In 2023 the British Library suffered a major cyber-attack that severely disrupted its internal computing infrastructure. Much of its computing capacity was lost, while the remaining systems were subject to strict security restrictions. Among the affected systems was Shibboleth, the identity federation service used by the Library to access external platforms, as well as internal Secure Shell (SSH) access. As of July 2026, restoration of Shibboleth was still under way and expected to take approximately another year.
With usual authentication route unavailable, British Library staff turned to the EOSC EU Node (EEN) to regain access to external computing resources. Initially, British Library users could access the EEN through EU Login only with Observer permissions, which were insufficient for the team's intended activities. Through the EEN Helpdesk, the Library connected with the EEN support team, who helped resolve the access issue. Nora McGregor, Digital Curator at the British Library, was granted Investigator access, followed shortly afterwards by Harry Lloyd, Research Software Engineer. This allowed the two colleagues to collaborate on the same project.
The EEN team subsequently recommended setting up a group project rather than continuing with individual accounts. This provided the team with a shared pool of computing credits that could be used for Virtual Machines and the Cloud Container Platform, allowing them to experiment with different technologies without relying on the Library's constrained internal infrastructure.
Putting the EOSC EU Node to use
With access in place, the British Library explored two practical applications for the EOSC EU Node.
The first was computational work towards an entry for the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) OCR competition. Investigator access gave the team the compute resources needed to explore this work at a time when equivalent internal capacity was unavailable.
The second was internal programming training. The library was looking for a secure environment in which staff could learn programming and found that containers running VS Code could be set up relatively easily and provided to trainees.
In these scenarios, the EOSC EU Node (EEN) offered a practical route for British Library users to continue exploratory computational work as well as training programs. The British Library team described it as "a convenient, secure offering that allowed us to experiment with different technologies including language models that require GPU acceleration while we had no internal provision to do so."
Reasons for choosing the EOSC EU Node
The EOSC EU Node stood out over alternative offerings for several reasons:
- Openly available, allowing the team to experiment without additional infrastructure costs.
- A trusted service, providing confidence when working with institutional resources.
- Aligned with the British Library's existing engagement with EU platforms.
- A complete computing environment, supporting moderately compute-intensive trials and experiments that could inform broader projects.
As Harry Lloyd, Research Software Engineer at the British Library, explains, "EOSC EU Node served as a fallback compute environment for cultural heritage institutions facing infrastructure disruption, and as a route to lightweight, secure training environments."
The British Library is the UK’s national library and an Independent Research Organisation, supporting research across disciplines and undertaking its own work in areas including Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Data Science. Its collections contain more than 170 million items, ranging from major cultural heritage materials such as the Magna Carta and Lindisfarne Gospels to scientific literature and increasingly large datasets.
