The disruption of the Library’s access to publications normally available via UK Electronic Legal Deposit is ongoing, following the cyberattack on the British Library at the end of last October. As a UK Legal Deposit Library, the Library of Trinity College Dublin along with the other legal deposit libraries, the British Library the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford and Cambridge University Library, share the infrastructure for UK electronic legal deposit publications.
This incident has since received wide press coverage, eg in the Financial Times and the New Yorker. For up-to-date information on the steps towards recovery, see the British Library’s blog. The Library continues to work with colleagues in the British Library and the other four UK legal deposit libraries to review and ‘build back better’ the access infrastructure for the e-books, e-journals, archived websites, and other digital publications.
Anticipating that it will be months before access is restored, the Library has issued a guide to describe the mitigating actions taken, and to point readers to alternative information resources. An action to highlight is a trial subscription to a large package of more than 230,000 e-books. You will encounter them in search results in Stella Search; they stand out because they include cover images and an access button labeled ‘eBook’. If you want to target them, click on ‘eBooks’ under ‘Format’ in the selection options on the left-hand side; or select ‘eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)’ under ‘Content Provider’ further down.