Cybercriminals are to blame for the current crisis. But renting out study space will not lead to recovery
It holds two copies of Magna Carta, the charter that set limits on royal power in 1215. It has the sole surviving manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and notebooks by some of the most beloved authors in the English language: Jane Austen, William Blake, Virginia Woolf. Also in the British Library’s red-brick London building is the original, illustrated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – given as an early Christmas gift to Alice Liddell in 1864. On handwritten drafts of Wilfred Owen’s tragic poem Dulce et Decorum est, visitors can see suggestions made by his friend Siegfried Sassoon.
But neither display cases filled with treasures such as these nor vast digital archives, basement storage rooms, six cafes and a shop have been sufficient to arm the library against a sea of troubles that first threatened it three years ago, when hackers raided its computers for personal data and demanded a £600,000 ransom. Its long-serving chief executive, Roly Keating, took the decision to step down once the worst of the cyber-attack – one of the most serious in the UK’s history – had been dealt with. His replacement, Rebecca Lawrence, lasted less than a year before resigning in the middle of a strike over pay. Now, a new row has broken out over plans to rent out three of the library’s reading rooms and outsource security.