Bloomberg: British Library Says Ransomware Attack Behind Weeks-Long Outage. “The British Library said a ransomware attack by a criminal group is the cause of a technology outage which has disabled its website and other computer systems for weeks.”
The Guardian: Chaucer goes digital as British Library makes works available online . “The entire collection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works held by the British Library is being made available in digital format after the completion of a two and a half year project to upload 25,000 images of the often elaborately illustrated medieval manuscripts.”
British Library UK Web Archive Blog: UK Web Archive Technical Update – Autumn 2023. “The most important achievement over the last quarter has been establishing a replica of the UK Web Archive holdings at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). The five servers we’d filled with data were shipped, and our NLS colleagues kindly unpacked and installed them. We visited a few weeks later, finishing off the configuration of the servers so they can be monitored by the NLS staff and remotely managed by us.”
British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: Cataloguing the Cotton charters. “A new project is underway to examine one of the British Library’s oldest and most important collections. The Cotton charters and rolls are being catalogued as part of the Library’s Hidden Collections initiative. Begun by the antiquarian and politician Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), and augmented by his son and grandson, the Cotton collection was the first library to be presented to the nation, in 1702, and it has been part of the British Library and its predecessor, the British Museum Library, since the latter’s foundation in 1753.”
British Library Digital Scholarship Blog: Open and Engaged 2023: Community over Commercialisation. “The British Library is delighted to host its annual Open and Engaged Conference on Monday 30 October, in-person and online, as part of International Open Access Week. In line with this year’s #OAWeek theme: Open and Engaged 2023: Community over Commercialisation will address approaches and practices to open scholarship that prioritise the best interests of the public and the research community.”
British Library Endangered Archives Blog: New online – July 2023. “Recent online collections include zoological records from Kenya, documents from a Sufi shrine in India, manuscripts from Java, and records from monasteries of cloistered nuns in Lima.”
British Library Social Science Blog: Historical census publications of Africa, the West Indies, and Pacific Islands: ‘Unlocking our Hidden Collections’. “The British Library acquires material at a rapid rate, and this has resulted in areas where material cannot be catalogued promptly soon after its arrival. This prevents discovery and access by readers, effectively ‘hiding’ the material away. In response to this, the Unlocking our Hidden Collections initiative aims to clear cataloguing backlogs, process donated material, and upgrade already existing bibliographic records, making the material ‘visible’ once more.”
British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: Medieval and Renaissance Women: full list of the charters and rolls. “… we are thrilled to release a list of all the rolls and charters digitised as part of our Medieval and Renaissance Women project. There are 25 rolls and 219 charters in total, in addition to the 93 manuscript volumes that we announced in a previous blogpost.”
British Library Endangered Archives blog: New online – March 2023. “This month we would like to highlight five new collections that have recently been made available online. They have come from South Africa, India, Nepal and from Georgia.”
British Library Digital Scholarship Blog: Open and Engaged 2022: Climate research in GLAM, digital infrastructure and skills to open collections. “As part of International Open Access Week, the British Library is delighted to host its annual Open and Engaged event online on 24 October, Monday from 13:00 to 16:30 BST. Since 2018 the British Library has organised the Open and Engaged Conference to coincide with International Open Access Week. In line with this year’s #OAWeek theme: Open for Climate Justice; Open and Engaged will address intersections between cultural heritage and climate research through use of collections, digital infrastructures and skills.”
British Library: New online – September 2022. “We have another four projects that recently went online to highlight this month. Two projects from India, and one each from Cuba and Columbia.”
British Library: Hildegard-go! “Thanks to generous funding from Joanna and Graham Barker, the British Library is digitising many of its manuscripts, rolls and charters connected with women from Britain and across Europe, and made between 1100 and 1600. We have some great news to report: the first batch of ten manuscript volumes is now available to view online.”
British Library Blog: 40 more Javanese manuscripts now accessible online . “In May 2022 the Bollinger Javanese Manuscripts Digitisation Project was launched, aiming to digitise a further 120 Javanese manuscripts from the British Library collection. We are delighted to announce that 40 more Javanese manuscripts have now been published online, and can be accessed directly through the live hyperlinks on the Digital Access to Javanese Manuscripts page or via the Digitised Manuscripts portal.”
British Library Endangered Archives Blog: West African Manuscripts Crowdsourcing Project Fellowship: Call now open. “We are delighted to be partnering with Chevening to offer a professional development fellowship. The Chevening Fellow will develop a community crowdsourcing project to improve the discoverability of approximately 10,000 digitised West African manuscripts within the EAP collections. We are keen to ensure these manuscripts are assigned titles in Arabic script, making them more accessible to local researchers.”
British Library Endangered Archives Blog: New online – July 2022. “This month we are highlighting four pilot projects that have recently been made available online, from Indonesia, Kenya, Russia, and Tunisia.”
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