The Authority File Round-Up: February 2025

Last month's series addressed a spike in AI bots targeting academic library websites.

Posted on March 11, 2025 in Blog

Did you know that AI bots are crawling academic library websites? February’s guest dove into this pressing issue, underlining how her library experienced service disruptions due to AI scraping. In particular, our speaker shared that the library’s catalog and repository were targeted and detailed concerns over sensitive data being accessed by large language models. Our guest also described the challenges of differentiating between typical bot traffic and AI models. She further explored the difficulties of dealing with low library budgets and staffing in the age of AI. We hope you find the episode eye-opening and beneficial.

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February’s Episode

Last month TAF was joined by Rosalyn Metz, Chief Technology Officer for Libraries and Museum at Emory University. Rosalyn discussed Emory library’s approach to spikes in AI bot traffic, building on a panel discussion at the 2024 Charleston Conference. Our guest made a case for increased collaborations across campus and with vendors to combat bot activity, underscoring the importance of a robust IT team. Rosalyn also explained the ethical implications of making library metadata openly accessible and pondered why academic library content is valuable for training AI.

Listen to the episode: Implications and Solutions for AI Bot Traffic on Library Websites with Rosalyn Metz

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What’s Coming Up in March

March’s series centers on open book publishing and the MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O) program. One of our guests from the MIT Press shares an update on D2O’s achievements, including boosting authors’ citations and global reach. Our other two speakers, authors published through D2O, underline how publishing open access (OA) can help grow one’s research network. The authors also explain the ways OA monographs combat the awkwardness of promoting publications to students and fellow researchers. Listen to the first episode of the series.

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You can find more episodes on our website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening! See you next month.

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