organizations that suffered similar attacks took more than a year to recover, the library said.

At the end of October, a criminal group attacked the National Library of Great Britain. disruption of Internet systems, including email and data theft, which the group later tried to auction online, the library said. Mr Keating apologized for failing to protect some of the personal data of users and staff who fled during the attacks.

Cyber ​​attacks on arts and cultural institutions are becoming more 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 experienced interruptions after a cyber attack. The attack targeted service provider Gallery Systems, which is used by hundreds of cultural organizations to showcase their work online.

The Metropolitan Opera in 2022 was suffered from a cyber attack which took down his website and paralyzed the box office. last year a cyber attack was carried out about the Philadelphia Orchestra and its home venue, the Kimmel Center.

Mr Keating said the full restoration of the catalog would be a gradual process. The outage is currently 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 availability and ordering books will be different until the system is fully restored. Researchers will need to visit the library, which holds more than 170 million items, in person to access offline versions of the specialist catalogues, Mr Keating said.

The British Library's collection includes two of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta, the world's largest surviving collection of Chaucer manuscripts, and five copies of Shakespeare's First Folio.