We have a wonderfully varied line-up of fascinating exhibitions and programmes coming to St Pancras, and your local libraries as well, this year. Here’s a glimpse at what you can expect to see coming up at the Library in 2024. 

 

Beyond the Bassline (26 April – 26 August 2024) 

Beyond the Bassline is the first major exhibition to document 500 years of Black music in Britain, from Tudor musician John Blanke and 19th century composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor through to Pauline Black, the founding member and lead singer of Two-Tone band The Selecter, roots reggae band Steel Pulse and award-winning contemporary record producer and DJ, Nia Archives. 

Spotlighting The Reno in Manchester, Bristol’s Bamboo Club, Scottish club night The Reggae Klub and The Four Aces in London, as well as carnivals, community centres and record shops across the country, the exhibition draws on different places that have cultivated creative expression and inspired a number of Black British music genres. Journeying through jazz, reggae, jungle and afroswing, it also examines the role the internet and new technologies play in creating, listening to and sharing music. 

On display will be a range of sound recording formats, instruments and audio equipment alongside posters, costumes and photographs celebrating music as a form of entertainment, vehicle for community, and as a source of liberation, protest and education. 

Tickets will be on sale soon.

 

Medieval Women: In Their Own Words (25 October 2024 – 2 March 2025) 

Later this year, our exhibition on Medieval Women will explore the challenges, achievements and daily lives of women in Europe from 1100-1500. It will tell the history of medieval women through their own words and uncover their lives through original documents and artefacts.  

Women’s lives during the Middle Ages were rich and varied. The exhibition will reveal that women exerted great influence across private, public and spiritual realms. It will delve into the lived experiences of medieval women, including their beauty regimes and healthcare, their personal relationships and the running of their homes. It will shed light on their work in a wide variety of trades and professions, their role in medieval politics, the power and influence they wielded as spiritual visionaries or nuns, and the art, music and literature that they created. 

Visitors will discover objects related to inspiring figures such as: Joan of Arc, the religious visionary and military leader; Christine de Pizan, the first professional woman author in Europe; and Shajar Al-Durr, the female ruler of Egypt who defeated Louis IX of France in the Seventh Crusade. 

The exhibition will take visitors on a journey through the lives of medieval women across cultures, religions and class. Exploring both their struggles and successes, the exhibition prompts visitors to discover how medieval women’s voices still resonate across the centuries and speak powerfully to our world today. 

This exhibition is made possible with support from Joanna and Graham Barker and Unwin Charitable Trust.

 

The Silk Road at Dunhuang (27 September 2024 – 23 February 2025) 

Featuring items from the so-called ‘Library Cave’ in the Buddhist caves complex of Mogao, this exhibition explores the stories of the people who inhabited or passed through the town of Dunhuang in northwest China, a vital resting point along the trading routes known as the Silk Roads.   

Sealed in the early 11th century and only rediscovered in 1900, the contents of the ‘Library Cave’ span the 4th to the 11th centuries. From the Diamond Sutra, the world’s earliest dated, printed book, to the Dunhuang star chart, the earliest known manuscript atlas of the night sky, the documents are an astonishing time capsule detailing life in and around the medieval metropolis of Dunhuang. 

This exhibition is made possible with support from The Klein Foundation and the Dunhuang Foundation.

 

Get Creative in Leeds 

We’re continuing to share stories in Yorkshire - expect oral history, Shakespeare and spooky fun later this year. In February, young people in south Leeds will continue to make their mark in our community programme, Get Creative. Our free weekly art sessions help young people aged 10–14 engage with the Library collection and find their voice. This is the second year of the project and it’s just one of the ways we’re getting to know the people of Leeds, where we hope to build a new home in years to come. 

 

Luminous: A thousand years of Hebrew manuscripts (in Melbourne, Australia until 14 April 2024)

We've partnered with State Library Victoria in Melbourne, Australia to create Luminous: A thousand years of Hebrew manuscripts. This exhibition explores the significance of the written word as a foundation for contemporary Jewish practice, showing ancient manuscripts as part of a dynamic and diverse living culture.

Spanning a millennium of history, Luminous illustrates the beauty and importance of Hebrew texts through items about Jewish life, culture, science, religion, philosophy, music and magic.

The exhibition provides access to rare and significant manuscripts that explore the significance of the written word as a foundation of Jewish culture and tradition, centering the lived experience of Australian Jews here and now.

Find out more

As we begin a new year, I'm pleased to confirm that – as promised before Christmas – next Monday 15 January will see the return online of one of the most important datasets for researchers around the world: the main British Library catalogue, including details of our printed books, journals, maps, music scores and rare books. Its absence from the internet has been perhaps the single most visible impact of the criminal cyber attack which took place at the end of October last year, and I want to acknowledge how difficult this has been for all our users.

When the catalogue returns it won’t be in quite the form that long-standing users will be familiar with. Most notably it will be 'read-only', so although you will be able to search for items as before, the process for checking availability and ordering them for to use in the Reading Rooms will be different. We’ll be providing more detailed information and practical guidance when the catalogue goes online on Monday.

In addition I can confirm that from next week we will also be able to provide our readers with access to the majority of the Library's key special collections – the archives, manuscripts and other unique items that are only available here. For the time being you’ll need to come on-site to consult offline versions of the specialist catalogues, but our reference teams will be on hand to help you with searching for and requesting items.

Taken together these developments mean that for the first time since the attack the majority of physical books, archives, maps and manuscripts held in the basements at our St Pancras site will once again be discoverable and useable by our Readers. Although the processes may be slower and more manual than we’ve all been used to, this is the familiar heart of the Library’s offering to researchers and restores a core element of our public service. It will be good to have it back.

Further stages of recovery

Positive as this news is it’s important to stress that there are many further steps ahead. The broader programme of full technical rebuild and recovery from the attack will take time, and we’re keen to listen to our users and the wider research community to ensure we get the priorities right in the months ahead. Some key future milestones, which we will report on in due course, include restoring access to the full range of content held at our Boston Spa site, and also to those parts of our digital collections that are currently unavailable.

Learning lessons for the future

It’s also important, as we enter this crucial new phase of recovery, to say that we are sorry that for the past two months researchers who rely for their studies and in some cases their livelihoods on access to the Library’s collections have been deprived of it. And we are sorry that for all our efforts we were not able to protect some personal data belonging to our users and our staff from being leaked by these hackers.

It has been a sobering couple of months for all of us at the British Library, and we’re determined that others benefit from the experience we have been through. As I said in my previous blog, what happened to us in October has implications for the whole collections sector, and in the months ahead we will begin to share the lessons we’ve learned from this experience with our partners and peer institutions.

We’re also determined that we learn those lessons ourselves, and use this as a moment not just to replicate the systems we ran before, but to improve as we rebuild. At the time the hackers hit we were embarking on a significant round of fresh investment in our core technology infrastructure, as part of the Knowledge Matters strategy we launched last May. That work will now be accelerated, to ensure that what emerges from this unwanted attack is a strengthened British Library that is as ready as it can possibly be to confront whatever future threats emerge from the constantly evolving world of cyber crime.

Other matters and next steps

Another vital part of the Library’s service is the annual provision of payments to authors and other recipients of UK Public Lending Right (PLR). We understand the vital importance of these payments to those who depend upon them, and many will have been understandably anxious since the cyber attack about the impact on this year’s process. I hope that many of those affected will have seen the message the PLR team published last week, giving reassurance that workaround systems are being put in place to ensure that this year’s payments will be made by, at the latest, the statutory deadline at end of March. A detailed timeline will issued by the end of this month, once this year’s Rate Per Loan has been laid in Parliament.

Full recovery of all our services will be a gradual process, but I hope that from next week onwards those users who have been most severely impacted will start to see real progress, and will continue to see improvements going forward. Recent press speculation about the possible cost of the recovery programme was premature as we have yet to confirm what the full costs will be. We remain in close and regular contact with our government sponsor, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and will work with them to ensure that our recovery takes place on a secure and financially sustainable basis.

In the meantime more detail about the interim catalogue and the manual requesting process will be shared on our website when the catalogue goes live next week. Future progress on restoring access will be announced via our social media channels and our website at bl.uk.

Once again I’d like to thank our community of users, partners and supporters for the patience and support you have shown so far. I also want to thank the many colleagues who have been working hard over recent weeks to make all of these latest developments possible. We will continue to keep you informed about our recovery programme as further milestones are confirmed and implemented.

Sir Roly Keating
Chief Executive

This blog was amended on 15 January to remove an incorrect number.

On the last weekend of October, the British Library became the victim of a major cyber-attack, the impact of which continues to be felt by our staff, our partners and our millions of users.

This was a ransomware attack, by a criminal group known for such activity, and its effects were deep and extensive. Our online systems and services were massively disrupted, our website went down, and we initially lost access to even basic communication tools such as email.

We took immediate action to isolate and protect our network but significant damage was already done: having breached our systems, the attackers had destroyed their route of entry and much else besides, encrypting or deleting parts of our IT estate. They also copied a significant chunk of our data, which they attempted to auction online and, a month later, released most of it onto their site on the dark web.

The Library itself remains a crime scene, with a forensic investigation of our disrupted network still ongoing. In parallel, our teams are examining and analysing the almost 600 gigabytes of leaked material that the attackers dumped online – difficult and complex work that is likely to take months.

Impact and response

The impact of the attack was felt in our Reading Rooms in London and Yorkshire, where collection items could no longer be retrieved, and one of our core responsibilities as the national library – free access to our collection – was put on hold. Essential digital services including our catalogue, our website and our online learning resources went dark, with research services like our popular EThOS collection of more than 600,000 doctoral theses suddenly unavailable.

We alerted our users to the scale of the disruption using our social media channels. Thankfully, we have been able to keep our physical sites open to the public throughout, and although services in the Reading Rooms remain severely limited, the public areas at our St Pancras building are as busy and lively as they have ever been with visits, events and personal study. Our exhibitions on the literature of Fantasy and the writer Malorie Blackman continue to attract the crowds, and in the very week of the cyber-attack we were able to successfully host a five-day fringe event on AI in our Knowledge Centre.

Most fundamentally, we have continued to care for our precious physical collection, and can confirm that the vast datasets held in our Digital Library System, including the digital legal deposit content that it is our statutory duty to collect and preserve, are intact and safe from harm.

Aftershocks

Although this kind of attack was something we had prepared for and rehearsed, and had taken steps to guard against, it was no less of a shock when it happened. It is our purpose to provide access to a collection of 170 million items – open to all and free at the point of use, for research, inspiration and enjoyment – and we found ourselves, that first weekend, at the receiving end of a smash-and-grab operation, and a crude attempt at extortion.

The people responsible for this cyber-attack stand against everything that libraries represent: openness, empowerment, and access to knowledge.

Our sense of outrage increased when the data the attackers stole was dumped onto the dark web. As soon as we were able to confirm it might include the data of Library users, we announced this publicly and emailed our users directly to alert them, and to encourage them to take sensible precautions to protect themselves.

We are continuing to collaborate with the Metropolitan Police and professional cyber security advisors to investigate the situation, and are receiving additional support from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). Should we find evidence of specific data that has been compromised we will alert the people affected as soon as we can.

Reflections and rebuilding

Our experience of the past two months has highlighted a great paradox for knowledge institutions in the digital age. Our deep commitment to openness, access and discovery means that we fully embrace the amazing possibilities that technology enables; while as custodians of our collections we also face an ever-increasing challenge in keeping our digital heritage safe from attack.

Libraries, research and education institutions are being targeted, whether for monetary gain or out of sheer malice. Society more widely, and all of us as individuals need to be alert to this fast-evolving threat. The NCSC provides excellent guidance on staying safe online, as well as specific guidance for individuals who may have been impacted by a data breach. For better or worse, everyone working at the Library now knows a lot more about the dangers of identity fraud than we did barely six weeks ago, and I would recommend to anyone the benefit of being both forewarned and forearmed.

Restoring access

Behind the scenes, teams across the Library have been working hard to develop hybrid services and workarounds that can restore some level of access to our collection, while a much broader programme of secure infrastructure rebuilding gets underway. We are as eager as our Readers to restore access to the collection, but we need to exercise exceptional care to ensure we do nothing to compound the risk of further attack.

From early in the new year you will begin to see a phased return of certain key services, starting with the most crucial of all, our main catalogue, a reference-only version of which will be back online from 15 January, further facilitating the manual ordering which is already available in our Reading Rooms. Other interim services will include increased on-site access to our manuscripts and special collections, and a bespoke inter-library loan capability designed to serve key sectors such as health, higher education and law. Each of these offerings will initially be somewhat different from our normal service, but together they will represent a crucial first stage on our road back to normality.

We know that the journey to full recovery will be a long one, but the weeks since the cyber-attack have demonstrated to me in abundance the expertise, energy and commitment to public service of our staff. This experience has also revealed the incredible understanding and generosity of our vast national and international community of users, supporters and partner institutions, who have patiently kept faith with us as we have navigated this unprecedented challenge. On behalf of all of us at the British Library – thank you.

Sir Roly Keating
Chief Executive