 The floor is yours. All right, thank you so much, Hope. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us again. We are on our second webinar for the course Protecting Your Collections, Writing a Disaster Response Plan. And today, Julie, we'll be going over prep side A communications. As you know, this is just one course in a series caring for yesterday's treasures today, a project that's been made possible by a Laura Bush 21st century librarian grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And we have learning times on board to help us out with these webinars and our website. So it looks like we have another great crowd today. It looks like we're slowly climbing up to 190, logged into this meeting room right now. Go ahead and keep those hellos coming. And I'm actually going to ask you to not only say hello today, but I also want you to share with the group now that you've had a chance to look at the prep. What do you think about it? Share your comments about prep. About the tool and what ideas you might have to customize it for your institution. So in addition to those hellos, tell us what you thought. So while you're doing that, I'm going to just quickly review some logistics for the course. After today, we have two more webinars next Tuesday and Thursday at 2 PM Eastern, same place. And like our two courses in the past, you may earn a certificate of completion. You, of course, do not have to work towards a certificate. But if you are interested, we just need a few things from you. The first is you must have been registered. And if you're getting our emails, you are likely set. You must also turn in a permission form by the end of the course. But it looks like many of you have already done that. So thank you. And we also ask that you watch these webinars live or because you understand that's not always possible, that you watch the recording. So after each webinar, I hope, as you already know, we'll send an email to all our registered participants with a link to the recording. You should have gotten one that went out on Tuesday around 5.30 Eastern. So if you didn't get that email, please contact us so we can figure out what's going on. And I do have to apologize. We had an issue with our group attendance. So you may have seen the wrong email. But we've gotten that taken care of. So if you were in a group, you're all set on attendance. And then the final requirement for this course is completing all four homework assignments, which will be posted to the course home page. And I have to say, I am incredibly impressed. We've already had 172 people complete the first homework assignment. So keep up the fantastic work. And I hope you've had a chance to check out the course web page since our last course. As I said, we'll post the homework assignments there. But you will also find a single handout for each of our webinars. This handout has the PowerPoint presentations and also resources that we'll be referencing. So we really encourage you to print these out in advance and have them handy for these live webinars. You'll also see at the very bottom of the page in a green box, many of the handouts that are in that single PDF are also available as a downloadable and fill-in format that you can customize for your institution. Just a few more things. If you are an archivist, we have some great news for you. This course is eligible for archival credits. And you can find more information on this website we have posted. I believe this is eligible for two credits. And I do want to point out, I know many of you are already members, but I want to invite anybody who isn't already a member to join the online community. It is free. It is, of course, by no means required to participate in this course and the other ones that are coming up. But becoming a member does grant you access to our discussion board, which is really a fantastic place to continue some of these conversations that we're having. And to join, you would just do so in that upper right hand corner. And becoming a member and registering for the courses are two separate processes. So just keep that in mind. We know it's kind of confusing. And then last but not least, if you have questions, let us know. We're here to help you. All right. Julie, it looks like we're getting a lot of great response and feedback in that chat box on the prep. And I know you also wanted to ask a question. And let me pull that over. So we want to know from you since our last webinar, have you had a chance to introduce PrEP to your colleagues? And I'll give you a second to fill that out. It's really exciting watching these comments that are coming in. I wish you could see the big smile on my face by how positive you are and how helpful you think this tool is going to be. I love the little comment. And I missed who wrote it. But it said, a prep in hand is worth two on the shelf. It kind of sums it up for me, too. So that's very exciting. So let's see. Well, it looks like about 50% of you haven't had a chance yet. I mean, after all, I only gave you about two days. So really only one day, practically. But a number of you are. So that's great. And I appreciate that. You can keep engaging other people with it. And I know you gave us a lot of information on the homework. Anything else, Jenny? I'm going to go ahead and move over your presentation. And I am actually going to move over this say hello chat box. And we're going to move over to that moderated chat. You'll notice that when you post something, you'll see your comment twice once when you submit it and once when I approve it. But don't worry, no one else is seeing it twice just you are. And throughout the presentation, feel free to post questions or comments. And we'll try to get to them as soon as we reach breaks or by the end of the presentation. So Julie, I'll hand things over to you. Great. Thanks, Jenny. Well, it's great to have so many of you participating again today. And I also appreciate it, as Jenny did, how many of you did the homework? Continue this process of sharing the samples and the template with your colleagues. There really was overwhelming support for the PrEP as a tool in the homework as well. For those of you who voiced concern in the homework about getting some of the information for the PrEP, I want to reassure you that much more to help you is going to continue to be covered over the course of these webinars. And also that I'll point you to where you can find some additional information. So someone also made a comment in the homework about they wish they had a PrEP for their personal use as well as their work use. I want to tell you that I do. In fact, I have filled out a PrEP with all the key information for my family, insurance information, utilities information. We have animals, so there are vets on there and all sorts of things, emergency phone numbers. I also have contacts with some of my colleagues around the US that help with disasters. And I have their numbers on there. So I encourage you, it's such an agreeable and easy to use little template. There are all sorts of ways. Can I know an insurance company has done a modified one for people and for medical information? I know some tribal cultural centers and libraries have put some together, medical libraries have put some together. So please look for any way you can to make use of it. Keep in mind that there is a deadline for getting your disaster plan done. Unlike other deadlines we face day to day in our work and our life, we don't know the date. It could be two weeks from now, two months from now, two years from now. It is a deadline. Nonetheless, for when something happens, you're going to want that plan. So I really shouldn't be stressing you out at the beginning of this. So anyway, let me go on to the first slide that encourages you to take a phased approach. Don't get overwhelmed, a few reminders here. I know a number of you are from very small libraries and museums, historical societies, historic houses. I don't want you to get discouraged. There's some real tips along the way to help you. And if you need help finding something or connecting to the right people, just ask. There are lots of us to help you. So keep your eye on the goal of a disaster plan that's going to maximize efficient response and minimize loss of materials. Remember, it needs to be tailored to your facility, your building, your staff, your collections, the formats you hold, and the available funding resources you have available. A successful plan not only teaches people what to do, but also how to remain calm. And so that's always something to keep in mind. So using this phased approach, take it in manageable pieces. Use the prep and the appendices to help you. Start off by identifying the key people, perhaps as you start to look at the communications side. And today, as we look at the handout, the appendix on team members, names and positions will begin to come to mind that would be good people to work with on a group. So remember, you don't reinvent the wheel. There's just plenty of help in who to pull together as a group. The importance is to get the plan and hold on your efforts incrementally. So gather some staff together. Remember, these can be volunteers, board members, and create a sort of planning group. The task is to gather the needed institutional information, phone numbers, floor plans, utility information, collection information, and so forth. It's much easier if you can divide up the tasks between a group of maybe three to five people or maybe it needs to be a few more if you're a larger institution. So draw upon staff with different expertise. For instance, your facilities person is gonna know right off where the floor plans are. Your financial person should be able to provide insurance information. Collection people will know what the priority collections are and so forth. So draw upon all of them and then set some realistic goals and a timeline. Be realistic, but the timeline is helpful to keep you on track. You can state things like, oh, by April 1st. Okay, well, April 1st is an interesting date. April Fool's Day, I wanna have X done. That can begin to help you get some structure. I had someone in a workshop who sent me her Excel spreadsheet timeline for the following nine months to accomplish their institutional disaster planning. I was really surprised by the formality of it and I queried her out of interest and she said she wanted to make sure that there was institutional buy-in to do the work and that she was gonna be spearheading. So by having the spreadsheet agreed to ahead of time, that gave her leverage to spend time on the project and to involve others in the process. So not really something I had thought about ahead of time. Tracking your progress. Maybe you use a checklist or an Excel sheet, you know, whatever works for you. Personally, as humans, I think, at least this is how I feel, there's a great satisfaction to putting a little check mark on a list to show that I've accomplished something. And by tracking this progress, it'll also show you just how much you've actually accomplished over time. We often forget to congratulate ourselves and others on what we've achieved and since this is gonna be a group process, that recognition becomes very important. Then keep your contents clear and reliable. Remember, a responsive plan is not a long plan. Keep it up to date, review it at least annually, especially to contact people on the phone numbers. There's nothing worse than going to a plan and finding out-of-date numbers and people who don't even still work at the institution. So the prep's gonna help you with that, kind of keeping this all together. Build on your webinar appendices from this series, the pocket plan, and the appendices will give you additional guidelines on how to customize. And you're gonna be pretty much good to go. Get help from colleagues. Look beyond your institution to other museums and libraries nearby. Do they have a disaster plan? How has it worked for them? If they've had to use it, pick their brains, share documents, an idea, even if to ask them to review your plan and provide some input. This also is kind of a networking component that will pay off far beyond just the disaster plan documents. These folks are the ones you may turn to for help when disaster strikes. So start developing the relationships and then familiarize your team with available resources. There are many out there. Investigate some of them, please that are on the webinar resource list. It's not a long list. It's annotated to give you some direction. So please take a look at it. Go to some of those sources. And then I always say be sure to print out information you find and hole punch liberally. Use what others have written when possible. I mean, you do not get extra credit for original writing when it comes to disaster plans. Save yourself whenever you can. There's so much good information out there. And then just keep your eye on the goal to complete the plan and train staff to carry it out. I wanna show you a couple of low-cost resources that are especially good. These are all on your resource list and they are available through Heritage Preservation website. If you're small, possibly volunteer or a couple of person staff, you may decide to get copies of the field guide shown on the left, field guide to emergency response. And then purchase some of the disaster wheels, which is shown in the middle, the emergency response and salvage disaster wheel. And then put those together with a pocket response plan and your floor plans. And that may be enough for you. You don't need a lot of other documents. Don't make this more complicated than it needs to be. I'm giving a broad cross-section of documents in this series because we have all different sizes of institutions, but simply pare it down to what works for you. Let me talk a little more about these three. The field guide, I even saw some folks, I think at the last session in the chat mentioning, get the field guide, somebody I think even said, put it in your glove compartment, right? It's not a bad idea. It has a CD with it on salvage of a variety of collection types. It provides a very clear and practical information. Helps you initiate your response in salvage steps. There are areas you can fill in local information to customize it to. It's very easy to use and practical. Then I advocate for everyone to have, at one, if not multiple copies of the emergency response and salvage wheel. Get familiar with it and have them out and visible. There's a magnet on it, which makes it very easy to slap them up in file cabinets and keep them kind of in the front of people's minds. One side is immediate response information and it includes instructions on what to do, even say if you have advanced warning. Say there's an incoming storm. It gives you some guidance on things to think about. On the other side is triage and salvage of a variety of collection types. Then you'll also see there on the far right is the app. This can make it even more readily available but the content is on the ERS, Emergency Response and Salvage. It's a free app for Apple, Android and Blackberry and the link for the apps is also on your resource list with the Heritage Preservation Entry. So these are great tools to use with your disaster plan and take advantage of them. We just start a little bit on the prep and then we'll see what questions you have. The basic components of your overall disaster plan and how do they interrelate? That's what this slide kind of lays out and I'll refer to it. So try to kind of keep these concepts or kind of three main parts. The pocket plan kind of sits on the top. It's our go-to tool. It's our quick reference for communications and actions and it'll really get us going in the immediate aftermath of an emergency. Then we have this category, broader category of emergency preparedness and response documents. The first five bullets are there. What's above the dotted line? Immediate emergency response and systems gives immediate call information and location of where some of your emergency systems are. Responsibilities during a disaster response and recovery and who's on the disaster team, that's kind of another component. Damage assessment can be a form to use to conduct an assessment after a disaster. Priorities or collection priorities and other priorities, establishing those, getting those written down. And then finally salvage procedures for the kind of what you include is salvage information for the types of collections that you specifically own. Now be reassured, these first five bullets, we are gonna spend quite a bit of time on, I'm gonna give you documents to gather this information. Some of it is simply printed out and added to your plan which is the case with the salvage procedures. So be reassured, this is what we're gonna spend our time on in the next couple of sessions. Now what is below that line is kind of what you're responsible for adding. I'm just gonna mention these things but these are customized to your location. So the first is kind of emergency and evacuation procedures. I consider these the people plans. So I refer to them, they're the things like what happens if a fire alarm goes off? How do you evacuate the building? What if there's a medical emergency? How do you proceed? What if a bomb is phoned in? That's the kind of thing. I'm assuming that the majority of you have this kind of information. Now if you don't, I would say email us about it and let us know and we can send you some templates of this general kind of information. You don't have to start writing these yourself. Sometimes these are those things that are on the little flip chart tools that we talked about at the last session, just kind of this immediate response kind of information. Another thing you add are floor plans. Now you may already have some of these posted around your building for evacuation routes, I hope. At session one you saw ideas for dropping floor plans right into the pocket plan. Certainly some of you are too large to begin to do that and so floor plans would be included as a separate part in your disaster documents. Facility and location assessment, that is something you should attach about your most likely risks and hazards. Three quarters of you at the first session said that you had attended the risk evaluation webinar done last month by Alex Allard. Now I need you to complete that risk evaluation and what it'll do is then help you figure out your most likely risks and to make sure that these are addressed in your disaster plan. Then your insurance policy. And if you don't have an insurance policy, you make a statement to that fact. We will discuss insurance more today and you should have a plan to attach at least a summary sheet about your coverage to your disaster plan. If you have no insurance for collections recovery, make sure that that is known as well and keep your fingers crossed that nothing happens to your institution. Okay, let's, Jenny, I don't see any questions specifically yet. Do you have? No, no. Do you have any? Not yet. I hope I'm not just lulling you all to sleep with all of this talking. So, well, in that case, I think I'll just go on. I'm sure you're going to, I'm sure you're gonna come up with some and I have seen some notes going in there about, for instance, to some of the citations I mentioned, so that's helpful too, thanks. Okay, let's go on. What I'd like you to do now is pull out your prep template, the one from Tuesday's session. We're gonna be using it today. It'll probably be easier for you to look at the paper copy and then keep it handy because we're gonna look at it again next week. You may want to, now that we have it up on the course website, you may want to download after this session the full eight and a half by 14 inch version and print it out as long as you can print out eight and a half by 14. The, that's a Word document in the Disaster Plan Template Downloads Area, which is towards the bottom of the course website page. I just wanna reassure you that we shrunk it to eight and a half by 11 paper to make it easier for you to print and have handy for this session. But I realize it's very small and so you can get it a little bit bigger. So today we're gonna go through each of the headers. As you see them here on the screen, each of these bullets are the headers across the top of the pocket plan. Side A is communications. Remember now, this is easily modified. The Word version, which you can download, it holds its column shape. You know, you can edit and delete information that doesn't apply to your institution and add components that will, like the floor plans or images, things like that that we saw some examples of. So the, let me pull up. Here's the small version. Now you can, if you don't have this, you can remember go to full screen up above the slides. Reminder, if you click on full screen, you're gonna lose the chat and the closed captioning. So you, it's a toggle button. You can go, if you toggle back, it will take you, it will take you back to the regular webinar page. But you may find it easier to be on the bigger screen. So I just can't stress enough how important communication is for a successful response. Quite frankly, without the ability to communicate with key people, you are basically dead in the water. I mean, excuse the pun, but you are stuck. I think we inherently know this. However, it's amazing how many plans fail or stumble at the communications point right at the beginning of an emergency. Key people's contact information is missing. Numbers are out of date. Employees are listed who no longer work there or they changed roles. I mean, the list goes on and on. So the beauty of the prep is that it's gonna pull all the names and numbers together in one place and it's gonna make it easier for you to see if any key person is missing. And that greatly facilitates keeping the contact information at one place and for regular updating. Let me see, I'm gonna try here with the arrow. I wanna point out to you right up at the top, right under the name, is date revised. And this is critical. Always be changing that date so people can tell right off what version they are working with. So making this communications part a priority, guide your thinking again for people and groups to be contacted and filling this out for the immediate responsibility areas, specific areas, regardless of who's in the building and who receives the first alert. This information they can go right to during closed hours if people are at home. It always seems to me disasters happen over three-day weekends or holidays or nights. They are rarely convenient. So always try to figure out what you have on here. We'll help you no matter where you are. So we're gonna keep going through here. Realize the text is small and I'm gonna keep showing you components of this as we go through. Before I switch to the next screen, it's not a my screen, but on your printout, there is text at the top and at the bottom, the header and footer on the prep. These are directions. It tells you when you're finished with editing it, you cut off, cut around the outside line which cuts off the header and footer information, and then you fold it accordion style on the vertical lines, and then you fold that little pack in half. So it gets down to about a credit card size. And then you can put it in a little envelope. It does say on the footer of your handout that you can purchase Tyvek Envelopes from COSA, the Council of State Archives, and it will fit right into that. Tyvek will last forever in your wallet. You can get other envelopes, but that's just an idea for you if you only need a few. That's one way to go about it. Okay, let's go on to, let me hear that. Let me go on to the next slide here because what we're gonna do now is start looking at the component parts. This is that side A communications. So on the left, what you see is the generic template that you have, and on the right is the prep of that section for the Placer County Archives and Management Facility. That's one of the ones we looked at quickly at the last session, so you have it as a sample in your handout packet from the first section. So that name, that date of revision right up at the top, very important, set up that schedule of updating. Do it at least annually, or when any of the key people's names change. And so we have that right there. And especially if any of these names change in the first couple of columns, that would be very important to get out an update. I wanna point out to you that kind of our template name here is Director. When you look over here, you see what they call that person was a museum administrator. This is how to do it, make these changes. The template is only meant as guidance. Simply change the name to what is appropriate for you. Now another part is that if you have people that have multiple roles, in other words, you have somebody, let's say, who is involved in security as well as facilities. You don't list these two entries, you simply combine security, facilities, building manager, all with slashes, and then you put the name once. So don't repeat a person's name down over multiple headings. Put them, gather them together. You'll notice also that it calls for a number of different modes of communication, and then you see that's exactly what they've done over on the placer example. Phone, work email, cell phone number, home email, home phone. Have as many alternate modes as you can, especially for these key people. If your institutional server is down and you can still access the internet, I guarantee you that Gmail, AOL, all these others are gonna be operational, and it may be that that's a way you'll start communicating. You may be texting on personal cell phones. When cell lines are overloaded, it would cause the smaller packets of text information can stack for a while and then get delivered. They're much more likely to get through when there is an overloaded system. If you find there's a delay in the text message, you may want to actually type in the time of when you're sending the text message, but just keep in mind, I'm giving you this kind of this detail to try to impress on you how important it is to have multiple modes of communication. You never know what may not be available to you to communicate. Especially if you're in more remote areas with less communication alternatives. So for example, you may have a board member or a volunteer who is a ham radio operator who can assist you in an emergency. If so, boy, add them to your contacts. That is a great backup way. So think very strategically and broadly when considering communication options. Notice also a placer used, you know, color to, and you mentioned this last time to kind of different sections to stand out. You can also highlight in with color like yellow, electronically with yellow or similar. My only warning again is to double check and print it out in black and white just to make sure nothing gets lost with the color. I had one person who developed a prep in a workshop and then used it about six months later for a pretty serious emergency. And she said that when she first pulled out the prep to implement her plan, all the names and numbers just started swimming in front of her eyes and she just couldn't focus in immediately. Remember that we operated about 20% of her capacity in the immediate aftermath of emergency? Well, that's where she was at that point. So what she did is she revised her plan and after that experience and highlighted in yellow and also put some things in caps, the most important information and phone number. So these would jump out at her more. So, you know, that's a great suggestion. So Jenny, it looks like maybe there are some questions. Did you? Yeah, well, we have one from, actually it was from Shelley out in Ohio. She said that they wrote a disaster plan last year and tried to denote responsibilities. But it's a small organization. So that was kind of naysaid. They thought it was not practical to give specific responsibilities to staff when it's such a small staff. And perhaps if they gave a responsibility, that person might not be there. Do you have any ideas, any advice to tackle this? Do you believe it's important to assign responsibilities? I think that's a very good point. I mean, when you have a small staff, you need, like for anything else you probably do, you have to cross train. And so what you may do is look at a responsibility list that actually we're going to be going through today and see what the potential people are and talk about it. And then you could actually assign when people get there who's going to take over what. That's fine. And because key people can be missing, absolutely. So yeah, that is fine. Just make sure you get to a point where you've trained people enough that they're comfortable, that they are comfortable with that. And then we did have a few questions about communication when cell phone towers are out. Janine is curious, what about short wave in areas where cell towers are already scanned? That's look for any options that you might potentially have available. And sometimes your emergency management, your county and city emergency management can tell you what some of the possibilities might be in the area. I see someone also mentioned satellite phones. That is more stable, also a lot more expensive. But yes, that's another option. So list any of those things. I mean, if you have a satellite phone or if you know somebody who does, who can help you. If any short wave, ham, any of those things, yes. I think that's it, Julie. OK, great. Let's keep going, then. OK, here's let me get rid of that. Here is some more on the next two. Actually, I think it's the next two columns. Building utilities and first responders. I want to kind of go through these, and we'll see what questions you have. First to start off, this is a very liberal definition of first responders. Normally we think of medical, fire, police, et cetera. But this gathers some of the non-institutional information together. So the left is the generic template again. And the right is the section from actually the Fresno County Library. If you're a standalone, not part of a larger system, utility information is vitally important to you. I mean, that is, you may be the one that has to initiate individual calls. So try to get 24-hour or emergency numbers where you can and find out what you can count on them in an emergency. If you have wells or pumps, anything like that that's critical, add that in. If you have a landlord, maybe you need to go through them for everything in this column. So what's their 24-hour number? What can you actually count on them for and how quickly? Filling out this part of the prep can also be used as a method to begin building these relationships with landlords and shared tenants. Set up a dialogue with these people. Their response will dramatically affect your well-being and your collection. So don't miss any opportunity to set up relationships. We'll talk more about that in session four. Now, in the responder column, you may be supposed to just call 911 to report things. That's fine. But find it out. I know campuses sometimes you call like a campus police. They don't want you to call immediately to 911. So put that information in. Also, city, county, and state emergency management is listed here. That's really important if you're in a regional emergency, a disaster situation, reporting to your city emergency management. So they can record what kind of damage you've had, what your immediate needs are, and they can also help to report up the chain what you may need. So that's why this hierarchy of numbers is here. They're also on their website, city and county. They usually will be providing regular communication updates. Health department is on here. It's down in here. The, you know, it's our contaminated water involved, chemicals. Anything like that with the health department, you might not have to be checking. Good number to have. Local Red Cross is very good. They provide a lot of comfort care. They can bring in hot meals. They're amazing. They're psychological support. So having their emergency number. Then down at the bottom is some FEMA information and numbers. The Environment and Historic Preservation Office. There's one in every FEMA region. It's important, especially if you were in a FEMA declared a disaster. If you're in an historic building impacted by an emergency water or whatever, they're very good to be in touch with. The Fresno example here on the side kind of shows how they've included their numbers. The one thing I just general I wanted to point out is that they include both full. Some numbers have area codes. Some have just the number and have just extensions. I just want you to be aware that extensions imply that you're making the call from within the phone system in the building. And area codes, I'm very sensitive. I have three area codes in my county. And I always put area codes on all the phone numbers. So I mean, this varies. I mean, you can decide whatever you want. Remember, this is really valuable real estate for you to figure out what you need and want to do. Let's go on to the next one. OK. So now we have the final two columns, template on the left, plaster archives, and collections facility on the right. Emergency services, you're going to need to decide what to include here depending on your collection types and your responsibilities. This is, again, these are things to prompt you to think about it. The first listing I highly recommend you keep on. It's American Institute for Conservation. It can help you find a conservator in your region. Their website's listed, their phone number. And also, they have emergency assistance through the AIC Collections Emergency Response Team, the AIC CERT team. And the 24-hour number is listed there. You can find out a lot more on their website. But they have conservators who can provide information on all types of materials in an emergency. And then it also mentions here, if you have specific conservators that you use regularly, list them and have their phone numbers. Hopefully they'll share a number with you that you can contact them in an emergency. If you have special things, you have an Indian basket collection, or you have books with special bindings, artworks, et cetera, you may want to list a conservator there as somebody to quickly call and help you. Down the rest of this emergency services column, don't worry. We're going to work more on this at session four. So I'm just going to kind of hold on that. I'm sure you've never thought about having refrigerated trucks and freezer storage, possibly, on your list. So just don't worry about it. That's going to be more in session four. Then the regional contacts, the top list here. And then there's also the staff phone list in this column. Regional contacts, this is important for you to, again, I've tried to give you some ideas of who to include. I'm going to come back to this in a minute because I want to give you some additional information and talk next about the staff phone tree. I know there was a question at the last session about phone trees. And clearly, if you have a big staff, you're not going to fill the information in right here on the prep. But what you might put there is the person or department responsible for maintaining that phone list, where it's kept how to access it, et cetera. If you use a phone tree structure, which is often the case with your larger institutions, make sure everyone understands clearly how to implement it. This is tricky. A true phone tree basically spreads the responsibility across everybody for spreading the word. For example, this is just a hypothetical example. There's a director. The director calls three assistant directors. Those three assistant directors, each call two department heads, and so on. It works its way down to everybody. The challenge is to remember, if you don't reach the person that you are responsible for calling, then you need to call all of the people that that person was responsible for contacting. Otherwise, the tree breaks down without the call getting out to everyone. Now, for many of you, a really helpful thing is that there are computerized ways to do this. And I encourage you to find out if you have access to any of these alert systems, because then it all is just kind of handled seamlessly. A message is input into the system, and then it is shot out to everybody who is part of this little database. So sometimes institutions have them. Sometimes cities have them. You may be able to become a subset, a little subset, of a city system that just gets triggered only if you want to send out alerts. So for example, because my phone number and email is in the database at the University of California, San Diego, I get all the emergency lists that come in as a phone message, a recorded phone message, a text message, and an email message. And they come in virtually simultaneously to me. I can tell when my cell phone and my house phone ring at exactly the same time, it's almost always one of these emergency alerts. These are called community alert systems, another term actually a proprietary name is Reverse 911. So I just mentioned it to you, because this is backed about how important communication is. Now let's go back up, we're going to go back up now to the top of the column, which is the regional contacts, because I want to show you some great resources on this next slide. These two sources, the URLs are listed. First is RAP, the Regional Alliance for Preservation. This is on your resource handout, a little more information about it, the URLs listed here. RAP provides information and resources on preservation and conservation to cultural institutions and the public throughout the US. There are 13 institutional and assistance groups that are members of RAP. I've noted a couple of them on your resources list, including the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia, Northeast Document Conservation Center in the Boston area, Library of Congress is a member, also West Pass, the group, the Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service, the Training Assistance Service that I coordinate is a member. So this is broadly across the US. Many of the members of RAP have disaster preparedness and response information on their websites, as well as providing emergency phone assistance. So please look at the RAP website, locate the regional center closest to you, investigate their specific website, and find out how they can help you in an emergency, and then get that information onto your prep in that regional resources column. Quite frankly, this would be a great little project for one member of your team to take responsibility for. This is that part of parsing things out and breaking them down into little chunks. This is one thing that one person could work on. Now, the other resource on the right, Heritage Preservation Cooperative Disaster Networks. This list actually runs to four pages on the URL that's shown there. It lists cooperative networks, and members of these cooperative networks collaborate on many issues, but the main one for this list is disaster planning and response. These networks can be combinations of libraries, museums, archives, historic sites, all types of cultural institutions, and they help their members deal with emergency preparedness and recovery, which is great, and they spread out the responsibility among a number of institutions that help organize training, some of them purchase shared supplies, they can respond to incidents, and they can provide you with moral support when you need it. So investigate if there's a network near you, get to this list. If you're small, with few staff, boy, get to know these folks. You can also find information on the Heritage Preservation site if you're interested in starting a network. Jenny, any questions? Yeah, we have a handful. So our first question I have is from Jennifer. She's curious for a small staff can the institutional contacts list also double us a staff phone tree? Possibly. I mean, you're going to have to, you know, institutional contacts. You might have some that fall outside. I mean, you could. Whatever, you know, whatever works for you, if you can get them recorded on there, absolutely. Just make it clear that that's the group to call. Sometimes it helps to separate it out a little bit, but if that works for you, fine. And we also had another question in a conversation about how often should PREP be updated every month, every three months, with, of course, the knowledge to update it when you know information has changed, but in addition to that, how often should you check it? Well, at least every year. Better, you know, it's one of those things. They say, check your batteries and your smoke detector when the time changes. Maybe that's a way to kind of hit it every six months. Absolutely, you're right. If you know something has changed and if they're critical, if they're critical numbers, you may need to issue one more frequently. You just have to decide with the numbers of people what works for you. Okay, and then another question from Janine, who's curious, are there training courses for first responders that could kind of alert them to the issues faced by cultural institutions or is it something, you know, that we need to train them? Well, that's great. There, well, there is a kind of an overarching alliance that set up the Alliance for Response through Heritage Preservation. You can look on the website and search for Alliance for Response. It's pretty clear. And these are trainings and meetings and forums that have been held around the country by different cities and in some cases by states to bring together cultural institution representatives with emergency management professionals. And to get a dialogue going, there is a publication called COSTEP, which is Coordinated Statewide Emergency Preparedness. It's been implemented in Massachusetts and it's been looked at in a number of other areas. It is a book, well, a book. It's a manual on helping you set up this kind of coordination and maybe Jenny can put a link in the chat. There is a hope that training will be more integrated into emergency management at their national training level. Certainly people are speaking at conferences about integrating with cultural community. There are a lot of us working on this, but there's no set training, per se, okay? We'll talk more about building relationships at session four. Okay, that's it. Okay, great, let me go on to the next one here. So immediate response. What I want to do now is show you a couple of appendices from today's handout packet that are going to supplement the communication side of your prep. The first one's appendix A. It says immediate emergency response. This is kind of a one-page call sheet for the first series of calls to be made. And this kind of information should be posted by telephones. All staff should know about it. It should be clearly available for anyone who might initiate an emergency call. So this handout gives you a sample template if you don't already have one. Try not to just list one name on the who to call column, but rather refer to groups if it's a department or another unit. If you can include 24-hour numbers, that's great in case you're open at night and there's a staff member trying to call using this list at night. You just don't want to get yourself into a position where there's only one number, and if no one answers, it goes to an answer machine, and then what do you do? Kind of thing. The third column of your prep, which is the building utilities, this appendix two on the right is a way to pull together information about the locations of your emergency systems. It kind of expands on the building utilities column where it just has phone number contacts, and this now actually records the locations of those key utility shutoffs, fire suppression, detection, where you store communication devices and supplies. Now, there are a couple of ways to use this appendix two. One is that you can take the letter, like this one says letter A, I have to get my crib sheet here so I can actually see what it says, because it's so tiny, main utilities, and then one says main water shutoff. So what you can do is you can put the code A1 onto your floor plan. So A1 would be indicated there, and that would be because these two things would go together, the main water shutoff. You know, it works. I'll show you a prettier way to do it that's more visually satisfying, and that is with using the floor plan and using icons, and that's what has been done here by the Fresno County Public Library. This is for one of their branches. Now, you do not have this in your PowerPoint or in your handouts, I'm sorry, I added it late to make this clearer for you, but you can certainly get the gist pretty fast. So here, A1, the main utilities, what it actually says there for the main water shutoff, it says outside, east wall, near the staff door. So they've described it in the text, and then you go, okay, north, south, east, west, you go east wall, and sure enough, this is the staff door right there, and there it says main water shutoff. So they've used an icon, and then they've also printed some information there. Another one. Here's HVAC controls, heating, ventilating, and air conditioning controls, and it says there that it's on the west wall in YA, which is young adult, and sure enough, right over here, HVAC controls, and there it is showing you where it is. This is an important one to know about. There's a fire right outside, and there's the potential for smoke coming in. You wanna get that turned off just as fast as you can, so you don't suck the smoke into your building. I've also seen institutions that have used colored dots, and so I gave you an example one here. Put a red dot by the fire extinguishers, and then you go over to the map, and you see the red dots. Okay, here and here are your fire extinguishers. I've seen places use multicolored dots along the column here by the letters to then put the colored dots onto the map. So that's another way. Again, just my warning is if you don't print in color, is it gonna cause you any trouble? But these are great for getting people right to these critical emergency systems that you need for fast response and part of your disaster plan. One of the things for, you may even be guiding someone when they arrive. They may not know where the turnoff is for your fire sprinklers, but you can pull out this map, you can show them right where it is, when they arrive, you can guide it right to them and save any valuable time. Okay, I'm gonna go on here to the next one. Appendix three is another supplement. It is a supplement on the responsibilities. Who's on the disaster team and the responsibilities? I know we had the question earlier about, you know, you fill in names and assign them ahead of time. I guess you can use the sheet on the left kind of as a worksheet to come up with what, think through what the jobs are that need to be done. You're probably gonna think of other jobs that need to be done. You can add them to this list. Again, make this work for you. But thinking ahead of time, the most likely person or the group of people to take on these roles and then you'll kind of get a better picture of how your response will work and then you can train them to it. Now I wanna warn you, the smaller your staff, the more hats that individual staff members are gonna have to wear. And if you see the same name start repeating over and over and over again on this worksheet, it's gonna become, it should become clear to you that that's just not realistic. You can't have a lead person taking multiple responsibilities that are going on at the same time. So figure out where others are that can help. So maybe you wanna call in someone from another part of your organization or look to a neighboring library, kind of agree to help each other if something happens. You look to another museum, regional disaster network, talk about and think about this ahead of time. The smaller you are, the more important this is gonna be and to train to some of these roles ahead of time. Staff need to know what's expected of them and what the institution is prepared to respond to an emergency through some sort of structure and this helps that. Then you have the template on the right to actually have the roles of the different coordinators. These also link to the field guide to emergency response. You can find more information in there about the coordination roles and recording this. You may put all of this information from this template for appendix three right onto your pocket plan and you may not need a separate piece of paper. That's just fine. Let me just take a minute here and see if there are other some questions. In case I'm getting too serious for you, I thought it might be good for a little bit of humor. Jenny, anything? Yeah, we have a few questions. We have Louisa who is curious. She's wondering what you think about on the disaster team list, including a place to meet after an emergency. So a specified time and location just in case it becomes too difficult to communicate. What are your thoughts on that? Oh, Louisa, you are like one session just ahead of me because it is, if you noticed, missing on the pocket response plan. And I will show you a place to insert it for part two. Thank you so much, or not part two, session three. I will show you where to insert it. Thank you for calling that out because it is something that's missing. And then we have another question from Nicole who's curious if you're dependent upon volunteers and community members for response. And this might come up later. What do you need to do in advance in regards of liability and insurance to cover them while they're helping? Do they need to sign forms or waivers? We're gonna talk a little bit about insurance very, very briefly. But the trick on this is that you should have them, if you already use volunteers, you should have them go through exactly the same process that you use for volunteers that may be regularly work for you. This, in a rush, people can get in there and try to start doing things you don't want somebody to get hurt. It's also something to talk to your insurance coverage about and about liability because I know this is always a concern. So talking to your insurance and then following any current procedures you have and if you don't, try to find out what some of the forms are and procedures that other places use. We have one final question. Tanya's curious, so all of these appendixes, appendices, are they optional? Do you just use what works best? Absolutely, this is all optional. There are some that will be coming up later. I mean, these first several are pretty tight to the communication side of the prep and so you may not need that much. The one that is most critical is the facility's location. Using that sheet to locate what you have and then you just must have floor plans as part of your disaster plan and show somehow on that plan where those emergency systems are. That's the one to me that just isn't negotiable and we'll keep going through, we'll go through the others and try to point that out, thank you. Okay, so this slide does not show an acceptable approach. I know you're going to get going here now. So what we're going to do now is I want to look at two appendices that relate to your prep in general and then we'll close out today the truly thrilling topic of insurance very briefly but the much more interesting, it's slightly terrifying topic of crisis communication. So let's look first at insurance. You have a very good handout, at least I think it's good, on summarizing the things to think about on insurance and this topic did come up at the risk evaluation webinar and so I wanted to include a little bit about it and insurance drives what funds will be available for you in a response and recovery and so it's important to know what you have. So this appendix for guidelines will help you gather the information, it has good definitions and it'll help you begin to educate yourself. You know, I keep using the two you and your because I don't want to keep saying your institution and your staff, the you I use, it may not be you personally but it's the broader you at your institution. So always think about, you may say, well I'm not the person to find out about insurance, okay fine but there is a person and you need to make sure that this kind of information is being gathered. I just wanted to mention that because I say that and then people will say, well I'm not authorized to do that. Okay, but your director, your chief administrator, your financial person, they better know what the insurance coverage is and you can also talk to a risk management or an insurance broker, they can, sorry. So use this sheet on the right to actually record and document what you found and this can write into the summary of your coverage in your disaster plan. Remember I said one of those things to add to your disaster plan. The more you know about insurance and the more steps you take ahead of time to educate yourself, be it commercial insurance or self insurance or some other kind of pool insurance, the better off you're gonna be when you need it. You know, are the main risks that you identified in your risk evaluation covered by your insurance? You know, I hope so. If you can try to establish the value of your collection prior to a disaster, this is more easily done at museums. So then it is at libraries. However, I have included a book in the resource guide, a very good one, Risk and Insurance Management Manual for Libraries published by American Library Association. It also has great information for other kinds of cultural institutions. So you can get guidance out of that. Also on the resource list is the Library of Congress website and they have on the URL area listed a risk management and insurance section. So both of those are very useful to take a look at. Okay, let's go on to the media. Crisis Communications, our last topic for today. Now, we could have done a series of webinars on insurance and pulled experts in and a panel. I mean, there is a lot to that and there is a lot to crisis communication. We could do a whole series on it. But my purpose here is mainly just to kind of hit the highlights and encourage you to think seriously about this for your institution. You know, if you're large enough and have PR public relations people or a PIO, a public information officer, you know, they are the key people in handling this information. But you need to make sure that all the staff know who is authorized to speak to the media. For everyone else on the staff, if approached by the media during an event, it's usually considered okay to tell them what your job is. But you should refer anything else that relates to the emergency, to the appropriate person for comment. Be very careful. And this is important thing to pull in and training. Everybody knows this. Appendix 5, what to say to the media has guidance and interview tips. This is an excerpt from the Field Guide to Emergency Response. You know, there's another excellent resource on your resources list. It's the Libraries Crisis Communication Planner. It's another ALA publication. And this is another one that generally can be used by more types of cultural institutions because it's a lot of basic information. You know, you can't ignore the media. They're gonna get the story for someone. And unless you want them seeking the story from just anybody there at the scene, you need to take control and accommodate them and provide them with information. Even if at some point it's vague and we don't know yet, we're looking into it. I'll tell you, the things they're gonna wanna know right away and if you are the only incident, if you read the banner headline coming across on the TV, on the morning news and it says major flooding at main library downtown kind of thing. You're gonna get besieged by people, lucky lose, you're gonna get the media, you're gonna get television, crews, all of this, trying to get information. What they're gonna wanna know right off is how much is damaged and what's the value? And then, when will you reopen? My warning, be careful, be very, very careful. You are so likely to be wrong at the beginning of an event. Don't commit, don't say, oh, we'll get this cleaned up and we'll be open by tomorrow. Or it doesn't look too bad and the cost loss is gonna be minimal. Don't go there, you may not have gotten into the basement yet and discovered that it is actually flooded with water too. Don't say anything. Pre-preparing some simple news releases that you can fill in the blanks with details about a particular incident can be very helpful. They can help you prevent overlooking something really obvious and they can also provide a little general information about your institution and your collection so you're not having to draft that at the time. Keeping these internal, both internal and external communications upbeat with one clear story is very important. For internal communications, remember, the staff want and need information and accurate information is gonna lower their stress level. You also need to control the rumor mill. So share and gather as much information as you can and include the police, the fire and the other response people in as well in providing this information. On the slide, you see some key tips, ones to keep in mind, you know, don't speculate or on the cause or who's at fault. No finger pointing at this point. Be very careful. Say I don't know instead of no comment. No comment has this negative connotation of trying to hide something. So saying, you know, I don't know and then better is I don't know but I will try to have more information at the next news briefing or I will call you with more information or I will email you with more information. Whatever you do, make sure you do that but don't say no comment. Don't speak off the record. One person's off the record comment can be turned into a question and asked to someone else who then is on the record. Here's an example, off the record, somebody says, no, you know, our disaster plan is 10 years out of date. I've been telling them we should update that plan for a long time but that's off the record. Oh, no problem. That person, media who has just gotten that off the record comment in a news conference or one-on-one with the director who's standing up in front talking away, asks, is it correct that your disaster plan is 10 years out of date? That has just been turned around into a question and that is legitimate, so be very, very careful. Have a consistent message, keep it upbeat. You know, you don't need a media disaster on top of everything else you are dealing with. You wanna emerge as competent, organized institution that's dealing effectively with a bad situation. Hopefully you are gonna come out better and stronger at the end of it. That's your mantra. We have implemented our disaster response plan and our response team members are in place and assessing the situation. I mean, that has a very positive, consistent message. Really good statement. Okay, that's what I have for today. Jenny, looks like questions. Yeah, we have a question from Cindy about insurance. If you can't place a value on your collection and you can't appraise the items, how can you obtain insurance? Well, you have to, that's a good question. I don't know what kind of collection you have in this case, but what you can do is to start figuring, and I'll take this from a library, you can figure out, we have 10,000 books, let's say. We decide the value of those books is $20 apiece. I mean, I'm going low here on the values. 20, oh, I'm so bad at math. 20 times 10,000, is that 200,000 dollars? So you might decide we're gonna get $200,000 in insurance. Now keep in mind, if only 10% of that collection is damaged, you don't get 200,000. You get 10% of 200,000. So just kind of thinking in ways of how you might assign some values. There are different ways to do it with archives and there are all sorts of different ways to measure them, but I'd suggest you look at the books, the resources, the Library of Congress website, look at the insurance information and also I think the guide, the sheet guide that's handed out will help some as well. It's tricky because if you have individual items and objects you're dealing more with one-on-one appraisal value and that can be costly and if something is damaged or completely destroyed, you have no way of going back and determining what that value is. Julie, does your answer change at all knowing that it's a pharmaceutical collection? Let's see, and Cindy says there are boxes and containers from drugs used in the 1700s and 1800s, tools from that time period and ledgers. Wow, out of my area. If any of you have any really good comments to add into chat, I mean I'd say it's talking to the insurance, I'm assuming you have, well I don't know if you have insurance, but talking to an insurance company, looking at the insurance companies that work more with museums and cultural collections, some of those are listed on the resources I mentioned and they can help you figure it out because they're more used to dealing with these kinds of collections that are not easily valued. That would be my suggestion. And Kristi had a fantastic suggestion of checking with the National Library of Medicine and I would imagine working with other museums with similar collections, they might be able to help you out there. That's a good suggestion and I did put on your resources list just because the medicine's coming up. There is an amazing website, a national network of libraries of medicine emergency preparedness website and that would be, they have listservs and it would be a place to place a question like this. I also want to mention, because Jenny and I noticed that a question was put on to the online forum of Connecting to Collections discussion group forum. A topic was started by Nicole after our session on Tuesday and she asked about dealing with them and preparing for emergencies during construction projects and what you should do. And already she's gotten a couple of really great answers on there. I think some of these insurance questions would be great to put up on that forum because you've got access then to conservators and a number of other folks who are part of it that can contribute. Great and then to move on back to media, we have a question from Cayman who says, he vaguely remembers that his institution had a policy that the director was the only one who was authorized to address the media. Now that makes sense, but what if that director is unavailable or take a long time to get to the scene? Do you think that that kind of policy is gonna hurt his institution? I think you ought to bring it up. There should be backups. When it's really only seriously one person, there should be backups to that and that person plus the backups should be trained. You could be out of town and you could still be able, I guess, to give information to the media, but you might not be able to have communication. I mean, again, think the worst case scenarios in a lot of things. Play the what if game, what if the person is out of town? What if they can't connect? What next do we do? We just issue no information. That's not, to me, a responsible approach. Going silent when what people need and want information is a real problem. It also will invite people stepping forward and giving information that then could be wrong. So I'd say come up with a policy, come up with some of the little template information so you could at least release basic information without that person actually being available. Think it through. I watch the crisis communication. I kind of get off on crisis communication because now I watch when things happen to people, when bad things happen to institutions, I watch how they handle it in the news and the media. And wow, when you take that approach, you can start watching things go south really fast with some events and then you watch others and you give them a thumbs up and you go, wow, they are on top of this. They are doing a very good job and you learn from these. So keep an eye, watch what's going on in the news around you and even approach your institution. What if that had happened to us? What kind of information would we be getting out? How would we be responding? Anything else, Jenny? I'm actually going to post the homework assignment. So we have about 10 more minutes left. I don't have any questions right now so I'm gonna post this and feel free to type in questions that you have. So here is a link to our homework assignment too and I'm also gonna pull over that group login and I promise this time we will get you all counted. So if you're in a group, you're watching with another person or multiple other people and you didn't enter your first name or last name to enter this meeting room, have your group leader type in your name now. So if you're by yourself and you logged in, we don't need you to use this chat box. This is only for people who are watching with the group. And let me, Julie, we have a few comments coming through. Well, you're looking, let me just mention that when we continue on Tuesday, we're gonna go on with the pocket response plan and look at the action side, the other side side B of it and we're gonna talk about disaster assessments, establishing collection priorities, using the incident command system and working with emergency responders. So those are some of the things that'll be coming up on Tuesday. All right, well, it doesn't look like we have any other questions. So as Julie mentioned, the next class is Tuesday, March 12th at 2 p.m., same place. You have the link to the homework. I've also put a link to the course homepage just so it's handy. And let's see. I think that's it, Julie. Okay, thanks, everybody. Have a good weekend. Thank you, everyone. See you next time.