The Solutions Showcase Series is organized by the AI Discussions Group, a collaborative initiative that emerged from shared concerns about the impact of AI-driven web harvesting on academic institutions. While our initial focus was on academic repositories, we’ve since expanded our scope to include all corners of the GLAM sector.
The group is currently working through three focused sub-groups:
- Solutions – to discuss and share mitigation strategies
- Metrics – to better understand the direct user impacts as a means for education and advocacy
- White Paper – to articulate the challenges and advocate for sector-wide awareness
Have a solution to share?
We’re actively looking for additional presenters! If your institution has addressed AI bot scraping in a creative or effective way, we’d love to feature your work. Please reach out to Arran Griffith at arran.griffith@lyrasis.org to book a presentation slot.
Session 1 - METRO & Southeastern New York Library Resource Council
The first session will feature demos by representatives from METRO and the Southeastern New York Library Resources Council.
Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) - Presenters Diego Pino and Allison Sherrick will share the Anubis-based, solution they are deploying and the customized elements they have developed to meet their needs.
Southeastern New York Library Resources Council - Presenter Zachary Spalding will share details on how they are deploying AWS WAF in combination with other services to control their bot traffic.
Date: Thursday, August 28, 2025 @ 10:30am Eastern
Registration: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/meeting/register/ITwAfGVFQdS2IF_0uCkTTA
Cost: FREE
- Each session will feature a live demo and time for Q&A.
- Demos will span a diverse range of technical approaches, including open and non-open source solutions.
Meet the Presenters
Diego Pino is a dog and plant friendly Software architect and the Director of Digital Strategy at the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO). As part of METRO’s Digital Services Team he co-designs and develops the Archipelago Commons Repository open source software, manages way too many Repository Servers, and helps support community use cases, needs and governance. He also tries (hard) to contribute to other OSS communities efforts like IIIF and Cantaloupe.
Allison Sherrick is the Digital Project and Services Manager at the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO). Allison works as part of METRO’s Digital Services Team to extend digitization, metadata, hosting and support services for digital collections and custom digital projects development. She is an active member of the Archipelago Commons open source software team, and specializes in implementing and supporting diverse digital repository configurations and environments.
Zachary Spalding serves as the Systems Manager at the Southeastern New York Library Resources Council, where he supports both the council’s technology services and its infrastructure. With a background in IT, networking, systems management, and cybersecurity, Zachary focuses on practical solutions that help member libraries better serve their communities. He is especially interested in open-source tools, secure access, and streamlining digital workflows.
Session 2 & 3 - Anubis, F5 Bot Defence & Captcha Project
The next two sessions in our series will feature demos by Anubis creator Xe Laso and representatives from Stanford University Libraries & Lehigh University.
Anubis - Xe Laso, creator of Anubis, will showcase the javascript-powered software that is being used to help deter impacts of web-scraping from bots.
Stanford University Libraries - Presenter Julian Morley will share details on their implementation of F5 Bot Defense, which is a component of F5’s BigIP line of hardware load balancers.
LeHigh University - Presenter Joe Corall will showcase Captcha Protect, which is an open source Traefik middleware that adds anti-bot challenges to safeguard systems from abuse and spam.
Dates:
Wednesday, October 29, 2025 @10:00am Eastern
Thursday, October 30, 2025 @ 10:00am Eastern
Registration:
Wednesday: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/meeting/register/UgpcagwuRyq3ZttNsCMkVw
Thursday: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/meeting/register/cyWtRLRhQL-EV7ow41okYA
Cost: FREE
- Each session will feature a live demo and time for Q&A.
- Demos will span a diverse range of technical approaches, including open and non-open source solutions.
Meet the Presenters
Xe Iaso is a technical educator, conference speaker, twitch streamer, vtuber, and philosopher who focuses on ways to help make technology easier to understand and do cursed things in the process. She lives in Ottawa with her husband and does developer relations professionally. Xe is an avid writer for her blog, where she has over 400 articles. She regularly experiments with new technologies and finds ways to mash them up with old technologies for her own amusement.
Julian Morley is Associate Director, IT Operations at Stanford University Libraries. As part of the Libraries’ Digital Library Systems & Services division he manages the operations engineers, application developers and business analysts of the operations and library systems groups, overseeing the Libraries’ digital estate. This includes the virtual machine infrastructure, databases, storage, networking, cloud platforms and critical systems such as the library catalog and the Stanford Digital Repository. Julian is also an editor of the Oxford Common File Layout (ocfl.io), which is designed to promote long-term object management best practices within digital repositories.
Joe Corall is a Repository Architect at Lehigh University, where he serves as the technical lead for the Lehigh Preserve, the university's digital repository platform. He is a contributor to the Islandora open source project, actively developing tools and workflows that support digital scholarship, preservation, and access to research and archival collections. He is also the founder of libops, which provides hosting and managed services for open source library technologies.
