Pity the poor British Library, an institution which simultaneously does such great things, yet at the same time seems to have utterly lost its way. The cyberattack of 2023 has created damage not only to its digital infrastructure (the full extent of which I fear has yet to be admitted…) but to the institution’s mindset.Read More
There is no time for complacency, the next attack on knowledge is about to happen. Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books (2020) The British Library has been a news story of late, and not a happy one. On 28 October 2023 the Library fell victim to a cyber-attack. A criminal group named Rhysida infiltrated the Library’sRead More
Two years I wrote about an exhibition of the remarkable infographics of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and said that I was working on an exhibition of infographics myself, due to be shown at the British Library in August 2020. Then fate intervened.Read More
Here’s some breaking news for you… On 22 April, and running until 21 August 2022, the British Library will be hosting a major exhibition on the history of news in Britain. Entitled Breaking the News, it will (according to the press release) spotlight the role news plays in our society, exploring issues of choice, interpretation,Read More
It is good to be involved in a good thing. Last week, after years of development and the coming together of assorted initiatives, the British Library made one million pages from historic newspapers freely available online. Next year it will publish one million more, and million the year after that. At the same time rawRead More
A few years ago I thought it would be a useful thing for the British Library (my employer) to have a shareable list of its newspapers. I had been speaking to an American archive with whom I wanted to share the records we had, and it seemed a reasonable thing to do. There had beenRead More
One medium that has shone out during the coronavirus pandemic has been radio. From the very start of the crisis, through lockdowns one and two, and life under tiers, radio – and I’m thinking particularly of community radio – has responded with alacrity and great enterprise. All media has responded to the pandemic with urgencyRead More
The British Library is currently engaged on a major programme entitled Heritage Made Digital. The aim of the programme is to transform digital access to the British Library’s heritage collections by streamlining digitisation workflows, undertaking strategically led digitisation and making existing digitised content available as openly as copyright and licensing agreements allow. Heritage Made DigitalRead More
In two years’ time, it will be the four hundredth anniversary of the newspaper in this country. The first known newspaper in English, Corrant out of Italy, Germany, &c. was published on 2 December 1620, in Amsterdam. A year later, on 24 September 1621, the first newspaper was published in this country, the Corante, or,Read More
Below is the text of a paper I gave recently at ‘Language Matters‘, the 5th Transfopress Encounter in Paris. Transfopress is an international network of archivists, librarians and scholars interested in the study of foreign language press. The subject of this conference was printed news in English abroad and foreign-language publishing in the English-speaking world.Read More