What is a library, anyway?

Image source: Wikimedia 


Here is a beautifully written article at publicbooks.org by Carolyn Dever on the soul of the British Library in the wake of the Halloween cyberattack.

"...if I wanted to request to see a specific book, I could look it up electronically, and then ask the librarians to find the physical copy. Until Halloween, 2023, that is.

How ironic that the most quaintly analog form of research possible, using physical books in a physical library, has been devastated by the hijacking of a digital system. I am experiencing this irony as especially bitter this morning, having arrived at desk 1086 with my list of tasks, hoping against hope that the crisis had resolved. It hadn’t."

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