TPL (Kinda) Back Up and (Sorta) Running

This is what you are likely to confront on your next visit to the TPL

Here’s the good news: You can take out, put holds on, and return books once again at the Toronto Public Library (TPL). Here’s the bad news: The TPL branches look like the above picture because their website is still down after some backhanded biblioclasts carried out a cyberattack on the TPL last October. Yes, you read that correctly. For the last three and a half months, the TPL has had no functioning website — and still doesn’t.

However, you can now visit a branch, let the kind and kindly librarians know of a title you are looking for (only two at a time until further notice, I was told), and then take out said title(s) for the usual three-week literary party.

In related news (i.e., my beef with the news outlets), the British Library was also the victim of a cyberattack in November 2023, and it’s online services are still down, too. I know what you’re asking yourself right now: Where’s the beef? Unfortunately, Wendy’s does not have the answer to this one.

The British Library, along with the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is the largest library in the world. The TPL is the largest library system in Canada and averaged a higher circulation per capita than any other public library system in 2023. And yet the news has been conspicuously lacking any news about two major events in the world of knowledge sharing and literature.

Books — and by extension libraries — may not be cool or relevant to some people in 2024, but I can assure all the people who make a living on reporting the news that there are still enough antiquated bibliophiles out there who thirst for more information on the cyberattacks to warrant greater coverage than has been made available up to now. And be careful journalists; we (wannabe) literary savants will not be easily ignored — and we carry a big bookmark.