British Library CEO: ‘Every Generation Has a Phase of Panic'

Bloomberg

2 days ago

Rebecca Lawrence is more focused on securing new funding and dealing with the aftermath of a cyberattack than stressing about literacy and AI.
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Are you reading books — physical books — as much as you used to?
Few of us are, and it made me wonder about the path ahead for national libraries. These great institutions date back to the ancient world — the first repositories of written material are in present-day Iraq and Syria — and evolved into the public or lending libraries that most of us know best. Particularly for children, library access offers a playground for the imagination and an endless source of discovery.
Today, some of these places are fighting for survival, under pressure from a fierce combination of forces. Budgets fall short of what's required to pay librarians or maintain premises; technology is changing our attention spans and reading habits; political storms affect even the most celebrated library leaders; and ransomware attacks can bring organizations to a standstill.
The UK's national library is still suffering from the impact of one such attack nearly two years ago. But when I sat down in the office of the new chief executive, I found her more than ready to turn the page.
This interview is Lawrence's first in her new role. It has been edited for length and clarity.
This is an organization with a storied past, where the original Reading Room was frequented by George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Karl Marx and even Lenin. What do you think a national library means in the digital age?
I would like the national library in a digital age to have that timeless, classic feeling of pride in the collections that come from different sources – past and future and present – where everybody can have a sense of belonging.
When I was little and I first came to the British Library's collections when they were in the British Museum, I was taken there with my London primary school class. My teacher wanted us to see our great institutions. We went to the museum to see the Greek collections and she said, 'While you are here, you must see the Reading Room, the round Reading Room.'
1
This historic room in the center of the museum's Great Court dates back to 1857 and recently re-opened to the public after a major restoration. The Library moved to new purpose-built premises near London's St. Pancras station in 1997, which is where this interview took place.
I'll never forget it. There were some manuscripts — you could only peek at them, but she explained what manuscripts were. She was the teacher that everybody wanted to have. And the thing that's really special for me, is that teacher was my mum.
A library of the future shouldn't need to rely on a particular teacher choosing to do that. The services should be available to learners at every stage of their learning journey — whether they're children, whether they're researchers, they should be able to feel that institution is theirs and be equipped at using the resources, which I believe will always be a hybrid of the physical and digital.
And you have school visits here. Do you worry that we are all reading less?
2 Does that threaten the future of an organization like this? Or do you think panic over changing habits is unwarranted?
A UK study from 2024 suggests that only 50% of adults read regularly (down from 58% in 2015). More than a quarter of those surveyed said they had let their library membership lapse.
Researchers around the world will be able to pull up text showing that every generation has a phase of panic about whether the current [generation will] be as equipped as the past. Around all different societies, you will have that panic. So I'm an optimist by nature, I don't have that panic.
Here at the British Library you've suffered the very worst and sharpest end of the digital age. It was before you started as chief executive, but the cyberattack — its impact is still being felt, isn't it? Your services are still disrupted?
Absolutely.
3
In October 2023 the British Library was targeted by hackers from a group called Rhysida, who asked for bitcoin worth around $800,000 in exchange for restoring services.
To what extent?
So we've got many services back, with workarounds that staff have been unbelievably dedicated to bringing about. For example, we've got some of our catalog up for current printed books. But if you want to access the older manuscripts, we have the printed catalog. You would need to come to the reading rooms, and our staff would give you their very best support.
But it's not the service that we'd like for all users.
4
I experienced the impact of this because I was using the library to research a book when the cyberattack happened. I was lucky in that I had completed most of my work before the catalog went down. Among those badly affected were students on one-year programs with a hard time limit for their dissertations, and academics up against other deadlines.
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I'm keen to understand why it's taking so long and why it's so hard to get fully back. Just to recap, you faced a demand of about $800,000 from the hackers. And you're not the only library to face that.
5 Is the cost and the painstaking nature of recovery why you're still affected?
Toronto Public Library suffered a ransomware attack in the same period. Hackers hit Boston Public Library in 2021, and Seattle Public Library was targeted in 2024.
Yes, let me explain. There's an organized crime group – Rhysida – who were able to access our systems, take data and then seek ransom. Ransom wasn't paid: As a public institution we don't pay. I believe that's correct and proper, but the malware is designed to burn through every aspect of your operating system which is not secure or cloud-based. In our case, that was everything except HR and finance.
So multiple operating systems were all simultaneously brought down — how you digitally retrieve, how you catalog, how you access the basements, et cetera. What that means as an organization is that, first, you are identifying what's happened. Then you're running a crime scene: How much data is gone?
You are also plunged into a multifaceted, multi-system-change program overnight that no organization would design that way, because it would be too complex.
'The life's work of a curator...the entire content of that knowledge might have been erased.'
So it's much more than the effect on your catalog?
Absolutely. You can't see the whole of your catalog but that's only part of it. Staff have described to me the trauma – and I use that word advisedly – of the first two to three weeks after the attack, when it wasn't known if the actual content of the collection — precious documents digitized from around the world — might not exist in that state anymore.
Because the hackers might have erased it?
Exactly. Or the life's work of a curator who is a global expert — their PhD thesis and beyond, the entire content of that knowledge might have been erased. And during that time staff's personal details were also compromised, so they were worried about their own financial and personal security. It felt to them the British Library might be [like] the Library of Alexandria.
6 The relief when it was discovered that the content hadn't been compromised was palpable.
In 48 BCE, Julius Caesar attempted to repel the forces of Ptolemy XIII from Alexandria by setting fire to the enemy fleet. But flames spread from the dockyards into the city, destroying the library.
Thank goodness the physical copies of the books were still there. Should this make us think differently about digitization? Does it mean that digitization should always go alongside safeguarding the physical copies?
It means you always need to have a recovery plan. Recovery planning, and then testing and exercise, are the key to resilient institutions.
How much are you spending on this recovery?
We don't cost it up in that way, so I can't give you a number.
But it's coming out of your reserves?
We've been generously supported by DCMS, Department of Culture Media and Sport—
A government ministry.
Yes, a government ministry that is the majority funder of our library. They understand our funding pressures and needs. They've been understanding when we've needed to call on them for money.
I'm wondering what should have been done in advance. Richard Ovenden, who is director of the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, says budget cuts suffered by the library over many years led to gaps in digital protection that were exploited by cyber criminals. The UK did go through a period of austerity. Do you think that the cuts of that period made the British Library more vulnerable?
That would be a question for the government. In my role and as a trained leader of organizations, what I do is ensure that I can see where all of our spending opportunities will be, where our spending pressures will be.
And we have had pressures, not just in technology investment — which was not at the level that was optimal or desirable — but also regular pressures from building maintenance, from acquisitions, from running the organization.
We are at a brilliant time in the junction of this library because we have an amazing opportunity for a different investment in our capital estate and a different way — in a really innovative public, private and philanthropic partnership — of complementing what will always be necessary government investment with investment from wider sources in our spaces, in our curatorial expertise and in our collection. Which really excites me. This is new.
This is the deal that has been reached with a Japanese real estate company. There'll be a big building project, an extension on this very site. Does that have to be the model for a library like this? Essentially that there will be commercial space on this site, companies will rent that space and that is what gives you financial security?
7
In March, the library announced plans to build a new extension through a partnership with Tokyo-based real estate company Mitsui Fudosan.
I see it slightly differently. I see it as part of the economic, social and cultural growth of a country.
I'm incredibly proud that private-sector investment from Japan is going to build a nine-story life sciences center with the jobs that creates, the attraction that creates. It's the bringing together of ideas, people, place. Should that be [funded by] public and private investment? Absolutely.
Is the look of that new space going to be in line with the exterior look here? This is an extraordinary building, but I do remember when it opened and Prince Charles – now the King – said at the time that it reminded him of an academy for secret police.
[Laughs] So not everyone loved it.
8
King Charles has always had strong opinions about the built environment that favor classical architecture. The architect of the library, Colin St John Wilson, in 1995 compared his 30-year toil on the library project to 'the loneliness of the long-distance runner.'
Architecture's always a personal taste, but it's baked into the development agreement — absolutely hardwired — that the architectural standards must be extremely high, and be in keeping with the quality architecture of this first building on the site.
Can we talk about some of the wider challenges to creativity? We're living in a world where AI is scraping writers' creations and the creations of other artists. Do you share the concerns of creators that safeguards are either insufficient or not present?
I absolutely understand that. There's a current debate in Parliament around legislation on exactly that.
9 We have a proud tradition of intellectual property laws. Alongside that, this explosive technological development age means that we have an extraordinary opportunity of computational power to analyze, to understand, to discover. What I do think is these two should not be set up in opposition.
Elton John and Dua Lipa are among those urging the UK government to rethink plans to allow tech companies to use copyrighted material to train their AI models.
But they are in opposition, aren't they? I looked online and discovered that both of my books have been scraped by AI. I didn't agree to that.
Every country in the world is grappling with this; no country has yet fully cracked managing this boundary. But certainly as groups of libraries, we can both value creative content and put in best-practice ways of how you can get the best of AI in a bounded, ethical way.
Let me give you an example around our historic collections. We have 170 million items in 200 languages — a huge imprint of the world's authentically created, human-created content. We've done a project through all our texts in older Javanese languages to use [the] mass computational power of AI to do machine discovery of what those texts say, and machine-supported curation of how to flag and catalog that. But that's very different from AI scraping of your books, which as an author I would be really distressed about.
'There is deep solidarity between librarians, and this community that shares knowledge very generously.'
Is it an unexpectedly difficult time to do a job like yours? We've talked about the cyberattack and other challenges, but across the Atlantic, the Librarian of Congress was fired by the Trump administration, accused of providing inappropriate books for children. I wonder if things like that have an impact on your community of library leaders.
Is [it] an unexpectedly difficult time to be in a role like this? Leadership roles are difficult. It's not unexpectedly difficult; there are a huge number of challenges simultaneously. I thrive on those.
But is there solidarity? What did you think when you saw the Librarian of Congress fired?
There is deep solidarity between librarians, and this community that shares knowledge very generously.
Carla Hayden was very good to me personally. I went to visit her before I started in this role. She's been a very active part of the international community of library leaders. Because we cherish collections that go back so many years, and that can be interpreted and reinterpreted for future generations, I think we are also a profession that has a very long arc of history.
In fact, a recent gift from the Library of Congress is a book from their current exhibition, 'The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution: George Washington and George III,' with side-by-side commentary about them, their lives, their personalities, their politics and their collections.
This is the Weekend Interview. Give us a book recommendation, based on your weekend reading.
I would suggest re-reading something that you may have read when you were younger, that you then interpret differently. I've recently re-read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, which I have a completely different take on now than when I first read it as a student.
Thank you so much, Rebecca Lawrence.
I think that's a very nice way to end. Thank you.
Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend.
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