 Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar which is exercising your disaster response plan techniques for testing your plan and training staff. So this is a follow-up webinar to our March course, Protecting Your Collections, Rating a Disaster Response Plan with Julie Page. And if you participated in that course, we hope you're just a little bit closer to having a written disaster response plan and are now ready to move on to testing that plan. Even if you aren't, that's okay. Or if you were unable to participate in the March course, we definitely think this information will still be incredibly useful. So I will just make a note that an archive of that March course is available and you're welcome to go through the material at your own pace if you're interested in doing so. And a recording of today's webinar will also be placed on that page. Now our entire course series caring for yesterday's treasures today, which we'll pick back up in the fall, has been made possible by Allure Bush 21st Century Librarian Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And we're also really fortunate to have learning times on board for this project to help us with our website and webinar support. So it's so great to see so many of you logged in. Go ahead and keep saying hello in that chat box. We love hearing from you. In just a moment, I am going to move this box over and as Mike said, we'll move to a moderated chat. This means I will approve all your comments before they're posted publicly. And because of this, you will end up seeing your comments twice, once when you submit it and once when it's approved. So don't worry, the group will only see it once. If you're having any technical difficulty, feel free to also post questions there and we'll answer you privately. Alright, without further ado, let me reintroduce Julie Page. Julie is co-coordinator of both the California Preservation Program and the Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service. And she expertly walked us through our March course on Writing a Disaster Response Plan. And we're so happy and so lucky she's agreed to come back to do this follow-up webinar. So Julie, I am going to move your PowerPoint over and hand things over to you. Great. Thanks, Jenny. I really want to add my welcome to all of you to the webinar, Exercising Your Disaster Response Plans. I do see a number of familiar faces, names in the chat, those of you who attended the March series that Jenny made a comment about, Writing Your Disaster Response Plan. I'd like to start off quickly with a poll and ask you how many of you participated in the March webinar series. We'll pull that over and give you a minute to reply on that. Great. Looks like we're running about two-thirds of you. And then we have a second question. For those of you who answered yes, have you made headway on your Pocket Response Plans? So of those 20 of three of you that replied, how many of you have made some headway? Oh, this is great. So it looks like about three-quarters of you. Terrific. Oh, that's great. Well, keep up the good work. And for those of you who did not participate in the March series and want to work on a disaster response plan, Jenny put up that link and you can use the archived series on the website. I will say too, if any of you want to add any comments into the chat on what you have accomplished on your disaster response plan or preparedness activities, since March, please feel free to share those in chat. My objective today is to provide you with practical strategies to keep your disaster plans up to date and to conduct staff training in order to successfully implement your plan when disaster strikes. I want to acknowledge those that have contributed to the content used in the webinar. Some of the content was originally developed for the West Pass workshops, the Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service. That's serving 14 Western States and Territories and it's funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The curriculum has also been supplemented some by content developed by Balboa Conservation Center and the California Preservation Program. I want to start off with a statement from the Library of Congress about testing your plans. I promise not to read other slides but I just, I think this is such a good statement. The most important action of any emergency preparedness planning is to carry out testing of your systems. It's in this activity that any gaps in the communication systems, in the supplies and in the training will become apparent. In our experience every real incident will have some new characteristic for which one is not prepared but if your planning and testing has been done there will be a great number of decisions and activities which will go smoothly, speed up the recovery so that everyone can get back to their regular activities in the shortest time possible. I just, I find this statement sums it up succinctly and what it does is it acknowledges that we can't plan for every little variation. However, the exercising and the training we conduct make many of our actions more automatic and we'll find strong similarities during different disaster responses. So a little more, why exercise? We want to do the following. We're looking to reveal any planning weaknesses and any resource gaps. We want to improve coordination and we want to clarify roles and responsibilities of individuals. But not only do we want to improve the performance of the individuals and their confidence, we also want to build a cohesive emergency management team. This team building aspect of conducting exercises is very important. And from the results of these exercises then we want to provide input to revise and update the plan. Now there are about three main types of exercises. The tabletop exercise, it's usually the first exercise conducted. You bring together the principal players in a disaster plan being reviewed and you assemble them in a meeting room around a table, tabletop. The scenario is then revealed and the group discusses the event presented to resolve the issues around the scenario. Now a functional exercise tests the institutional response to a disaster scenario and often focuses on a particular aspect of the plan such as evacuation of the building or collection salvage. Now, so it's kind of a hands-on in its activity. These two types of exercises are the most common for cultural institutions and I'm going to talk more about them in a few minutes, but first I also want to briefly mention full-scale exercises, simulations. These provide the most complete and complex training short of an actual emergency situation. It's really as close to a real event as you can get. These simulations operate in real time. You tend to see the full-scale exercises being conducted by cities or counties or large institutions or like campuses and they may involve victims, play-acted victims, fire and ambulance response, maybe even SWAT team, and often the activation of the Emergency Operations Center. All of these kinds of activities are possible in full-scale. I would think you can guess from that description I've given that cultural institutions are unlikely to organize a full-scale exercise. However, it is possible to participate in one of these and I highly encourage you to volunteer your building and staff to be part of why these regional events. You can learn quite a bit about how emergency responders operate and an added benefit is, of course, they're going to learn more about your building and your collections in the process. So it's a two-way, it's kind of a win-win for you. Before I start to talk about specific types of exercises, there are a couple of very important considerations when you actually plan and execute this kind of training to test procedures. Keep in mind these exercises should teach success, not failure, and they should build the confidence not make people apprehensive. These are both very critical things to keep in mind. You need to educate participants enough before an exercise so they know the basics in order to succeed and to make them more confident in their response capabilities. If you don't, quite frankly, you'll end up with a bunch of resistant, angry people on your hands and they won't want to play with you again. This makes future exercises very difficult. You want them to end an exercise asking, wow, when are we going to do something like this again? What do you have in mind for us? That kind of feeling with it's fun, you know, kind of bring it on. We're ready for more. Okay, so going on to tabletop exercises. Let me just ask you quickly in a poll, have you used a tabletop exercise before to test your disaster plan? So it looks like we're looking at kind of a flip here. So maybe about a quarter if you have. Okay, great. So we'll learn more about that as we go along here. Now, if you want to also feel free, those of you that have used a tabletop, if you can briefly in a sentence or so summarize what the scenario was you used, feel free to add that into chat as we go along. So let me go on more with a tabletop. So a tabletop exercise helps to identify the gaps in the plan by presenting a series of questions or problems relating to an incident or a disaster event. The discussions and actions are based on a described scenario and a group can practice a coordinated problem-solving approach. Messages can be given to individual players along the way or injects, they're often called. These can also be added for the whole group to respond to. You know, as we know, emergencies don't unfold in a predictable way and in this way an exercise can try to mimic this challenge of changeability, things going on. Between these injects there is a flexible amount of time for discussion so you can kind of slow things down and have more of a discussion and then keep going. Participants will practice in this way a coordinated and effective response and important again is that team building aspect. Finally, the input you gain from the exercise leads to an action list to then help review and update the disaster plan. Hopefully the exercise will also lead to an ongoing discussion and a critique of the appropriateness of the actions taken and decisions made and make for more effective response capability. That's our goal. Table top exercises can be developed to involve your emergency team, including facilities and security, your administrative team, your collections recovery team, whatever groups need to respond in an emergency. So, and you're seeing some, a few comments here. I see Russell, Robin from Fairbanks, talking about connecting with the disaster response team and cultural institutions so they have a seat at the larger table in an emergency operations center, say, for the city or for the county. And, you know, by getting involved in some of these kinds of exercises, you become, you kind of get on their radar. You get on the emergency responder, first responder radar and they realize that it's important for them to bring you in. And so that's terrific. I mean, connecting with a fire chief or a fire training officer, these are folks, and I'll talk about some other ways you may be able to involve them in exercises. So let's look at a couple of scenario ideas. Scenarios can be simple. Well, okay, these aren't simple. They're simply stated. They can be brief. They can be a one-liner like we have here. Torrential rains are expected to hit in three hours with widespread flash flooding. Then the question would be, what do you do? So that could be that straightforward of a scenario or it can be more developed. But this gives you an idea of just some number of scenarios that involve health and safety issues. Some of them have warnings. Some of the others, like the earthquake, there is no warning. So this kind of gives you some sort of an idea of directions you can go. Now, keep in mind one technique to use for greater impact in an exercise can be to schedule an exercise near the anniversary of an emergency that maybe is well known at your institution or in your community. To help you develop other ideas for scenarios on the resources list, it's the downloadable. It's just one page. It's connected with this webinar that you logged on for today. There's the PowerPoint handout, and then there is also a resource list handout. And on it are a number of excellent resources to help you with tabletops. One is the Library of Congress website. Has developed some scenarios that pertain to all types of cultural institutions. So be sure to take a look at that link. The National Network of Libraries of Medicine has emergency preparedness website, and on it they have a storm and a tornado tabletops, two different tabletops, and they also link to an earthquake exercise. This NNLM emergency preparedness page is just truly a fabulous resource for all types of institutions. I highly recommend you take a look at it and click around on it. Also on the resources list, under the entry flood, a tabletop exercise. There's also a tornado, a tabletop exercise. They're part of one entry on the resource list. That is an exercise CD that you can order and has some great ideas. Let's take a look at a few other examples. Jenny, let me just ask you first any questions? It doesn't look like yet, so we can keep going. We'll keep an eye on it. And folks, if you have questions throughout the webinar, feel free to type them in the Q&A. Okay. Now, these kinds of tabletops are a great way for an administrative team to start off, to discuss kind of the big picture issues. They can take a scenario and they can kind of look at what they're going to have to be thinking of at the administrative level. And if the scenario is developed by someone outside of the group or possibly by a facilitator, which can be very useful to use, then the scenario is a surprise for all the participants and it more closely mimics a real-life event. So keep that in mind to pull others in. You can also involve large groups of staff and have everyone go through a training. This is from an academic library that used this approach to train all their staff for a major earthquake response. This was a two-hour tabletop exercise. It was actually required of all library staff to attend. And boy, as soon as you make something required, people kind of raise their hackles and aren't sure they want to do it. But I will say this was exceptionally well received and many said it was some of the best training they'd ever had. There are a couple of hundred people on the staff, so this exercise was done over multiple sessions until everyone had a chance to participate. It started off with showing a short clip from a California earthquake video. And this excerpt, it was only about five minutes, only about five minutes long, but it truly set the scene for the scenario with sound and images and it really got your adrenaline pumping. Truthfully, whatever you were thinking about or working at your desk on before you entered the room for the training, was gone from your mind after you watched this video clip. Jenny, I think we have the URL for the link to that just in case you're interested. It's actually online. And we'll put that into the chat. Keep in mind that using these images, video especially, using these images can be very effective way of getting people to focus in and visualize more what would be happening during the scenario, during something that was real. This particular tabletop was presented as a progressive event with about six in-vex presented at regular intervals and with facilitators at each table. It brought up all sorts of issues around safety, especially how to handle things like an evacuation, where people should assemble, preparing for aftershocks, search and rescue procedures, dealing with rumors, because that would be something that we often don't think about is going to happen. Also, the challenge of what to do when staff want to leave and the advice that's coming over the radio and everywhere is that everyone should stay put and not get out on the road. So what do you do then? In this case, what were the campus plans for taking care of everyone who maybe had to stay? So it brought in all sorts of issues and was a general education for the whole staff. I mean, you could have sat there and presented this kind of dry information in just a training room with no one actively participating, but I'm telling you, they wouldn't remember very much about it. You can also use a tabletop to test out functional roles, including those implemented by emergency responders under the Incident Command System, ICS. We talked a little bit about ICS in the March webinar, and you can find more about it, much more detail about it, on the FEMA website for the Incident Command System. There's a very good book, too, that includes information on ICS. David Carmichael, an entry on the resource list. It's called Implementing the Incident Command System at the Institutional Level, a handbook for libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions. David is the same one who also did the flood and tornado exercises that you can order. The book has really made a tremendous contribution to the field. He was the president of the Council of State Archivists at the time of Hurricane Katrina and had a real trial by fire presidency, you might say, and became quite an expert on emergency response. And this book is truly a gem for us, geared towards us. So I highly recommend you take a look at it, because you can then use it during a tabletop exercise to organize yourself using the ICS structure to respond to whatever scenario is presented. The best way to ingrain the ICS idea into your procedures is just to practice, practice, practice. So using this approach as much as possible during exercises will get everyone very familiar with it. So consider the idea of holding a tabletop exercise with emergency management and fire personnel. You may even be able to hold your tabletop in the EOC, the Emergency Operations Center, for your city or county or campus, and it truly will make it feel even more real to you. You can expand the scenario to include not only the effect on your institution, but also the effects of the event on what would be going on in the surrounding community and how that would affect your response. If you're only one site of many that is affected, you're going to have to do more on your own than if only your building is affected. And so what can you count on from emergency responders to be able to tell you what their priorities are, which are life safety first and protection of property and under protection of property next kind of becomes you and your important collections. So this can be very, very helpful. Jenny, Annie. Yeah, we do have two questions. Donna was curious when you were talking about the clip. If the clip showed an actual event or was it a simulated event? It is actually from the Northridge earthquake and so it's a very real event and what it is is it was put out by California State University Northridge as kind of what happened on their campus. They were dramatically affected. Their library was closed for quite a length of time. It was all their staff moved to the UCLA library to help serve their students. And so the beginning of the clip is just a lot of emergency calls and shows damage and shows fires and so it gave kind of an idea of what was going on throughout the community and then the video goes on into what happened on the campus and shows them setting up their emergency operations center on campus and that's when the orientation clip I want to call it for that tabletop stopped. When it got into the specifics that wasn't the point of why we were showing it but you can watch the whole video online at that URL and then you can also download it. So that was the...it was very real. Oh goodness. That would definitely shake you awake, huh? Yes. So we have Amy in Buffalo, New York. She posed a question to the group about if anybody had ever practiced a tabletop exercise where they took out key personnel, someone who you might go to to consult with. So Julie, I'm going to ask you if you've heard of others doing tabletop exercises like this. Yes. And I've done it. It's very interesting. Sometimes I've done it where people have been assigned roles. Now let's instead take it that it's your emergency team and you maybe have your facilities person there, you have a security person there, you have a collections person, maybe a business person, administrator, and you have this key group. Well, then what you can do as one of those little injects is that maybe after the first scenario has been presented, et cetera, you pull out, say, the facilities person or you pull out someone... any one of the people you want to or you take out the key administrator and you just have them leave the room and let the rest of the group then try to figure out what they do now and they'll realize then what kind of key information that person have. I really always stress this because anybody can be on vacation at any time when something happens. And if those are key people, what is the continuity that you have around organization? I would not suggest for a first exercise that you take out a person. For a first exercise, maybe even a second exercise, just have it be kind of a normal approach, but then you can pull them out later on. I hope that gives you an idea, but it is a very... I've also had someone where they were given an inject that they were to... went to a specific person. They were to become very, very upset and to be kind of antagonistic and to argue and to see how the rest of the group would then react. And so that's another possibility or someone can become kind of hysterical and say, you know, I just have to leave, I have to go home, I'm worried about something. And Donna pointed out here, she said that her institution had done something very similar and she makes a great point that it made everyone realize that they shared a responsibility, whether or not they were designated for a particular role. Terrific. Yeah, exactly. That's all we have for now, Julie. Okay, great. Again, all around emphasizing the team aspect of working in exercises, that you have to know more than just your little component part and this is how you learn it. You learn it in doing these exercises. Okay, let's go on to functional exercises because these are an excellent way to get a more realistic sense of what an event feels like. They're more realistic. They are conducted in real time. You actually do something. You don't just sit around and discuss actions. It's kind of like a dress rehearsal. An example is a fire or an evacuation drill. You, when alarm goes off, you get up and you leave. You stay outside until there's an all clear and you come back in so it's all in real time. You train staff basically in prevention and safety this way. It allows you to assess the adequacy of your plans and resources and then you can also do things like teach through functional exercises. You can teach collection salvage techniques, how to safely use a fire extinguisher and what are the specific evacuation procedures. These are some of the more common functional exercises. Through them, participants develop a better understanding of the disaster plan itself and how it will be implemented at the institutional level. And as with tabletop exercises, it importantly provides that input to review and update the plan where things maybe look like they're falling through the cracks. What can we add? How can we make this clear? What kind of new training could we add? One exercise, for example, might focus on crisis communication with your key administrators or your PR people standing behind a podium and responding to media questions. You can even invite media personnel to help you out with this or you can have some of your staff play act the role of newspaper and television media. Truly, those who are responsible for updating the media during an emergency should be given ample opportunity to practice. They should never be shoved for the first time in front of microphones and be trying to give information. So that's a good one, too. And there are some other functional exercises that can be done with staff. Another, one of the best known, really is the evacuation drill. These can be practiced as scheduled events or anytime the fire alarm gets pulled in the building. That's basically an functional event for the rest of your staff. So take advantage of it. Now, this one on the left was a large library participated during National Preparedness Month, which is in September. Letting you know that. That's something you could put on your calendar. They conducted a full evacuation to the disaster evacuation site. Their staff went out, outfitted with hard hats that they all had. They took out emergency supplies. They conducted a roll call to make sure that everyone had evacuated safely. That's a situation where you can have a couple of staff held back. And does anybody realize that they're missing? Yes, they have not made it to this site. And then they discussed, after all this was done, they discussed what would have happened in a real event. What kind of differences there would have been. On the right side of the slide is a building monitor checking that all people from his museum building had been evacuated as part of California's great shakeout exercise. This is held each year in October at a specific day and time. All types of institutions, businesses, schools are all encouraged to participate in this statewide event. Now, while I'm talking about specific days, let me just, you know, add a couple more. May Day, May 1st, as a day to do at least one thing for your emergency preparedness, the Society of American Archivists and Heritage Preservation encourage this action each year, and they also collect examples of steps taken by cultural institutions. You can look at the May Day site on both the SAA and the Heritage Preservation website and see what people have done. And the American Library Association sponsors Preservation Week in April each year. And emergency preparedness actions have been taken by many libraries in support of that event. So I encourage you to look for any special exercises you have in your state, your city, your county, and look for ways to incorporate them into your training days, or step up and initiate an exercise for your institution or your community. Are we getting anything over in the chat? We don't have any new questions yet. But I see some of you putting things in. That's great. Okay, you can keep adding any ideas in there. So now let's get back again here to functional exercises. I got a little sidetracked by dates that you can take advantage of. But another very worthwhile functional exercise is fire extinguisher training. It's one of the best hands-on exercises to do, and it's an easy one to start with for your staff training. You can get a lot of buy-in, quite frankly, from staff for this kind of training, because in fact, the staff are more likely to use it at home or in their car than they are at work. So it does kind of a double-duty kind of training. Jenny, why don't you pull in that question about functional exercises just so I get a feeling, because I'd like to, the poll question, I'd like to have some of you be adding them into chat if you've done them, if you've done anything, any other examples of functional exercises. It looks like it's about the same percentage as with the tabletop exercises, maybe just a little bit higher. Those of you that have, feel free to add into chat what your scenario was for a functional exercise, and we'll kind of track on some of those and see if we can build on them. So for the fire extinguisher training, you can contact the company who services your extinguishers or your fire department or your campus and ask about training. There are commercial companies that provide fire extinguisher training as well. So the best bet, like is seen here, is to give the staff a chance to actually extinguish a small fire in that pot before blasted by a chemical extinguisher was a little fire started remotely. You can see the canister way over to the far right of little propane. You do not do this yourself, and clearly you do it in an area that is very safe and secure, no chance of having a fire. And that's why bringing in someone that actually knows how they can do it and can set it up for you, but let everybody actually try to put something out because getting the feel of lifting the extinguisher, pulling the pin, and squeezing the trigger. This is important to do all of this. And have staff get familiar with the types of fire extinguishers that are available for them to use in the workplace and discuss if there are different types. If you have water, if you have CO2, if you have the chemical extinguishers, discuss them and discuss the use of them. You can download a FEMA activity facilitator guide and handbook at the website shown on your resources list. They have kind of an extensive information. I'll tell you, you can also find a number of other resources if you simply search and quote, fire extinguisher training on the Web. There is, I had a lot of hits when I tried that. A popular functional exercise is hands-on collection salvage. Here they're dealing with a kind of a wet soup of objects, some paintings, scrapbook textiles. I think there was leather in there, some photographs, and so it was kind of a mix of things. It's good to let collections, recovery staff, or volunteers, whoever is going to help you if you have to do a collection salvage, give them some experience in hands-on salvage of the types of materials you have, objects, baskets, textiles, paintings, whatever it may be. Large format materials such as maps can be especially challenging, and it's good to have staff experience the issues that come up with salvage and air drawing of water damage materials, especially these large kinds of things. Also the pros and cons of air drawing, which is really the main thing we can do without special equipment, and so giving them the idea of how to go about that. If you have types of media, photographs, scrapbooks, all of these things have recommended water damage procedures that are very good to practice. As a reminder, in the documents that we had as part of the Writing Your Disaster Plan webinar series, there are detailed downloads there on salvage procedures of the different types of materials, and so you can go back to that or those of you that didn't participate, feel free to go to that and download some of those documents that give quite a bit more information. Also for training purposes, the Heritage Preservation Field Guide to Emergency Response, it's on your resources list. It has an instructional DVD that covers about 10 typical problems after a disaster, including getting started, mold, water, broken objects, hazardous materials, a wide range of things. The clips run 5 to 10 minutes in length, and they can be used for hands-on training, so consider integrating those into your procedures. If you have framed collections or specialized materials such as furniture or textiles, be sure to understand the procedures and special supplies and tools that may be needed in a salvage operation. So by training on these kinds of materials, you'll be better able to anticipate what will be needed in a real salvage operation. And worry not, these folks are not practicing on real collections as they remove wet items from frames. Truly, you just make a visit to your local Salvation Army or your thrift store and you can find all kinds of things to use to get wet and practice salvaging on. It's a great resource for finding things. So, Jenny, any questions? Yeah, we have a few from Valeria. Some great questions. She's curious how other folks have gotten firefighters or emergency departments to work with cultural institutions on doing things like fire extinguisher training. Do you have any suggestions on how to approach them? Well, I think it's really good first to make a connection with them and have them maybe come out to your site. And the phrase I always use is that you want to find out from them how to make their job easier when they respond to your institution and how to make their job easier. Everyone wants to have their job be made easier. And so that's one way to get them out. And then you could say, gee, we've really been wanting to do a fire extinguisher training. Is that something you can help us with? Or, oh, we've really been wanting to do a wet book exercise and set up some items out on some shelves. Would you be interested in coming and turning a fire hose onto those materials? There'll be intrigue by that kind of request. So look for ways to kind of pull them in and then go on to ways that you could work together and offer your place as an exercise. Because that's what these guys do all the time. When they are not responding, they are training and exercising. They are doing functional exercises continually. So if you offer your spot, ask anything that they have coming up, just continue to get them in there. I think I also see that you can use them or maybe Valeria is asking this question, the difference between the hazards of the different kinds of fire extinguishers. Is that the question? I'm thinking it was related to, you had mentioned practicing on handling different types of extinguishers. So that's how I interpreted what types of extinguishers are available on the market. Okay. Well, first it's to look at what you have already in your institution. A lot of them now are the ABC, which means they're good on paper products, they're good on electrical, and they're good on, I want to say, liquids. But you have to look at them. There's also a D type. But a lot of them are this kind of a chemical extinguisher now. Water extinguishers are extremely heavy because just think of it, the canister is filled with water. This is different from fire hoses, that you may have a fire hose hookup in your building. Is it different? Sometimes are these huge canisters that are water, and then sometimes they're large CO2 canisters. So look at what is available at FEMA download and on the website. It's where you can get quite a bit more information. And so I'm not an expert on this, and I would suggest looking especially at the FEMA site and some of those downloadable documents. And look first at what is actually in your facility. Anything else, Jenny? That's it for now. Thank you, Julie. Okay. A little bit more on some functional training to train recovery teams. As I mentioned, you can set up a shelving section outside with discard books and maybe do it down on a loading dock or in a patio area, and you can wet them down yourself or if you want a really big impact, you can liaise with the fire department and ask them if they'd be willing to come in and turn fire hoses on the book stack, which you'll also discover is that pressure and the issues that come around fire hoses being used on stacks. And if you don't have automatic fire suppression sprinklers in your building, this may be what you will be faced with is them coming in with fire hoses. There are low pressure hoses, but they have a nozzle that diffuses the pressure and it's a good way to actually ask them about that and say you'd rather, you know, clearly you'd rather have them use the low pressure hoses if they needed to come in to respond to a fire. So that's one way. Or what you see in this picture is a way of training teams to do a damage assessment using a functional exercise. We can't get things wet up in our buildings, so that's why the loading dock or the patio. But what you can do is you can mimic this type of exercise where here you see a disaster recovery team actually conducting an assessment of damage by fire where the blue crepe paper is water damaged, which you see on the left, and then red crepe paper, I don't think you can see anything here, but it's on the red crepe paper to distinguish things that were burned. And so teams of four people each assessed the damage in a specific area of the stacks. This was just using a disaster recovery team, so it was a way to treat, train a team. And then they were to estimate the number of books affected, you know, how many were burned, how many were wet. They were to identify any priority collections that were damaged including the library salvage priorities list, which had already been put together and was made available to them. Wanted to make sure they could actually use the list when they were in the stacks and then determine the number of boxes and supplies that would be needed to pack out their sections. So this was a pretty interesting exercise. You can close off one area of the stacks. You can continue to page books out of there. You can do this while your library is actually open, just coordinating an often area and offering to have someone there to page books so there's continued access the whole time. There was a second part of this exercise unrelated to the assessment part, but there was a second component and each of these four people teams had to go and locate the plastic sheeting which was stocked in different areas of the library and they were to cover a range with plastic. Now, there were different widths of plastic available and so they had to determine what worked best and how to physically accomplish this task, which is not that easy. It's pretty heavy stuff dealing with this plastic. And this exercise also allowed them to experiment with overlapping sheets of plastic to completely cover the stacks or using tape to connect the sheets or even, as you see here, clips to hold the plastic sheeting together. Ultimately, this also gave an idea of the amount of time and staff involved. If a decision was made in an emergency to cover ranges, then realistically, how many people would it take, how many supplies, and how long would it take? So this is a way to kind of really get people thinking. You can do these two separately and get them up into the area, into the collections area. I think it's important. So some other training ideas. Maybe you don't want to do anything as organized as a tabletop to start off or you need something smaller to do between tabletops or functional exercises. On this slide are some ways to engage all staff or subsets of staff, such as administrators or recovery teams. Adults learn best by doing, so get them involved. Look for ways to get them involved. On your resources list is the book, Building an Emergency Plan. It's put out by the Getty Conservation Institute. The citation is there for the free downloadable PDF of the book. And this is excellent for training and exercising ideas. And it really is applicable to all types of cultural institutions. It has a little more of a museum plant, but I think it's great. It's one of the best with a number of ideas. Specifically on page 106, there's a really nice chart for emergency preparedness and response training suggestions. It has guidelines to help you relate the training to the staff and to engage them in your preparedness and response program. So you can take a look at that. Now, as you see here on the slide, you can include training in regular departmental meetings. I mean, this doesn't always have to be some special separate event. Everybody doing it at the same time. One I liked was I would just ask the departmental staff to pull out a piece of paper and answer a couple of questions. Where's the closest fire alarm to our department? Where's the closest fire extinguisher to our department? Where is our closest exit in an emergency? The alarm goes off and we exit. Which exit do we use? If that exit was blocked, what's the next closest exit? And so once you've got maybe five, six, seven questions, you could ask where the copy of the emergency plan is for the department and things like that. Then you don't have them turn this in. You don't grade it. You then just ask for volunteers to the answers and you briefly discuss it. This is over the course of maybe 10 or 15 minutes in a regular meeting. Another kind of thing is role-playing, providing some opportunities for role-playing. Again, people like this, they can get involved. One that's in the Getty Book, and I'll just read you a little bit about it, says we're going to do a role-playing exercise in which we take turns playing the role of the reporter and the spokesperson. And here's a data sheet with the facts about a late-night fire and the institution has just experienced and a fact sheet on the institution's emergency plan. Who would like to go first? And you let these people role-play in teams. And then after the fact, you can talk to them about it and you can say, you know, so-and-so played the role of the spokesperson very well. You answer the questions and when you couldn't, you deferred to the emergency officials to give answers. And then a reminder, you don't have to always rely on your memory. You've got the fact sheets to fall back on and just kind of get people a little more comfortable with some of these things. There are a number of these kinds of ideas in the Getty Book. Another thing you can do is ask them how to initiate an emergency notification. You know, what do you do? What steps do you take? And in what order do you do them? A phone exercise is another relatively straightforward one especially good for response and recovery teams or an administrative team. It's one of my favorites. I've used it for a disaster response team about three weeks after I distributed an update to the disaster plan. I had them... I had them... I called them and I set up a list of questions and I called them in the evening with a set of questions and kept track of their answers. Things like I asked them to go get their emergency plan. Just lose at home at night, get their emergency plan. I asked them what the date was on the emergency plan and then I asked them what the date was on the call list, the notification list, the sheet that I knew that had been updated about three weeks before. And I asked them the date. I asked them if they'd be able to respond to an emergency the next day at the library and how long they'd be able to stay. I was very careful to keep reminding them this is only an exercise. I didn't want them to start thinking that, yes, they were supposed to show up the next day at the library. In phoning people, I only talked to the person who was on the team. If they weren't there, I did not leave a message. I never left any messages on answering machines. I didn't want anybody to misunderstand the call that it was just an exercise. So keep that kind of thing in mind. In an emergency, I would have left messages, but I didn't want anything to get conveyed incorrectly. So that's one thing to do. You can also develop something like a fun exercise. A scavenger hunt, for example. Find the emergency supplies. Locate the disaster binder and procedures. I heard about one that was conducted last year as a training event. A disaster plan review scavenger hunt. This was done by Snowden Library. Their disaster planning team created really kind of a fun and different way for the staff to review their disaster plan. Everyone started from the library classroom, and they worked as a team. They followed clues throughout the library that led them to a number of simulated disasters, such as one with a fake leak in the ceiling on one floor. In another area, they put out a mock fire. They also had another situation where they stopped a bogus vandal on the main floor. So it kind of let them try out different things, and each clue that led them to the next simulation gave information on the emergency procedure needed to resolve the crisis. So they were learning all along the way that they were also being active. In the end, the staff was rewarded the treats by the disaster planning team, and they were much more likely to remember the procedures because they actually did something. Their mind has something to link it to. Who wouldn't have fun doing that kind of a functional exercise? I thought that was a great one. The Fresno County Public Library in California integrated the rollout of their new pocket response plan and some components of their disaster plan into an all-day staff training they have. On a holiday, I think it's Columbus Day, the staff reports for work, but they are not open to the public, and all from all their branches and their main library all come in for training. So they rolled out this plan as one component of the training, and then they also gave staff the opportunity to practice covering some stack ranges with plastic sheeting. So, you know, I know you can all be creative in coming up with exercises that will work for your institution, and it really is kind of fun to do. To get you started, if you're just kind of trying to think of a way to organize this, you might consider these six questions to help you plan out exercises and work on it as a group to see what ideas you can brainstorm. First decide what type of exercise you want to conduct, and I'd say develop maybe about three or four types of exercises. Just list the exercises. Then you work on the rest of the questions for each of these three to four types of exercises. You know, who's going to be involved? Where are they going to be conducted? When should it be held? How will it be conducted, and why are we actually doing it? These could be both collections related, and for example, a collections related one of what could be... You're going to do a collections and salvage response. That might be a line of a hands-on collection salvage, and the who could be the collections group are the ones that are going to be involved, and where it's going to involve water, so you're going to do it in your outdoor patio, for example. And you're going to do it during non-public hours. You've decided maybe, so everybody can participate from that team, and you've got public service people that you want them to actually participate, so you're going to hold it during non-public hours. And it's going to be a planned exercise. Everybody knows what's going to happen there to come dressed comfortably, to be dealing with things that are wet and maybe dirty, so it's a planned kind of exercise. And then the why, because that's... It's going to make it mandated for your collections team, but more importantly, you want to build their confidence and you want to enhance their ability to respond. So with each one of these, you can kind of go through and develop this, and then using that information you've gathered, your planning group can then lay out a training plan for the next year or so, and sequentially figure out the best way to integrate the different exercises and who will be involved over time. I also keep in mind that every event, every exercise, or every actual emergency that happens, it's important to debrief on these. Use every emergency event as a learning experience. Every event, when it involves more than just a couple of people, especially when it requires outside response, such as bringing in a disaster recovery company, or it involves the fire department. Sit down as a group and evaluate the effectiveness of the response and improvements that can be made in either the written plans or adding other documents or in additional training that's needed. The objectives of the debrief, you want to gather complete and accurate information about the incident. You want to objectively assess the aspects of the response. What worked well, what needs improvement, and then also important to recognize the incident stress, the stress level, and allowing those participants to unburden and share their personal reactions to the event, especially when something major has happened. This slide provides kind of a framework for your debrief and the three components of the information gathering, the assessment of the response, and the all-important human factor. I'm not going to read through these. I just want to remind you, it's important to let people talk. You may find that someone went above and beyond and needs more recognition than they've received when you go through this debrief. You realize they're really the ones who were on top of it and got things going and involved the others. It's important that everyone gets to share their personal reactions and were there any personality issues that came into effect? Were there human factors that affected the response and what can be done to help on that in the future? You begin to make adjustments to your disaster plan and to future training as a result of what you learn during that debrief. Also use the information from every real event to keep an emergency event history as part of your disaster plan. Remember, what has happened before, if the cause has not been mitigated, it is more likely to happen again. This event history will help you better evaluate your risks and vulnerabilities, and it will also help you develop training and exercises. Jenny, any questions? Yeah, we do have a question from Amy and she is curious if there are any resources that are already ready made, where there are quick quiz questions, there are activities for things like a scavenger hunt versus having to start from scratch on some of these activities. Well, I've given you some of them on the resources list, the Library of Congress scenario, but you know, I did in the past the kind of a quiz more detailed than what I talked about of just a little departmental one. But I'm sorry, I don't specifically remember that. You know, I actually think if you sit down with a few people from your institution, you'll be able to come up. It's kind of a fun thing, brainstorm. That's a great way to get people involved. Brainstorm, a few ideas. And what we can do is we can watch and chat and see if anybody can answer Amy's question with something more specific. But I think brainstorming, it's kind of part of the fun of it. Somebody did a written, actually kind of a written exercise like that, but I personally like them if it's... and they passed it out as written, and I kind of like it where people are actually involved and in a room. Sometimes I've conducted exercises with locations where I asked, there were maybe five or six people that were going to take part in a tabletop, and it wasn't my institution. And I asked each one of them to come with a scenario that they wanted the group to talk about, something that we could talk about and spend maybe 15 minutes on each one of them. And we worked our way through them as a group, so nothing elaborate had to be developed ahead of time. And it also then responded to their concerns. If you turn to a group to help develop it at your institution, you're more likely to develop the things that they're concerned about. And so, you know, this is when something came out of this one of these that I did where that they were in a stretch of highway where there were a lot of accidents, and they were often being called on to help with emergency kind of medical kind of treatment off on this rather rural road. And so I never would have thought of that. I never would have developed that as a scenario. So that's why I think getting them involved is a good way to go. Hope that helps, and we'll see if there are others that get added in. I kind of want to review at this point some of the keys to a successful exercise as we begin to wrap up. I want to quickly run through these because it's important to know that this is behind you. Critical is administrative support, and so sometimes a way is to start with a tabletop exercise for administrators at a library or museum and let them participate in their own small exercise then they begin to see the benefits of it for other groups of staff. Good exercise design is important. Have a good facilitator if you decide to go that direction. Often you can bring in a safety coordinator or a training officer. These people have the skills to facilitate because the facilitation is a skill and they will be very helpful with it. A positive learning plan or objective is important. Make sure that people know what is expected of them. This is part of that, making sure they aren't anxious. There isn't an anxiety about what's expected of them at this exercise. A realistic scenario, don't overwhelm them or make it too complicated, especially for a first exercise. You can use something that's already happened to you before. Then no one can say, well, that can't happen here. Make it something that there will be some familiarity with and then you can make it progressively more challenging. Take it in stages. For preparation, don't do an exercise that will have the disaster plan with the procedures distributed and discussed with any staff feedback incorporated. Make sure they're comfortable with it. Otherwise it's going to be too frustrating and too many problems will be brought up. You just don't want that first exercise to defeat or overwhelm them. That's important. Keep instructions clear. For a tabletop exercise, for example, give everyone a sheet of paper with the scenario on it. Tell them how long it's going to be and the format of it. Answer any questions before you get started. Give them an opportunity. And convey the same kind of information for a functional exercise of how long and the format and any questions. So people start off feeling comfortable. In a critique, I don't like the word, I should have taken critique off of there. I like to call it a debrief because a critique begins to kind of sound more negative to me than if you're going to debrief. Make sure everyone participates. Watch for non-participation during an exercise. Then try to determine why someone maybe was very quiet. Maybe they were just being thoughtful and they were taking their time before responding. And the rest of the group was going too fast. If you ask them and say, you know, Paul, I noticed you weren't participating as much. Was there any reason or some comments you'd like to add? And you may find out, well, it was all going too fast. And sometimes that happens. Our adrenaline gets going and we start pushing too fast. And that is a very valuable lesson to be learned and that would come from a person who maybe did not speak that much. Or maybe the flip side of that, someone's dominating the exercise and others can't get a word in edgewise. Or maybe a person is simply overwhelmed. And if this person is a key person on your team, this may be something to investigate a little bit more. They may not be able to actually function in a real emergency event. And then follow-up. Develop an action list from this debrief and distribute it after the exercise. Have some assignments. Have a time frame where you're going to complete some of these actions. Also make a list of what went well. For example, you know, collection priorities were clear and up to date and there was agreement on what to salvage first. Well, that's a real bonus. So acknowledge that and get that into your debrief. As you proceed through more advanced exercises, they should be as realistic and as challenging as possible. They should last long enough for the full response to be evaluated and documented. The exercise should be instructive and educational and encourage that confidence building. And it's going to, overall, it's going to contribute to your sense of an organized response. But you're still going to cut, you're always going to come up with things that require improvement. And that's really when the work begins. That's the fine-tuning of the plan and the development and the maintenance of the plan. Allow plenty of time for an exercise, a minimum of two hours. You may want to run the exercise for one hour and then spend an hour debriefing, for example. Allow plenty of time for the debrief. You could also assign some staff members to observe the exercise and they might provide their comments of observation. Another method is you could have a recorder write down everything that's said in a tabletop or you could tape a session or videotape it. But start low-key until people are comfortable. No one wants to have it recorded if they say or do something that may reflect badly on them. You don't want to hinder discussion by having some sort of a recording. But videotaping an evacuation event or a hands-on collection salvage or recovery, that may make a lot of sense. It may make more sense than taping a tabletop exercise. Remember what I said before. These exercises should teach success, not failure and build confidence, not apprehension. Jenny, any questions? Well, we had a great follow-up from Amy who had asked about those ready-made exercises and she's saying from a small staff of just 13, she worries that unless something's really quick and easy there might be some administrative resistance. So she's looking for something to get that quick success. So my question for you is how do you make the case to your administration that utilizing time and resources for these exercises is worthwhile? Well, it's a responsible role in protection of the assets of your collection. I get this question on not only the components of doing an exercise, but on why should we spend the time writing the disaster plan. I'm assuming, Amy, that you have, you're to the point where you have a disaster plan, a plan is only as good as people are trained to implement it. If it's just sitting there without any training behind it and training is not just sitting people down in a room and saying, here's the disaster plan and walking through it, until you test it against something, you test it against an event, you don't know how it's going to work. You don't know how those people are going to work together. And so what I can really... I guess my main thing is you haven't finished. Just getting that disaster plan written, you have not finished your disaster preparedness. Part of that preparedness is the training. And training for... you could start with something like a fire extinguisher, especially if you don't have sprinklers in your building. Start with a little kind of exercise like that that you don't have to spend that much time on. But pulling them into a tabletop, maybe you can get the couple of administrators. Boy, anybody else have any other suggestions? It's just responsible stewardship. And you can't know how your plan is going to work and how people are going to respond until you test it. That's to be the bottom line. You're only halfway there with the plan. Julie, this is just a question that I have, which I think might help Amy's case. Are there case studies on how emergency disaster response plans have been used for actual emergencies that people can review and get an idea of how things happen so that they can say, you know, this is why we need to practice? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's one of those things that's hard to... Those that have gone through disasters often will say, you don't often read a lot about it, but they will say, you know, if we hadn't had, for example, a big flood in Hawaii, the campus, University of Hawaii campus, really had not done a lot of training. But the preservation department at the library had, as far as what to do with salvage of collections, how they were going to work, they were able to operate at the library level. But interestingly enough, they were dealing with the bigger picture at the campus level that had never really thought much about a flash flood cutting through the middle of the campus and affecting multiple buildings. So you get it kind of word of mouth. So I haven't seen that much written out. I'm sure there are things that have been captured in articles, that kind of thing. There may be some case studies on the NMLM, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine website, because I know they did some interviewing of people that had been through emergencies and actually pulled together, not best practices, but kind of trends and things that came out from that. So you might take a look on that page as well. This would be a great question, too, to ask in the Connecting to Collections online community. And that is something that you can post right onto, and I would encourage you to do that. And I think you may get some more specific answers because many, there's 1,000-plus people on that community. And you may then get some specifics from specific locations, but also more that you can read, some that may have been written. I also see that Anna has made the comment, you know, can you think of emergencies that happened in the past and adapt that? And that's true. I mean, anything that's happened to you before to capitalize on, you know, if it's happened to you before, it's likely going to happen to you again if the cause hasn't been mitigated. I hope that helps. I'd like to see that as a question in the online community. If one of you doesn't pose it, maybe Kristen or Jenny or one of us will get it on there, too. Yeah, we can definitely do that. Yeah. Anything else, Jenny? That's it for now. Okay. The, I just, kind of a few final words as we wrap up. I want to encourage you to conduct training for response to your most likely event. You know, if you don't have fire sprinklers, automatic fire suppression in your building, fire is likely. Water is likely for all of us because of all the pipes and everything else, exterior water coming in, but also we've got a lot of potential for water damage right within our buildings from our utilities. So conducting training for that and any others, if you're particularly prone to earthquake zone or tsunami, you're very low-lying and tsunami is a threat. You know, all of these different kinds of things. So extend this training beyond just evacuation drill. That's the functional exercise that all of us, I'm sure, have done multiple times. And extend your training beyond that. And get creative. Add other exercises. Conduct an exercise at least annually. Get it so the staff looks forward to it and to what they will learn next. And then use every event that happens to you, every real event as a test of your preparedness. You know, when something happens, learn from it. If an event happens to your neighboring institution, you know, someone else you partner with, or another library in your district, whatever it is, use that as a test. What if that had been us? What if that had happened in our building? What would we do? And this is a great way to learn from it. And so any other comments? I actually had a question for you, Julie. You've mentioned at least annually to do an exercise in your ideal world. What would, how often would you hold exercises? Well, it depends. The more elaborate ones, I wouldn't do them more than annually. In between, you can do the little things. Some of the little ideas I mentioned by telephone or focus and exercise towards a particular subset, your disaster team or administrators. I will say when I did that call of the disaster recovery team and asked them, you know, if they had their plan, they had all these different things, and I just tracked it on a little spreadsheet, and the administrative team was really upset that I hadn't called them too. I wasn't trying to test them, but that wasn't been my goal. I was after the disaster team, but they wanted, they really wanted that little exercise too, which I thought was interesting. So if you get them interested enough and you do these, they'll want more. They'll want more opportunities. I will say too, if you report out the results, don't, you never report out names. I just reported out that 75% of the people had the up-to-date call list with them. No names, nothing like that associated with it. But that was helpful. That was interesting for everybody to know. So annually maybe for the big ones, I would do at least some sort of exercise every year for some group. Keep it as yet another tool in your disaster preparedness. Great, Julie. I'm going to, are you ready to move on to the next slide because I know you have contact info, and I'm going to actually plop on top of that in evaluation for this webinar. If you guys have a second, we'd love it if you'd fill it out. We really look at all your responses, and they really help shape what we provide in the future. We have about five more minutes, and I'm going to just take a last call on questions and give you a second. I'll also mention, while we're closing up, that at American Library Association Meeting, if any of you are going on Friday, June 28th, ASCLA, which I have just drawn a blank on what that stands for, they are doing an all-day session called Ports in a Storm. They're talking about a new community-focused approach to library disaster planning. It is going to include an exercise by Dan Wilson, who is one of the main people responsible for the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Emergency Preparedness website. Dan's very knowledgeable, and he did tell me he is running an exercise. So that, I guess, is being run as a separate, I don't know if it's really a pre-conference, but there is a charge for it. But you could go on, you can go online and find out more about it. But it's going to also talk about the fact public libraries, especially serving as community resource centers in emergencies, a lot has come out as a result of hurricanes, hurricane Sandy, and others in Florida have done quite a bit of research along this. So I just wanted to mention that that will be coming up later on this month. All right, it doesn't look like we have any questions, so I'm going to just quickly plug our next webinar, which is tomorrow. It's WebWise Reprize, so it's our second part, and it starts at 2 o'clock Eastern time, so make sure to join us tomorrow as well. And, Julia, that looks like all the questions we have. Thank you so much for doing this follow-up, and thank you to everyone who's participated. Thanks, Jenny. This was great, and I encourage you to keep asking questions on the Connecting to Collections online community. Great. Thank you, guys. Have a...