NEWS
Public bodies’ FOI failure
THE Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has taken action against five public authorities for continued failings to meet their obligations under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.
Sussex Police and South Yorkshire Police
have been issued with enforcement notices with the ICO’s director of FOI saying they “have let people down with their woeful failure to comply with the law on respond- ing to information requests”. Two Government departments – Edu- cation and The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, and the Financial Ombudsman have been given practice rec- ommendations setting out improvements to better comply with their legal obligations.
Visualising data online workshop
SUVODEEP Mazumdar will lead a work- shop on Data Visualisation for librarians, information and knowledge professionals on behalf of CILIP’s UKeiG.
The training event will introduce and ex- plore data visualisation theory and applica- tions with advice and tips throughout. Data visualisation can be a valuable tool, helping to highlight opportunities and challenges, and can be especially useful in data-rich environments such as libraries and informa- tion centres.
The workshop takes place on Zoom from 1pm to 4pm on 12 April and places can be booked at
https://tinyurl.com/4haresyp.
Board game club in 100 libraries
BOARD Game Club boxes are set to land in 100 UK libraries ahead of Easter, as part of an initiative to increase access to games for local communities. Toy World magazine reports that games-focused PR company, Playtime PR, will deliver the first wave of Board Game Club boxes – which contain 11 games – to libraries across the country later this month. Ceriann Smith, director of Strategy & Creative at Playtime PR, said: “The response by both games companies and libraries has been phenomenal.”
10 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
BL update: national collection still at risk
THE British Library has published a report called Learning Lessons from the 2023 Cyber-Attack, which exam- ines the implications for the library’s operations, future infrastructure, risk assessment and lessons learned. As well as assessing its own challenges,
the BL report says: “Many of the major col- lections institutions in the DCMS family and the wider sector are likely to have sim- ilar risks to the British Library in terms of investment levels in cyber-security, legacy infrastructure, and difficulties attract- ing and retaining sufficient IT talent.” It goes on to add: “A significant part of
the national collection, across multiple institutions, now exists in digital form – in some cases digital-only – and we all have a vital interest in ensuring that this vast and growing national asset is pro- tected from increasingly sophisticated and destructive cyber-attacks.” The report highlights the impact of old software in weakening security, but also in hampering the recovery – with some systems remaining unrecoverable, say- ing: “Our major software systems cannot be brought back in their pre-attack form, either because they are no longer sup- ported by the vendor or because they will not function on the new secure infrastruc- ture that is currently being rolled out.” The report describes “the library’s
unusually diverse and complex tech nology estate, including many legacy systems” as a product of “the merger of many different collections, organisational cul- tures and functions”. It said: “We believe that the nature of
this legacy infrastructure contributed to the severity of the impact of the attack,” and that it “allowed the attackers wider access than would have been possible in a more modern network design, and the reliance of older applications on manual processes to pass data from one system to another increased the volume of staff and customer data held in multiple cop- ies on the network.”
Setting out a list of 16 “early lessons from the attack” the report says: “Although the security measures we had in place on 28 October 2023 were extensive and had been accredited and stress-tested, with the benefit of hindsight there is much we wish we had understood better or had prioritised differently.”
It calls for a re-think on the approaches
taken to security, saying: “Investment, boldness and relentless focus are all needed to ensure that we are as secure as we can be against this threat, as the cost of investing in prevention is outweighed by the risk of failing to prevent.” For the full report visit https://tinyurl. com/37k83yfe.
Know your rights and track them
CILIP has set up a Libraries at Risk Mon- itor – an interactive map, to track threats to public libraries and provide updates on its own campaign to engage with at-risk authorities.
CILIP said it will write to every local authority where budget-reductions threaten their public libraries, reminding them to follow due process and that councillors understand the importance of libraries in their communities. CILIP set up the Libraries at Risk Mon- itor to keep track of this campaign and to enable librarians and library users to raise an alert of new threats, saying: “We need your help to keep the monitor up to date. If your local authority has proposed cuts
to its public libraries, is discussing cuts or has already initiated cuts, please visit the Libraries Risk at Monitor page and add this information to the interactive map.” The Libraries at Risk Monitor builds on the Know your Rights campaign which helps public librarians (and the wider sec- tor/general public) to engage with their local authority over financially motivated cuts and closures. It provides step by step guidance on how to oppose service reduc- tions and includes example letters to act as templates to write to local politicians. Contributors will remain anonymous
and can add to the register at
www.cilip.org. uk/page/libraries-at-risk.
March 2024
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