The BL was cyber attacked
My intellectual cozy space - threatened in the digital world.
When I was working on my doctorate, I spent time at the British Library, a.k.a. the BL. (That’s also their web address: bl.uk.) Truth be told, it was the easiest large archive for me to reach. It’s two blocks from London St. Pancras station, where the trains from Nottingham arrive. I could walk from my flat between Maid Marion Way and the castle in Nottingham to the train station and two hours later be in the British Library.
It’s not really a library. It’s a repository and archive and more than anything else, an experience. It has a gift shop, an exhibition space, and at least four places to get tea without leaving the building. When I walk into the British Library, I exhale. It’s like coming home. My shoulders drop a little bit. I have my pencils, a small magnifying glass, my laptop, and an A5 grid notebook ready to go into a clear plastic bag to enter the Manuscripts Reading Room. If I’ve planned things right, there are some pre-ordered manuscripts waiting for me at the call desk.
The Manuscripts room has restricted access. You have to show the guard at the door your Readers card and anything you are bringing into the room. Hence, the clear plastic bag. There are rows of exceedingly heavy wood desks with some old-fashioned desk lamps every few feet, far-from-clean rope weights in various sizes and lengths, foam supports for fragile items, and tons of electrical outlets. The public spaces are quite modern by comparison, lending to the feeling of going back in time when entering the Manuscripts Room.
The walls of the room are filled floor to ceiling with bound books of printed state papers from several centuries, catalog descriptions of some holdings, indexes, and other reference material. Around the back corner, past the call desk, are lighter-weight tables with some computers for accessing the online indexes and digital resources. The whole place has sort of an amber-golden hue from the wood furnishings, the carpet, the lighting, and the reverence of the inhabitants hunched over documents, puzzling out transcriptions on paper, typing into laptops, or just staring in awe at items hundreds of years old.
It’s in the BL Manuscripts room that I found proof that my doctoral thesis was valid. The thumbnail image I use to mark my social media accounts is an image of that essential document. It is in the BL that the fictional Diana Bishop from A Discovery of Witches finds the secret to locating the ‘Book of Life’. (Read the books or watch the TV series for more on this.)
But most of the time, I’m not in London. So, I use the BL website to view digital images and check descriptions of documents relevant to my research on early modern English women from my rural New Hampshire office.
This place of my delight, fell prey to a cyber attack. The attack is severe as the website has been down since at least November 26, 2023.
Visiting the BL when I am in London makes me feel connected and peaceful. If I surround myself with too many books (is there such a thing really) at home, imagine my delight at knowing that I am surrounded by such vast quantities of books, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, and stamps that they can’t be fully cataloged. There are still gaps in the indexing and digitizing of the catalog.
See here and here for some of my experiences with that. See here for having books in every room of my home (yes, it’s my son’s substack about my mother, but my need for books in there a little bit - read down).
Because I’ve spent time in the Manuscripts room, I know that the set for Discovery of Witches for the BL scene was filmed elsewhere. If I were in charge, I wouldn’t let a film crew in the Manuscripts room either.
If you ever want an example of ‘Dark Acacdemia’, start with A Discovery of Witches.
I love the BL. The answers to the world’s problems, as I see them, can be found in the BL. During term time, all the booths and tables are filled with students from around the world on their keyboards, earbuds firmly in place on the public wifi. Britain’s colonial past can be seen simply by scanning the faces and clothes of the students diligently researching in the BL. That is the post-colonial, post-empire, post-modernist, semiotic image of Britain. My research area is at the beginning of this acquisitive empire in the 15th and 16th centuries. Leaving the Manuscripts room, I am confronted by the now. Hijabs and saris. Afrikaners and Cantonese. Tea and coffee. Sugar and pineapple slices. Cinnamon cake and peppered chicken strips. It is an abrupt time jump.
Despite the British Library’s crippled state, they are still functioning in the best spirit of ‘Stay Calm and Carry On’. More on this anon. As of late December, the public spaces are open again, although the website has not yet been fully restored.