After 12 years as Chief Executive, Sir Roly Keating has announced that he will step down from the role in April next year.

Sir Roly said: “When I took on this role in 2012 it was always my hope to serve for 12 years and I will reach that milestone in September this year. Being at the helm of the British Library has been – and continues to be – the greatest privilege of my life. The Library is an extraordinary institution, and it is impossible not to feel a daily sense of wonder at the collective dedication, knowledge and passion of its staff, and the sheer scale, depth and quality of its collections. The years I have served here have seen great achievements as well as times of challenge, including a global pandemic and a major cyber attack. Over the next 12 months my priority is to ensure that our recovery programme succeeds in its goal of leaving the Library even stronger and more resilient than it was before – able to serve new communities and new generations of users, and to continue to be a national library that is truly for everyone.”

Under Sir Roly’s leadership, the Library has undergone a transformation in its public impact and its visibility across the UK and internationally. With a focus on openness, creativity and innovation, his tenure has seen the establishment of major new partnerships including the Knowledge Quarter around its London HQ, the Business & IP Centre National Network and the Living Knowledge Network of public and national libraries across the UK.

Digital initiatives have included Save Our Sounds – to rescue and digitise the UK’s audio heritage – and Living with Machines, a groundbreaking research programme in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute. He has also initiated a programme of major capital developments, including the renewal of the Library’s campus in Boston Spa, Yorkshire.

Most recently, he has led the launch of a new strategy, Knowledge Matters, and the Library’s response to a significant cyber attack which took place in October last year.

Dame Carol Black, Chair of the British Library Board, said: “Roly’s clear-sighted and compassionate leadership has helped the Library to steer a steady course of growth and engagement through often turbulent times. As well as presiding over a massive expansion of our digital collecting, he has also overseen a transformation in our public engagement programmes – both online and onsite – and set in motion the next phase of the long-term development of our sites at St Pancras and Boston Spa, along with steps towards a permanent presence in Leeds City Centre. Having celebrated our 50th anniversary just last year, the British Library plays a unique and irreplaceable role in our society, and as Chief Executive Roly has helped future-proof that status.”

Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer said: “Sir Roly Keating has shown fantastic leadership at the British Library over the last twelve years. He has grown its presence across the UK and around the world, expertly overseen major projects, guided it through the pandemic and more recently overseen its continuing recovery from a major cyber attack, as well as celebrating its 50th anniversary last year.

“The British Library is a vitally important national institution and Sir Roly can depart knowing that he has made a hugely positive contribution to its continued success.

“I look forward to working closely with him in this transitional period and wish him all the best for the future.”

Roly Keating was appointed Chief Executive of the British Library in 2012, succeeding Dame Lynne Brindley. Prior to that, he had a long and successful career at the BBC, as a programme-maker and broadcasting executive, where he launched BBC Four and served as Controller of BBC Two and Director of Archive Content.

He is a Trustee of the Clore Leadership Programme and a former Board member of Channel 4 and the Barbican Arts Centre. From 2015 to 2021 he served as Chair of the Conference of European National Librarians. He currently chairs the Steering Committee for the 5-year AHRC-funded research programme Towards a National Collection. In 2023 he was knighted for services to Literature in the New Year Honours List and appointed Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the Government of France.

The British Library Board has begun the process of recruiting Sir Roly’s successor.

For more information, please contact the British Library Press Office: [email protected]

 

Notes for editors

The British Library

We are the national library of the UK and we are here for everyone. Our shelves hold over 170 million items – a living collection that gets bigger every day. Although our roots extend back centuries, we aim to collect everything published in the UK today, tomorrow and far into the future. Our trusted experts care for this collection and open it up for everyone to spark new discoveries, ideas and to help people do incredible things.

We have millions of books, and much more besides. Our London and Yorkshire sites hold collections ranging from newspapers and maps to sound recordings, patents, academic journals, as well as a copy of every UK domain website and blog. Our public spaces are a place to research, to meet friends, to start up a new business or simply to get inspired by visiting our galleries and events. We work with partners and libraries across the UK and the world to make sure that as many people as possible have the chance to use and explore our collections, events and expertise. And we’re always open online, along with more and more of our digitised collection.

Since 2018 the Library has published annually its gender pay gap figures for staff working here, and this year’s report can now be viewed online - Gender Pay Gap Report 2024 (PDF, 5.2mb).

Last year the median figure stood at 0.21%, effectively eliminating the gender pay gap, and I’m delighted to report that this year’s figure is 0%, which is even better – fulfilling the ambition we set ourselves of closing the gap by the end of our Living Knowledge strategy period in 2023.

Closing the gap for good will continue to be an ongoing effort, and may of course be subject to a range of fluctuations over time. Through a range of measures we’ll continue to actively progress gender equity, not only within pay, but across all areas of working life at the Library. You can read about these in the report, in the section headed ‘Our commitment.’

This year, for the first time, we are voluntarily publishing pay gap figures relating to ethnicity and disability. From this point forward we will also be publishing these figures annually, with the goal of reducing and eliminating these gaps, and ensuring that the Library as a workplace is welcoming, fair and empowering for everyone, regardless of their background.

As publishing these pay gaps is currently voluntary, there are challenges in benchmarking both nationally and within our sector – however, these initial figures will serve as a necessary baseline for assessing our future progress. The Ethnicity Pay Gap Report (PDF, 6.3mb) shows a median gap of 5.33% for Asian colleagues and 13.03% for Black colleagues, while the Disability Pay Gap Report (PDF, 5.5mb) shows a median gap of 4.20% for colleagues with disabilities.

Clearly this is not where we want to be and so our target is to eliminate these gaps by 2030, the end of our current Knowledge Matters strategy period. Annual publication of these figures will ensure that we do so in a transparent and accountable manner, and in each report you can read more about the targeted measures that are currently underway that we believe will make a substantive difference.

By focusing our efforts, and tracking our progress in the coming years, we are determined to deliver positive change in these areas, as we have done with the gender pay gap.

Jas Rai
Interim Chief Operating Officer

Pay Gap Reports

• British Library Gender Pay Gap Report 2024 (PDF, 5.2mb)
• British Library Ethnicity Pay Gap Report 2024 (PDF, 6.3mb)
• British Library Disability Pay Gap Report 2024 (PDF, 5.5mb)

Photo: Tony Antoniou

Today, we’ve published a paper about the cyber-attack that took place against the British Library last October. Our hope is that doing this will help other organisations to plan and protect themselves against attacks of this kind.

The threat of aggressive and disruptive cyber-attacks is higher than it has ever been, and the organisations behind these attacks are increasingly advanced in their techniques and ruthless in their willingness to destroy whole technical systems.

This is of especial importance for libraries and all those institutions who share our mission to collect and make accessible knowledge and culture in digital form, and preserve it for posterity. Though the motive of the attack on the British Library appears to have been purely monetary, it functioned as, effectively, an attack on access to knowledge.

The paper is informed by our expert advisers and specialists, but is our own account, updated and adapted from our internal investigations into the incident. It gives a description and timeline of the attack, to the best of our current understanding, and its implications for the Library’s operations, future infrastructure and risk assessment. Its goal is to share our understanding of what happened and to help others learn from our experience, with a section (‘Learning lessons from the attack’, pages 17-18) drawing out 16 key lessons. You can download and read it here.

We hope it will also help our users and partners understand why the disruption generated by the attack has had such an impact on our services, and why it is taking time for us to recover fully. Of course, every cyber-attack is different, and the best source of advice and guidance for individuals and organisations looking to protect themselves is the website of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). We will continue to share updates on restoring our services on this blog and via our website.

We remain conscious at all times of security, and have sought to avoid providing information that could in any way aid future attacks, or inhibit the law enforcement agencies in their task of tracking down the perpetrators. The paper does not go into detail about costs, as the net financial impact of the attack is still under review, nor have we gone into detail about the organisation behind the attack, Rhysida, as this information is better available from other sources such as the specialist technology press.

Wherever possible, though, we have tried to err on the side of openness, and not everything here makes comfortable reading for ourselves as an organisation. We have significant lessons to learn about matters such as our historic reliance on a complex legacy infrastructure, which has affected our ability to restore services as quickly as we would have wished, and the varying effectiveness of different security measures across our digital estate.

We are also conscious of our duty as data controllers and deeply regret the loss of control of some personal data, for which we apologise wholeheartedly to everyone affected. We have co-operated with the Information Commissioner’s Office since the start of the incident, and will abide by the findings of any report they may publish in due course.

Whatever your perspective – whether you are a member of the public, a British Library user or staff member affected by the attack, a peer institution in the library or cultural sector, or indeed any other kind of organisation concerned about these issues – we hope you find this report useful. If the outcome is increased resilience and protection against attack for the UK collections sector and others, then at least one good thing will have emerged from this deeply damaging criminal attack.

Sir Roly Keating
Chief Executive