What is Happening to EThOS records in Summon? 

Links for the EThOS platform in CDI records for this provider were not resolving, as EThOS had to be taken down as a result of a cyber-attack and will not be restored. However, in order to allow access to these records, we have consulted with the British Library EThOS personnel and have re-configured the links to resolve directly to the platforms of the contributing institutions. This should provide working access to about 60% of the UK PhD theses.

May 2025 - The British Library has also informed us that they are in the midst of the process to get EThOS back online, and the timeline for this task is around three months. Once the service is back online, we will resume a discussion about updating the metadata feed from EThOS in our Central Discovery Index, serving our Summon and Primo applications.

September 25th, 2025 - The British Library updated us that the relaunch of EThOS is expected towards the end of the year. In terms of planning, the initial phase of User Acceptance Testing is scheduled for late October / early November. After the UAT, the provider will have a better assessment of the expected launch date. The provider also mentioned that they have updated the page dedicated to EThOS on their site with the most recent information; you can check it at: https://www.bl.uk/collection/ethos.

January 20, 2026: The provider updated that, regretfully, they don't yet have a new service ready. 

March 20, 2026: The provider updated that they are now in the 1st phase of user testing of their new platform. By mid-April, they should have a clearer idea of the detailed go live timetable. 

July 10th: The restored EThOS platform is now live: https://ethos.bl.uk/
The OAI-PMH end-point has been set-up by the provider, but they are still working to determine how to manage ‘record deletions’ and ‘Tomestone pages’ in EThOS. They hope to have more clarity on the timeline towards the end of July. 

August 5th, 2026: We have followed up with the provider regarding the expected timeline for the OAI-PMH endpoint to go into production. We are still awaiting their response.

We will update this article once we have any additional information from the provider.

Last updated: 05-AUG-2026