Disaster, contingency planning for libraries, archives, museums

Consultancy is available in disaster plan review, formatting advice or bespoke plan composition. HDRS can also provide in-house training in handling of water and fire damaged paper-based media and in testing your existing plan in an implementation afternoon, where we test the plan against a range of minor and major scale scenarios.

Priority Users are entitled to a free review of any draft or existing disaster plan. Simply post your plan in hard copy to our Cambridge office and a report will be sent to you with any observations HDRS makes.

Tips on Disaster Planning for Libraries and Archives

Remember that if the document is ever used, it will be in a highly stressful situation - so make the format very user-friendly (flow-charts, bullet points, tables, checklists) and easy to follow. Large paragraphs will not be followed!
Whilst disaster prevention is very important, it is important not to confuse this part of the planning process with disaster reaction and recovery - if a disaster prevention section appears in the plan then it is going to add to the size of the document and make it more unwieldy in a critical situation. If they must be combined, then try to print the reaction and recovery sections on different coloured paper for easy reference in a disaster.
Health & Safety - fire and flood situations are very dangerous and very few of the plans reviewed by HDRS have mentioned the word 'Risk Assessment' which, given the inevitable difficulties in working conditions, should be one of the first actions for the disaster recovery manager. If someone is injured in the salvage effort, then questions will be asked of the Disaster Recovery Manager.
Identify your priorities for salvage: criteria to consider are: monetary value, difficulty for replacement, vulnerability when wet, historical value, those vital for operational continuity. Remember that priorities are not necessarily antiquarian items, but might be those whose absence would have the worst effect on your organisation's operational continuity - e.g. short loan/most accessed stock, catalogues, administrative records and so on.
Your plan should be able to contend both with a minor incident and a major fire or flood - remember that in some major situations, certain actions will be impossible, impractical or counter-productive given the scale of the incident. (e.g. bagging of individual items, comprehensive cataloguing - by the time you have catalogued the last shelf if an entire record store is flooded, it could be weeks after the original incursion!). The image below shows some of the undamaged material after a major flood - the scale of such an incident precluded comprehensive cataloguing and the focus moved to stabilisation of damaged items as soon as possible - even this took several days.

Disaster kit locations - if you can only have one kit, try not to keep it in a difficult to access area such as on a high floor or in a basment- it won't be very useful if you cannot get to it. Preferably it is better to keep disaster kits in a separate building to which you have easy access. Also conduct an inventory of disaster kits every six months as contents can easily be pilfered!
Remember that the demands on your staff after a major incident will be considerable - you may have to introduce shift patterns and turn people away on the first day of the recovery to ensure that you have fit people to assist on the second day, or overnight. Staff may not be used to heavy manual handling - wet paper can be 200% heavier than its original weight - and should take breaks at least every 90 minutes.
Set up reciprocal arrangements with local counterparts so that if you experience a disaster you can rely on additional people to assist in the recovery experienced in handling documents and books.
Ensure the telephone number of your insurance company and policy number is featured early in your plan and that there is an action on the Disaster Recovery Manager to call them. They will need to be involved in all major decisions and will appoint a Loss Adjuster to resolve the claim.
Don't let your plan be a paper exercise! Ensure that it is distributed to your key disaster recovery staff and at least summary page is distributed to others - and not just library staff. Who uses your building outside of office hours? They are probably more likely to discover an incident and so should be trained in the disaster plan.

For further information, please contact us.