TCDL 2026

As AI-driven harvesting agents—also known as crawlers, bots, or spiders—proliferate, all digital repositories and other high-value content platforms maintained by memory institutions around the world are experiencing serious problems and feeling the strain. Increased and often aggressive crawling has led institutions to respond in a variety of ways: scaling infrastructure to absorb traffic spikes, playing whack-a-mole with IP ranges and subnets, and deploying tools to throttle or block unwanted activity.

This informal birds-of-a-feather session will bring together TDL systems administrators and staff to share their experiences navigating this evolving landscape. Everyone curious about bots is invited to learn about them, swap “bot battle” stories, compare mitigation strategies, and discuss what’s working (and what isn’t) as we collectively figure out how to defend our repositories—or at least coexist more peacefully with the bots.