Jason Casden et al. write: “Since the release of multiple competing generative AI platforms, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries has seen increasingly overwhelming and service-disrupting traffic from web crawlers. This traffic consists of an unprecedented flood of evasive and extremely aggressive requests, which caused multiple consecutive days of intermittent service disruption for our public catalog interface (and later to various digital collections services). This article will describe these impacts, as well as our evolving and escalating attempts to mitigate the denial-of-service caused by these automated crawls.”

Code{4}lib Journal, Oct. 21; University of North Carolina Libraries, June 9