We Are Getting More Prepared – How About You?

Posted by nwsoadmin on February 27th, 2009 Posted in: Emergency Preparedness, News From NNLM PNR

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On Monday, February 9th we hosted a meeting to continue emergency preparedness planning for our region.  Dan Wilson and Susan Yowell from University of Virginia provided most of the content for the day, with particular focus on 10 Steps to Service Continuity for our Network member health sciences libraries.  Others who attended the meeting were our five State Coordinators for Emergency Preparedness: Kathy Murray (Alaska), Marcia Francis (Idaho), Laurel Egan (Montana), Dolores Judkins (Oregon), and Bob Pringle (Washington).  Several key staff members from the University of Washington Health Sciences Library also sat in. Contact information for our 5 State Coordinators is available from the NN/LM PNR’s Emergency Preparedness Page.

We reviewed activities and issues to date and looked closely at the NN/LM Emergency Preparedness Toolkit – a rich resource to consult for preparing library disaster plans.  If you are not familiar with the Toolkit, there is now a tutorial you can view, linked here:  http://nnlm.gov/ep/toolkit-tutorial/. At the end of the day, we came away with a plan for our region to continue to promote emergency preparedness for our medical library Network members. Watch for more on that soon!

On February 18th, the RML hosted an RML Rendezvous session featuring Dan Wilson who went over the 10 Steps to Service Continuity. One tool Network members are strongly encouraged to use is the NN/LM Template for 10-Step Approach to Service Continuity (a Word document). It is a great way to start thinking through what events might affect your area, what your core services are, and how to prioritize your collection for salvage, just to name a few of the steps. The RML Rendezvous session is archived and you can watch the recording at your leisure. Nikki Dettmar also wrote a Dragonfly article highlighting some checklists that Dan suggested people use to think through different scenarios that may occur following an incident. For example, one scenario is that the library is closed, but there is still power and internet service available. The checklists help prioritize which of the library’s services are high or low priority, given these circumstances.

Lastly, don’t forget that last November, MLA hosted a Webcast – “Survival Tips and Stories: Exapanding the Library’s Services in Times of Disaster.” If you missed out on the opportunity to view the webcast, we have a DVD copy you can borrow from our Lending Library.