Agreed. I wrote this in January to try to get some attention on the issue. It’s going to cost the BL a great deal more than £400k … www.standard.co.uk/comment/brit...

I’ve started to find the situation genuinely distressing now: obviously struggling but valiantly trying stuff, a critical national piece of infrastructure neither valued nor prioritised… symptomatic of quite a lot of things in Britain today.

The BL published a report on the attack in March. www.bl.uk/home/british... While no costs there, you can see the scale and scope of the rebuilt.

What happened to the BL is terrible and needs fixing, but the Standard article claims national funding is justified because the BL is a national resource. How many people outside London would see the BL as a national resource? Perhaps these ‘national’ resources should be spread around a bit more.

Indeed, it is a scandal it is not treated as a national scandal. Can you imagine a similar silence happening in France if the BnF had suffered in the same way?

Seconded and critically #openaccess#arts#humanities