Help in Emergency

Do you know about NVOAD?  It’s a coalition, the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster.  Their website lists a broad range of organizations, faith-based and otherwise, who provide disaster relief and many support services all over the world.  You can find contact information and links to the web pages for each organization.  Check your state’s listings to see whether there’s a group you can contact as a resource, or maybe you would like to volunteer to help out in your area.  There are also valuable resources listed from their Member Tools link and their Links link.  The more networking we can do, the better off we’ll all be in recovering from a disaster.

Highlighting a great salvage/recovery site: NEDCC

The Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) has many very helpful resources available to help rescue paper-based collections.  (Their own disaster plan template, dPlan, is featured on their pages.)  What I found especially pertinent, however, were the many preservation leaflets–there’s a “Click to view Preservation Leaflets” link in the left menu bar on every page.  The leaflets deal with every situation imaginable and are well-written and succinct.  NEDCC also offers a 24/7 “hotline” number to call with salvage questions.  I’m adding them to our blog’s list of sources for future reference!

Interleaving

Drying a wet book is not as simple as we might think!  At the ANCHASL meeting last Friday, Walter Cybulski showed a fascinating presentation on how to deal with water-damaged materials.  Many of the procedures he outlined are contained in this page from Washington University in St. Louis, which gives detailed directions and contains some very helpful pictures of how to interleave paper towels in a wet book properly and how not to do it. 

ANCHASL meeting in Raleigh: Disaster Preparedness and Response for Medical Libraries

Dan and I attended the ANCHASL (Association of North Carolina Health and Science Libraries) meeting in Raleigh on Friday, June 15 (click here to see the program).  The meeting was held in the beautiful Andrews Conference Center at the Wake Area Health Education Center.  Robert James (Duke University) is the president of ANCHASL this year, and had organized the meeting, which was well attended by both academic and hospital librarians.  In addition to the North Carolina members, a hospital librarian from Lowell, Massachusetts attended, as well as Beth Wescott from NN/LM.  The program for the day included a short business meeting for the organization, but otherwise focused on raising awareness about disaster preparedness and educating attendees about writing disaster plans, developing contingency plans for maintaining services, and salvaging collections.  The meeting featured informative and entertaining speakers on several different aspects of disaster preparedness and emergency response.  The information presented engendered some very productive discussion and questions.  Here’s a list of the speakers:

• Mark Schell, Durham County Emergency Management, on working with first responders and emergency managers 
• Robert James, Duke University Medical Center Library, on writing a library disaster plan.  As part of his presentation, Robert outlined use of the Heritage Preservation’s Disaster Wheel, and distributed copies of the wheel to all participants.  He also referred to the Field Guide published last summer by Heritage Preservation.
• Walter Cybulski, NLM, on salvaging water damaged collections
• Angie Santiago, of the  Contingency Planning Association of the Carolinas, on service continuity planning for medical libraries
• Dan Wilson, chair for the SE/A RML Emergency Preparedness Task Force, on how the RML can provide support to health sciences libraries in emergency

Georgetown Public Library Update

Click here for a nice update on the recovery efforts at the Georgetown Public Library in the District of Columbia.

Georgetown Public Library Update

Below is an excerpt from an article in the Georgetown Voice on the recovery status of the library.

Fortunately for historians, the Peabody room escaped the disaster mostly unscathed. Dorsey said that 95 percent of the collection was saved. According to a library press release, library employees, as well as contractors from a document-preservation company called Belfor Property Restoration, were able to re-enter the building early on Tuesday and began loading water-sogged records into refrigerated trailers to prevent mold from setting in.

Though no timetable has yet been set, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s office estimates reconstruction will cost between $15 and $20 million. In the meantime, local residents will still be able to get their reading fix. According to the library release, “A bookmobile is being readied to serve the Georgetown community while efforts get underway to establish a temporary library.”

Kudos to Memorial Hospital in Gulfport, Mississippi

The physicians, staff and friends of Memorial Hospital in Gulfport, Mississippi, have raised $13,500 for the Sumter Regional Hospital.  (Gulfport was one of the towns hit hard by Hurricane Katrina.)  “So many people assisted us in our time of need, and we felt that now it was our turn to show support to someone else in need,” said David Estorge, Memorial Foundation president.  Click here to read the complete article from SunHerald.com.

“Serving Through Disaster”

Check out the March 15, 2007 issue of Library Journal for the article, “Serving Through Disaster.“  It makes an excellent case for the importance of service continuity planning as a key part of any disaster plan.  For many Health Sciences libraries, it might be the most important part, as we rely more on timely access to electronic resources than we do on saving books and print journals in an emergency.   My favorite quote is by Anne Candreva, CIO of the Brooklyn Public Library, “The question of how quickly we can get back on our feet has turned into how can we make sure to stay there in the first place.”

Sumter Regional Hospital Library Update

Here’s an update on the library at Sumter Regional Hospital:

• The print collection has been saved and packed away.
• The hospital budget will likely be tight, so updates of some of the textbooks over the next few years are unlikely.
• The librarian has moved into a modular building behind the hospital, with some shelving, filing cabinets, and a small desk.  She’s trying to figure out where all the print journals are going to accumulate.
• The librarian is going to attempt to get a computer set up in the temporary hospital for the doctors and staff to us.

Click here for additional information about Sumter Regional Hospital.

Importance of Disaster Recovery

“The greatest stress on hospitals … is after the event rather than during or before. Yet in disaster planning, we spend time planning for the 30 minutes before the disaster hits but rarely get to the recovery phase in our planning exercises.” - Admiral John O. Agwunobi, MD, MBA, MPH, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, speaking at a VHA Health Foundation forum

Admiral Agwunobi argues that disaster planning should begin 30 days after a catastrophic event occurs, not at the actual event. This is an interesting perspective, and one that is currently playing out at the Sumter Regional Hospital. When you get a chance, take a look at Sumter’s current web page (in particular, click on the SRH Employee Updates) and see how the issues are changing as the days go by.