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.
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.
Want to see a Past Recording?
Recordings of past Solutions Showcases are available upon request. They may be shared with colleagues and peers, but please do not post them in publicly accessible spaces, as this could expose the mitigation strategies to the bots they are designed to prevent. 
To get a copy of a recording, please submit the following form: https://forms.gle/zwkujzxZh2pBNCgh7
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: Closed
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 Protect
The next two sessions in our series will feature demos by Anubis creator Xe Iaso and representatives from Stanford University Libraries & Lehigh University.
Anubis - Xe Iaso, 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: Closed
Thursday: Closed
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.
Session 4 - AWS WAF & CloudFlare Turnstile
The next Solutions Showcase will feature demonstrations from Emory University and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Emory University Library - Presenter Beth Crompton will share details of the AWS WAF set up they are using to control bot traffic at their institution.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Presenter Jason Casden will discuss the Cloudflare Turnstile deployment they are using and how they have tuned it for their system.
Date: Friday, November 21, 2025 @ 9:00am Eastern
Registration: Closed
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
Beth Crompton is the Senior Systems Administrator at Emory Libraries Technology and Digital Strategies. She does the typey-typey to build and support the infrastructure for the catalog discovery layer and several digital repositories. She works on automating workflows and building infrastructure as code so she can work less and pet cats more.
Jason Casden is the head of Software Development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries. He leads engineers working on a diverse portfolio of projects dedicated to building, maintaining, and innovating the Libraries' digital services, including digital collections and repositories, archival information systems, digital preservation systems, and the public catalog discovery layer.
Session 5 - JA4 + Fingerprinting & CloudFlare-based WAF
To kick off 2026, the February Solutions Showcase will feature demonstrations from a representative from The Internet Archives and The Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University.
The Internet Archive - Presenter Michael Della Bitta will share details of how he implemented JA4 + Fingerprinting solutions during his previous work at DPLA.
Bodleian Libraries - Presenter Tom Wrobel will discuss the CloudFlare-based WAF they are using for the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) Public.
Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2026 @ 10:00am Eastern
Registration: Closed
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
Michael Della Bitta is an Engineering Manager of Archiving Services at the Internet Archive, where he oversees the technical teams that power Vault, the Internet Archive's preservation repository service; Scholar, a portal to public domain scientific knowledge; GifCities, which preserves and makes available animated GIF cultural heritage from the early web; and the contract crawls team, which does nation-scale web archiving for multiple national governments worldwide. Previously, he was Engineering Manager at Harvard University’s Library Innovation Lab, was the Director of Technology at the Digital Public Library of America, and an engineer at The New York Public Library focusing on on repository, description, and presentation systems.
Tom Wrobel is the systems architect and Development Team Lead for the Bodleian Libraries' open access services, encompassing ORA (Oxford University Research Archive) and OAPayments (our Open Access "gold" payments administration system). His focus is on service improvements, metadata enhancement, and systems automation. He has been working hard to keep the ORA Public website at https://ora.ox.ac.uk up and running in the face of increasingly ingenious bots since 2023.
Session 6 - Notch8: Cloudflare + Customized Infrastructure & Lyrasis: AWS WAF
We continue to showcase unique and different approaches for implementations of known services to prevent and mitigate bot activity on digital infrastructure. This month we welcome two Service Providers to the Solutions Showcase. They will focus their discussion on how they are protecting their clients from malicious bot activity and how they are working to maintain these solutions to keep impacts to a minimum.
Notch8 - Presenter April Reiger will share information about the multi-solution approach they have taken using Cloudflare's edge protections.
Lyrasis - Presenter Blake Carver will discuss the AWS/WAF implementations they are using for Lyrasis-hosted ArchivesSpace clients.
Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2026 @ 12:00pm Eastern
Registration: Closed
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
April Reiger is a Senior Software Engineer/Senior DevOps Engineer with Notch8.
Notch8 provides hosted and managed repository infrastructure (Samvera, Hyku, Dataverse) for libraries, archives, and research institutions operating in both single-tenant and consortial models.
This session highlights their approach to mitigating large-scale AI scraping using Cloudflare’s edge protections—combining WAF, rate limiting, and bot management implemented via Infrastructure as Code to protect shared, multi-tenant platforms without degrading legitimate access.
Blake Carver is a Senior Systems Engineer with the Community Supported Services & Hosting Technologies (CSTHS) Division at Lyrasis. Blake will provide an overview of the AWS/WAF to protect ArchivesSpace hosted clients at Lyrasis.
Session 7 - LibLynx: Bot Filter
Continuing to explore new and innovate approaches to bot mitigation, we welcome Tim Lloyd, CEO of LibLynx, and his colleagues Paul Dixon (CTO), and George Andrei (Senior Software Engineer), to introduce us to a tool they are developing to automatically classify and categorize bot traffic. The Bot Filter uses a combination of techniques including machine learning and IP address verification. The goal is to enable service providers to identify robotic traffic upfront with no impact on the user or privacy concerns, and to tag those access requests with metadata that can help platforms make informed decisions about management of bots downstream (e.g. send to headless architecture; include in usage analytics).
Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2026 @ 9:00am Eastern
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
LibLynx is a niche service provider specializing in providing publishers and libraries with more engaging and seamless access experiences, and insightful usage analytics. They have over 60 clients, ranging from large government departments - like the US Department of Veterans Affairs where they manage library resource access across 130 hospitals - to corporate publishers like The Economist, larger commercial publishers like De Gruyter Brill, scholarly societies like the American Mathematical Society, and non-profit publishers like PLOS. Operating with a small team (<20), they are fully remote with employees across North America and Europe.
Session 8 - Mozilla: Data Collective
The bots are continuing to hammer our systems, and the rate and pace at which they're adapting is incredible. So what should we do next? On the approach of taking back control, and as a follow-up to the LibLynx Bot Filter Showcase, we welcome Christine Kim from Mozilla Data Collective (MDC). MDC's mission to ensure tech is multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal. Through giving data creators and stewards the platform for data agency and fair value exchange. MDC lets you decide what data sets you define as open-source. It provides ability to allow controlled-sharing through community governance, or commercially licensing your data. Their aim is to make it simple and safe - empowering global communities to control their digital futures.
Date: Wednesday, May 27, 2026 @ 11:00am Eastern
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
Christine Kim is the Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships at the Mozilla Data Collective. MDC is a new initiative from Mozilla that aims to rebuild the data-for-AI ecosystem, so that people and communities have control over who accesses their data, for what purposes. At MDC, Christine engages with a diversity of partners - language nonprofits, social enterprises, government agencies, GLAMs, etc. - who wish to share and download datasets with fair value exchange. Previously, she served as Director of Technology Adoption at Co-Develop Fund, leading $14.3M in investments across digital government projects in 10+ countries, spanning financial inclusion, social protection, and civil registration. Her work has enabled governments to build robust digital public infrastructure through strategic partnerships with organisations including the Inter-American Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and multiple digital public goods.
She holds an MPhil in Development Studies from Cambridge University and a BA in International Studies from Boston College, with concentrations in Economics for both degrees.
Session 9 - California State University & The University of Vienna, PHAIDRA
Moving back to implementable solutions, we welcome David Walker from The California State University (CSU) and Rastislav Hudak and Matthias Heirserer from the PHAIDRA team at the University of Vienna.
CSU - Presenter David Walker will share information about CSU's current Cloudflare implementation and discuss some of the differences they have experienced across different Cloudflare offerings. The CSU Office of the Chancellor has implemented an enterprise Cloudflare service across all its websites, including our two AWS-hosted digital repositories. This provides protections such as mitigation of malicious bot traffic and DDoS attacks, along with a Web Application Firewall. It also offers performance enhancements like caching and image optimization. The service is centrally managed by the CSU IT group.
University of Vienna - Presenters Rastislav Hudak and Matthias Heiserer will discuss the multi-solution approach they are implementing, involving PHAIDRA + Caddy + Anubis. PHAIDRA is an open-source platform designed to simplify the management, preservation, and reuse of digital asset built on the Fedora repository. Caddy is an extensible, cross-platform, open-source web server written in Go. Anubis is an open source software program that adds a proof of work challenge to websites before users can access them in order to deter web scraping
Date: Wednesday, June 24th 2026 @ 12:00pm Eastern
Registration: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/meeting/register/zDuYiyZoT5SslFTsbj8H7A
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
David Walker - David Walker is the Director of Systemwide Digital Library Services at California State University. In this role, he oversees a small team responsible for the library services platform and discovery system used across all 22 campuses. He also serves as lead developer and project manager for two Samvera-based digital repositories.
Rastislav Hudak - Rastislav Hudak is the head of the Data management team and a developer and maintainer of the PHAIDRA repository since 2011. He coordinates and oversees the hosting of PHAIDRA for the University of Vienna and multiple other institutions as well as other services of the department.
Matthias Heiserer - Matthias Heiserer is a system architect and administrator actively contributing to the development of PHAIDRA repository since 2024. He's main focus is on the infrastructure: docker, monitoring and automatisation. He's also responsible for the infrastructure behind the webpages of the university as well as other services of the Data management team.
Session 10 - The Internet Archive - Behind the Wheel of a Crawler
Adding a new twist on our Solutions Showcase Series, this month we are bringing back Michael Della Bitta from the Internet Archive to explore bots from the other side of the narrative. In this session, Michael will provide an in-depth look at what it looks like to operate a batch crawling job. From there, he will share overview of different types of crawlers, discuss why you'd want to use multiple types, and how that might inform how attendees think about and work with the crawling ecosystem. This session is intended to bring a new perspective on harvesting bots, and provide information on the crawling ecosystem from the inside.
Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2026 @ 11am Eastern
Registration: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/meeting/register/INYB7g1_RRGuvQJuAzm31A
Cost: FREE
- Session will be recorded and all registered attendees will receive a copy.
- Presenter will share details about their work, and provide time for Q&A from the audience.
Meet the Presenters
Michael Della Bitta is an Engineering Manager of Archiving Services at the Internet Archive, where he oversees the technical teams that power Vault, the Internet Archive's preservation repository service; Scholar, a portal to public domain scientific knowledge; GifCities, which preserves and makes available animated GIF cultural heritage from the early web; and the contract crawls team, which does nation-scale web archiving for multiple national governments worldwide. Previously, he was Engineering Manager at Harvard University’s Library Innovation Lab, was the Director of Technology at the Digital Public Library of America, and an engineer at The New York Public Library focusing on on repository, description, and presentation systems.
