AI scraper bots swarm university libraries: 11,000 searches in a day lock out users
Justgototheeffinmoon · reddit · 2026-11-14
AI training-data crawlers are overwhelming university and cultural collections. UNC Chapel Hill's catalogue saw 11,000+ searches for Finnish music in one day from thousands of IPs, locking out students and faculty; librarians report bots ignoring robots.txt, testing library card numbers, and crashing sites. A 2025 GLAM-E Lab survey found 39 of 43 collection maintainers saw traffic spike, 27 blaming AI bots directly. Major labs back a voluntary robots.txt opt-out, but it doesn't bind smaller scrapers.
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