I’m struck by how little coverage there has been of the crisis at the British Library, still paralysed following an attack last October by a ransomware gang called Rhysidia. Though its buildings are open, the library is likely to remain in what we might call its current pre-digital state for some months yet, its online catalogues out of use, and access to its collections highly limited (books cannot, for instance, be delivered to London from Boston Spa in West Yorkshire, where about a quarter of them are held).
Even those who’ve never so much as stepped inside it must surely be wondering what all this tells us about the vulnerability of British institutions generally – the National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of GCHQ, is reported to have been called in – and yet, hardly anyone seems to be talking about it. But then, for a writer – as I am, and many of my friends are, too – this isn’t an abstract situation, and not only because the BL administers the Public Lending Right, a scheme by which authors are paid for library loans of books (payments may be late this year). Anyone who was in the middle of researching a book when the disaster hit is by now mildly panicked – or worse, if their deadline for delivery happens rapidly to be approaching, as mine is.
