British Library
National library of the United Kingdom
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| March 2025 | The British Library announced a £1.1 billion renovation project funded by Mitsui Fudosan, aiming to expand public spaces and add commercial areas. |
| 2025 | Rebecca Lawrence is set to become the new Chief Executive of the British Library. |
| 2024 | Around 20,000 writers, illustrators, and translators experienced delays in their Public Lending Right payments due to the cyberattack. |
| October 2024 | Many previously inaccessible services were restored, including remote item ordering, online learning services, and online manuscripts. |
| July 30 2024 | Library announces plans to restore remote ordering of physical media by September 2024, incrementally re-release digital manuscripts, and restore educational websites and digital academic journals before the 2024–25 academic year. |
| March 8 2024 | Roly Keating publishes a blog post announcing a comprehensive report about the cyberattack and introducing a 'Rebuild & Renew' scheme to improve future incident response, including a shift towards cloud technologies. |
| January 2024 | Partial restoration of the computerised catalogue occurred after being offline for months following the cyberattack. |
| January 2024 | The British Library continued to experience technology outages as a result of the October 2023 cyber-attack. |
| January 15 2024 | The British Library's main catalogue was restored online in a read-only format following the cyberattack, with several services expected to remain unavailable for months. |
| January 10 2024 | Library announces partial service restoration beginning 15 January, with Chief Executive Roly Keating apologizing for the two-month disruption to researchers' work. |
| January 5 2024 | Financial Times reports the Library will use around 40 percent of its financial reserves to recover from the attack, estimated at £6–7 million. |
| November 27 2023 | After the British Library refuses to pay the ransom, Rhysida releases 90 percent (approximately 600GB) of the stolen data freely on the dark web. |
| November 20 2023 | Cybercriminal group Rhysida claims responsibility for the breach, launching a dark web auction for 490,191 files of data, starting at 20 bitcoin. They advertise leaked documents including HM Revenue and Customs files, employment contracts, and passport information. |
| November 16 2023 | Library confirms the technical incident is a ransomware attack involving digital extortion. |
| October 2023 | Rhysida, a hacker group, launched a cyberattack on the British Library's online information systems, demanding a ransom of 20 bitcoin for data restoration and return of stolen material. |
| October 31 2023 | The Library publicly confirms the technical outage is a result of a cyberattack and launches an investigation with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and cybersecurity specialists. |
| October 28 2023 | British Library first reports technical issues on Twitter at 9:54 a.m. GMT, experiencing website problems, public Wi-Fi outage, and non-functional online catalogue. |
| October 28 2023 | The British Library's entire website went down due to a ransomware attack by the Rhysida group, rendering most collections inaccessible. |
| May 2023 | Rhysida hacker group became known to intelligence services as a 'ransomware as a service' provider targeting critical infrastructure. |
| 2022 | Helena Bonham Carter takes over the presidency from Sir Tim Rice, becoming the latest president of the London Library. |
| 2022 | BBC Redux service ceases operations. |
| 2022 | Completed the 'Unlocking Our Sound Heritage' project, which involved comprehensive digitisation of sound recordings from local archives across the UK over a five-year period. |
| 2020 | A risk assessment raised concerns about the lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA) on the newly installed Terminal Services server. |
| February 2020 | British Library installed a new Terminal Services server to facilitate remote access for third-party providers and internal IT administrators during the COVID-19 pandemic, which later became the initial point of unauthorized access during the cyberattack. |
| 2019 | The library reversed its long-standing policy of retaining almost all acquired items, introducing a new strategy to remove certain materials like online-available journals, duplicate books, and low-use materials to manage space constraints. |
| 2018 | Liz Jolly succeeds Caroline Brazier as Chief Librarian of the British Library. |
| 2018 | Established the Human Lending Library service in the Business & IP Centre, partnering with Expert Impact to provide mentoring for social entrepreneurs. |
| 2017 | Sir Tim Rice becomes president of the London Library, succeeding Sir Tom Stoppard. |
| 2017 | Launched 'Unlocking Our Sound Heritage' initiative, establishing a network of ten regional centres across the UK to digitise and preserve diverse sound recordings from local archives, including music, radio broadcasts, drama, oral history, and wildlife recordings. |
| 2016 | Caroline Brazier becomes the first Chief Librarian of the British Library, after working at the library since 2002. |
| 2015 | The British Library launched the 'Save Our Sounds' programme to digitise and preserve unique sound recordings from UK archives, addressing the risk of losing recordings due to format deterioration and decreasing playback device availability. |
| August 1 2015 | The Euston Road building was Grade I listed. |
| November 8 2013 | The newspaper library at Colindale was closed, with the collection split between St Pancras and Boston Spa sites. |
| April 6 2013 | Extended Legal Deposit Libraries Act came into effect, allowing the British Library to collect non-print electronic publications. |
| April 5 2013 | The Library announced a project to archive all .uk websites to preserve the nation's 'digital memory', containing about 4.8 million sites and 1 billion web pages. |
| 2012 | Sir Roly Keating becomes Chief Executive of the British Library, replacing Dame Lynne Brindley. |
| 2012 | Legal deposit libraries signed a memorandum of understanding to automatically collect UK websites and create a shared Digital Library System. |
| October 2012 | British Library launches its moving image services, providing access to nearly a million sound and moving image items onsite. |
| 2010 | Playback bulletin of the British Library Sound Archive ceased publication after 44 total issues. |
| 2010 | Publication of the Playback bulletin ceased after 44 total issues, all of which were later made available online. |
| May 2010 | British Library begins making off-air recordings of daily TV and radio news broadcasts from seventeen different channels. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles London Library, British Library Sound Archive, British Library & British Library cyberattack, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.