16 July 2025
Sharing our Annual Report highlights for 2024–25
We’ve now published our 2024–25 Annual Report and Accounts, outlining the key accomplishments and challenges for the year, and how we’ve been performing as an organisation.
It details what has been a year of transition for the Library as we have welcomed our new Chief Executive, Rebecca Lawrence, continued to recover from the cyber-attack in 2023 and made strong progress with some of our key Knowledge Matters priorities.
The scale of the technology rebuild following the cyber-attack means that our recovery has taken longer than initially anticipated and continues to be gradual. We understand the frustration this has caused many of our users and we’re determined to complete the recovery of the services on which they depend.
Despite these ongoing challenges we have made important progress: restoring full access to the physical collection, enabling more remote ordering of collection items to the Reading Rooms, providing access to some of our most-used digital learning resources and most unique digitised manuscripts, and restoring access to electronic Legal Deposit books and journal articles received up to the date of the cyber-attack at our legal deposit library partners’ sites.
Over the past year we have reached important milestones in major capital projects that will secure our future. We were delighted to have confirmation from Mitsui Fudosan of their £1.1 billion landmark investment into the major expansion of our St Pancras site; construction has reached an advanced stage for our world-class collection management building at Boston Spa, which will provide the next generation of storage for our collections; and the Government confirmed its intention to invest £10 million to bring the Temple Works building in Leeds into public ownership and to further explore its viability as a future home for the Library.
Alongside this there have been other significant achievements:
- our exhibition Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music reached nearly 800,000 people across the UK through our Living Knowledge Network partnership of public libraries
- we gave 18–24-year-olds a platform to create meaningful stories for social media with the creation of our Young Creators Lab youth programme
- Library items digitised with partners were used almost 90 million times
- our Business & IP Centre National Network supported over 40,000 people to create and develop small businesses
- our Endangered Archives Programme celebrated its 20th anniversary.
These are just a few examples of the extraordinarily diverse and dynamic programme delivered over the year.
As ever, our collections have continued to grow, with over 195,000 physical items received this year under legal deposit. However, the cyber-attack continues to limit significant aspects of collection processing for both physical and digital legal deposit, and work to address a backlog and assess potential gaps will be an important task as we look to complete our recovery.
Despite this, our core responsibility of developing and caring for our collections continued. 2,500 items received direct remedial conservation, a further 3,100 were prepared for digitisation, and 7,500 items benefitted from bespoke boxing and storage.
We added many unique heritage items of significance:
- the archive of novelist and playwright John Galsworthy, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932
- a rare illuminated charter issued by Edward III to David de Wollore
- 15 pages of autograph sketches and drafts by Sir Edward Elgar
- the only known surviving copy of a printed broadside mandate issued by Henry VIII’s confessor John Longland
- the archive of science fiction writer Christopher Priest.
Throughout this year our focus has been on becoming a more resilient institution, able to respond to the extraordinary changes and pressures that are reshaping the knowledge sector at speed. We are deeply grateful for our remarkable community of partners, peers, supporters and users who are working with us to achieve this.
Max Benson
Public Policy Officer