Are AI Bots Knocking Cultural Heritage Offline?

In late 2024, isolated accounts began to emerge from individual online cultural heritage collections. Those stories described servers and collections straining – and sometimes breaking – under the load of swarming bots. The bots were reportedly scraping all of the data from collections to build datasets to train AI models.

Did these reports reflect the experience of most online collections? Were they outliers? Or early warning signs?

The GLAM-E Lab surveyed dozens of GLAM (Gallery, Library, Archive, and Museum) institutions to begin to answer those questions. This report, published in June of 2025, documents how institutions are straining under swarms of scraping bots, and how things may get worse before they get better.