Over the past year, BHL has been forced to contend with the issue of AI Bot (short for robot) Crawlers and the effect of their unreasonable requests for BHL’s content. I say unreasonable because while BHL’s content is made freely available and is probably beneficial to modern LLMs, the behavior of these bots and their disruptive effect on BHL has proven that they are bad partners in the exchange of information.
BHL is not the only organization to contend with this in recent months. Other cultural heritage organizations have reported the same or similar experiences, most notably this detailed report from Michael Weinberg at the GLAM-E Lab.
By the time this and other articles had been posted in mid-2025, BHL had already crested the first wave of interruptions.
