- Tuesday 17 February 2026
- 13:30 - 14:45 EST
- 18:30 - 19:45 BST
Access in Flux: Three Hot Topics You Need to Know About
Session Description
The last 24 months have been a rollercoaster for online resource access, with rapid changes in AI-driven services, browser technologies, and the evolving regulatory frameworks introducing new barriers and uncertainties. These challenges are reshaping how libraries, publishers, and service providers think about authentication and access. This session explores three particularly hot topics impacting our community on a daily basis.
The first topic is security, and it's hard to imagine any organization involved in the knowledge industry that isn't worrying about the security of their networks and data. As the scale and sophistication of hacking and phishing attempts increase, access workflows are a high profile potential vulnerability.
The second topic is robotic traffic. The traditional view of bots as a manageable evil has fast been replaced by a world of aggressive crawling that cripples capacity and poisons usage stats - we need a more nuanced approach to bot management.
Our third topic is AI access to content and services. As users increasingly switch to AI discovery services, those services need more effective ways to search and incorporate the content we publish. Legacy access controls won't work, so what does the new normal look like?
