Jeremy Silver had been enjoying his retirement when he was asked to take the helm of the beleaguered British Library three months ago. Silver, a tech entrepreneur and investor, had been a trustee of the library since 2019. He had a front-row seat for its crippling by the hacking group Rhysida in October 2023, which knocked out the library’s digital nervous system and left its staff using pen and paper for weeks.
Nearly two and a half years later Silver, the interim chief executive, says the library is “recovering”, but issues linger. Access to its full set of electronic publications will be restored in March, he says, and its archive of the entire UK web — the .co.uk domain — should be brought back by the summer.