[Web4lib] Duplicating/overlapping resources for Katrina

[Patricia F Anderson]

Karen,

Thank you for the excellent thought to use lessons learned from Katrina to 
inform discussions and planning for both archiving and disaster/homeland 
security/preparedness discussions. I have seen similar discussions come 
forth on other library lists.

Some of the lessons I've noted are these.

  - Doctors in shelters may not have access to online resources. There 
needs to be identified a core set of print reference materials that 
medical and public libraries keep print duplicates of to distribute at 
times like these. The Govt could develop a set of core information 
resources to keep in print, and ensure that a copy is in every library in 
the country as print and CD, as well as online..

  - Without access to electricity or computers, patient care may revert to 
less technological solutions. We may need different types of information 
for health and shelter than what is preferred during non-emergency times. 
We need to consider this in weeding our collections and deciding what is 
archived.

  - We may want to plan partnering efforts to distribute backups of our 
server data at sister institutions.

I teach web-accessible design, and took the opportunity to run a variety 
of tests on pages from the affected area. In loading cached pages, I 
noticed certain pages would not work from the cache if the original server 
was underwater (for example). These tended to be image heavy pages with no 
alt tags. NOPL's homepage was one of these. Other libraries had a blend of 
text  and image and used alt tags, with the result that loading the page 
from cache provided good information about contacts and location. I see 
this as an illustration of how to design web pages 'in case'.

Interested in hearing what other people have learned.

-- Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu

On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, K.G. Schneider wrote:
[snip]
> One of the contributing factors, I've heard, is that the Red Cross was very
> slow in getting its people-finder function going. But I'm wondering if
> disaster preparedness doesn't mean ensuring databases are in place and
> widely accessible before a disaster strikes... or that there is a standard
> that allows for easy cross-searching of any disaster database, with ways to
> fine-tune searching through metadata.
>
> Since we're librarians and presumably smart about this stuff, thought I'd
> let this thought emerge on web4lib...
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs at bluehighways.com
>
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