 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that would be of interest to libraries in the state, and outside the state. Anywhere, we're free and open to anybody to watch. The show is broadcast live at 10 a.m. central time every Wednesday morning. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week and then post it to our website for you to watch later at your convenience. And at the end of today's show, I will show you where those archives are on our website. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos, services, and products. It's anything that we think that may be of interest to libraries and library staff. The Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska. In some other states, it's called the State Library. It's called the Commission. Nebraska always has to be different. Got it. So we actually are the agency that serves all types of libraries in the state. So you will find things on our show for public, academic, K-12 schools, correctional facilities, museums. Really, our only criteria is that it's something library-related. We do have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations on things that we're doing here out of the commission specifically, but we also bring in guest speakers. And that's what we have this morning with me today is Michael Stratman, who walked down the street. I did them all the way down the street. Yeah, from University of Nebraska at Lincoln here. And he is the Access Services Coordinator, oh, and Disaster Response Manager. I didn't know that, I didn't have any official title to go with that, do you? You need those to be that. At the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and he is going to talk to us today about emergency and disaster response planning and what you need to be thinking about in your library. So I'll just hand it over to you to talk to us about all the things that can happen. Good morning. I appreciate all of you joining us here today. One of the things we're going to be focusing on today is F, you had never begun planning for a disaster. Hopefully the number of people in that category are very, very small, but we're going to start from there as we go. We've got a lot of stuff to cover today. As I mentioned, this is frequently a four-hour sort of seminar, so she made me promise not to go that long. This will not be four hours, though. Officially, we are an hour long show. We are an hour. 10 to 11 a.m., central time. But if things do get a little longer, that's okay. So be aware of your microphone a little longer. If you have a lot of questions or things, but if you have to leave before we do officially wrap up, don't worry. As I said, everything is being recorded, and you'll be able to watch it later. Right, and we've tried to do some little heavier text slides than we normally do, just so that if you want to go back and review things or look at things, the information will be there on the slide. Right, and the slides will be available to you at the time of the recording. We post them as well. We post the recording on YouTube. We then do a separate document that you'll be able to download and have the slides for yourselves as well. So great. So, okay, well, we'll get started. So one of the first questions I always get is why do I need a disaster plan? I've heard people tell me that it can't happen to my institution. I've heard people say, I don't have time to do it. That's always my favorite one because the time spent before disaster is infinitely more productive and valuable than the time you spend after if you have to start figuring out what to do with it. You don't know how to do the disaster plan. I understand if you've never had to. Never had to do it, never had to think about how to write it. Luckily, that's one of the reasons we do this sort of teaching and we go around to do it. And there's also a number of resources that we'll talk about a little bit later that can help people plan to do it. No one wants to do it. You don't want to think about it. No, it is an honorous task, especially doing all the planning and the preparation, especially with libraries with smaller staff. It is a significant time investment to do this. So thinking that your insurance will just simply take care of it, that your company will swoop in and everything will be all right. You'll have a new building next week and all your collections will be back on the shelf. Very optimistic. It is, it is. And that you can't afford it. And the answer for this is that actually you can afford it if you do it at the beginning and if you do the pre-planning as opposed to the end. So we're going to talk about what we need to do and the different steps to think about how you're going to approach your disaster planning. Okay. The idea is that we need to identify, anticipate and avoid preventable emergencies. There's always going to be those emergencies that just happen out of the blue disasters, you know, whether the first earthquake strikes in your region in the last 100 years or something like that. But the majority of emergencies are preventable. So how do we stop the disasters from happening in the first place? One of the biggest things people always tell me is, you know, the chances of me having a disaster are small. You know, there are tornadoes here. We're not in a flood zone. There are many, many small disasters that you think of. They're not always tornadoes, floods, fires. Frequently, it's something as simple as a water pipe breaking, you know, a water fountain coming off the wall or a window being damaged by vandalism or less rain in or a small fire that may happen in a janitorial closet. All of these have huge effects on collections. Maybe your PowerPoint in the microwave is too long. That actually happened upstairs. It's not our office. Which set up sprinkler system, which then caused water to come down into our area. Right. So they're not always the big tornado or earthquake flood things. They're often the smaller things in planning for those. And those are the ones where you're going to use your disaster plan on a regular basis. And we probably enact our disaster plan at UNL once every couple months in terms of collection damage or building damage across our different sites. So not always big. We need to plan for the emergency response for staff and patrons. It's often easy to think about our disaster planning as what are we going to do with the books after all said and done. But a bigger question is what are we going to do with the people as the disaster or emergency is occurring? That has to be included in our plan that we're aware of that and being able to go through the whole cycle of response. We need to talk about ways to prevent destruction and protect collections. So as things are going along, we need to already have thought of ways to make sure that our collections are safe as we go through those. We want to consider how we're going to mitigate damage when an emergency occurs. So when that water problem falls off the wall, how fast do we respond and do we have the resources at hand so that it becomes a matter of a few wet books as opposed to the matter of a flood inside a building. So we can find ways to respond quickly enough. A lot of times we can avoid the incredibly large tragedies there. And last of all, we need to establish guidelines for managing disaster salvage. So that's what most people think of when they think of disaster response is how are we going to deal with the wet books or the burnt books or the microfiche that stuck together. But that's actually the last thing we're thinking of as we do these. So as we look through these bullet points, these are the things that we need to think about having in any effective disaster plan for an institution. And this is true of an institution for any size. From the smallest public library with a part-time staff member on up to the largest of the academic or special libraries, these are all components you should be having in your disaster plan. So we're going to go through and we're going to talk about the various components that you should think about introducing into your plan. I think the first and most important component you need to have is your statement of objectives. You need to talk about what you're actually going to cover, what you hope to achieve by it. This tells you and it tells the reader of the plan what's covered. You're going to be sharing this plan widely with emergency responders, insurance companies. They will all receive a copy of this plan beforehand. Your city managers, your university managers, whatever your case might be. And they need to know what you plan for and where you're going with it. So that statement of objective is really important to cover those things. Now, your emergency response plans. This is what we were talking about when you're building a disaster plan. You're often going to be in the building in a disaster when it's right. You know, it's not going to be you get a call and you have to come into work because the building's on fire. It's likely going to be the fire alarm starts going off inside your building. So what are you going to do? First and foremost, human life and safety is the most important aspect of any planning and emergency response. Collections can be replaced. Our staff and our patrons are absolutely irreplaceable. So we want to make sure we think about that. So in part of that, we need to think about our evacuation routes. What do our buildings look like? How do they go? Where are we going to get people out of the building? How are we going to get them out of the building? And you can do a whole seminar just on this sort of emergency response planning in terms of how we build those. But we're just going to leave it as a day in that we need to think about those. All of these are building specific. That's going to be a theme you're going to see over and over today and all of our disaster planning is very, very building specific. You can look at other plans. You can see other people's way of dealing with things. But they're going to be unique to you. Where your fire exits are, where you originator shelters are, where your evacuation route point is, et cetera, et cetera. So then we need to think about what to do in individual types of emergencies. So our response for attorney those much different than a response for fire or a bomb threat. You know, for instance, in my plan, we talk about you given our proximity to the railroad, but it's a chemical spill applied, things like that. So, you know, there's going to be a lot of different types of emergencies that you're going to have to prepare for. And again, we're not talking collections here. We're specifically talking people. And now for those things like, you know, the evacuations and whatnot, this is something we're going back to in school. Excuse me, doing fire drills. So you're going to have to practically figure out what is the route and you need to practice it with everyone on your staff. If you could write the best disaster plan in the world, put it in your desk. It does nobody any good. Right. We need to disseminate it. We need to get it out there. No. Yeah. So the damage say, well, this is happening. Let me read the document and figure out what you're doing. No, you don't have to know it off the top of your head. I go to that door and then the details and you have the chance. And that's a really good point is practice all aspects of not just the evacuation, even the collection salvage is an important one to practice. And I don't hear at least in Southeast Nebraska. We work frequently with the regional library system to do those workshops where we actually get to deal with wet books or damage books and what have you. So hands on hands on. The only way to learn something else that's really important for your thing is who's on the disaster response team. A lot of this is going to depend on how many are available on your staff. So, you know, if it's you and your assistant in the library, there you go, you already have your response team, but there's also resources and we'll talk a little bit about these that are around you. They can be included in that, whether that's your city manager or or your business office, things like that. You need to be thinking about who's going to be the manager who's going to do publicity, communications, financial, et cetera. And again, that may be all of two or three people or it may have a team of 15 or 20. And this would be the same people that I seem also consult with when you're writing this whole plan response that the people that need to be involved in it should because that's what I was thinking about on your first slide was who do we who should be participating in this and don't just be. I'm the director and I'll do it all on my own. Actually, you can't bring in all your staff that you have potentially that would be involved and especially in cities, you know, if there's someone within the city who you need to be communicating with say, Hey, we wrote this, right? What do we do? Okay. The biggest thing in all this is who has the authority. Now, there's a couple kinds of authority here. The one that I like to him rose is financial authority. Who can write the check to do anything? Who can make the decision on where they're going? And again, that's going to vary wildly with your your governance there. So so think about that. So once we get all these people together, we know what they're going to do. We need to write down specifically what their duties and responsibilities are, especially in times of crisis. Big descriptions do us no good at all. We need exact specifications. This is what my job is and how I respond to it. People are going to be panicking and not thinking. Right. This is your job. The second and we need backups. Emergencies seldom happen when everybody is present during the day and nobody's on vacation and all of that. So, you know, if your city manager is weeklong vacation in Aruba, then who's going to write the check or whatever. So we need backups for all those positions. Who's going to be able to take care of that? Okay. So the next aspect of what we're thinking about is disaster plan. We got emergency response. We got a disaster response team. The next is our collection priorities. What type of collection do you have within your library information agency? Is it primarily just paper bags? Do you have a microfilm component? Is there a large number of DVDs or CDs? You know, even in some of the archival collections, there might be odd formats, you know, that we need to be thinking about. Are there paintings that are hanging on the walls that we consider part of our collection? So we need to think about what kind of collections we have in our buildings. And they're almost always more varied than we think they are. Once we get down and start looking, yeah, and inventorying, right? What are the most vulnerable objects within your collection? What are the things that you need to think about protecting? What are the things that are damaged most easily? Going through and making a priority list. You need to be thinking about things that are on loan, things that are valuable, things that are important, things that are environmentally sensitive. All of these are factors. It does no one any good to say my entire collection is super special and it has to be all saved because that's not a reality at all. There's going to come a time where you have to think about what am I pulling out? There may even be an opportunity during an emergency where you have an opportunity to save a few things. And that's where you want your priority list to have. If the fire crews are responding to a long running fire in an adjacent building and you're able to say, this is the shelf I need you to go in and save for me, that's something you can do. You can say, I'd like you to take care of this floor, right? That's not a thing. So think about what it looks like and make your priority list. You have a question. It was actually a related to what we were talking about previously about doing drills. And the question says, how do you get management to do drills? I'm assuming there's some sort of a piece. Certain people are not important for the fact that this is important. Well, in a lot of times, there's a fear, I think, of customer patron disruption. Nobody else pull a fire alarm and go out in the middle of the thing. And I think talking a lot with management about the importance of human life and safety. You're responsible for them. You're responsible. And without being too basic, nobody wants to be the person that's quoted in the newspaper or the one that didn't want to run fire drills when the building burned out. That's something happens. Yeah, PR nightmare. Right, we want to think about doing that. So I encourage you to have a very frank discussion with what that is. And the reality is there are a lot of things we can drill for nowadays, especially in terms of emergency response. You know, active shooters are very, very common thinking about that in terms of training. That's a component of training that we really didn't do 10 or 15 years ago. So maybe starting with some of those higher profile sort of drills and training. Some of them, if you want to go through and think about drills at times where there's low customer and patron interaction in the building. You know, can you do this, you know, the hour before we open where all the staff have to come in and we have to practice that. You know, do we have to have the patrons here to do all that? So, you know, there are some different ways to drill that you can think about, I think, in pitching that to your management. So I hope that answers your question. If not, just let us know there in the text box. So we talked a little bit about how we're prioritizing assets. Assets aren't just collection of the life of the property, the environment. Your number one things are the extremely important and must be protected at all costs, irreplaceable. You know, if there's something in your collection and these could be anything from the landplot records from the late 19th century that might be sitting in your library or things like that that are just unique. They're not digitized. You have the only one, right? That's the sort of thing that we're going to be thinking about we have to replace or we have to protect. Okay. A lot more of our stuff falls into the second category of great importance, you know, it would be a loss. Objects are generally irreplaceable would be a serious loss. These are going to be a lot of things we keep in our local history collections or archives or special collections that might have unique value. As an artifact, less about maybe if a book was owned by somebody or had a signature or things like that, those would be things that we really wouldn't want to lose. They're pretty important to us, but you know, it would be okay. Now, the third, and to be quite honest, the majority of libraries, this is where this material lies. It's hard to say that. It's hard to say that, but you know, we all have a copy of something. And we're sharing it. So it's something we can easily replace. My running joke for all my disaster trainings is this is where your Daniel steel paperbacks, right, you know, we're here with the things that we can go out to a bookseller and just have John on our desk in a week. And this is also, I think, where insurance would come in and replacing all of your Daniel steel backs us. I mean, you don't worry about that it's going to cost something and be a hassle later. It's okay because that's what you can use that money for. I'm like number one and two that there isn't anything to replace it with. Right. Exactly. So in your prioritization of all of this, you're going to want inventories to be able to send. Now, it's entirely possible that if you can get, if there's for instance bulk water damage, you can have materials cleaned and dried and we'll talk about this a little later on. But you need to balance that cost of replacement. So there's a discussion there. And this is where when you have that prioritization list that you can have those conversations with your insurance about what was damaged what can be replaced. What's the best route to go now. Right. So. Okay, the next step we have to have is in our resources. This is in your disaster plan. You need to have pages of what kind of equipment and supplies do I think I'm going to need. Where am I going to store it doesn't do any good to be in a closet that only one person might have access to need to we need to have a central place to put it. This isn't always on site. You know, there can be emergency stores off site. So thinking about, if you have a drastic disaster. Is there anything that you have stashed off site. And the last thing I want to say is where's the nearest conservator. Now we're very lucky in Nebraska to have one of the best conservation labs in the region just in Omaha and some absolute staff up there. But you know, for those of us outside Nebraska or the region. You know, you can track down where your conservator is. What type of conservator. Mostly we're going to be talking paper but again if you have paintings or those sorts of things. Where's the best person that can do that. And so, so this will be for stuff for. Are you going to talk about like computers and that kind of. We'll talk about that a little bit. It's a different topic. That's a different topic. And that's certainly something that we're going to have to think about. And that's especially important in the off site location. So, you know, where, where, where are certain backups, you know, things like that. So, and that's certainly, you know, a lot of what we're thinking is talking about is print, but electronic collections are increasingly a huge portion of our stuff. The nice thing about it is that most of those are either cloud based, or we should have an effective backup system in place. So it's often a matter of replacing machines and reloading. It's a little easier to regain. Yeah, so. So, the big thing and resources think outside your institution this just isn't what's in your building. What does your city have available to you what do near universities have available to you. All sorts of things think outside the box. This could be something as simple as where's the nearest freezer. I've known some local, some small libraries that have used a local butcher or something like that in order to find a place to just bring them in there. We want to think about things outside your institution. We got another question there. So let's know this is a question. How just does one find where the nearest conservator is located or what kind of organizations are we talking about there. So a lot of those you're going to be able to find online you can do a search for those in Nebraska. It's the Ford Conservation Center outside Nebraska you can look. I'm a last has some lists of conservators. There are a lot of things there, again, depending what you're looking for, but often a quick internet search will be able to provide your nearest one. There are also I would know freelance conservators. So don't necessarily think about just governmental response or what have you but you know you could very easily have someone trained in paper conservation in your area that you might not think of that might be available for consultation or even employment. So, but those people didn't hang their shingles out pretty predominantly it's a very specialized task. As I said, this is something that is these are going to people that specifically work with libraries. Well, they normally they work with libraries you museums. There's a stronger museum component to a lot of that with the repair of artifacts. We're focusing on items that are unique and invaluable and rare. My conservator is not going to really touch your Danielle skills and nor do you want to pay them. I'm sure they would be happy to at their rate. Frequently a conservator is a multi PhD sort of position and their skills don't come cheap. So we wouldn't think about doing that. Think about where your emergency services are police fire ambulance hospital. That needs to be included in your thing. Again, experts conservators or salvage companies. I know you hear a lot about water damages, something very popular happens a lot and then there's companies that are their thing is company with a freeze drying. There are a couple types of drying and we'll talk about the later together. There are companies specifically focus on that. Belfort is one of the biggest ones that go around and they come in. They have trucks that can either do things on site or take things off site. Knowing how to get all of those companies in advance is an important thing. You can even do pre disaster contracts. If there are seven information agencies that have to be responded to the ones with contracts get responded to first. So there are things like that. And those are very, very regional in terms of where they're stationed around the country. For instance, Belfort has one in Kansas has a station in Kansas City, even though they're stationed out of Dallas, they can respond to regional agencies faster. So the victims will have that. And then volunteers in the community who's trained or experienced, not necessarily and sometimes you just need bodies to help you move books around. But if there are people that might be regionally available, that would be willing to serve. I know several is on the disaster team at UNL have assisted with regional problems and going and offering to do that. So who around your area is might be of assistance in those times of emergency. And the last thing and on resources I want to really emphasize is where are you going to get your stuff, the materials, the supplies, the equipment. Sure, we want a little bit of tieback or plastic in our in our institutions to respond to those small things. But if suddenly we're to have a whole floor damage, we are not going to have the resources stored on site. You want to have that much just in case who can I call up and say, hey, I need 700 boxes or, you know, I need to football fields with the plastic, you know, or whatever. We want to source those materials first so that that we're not sitting there on our cell phone while the party trying to talk to us looking for those things at midnight. So all these lists for for your disaster team, you need your name, you need every way to get a hold of impossible work, mobile telephone numbers and exactly what they do. Disaster response is a 24 seven job. So make sure you have a variety of ways to get a hold of people. And that's true for anyone whether that's your city manager, writing the check or your dean or your director. These disasters are not always going to happen between you know 9am and 5pm and everyone's on clock. Because they do do this and they know they're part of a disaster team they know that that's their possibility. Freak out that you're going to be putting on a list to call it to him but make sure you have the way to get in touch with them. And that could be when you share this disaster plan with your local emergency responders. You know, I've had a call at 2am from the fire department saying yeah, can you come down to your building you need to come check us out you know so right we need to think about doing that and so there are those are ways to get a hold of you as well. Let's talk a little bit about the equipment and supplies that you need to think about and this is in your disaster plan where this stuff is at what you need. There's a couple different categories one of a lot to think of operational this is just how are we going to. This isn't necessarily salvage yet this is just how we're going to do stuff. How are we going to get around in the building how are we going to take care of ourselves. You know, how are we going to take notes or write things down that's all this operational stuff that we need to be thinking about, including in our disaster response. Package at the smaller kid or our supply list is a larger kid. salvage, okay, that polyethylene sheeting tyvek blotting paper plastic bags, and we're not going to go too deep today since we're just talking about writing disaster plan on how you use all these different things. That's the hands on class. Right. That's that's that's a little different. What's that? Tyvek is actually the wrap you see put under. Siding. So when you see that that siding wrap around a house over the sheen before you put that up. What that is is that's a water permeable barrier barrier that doesn't stick to things. So it has a lot of interest in uses when it comes to, to wet books. So, and remarkably cheap, you can go down to the larger home Depot and buy a whole lot of it relatively expensive. Right. So it's one of those things that we can do. And that's boxes, book cards, fans, the humidifiers. Again, we're going to have someone site, but we're going to have to think about where we're going to go. Go to your your menards or your loads grab some of these because something happened. Yeah. And then the last thing we want to think about for equipment supplies is what the site cleanup look like, you know, and this is, we're not so much thinking about how we're going to repair the building. We're just trying to think about how we're going to get to the collections, how we're going to help them. And again, this is going to come back to not all disasters are big. You know, when the water fountain falls off the wall, we're going to need a way to clean that up. We're going to need a way to do that. We're going to need a way to do repair things. And of course that's the size of that. Right. And not all of these things because I mean I'm looking at this thinking. Well, do I need to buy a wet drive back just in case for the library. No, you need to know where you can get one and lots of places to other places. Now you can rent some of these machines for a temporary amount of time. You don't have to purchase one. Right. You know, like loads of menards and sad just need this because this because they don't get all these kinds of things happens in people's personal homes and in businesses. So just your, so your equipment and supplies for some of these things would be when something happens where they'll get it right to rent it to borrow it to whatever. Multiple sources. Okay. If there's a fire in your building, it's perfectly okay. I think I can go down to home depot and get a wet drive back. If we have a tornado go through the town. Right. So we need. Right. What are all the resources there. So things to sort of think about. Disaster plans. Right. It is, it is super easy to make one that is too big and too complicated and isn't understandable by everyone. So use the keep it simple approach. Make sure everyone has a copy of it and they understand it and have multiple copies of the plan. Now, for instance, at UNL, we have a very large collection across, you know, nine different buildings, including a high density facility and ours gets a little more complicated because of that. But still we want to make sure we have multiple copies everywhere. Everyone's ready. Everyone understood what's going on. So keep it as simple as you can though. We need to do that. Generic plans and templates. This is one of the best places to start. If you're absolutely in it. Oh my gosh, I've never done this before. Go out on the web. There's a bunch of them. There's a few sites D plan is a great one that you can go and you just sort of input some of your stuff and it'll start giving you the basics of a plan. The idea is about what you might want to include that might be unique for your site. Okay, but don't think that a generic plan is all you need. I've seen some sites where they just printed somebody else's offer made a few invitations and again that's going to go back to each building is specific each collection is specific. Don't don't think about a generic plan is all you might need they have to be clear sites need so make sure make sure you do that with the time and make that work for you. All this you've written all this down you have this beautiful plan it almost in the small bound book. You're ready to go out and congratulate yourself. The unfortunate news is you're not done. The disaster planning is never done. Whether your priorities change collections change different scheduling change budgets might change all of those are going to be an ever evolving target. So your plan has to do that as well. Think about refreshing your plan. You do it on the fly great, but there should be a systematic refresh at least every four to five years, where you just go through your schedule. This is something I do regularly. Right, I got to start reading at the beginning and go through and you may use the number of people that have retired or moved on. Or, you know, is this company that I was going to get my backing from still in business or, you know, make sure all the phone numbers work and everything like that. So it's an always moving target. There we go. Okay, so we started thinking about this. We now know our basics for our plan here. We're going to talk a little bit about prevention. The easiest way, and I alluded to this early on to avoid a disaster is to stop it from happening in the first place. We don't want to respond to everything we prefer that it just didn't happen. So what we need to do is we need to go through and we need to look at our collection. We need to do a risk assessment on what might go wrong. How can we fix this in advance? If that hill outside your library that gets a little soggy every time it rains, what happens if we get a 50-year rain, right? Do we have a good drainage system in place, you know, those things like that? Can we do that in advance before the basement floods? Those things like that. We want to look at the topography, the conditions, our building, look at our collection, you know. Are there any problems with the collection that we need to be thinking about addressing? Do we need better shelving or things like that? In external influences, are there things out there that we just that are going on in our town that we need to be thinking about when we're addressing those? I won't spend too long on all of these, but some of the things when we talk about topography, okay, we think about our rivers and lakes, you know, our graves. How do we get into the building? How can emergency responses arrive? You know, is there only one dock that's capable of getting a truck into things like that? I often say flora and fauna, you know, are the bushes overgrown outside of our buildings? You know, do we have a fire hazard or anything like that? So those real, and like I said, I'm not going to go real deep into all these, but think about what's going on there. In our physical conditions within the building. One more. Okay. What's our temperature look like? Do we have good HVAC system? You know, yeah, a lot of our buildings, it's okay. You know, but then when it's stressed out, our relative humidity, if we have a portion of the building where it's just muggy all of the time, and the books you're doing in there, there's going to be problems, and you're going to develop potentially mold or mildews that we've been. That's a disaster. We get a bloom and then we're in a disaster, right? So if we fix the humidity problem before the mold outbreak, we're going to be good. So, and then precipitation and, you know, that little leak over the photocopier might get a lot worse. So our building, we want to look at the structure inside and outside, top to bottom. Okay, so when we go through, take a walk outside your building, what's it look like? The roof in good shape, the siding in good shape, all of those things are things that we have to be constantly thinking about and on top of to avoid those disasters happening in the first place. Think about the activities and the use in the building. And this is all ours. So, you know, if you share with the community center or, you know, you have an auditorium or there's a lot of different things that happen in the library that aren't just library stuff. Make sure we're thinking about that. So, thinking about safety and security. What sort of response do we have inside? You know, do we have somebody walking through or can we see everybody? You know, we had an incident a few years back where somebody tried to start a fire on one of our stack levels and then university police would respond very quickly and it didn't become a big disaster. But it varies with us. Yeah. So think about that. For these things that they outside the building, the activities use, you know, in and out of the building. This is something to look beyond your property. Are your neighboring buildings taking care of their building, taking care of their landscaping. Are they, are they having water issues that may affect your building? And so you need to look at something outside of your square library owned space and see what's going to come from the outside and potentially affect you. Right. I've seen plenty of neighbors regrade their space to fix their water problems. And it just funneled all the water into the. Sorry. You're underwater. Yeah. So think about those things. Now for your collection, we talked a little bit about this, so we're not going to go in. I think about unique items. Again, it's not just your books. So think about that. And there are some inherent risks in a collection. You know, we all know that certain collections and books in general are really just in an inevitable state of the case. And some collections are more decaying than others. So think about what the risks are in your collection, just in terms of how they're progressing. And none the same as the sensitivity of objects, but we won't spend a lot of time on each of these so that we actually get done before my four hour mark. So our external influences, and this is a lot what Chris was talking about, your neighbors, your other places around. I alluded earlier, thinking about chemical spills and what have you being near a railroad or those sorts of things. Are you near a power plant, gas lines, all those sorts of things. Think about civil disturbances, right? If every time somebody wins a football game, does the riot go down your street? Or does it go down another street? So we want to know what those are and think about what those might happen. So something we don't often want to think about terrorism. Right. It's just something to think about what we do there. Vandalism, that's something all of us have to think about in terms of both interior and exterior, about things going on. Theft of our collections, all of those sorts of things are there. When we do our risk analysis, we do our risk analysis, we do our risk analysis, we do our risk analysis over there. When we do our risk analysis though, we're going to go ahead and think about how likely is this to happen? And then what is the effect going to be? Sure, we want to think about, you know, terrorism and so on and so forth. But is the likelihood that it happens? Not really. We don't need to spend a huge amount of planning time on it. We just have to be aware of it. However, there's a high probability that at some point in your institution you're going to have a fire, you're going to have a flood, or if you're in Nebraska, you're going to have a tornado. You know, saying with the building leak, likely you're going to have a leak somewhere in your building. I think we all have. You know, we've all had vandalism and that's going to happen, but its effect is going to be much lower. So, but those, these are the orders in which we're going to want to, to prepare for those. And I think this also, these categories give us a idea of the order in which we need to dress these and the energy in which we need to spend to look at both of them. So, we don't need to, if something's down in the four category, and we need to acknowledge it, but we don't need to. Be aware that it could happen. Right. But I don't need to lay in supplies, my on-site story room to, to worry about a window seal. You know, it's, there we go. Again, we're still in prevention. All your staff should be trained to recognize, look for evidence. When, when somebody walks through and hears that little drip, drip, drip in the ceiling tile, right? They should know exactly what they need to do, who they need to tell. And we can get those. No, what's normal and what's not. Right. You know, so we need to get all of that stuff. Preventing the disasters is the best thing your disaster planning can do. So, make them not happen. Water is our big one. And then we'll get a little bit of, you know, you mentioned when you were talking about disaster response, you, we always think about the water. Yeah. Almost every disaster has water, right? If it's a leak, if it's a flood, if it's a fire, you know, they use water, you know, almost all disasters somehow end up with wet things. So, but we want to look for that as we're preventing, look for the water stains. And, you know, especially many of our facilities have suspended ceilings. We don't see the pipes. We can see. I mean, we're good in here right now. So we're in our offices. I know that, you know, that's the best spot. And every time it rains is going to be a garbage. Right. We got to know those, you know, we, we want to look for high humidity, that musty smell, that mold smell. We want to be able to stop those things. Fire hazards. This is huge for, for venerable. I can't tell you how many libraries I've been to. Where there are parts of books. In the path of an egress, right? And we're back to that. We have our people first and we need to be able to make sure it gets out of the building. We want to look at that. Or the, the, the 23. Surge protectors plugged into one another to get down the hallway. Right. We wouldn't be able to look at all of that and have our staff trained to say. That's a problem. Yeah. And get that fixed. So. Okay. We're never in a long year. So, we're, we've talked about preventing our, we've talked about, we've talked about, we've talked about, we've talked about our problems. We want to talk about our first response. To any emergency. It happened. We want to raise the alarm. And if possible, contain the source of the emergency. Water, hot and balls off the wall. We want to get that water shut off. We want to get things there. We want to make sure that everybody is safe. Collections are all secondary to make sure people are safe. We need, if it's big enough, we need to get that water shut off. So we want to get the water shut off. I'm pretty chubby there. So what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that, that all of our response activities are controlled. In a central area. So that we're not working in things. And we're going to be able to get our people together and given specific instructions on what we're going to do. Again, this is very, very early in an emergency is that we're going to want to do these sort of responses. So if we have a big thing, we don't want additional people being injured or additional inflection beings. So we want to get that done. We want to stabilize the environment as quickly as possible. After we've stopped the source of the problem, we want to make sure that our temperature humidity, get control as quickly as possible and get those sorts of things done. We want to protect our collections, obviously. Remember, we've protected our people already. Now's the time we need to think about taking care of the stuff that we're actually in here to protect. And then, of course, we need to start salvaging those sorts of things. Assessing damage, we want to be able to look at the building. This is sort of the next step when we did our prevention look through. We want to see what's going on. Is there any structural weakness to our loss of utility, water damage, things like that? Is this something, though, I would think that other experts out there can be like, someone from the fire department or somewhere comes and decides, no, this is structurally too damaged. Because I can see some librarians or staff saying, I don't have the expertise to know. That's true. I can tell, oh, God, there's a huge crack in the wall. We're still in immediate response here. This is less, you know, the structural engineers haven't come out yet. So we're coming here and this is our late call when we're looking at saying, you know, that wall looks really dodgy. We're not going to go anywhere near that wall. And this would go along with, I know my building. Right. So I know where its weaknesses are in general. So I can tell someone right off the cuff, you're probably going to want to watch out for that. Now, you know, if you had a fire and the fire crews are in scene, they're going to start taking care of all this. But these are still components you have to think about. These are still questions you need to ask if you've been taken from the building and the fire chief comes up to talk to you, you want to ask him, okay. So is it safe? What's going on? And they may ask you questions because they don't know the building as well as you do. Exactly. So these are all some of the things we want to look at when we're assessing damage. We want to look at our security concerns, you know, are there security systems, the power available in things, just a wide open window, you know, and in case of civil unrest or whatever, we want to think about building. So here's a summary of some of our health and safety hazards during and after an emergency response. Okay. And we won't go through each of these. At the time, I just wanted to put them up here on the text and then so you'll be able to review this later when you look at that. When you're working on writing up your plan, this is the things you need to be addressing. Right. These are some of the things we need to think about. You know, we often think about the physical environmental, but we don't often think about it as the health things. Responding to a disaster is a very stressful situation, not just physical in terms of the way it looks around, but the mental and emotional stress. It's often, you know, hot, you know, it's muggy, it's whatever, so, you know, there's dust everywhere. So we need to be thinking about those things as we're going along. So and these are things in your plan that we're going to talk about as you're writing through on your health and safety precautions. We're going to make sure everything is sound and safe. We're absolutely not going to use power heat unless we're told it's OK to do it right. Nobody wants to be the guy that flips on a light switch and realizes and suddenly understanding it's a little water, right? We don't want to do that. And of course, personal protective equipment at all the time. We want to rotate work crews. So when I'm getting the stress and stress and everything. So when we're thinking about our plans, what do those workers look like? How are we designing those and be prepared to just close the building to everybody? The big one I like to put in here is never work alone. And this is true for almost any disaster, regardless of scale. Your water fountain comes off the wall and in my favorite example. And we're bundling up web books. It's easy to overdo it. And suddenly you need to help. And so in general, never work alone on these things. OK, our last component that we're thinking of when we do actual disaster response is our salvage. So what are we in? This is the part everybody thinks about. That's what it's all about. Disaster. The horrible thing has happened. What do I do? Right. And we're almost through most of the hour. And we haven't gotten to it. So much more. And all that prevents it. You might have to do this. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully. You're so prepared. This is easy. This is easy. So we're going to do that. So how are we salvaging? OK, now this is where we're stopping in the source. We're making the temperature all the same we talked about before. But this is a long term basis. So before we were talking about immediate response, you know, we're going to we're going to stop the problem here. We're going to be OK. We're going to try and control things. This is a long term. When we go into salvage, when the immediate response is over, this is where the long hard work starts. So we need to be thinking about this isn't a quick in and out. This is what we're going to be doing for some time in the future. We need to look at assessing damage to the collections. We got to organize our priorities. Hopefully, we've all done that priority sheet we talked about earlier on, where we know exactly what we need to pull out, what we have to do first, second, third. There's going to be some waiting time. OK, it may be that the fire crews or insurance aren't letting you into the building right away, and you're going to have some time to think about that's the time where we're going around calling all of getting our supplies ready, getting our equipment ready, getting our workers so that the minutes that were allowed into that building, we can hop in there and be productive. What we don't want to do is be able to walk in and say, oh, I wonder where I should start. That's why we've written this plan, you know, so put it in place as soon as possible. Triage, OK, those are the things that we're going to think about in which objects we're going to think about, which are wet and by wet. I mean, just soggy, completely so bad. Hopefully they're not that way. They're just damp or partially wet. Our responses are different for those. Are they smoke damage? Are they fire damage? Are they frozen? Are they dry, but they're dusty, you know, in the case of a building collapse or something like that, you might have damage there. You need to think about what that is. In the order I have listed here, that's in general of the order I would approach objects in my part of this. So everything on my high priority list, I would then put in this order, I would subdivide it. If it's just dry and dusty, that's going to be the last thing I deal with. Is it what you need to address right away? Right. Add down to you can set it aside and look at it. You know, if we're in a building and, you know, it's 12 degrees out because we live in Nebraska and things are frozen, well, that's going to help because that's what I was going to do them anyway. So we're going to think about that. So that's lower down the list. So that's why we get on this. When we talked about everything being wet all the time, the wetter the atom is, the faster it's simmering, its findings are coming apart, it's going to slip its glue. It's just going to fall apart. So that's why we get there first. When we do these, when we're handling this, once you get a book wet, we need to be thinking about training when we're writing our disaster plan for how we're handling those things, right? We have to take a lot more care. Suddenly, a book that you could throw down on a table and not have a second thought of is going to be fragile. It's going to be able to break, it's going to tear, it's going to do all sorts of things. So we have to be really careful of how we're doing these. It is so easy to damage these materials, you know, whether they're fire damaged or they're wet damaged. And this goes back to what we're talking about, training, making sure you practice this sort of stuff. Yeah, and look for some of those workshops, the hands-on workshops that Michael has done or other people about how to deal with, what do I do when I have on these wet materials or fire damage materials in my hands and how am I supposed to actually, you can actually practice holding something like that. Unfortunately, in a small community, we're the expert a lot of times. And so even if we're not an expert in it, we're probably all that's available at the time. So we need to be really careful about that. So one of the things we're talking about here is, again, like we mentioned before, take care of yourself, take health precautions, use gloves. And that's not just for the collection, that's a lot of that's for you. You know, as you're handling different materials, you never know, glues, there's all that sort of thing that we just don't need. Things that might be really hazardous that you haven't encountered before. Right, that's what we thought about, that suddenly become mobile when everything's wet and what have you. And use supports and more than one person and these are just sort of some self-explanatory things to think about those. So we won't go into what each of these are, but there are a couple different options available for you for salvage material. Here, we're really just gonna talk about wet. As I mentioned before, everything is up wet, right? We can air dry something. It's for the damn thing. We've all done this in our facility. We've opened up, we've put fans on things. We can use a dehumidifier. In general, everything below air drying tends to be professional. We need to be able to have a specific environment to do that. Research each of these options, know what they are before the salvage guys come up to you and ask you which one you wanna do. As you go down the list, the efficacy increases as does the price. You can vacuum, freeze dry something. That's awesome. And wow, that's definitely not your Daniel's field offer. So there's a couple different options. Just be aware of them and understand them. Clean up. It's all done. All the books are fixed, right? Whether that's a big disaster or a little disaster. We need to think about making sure the physical environment is repaired and this doesn't happen again. Was it something that went wrong that we need to fix? The big thing, and this does not happen often enough, is replace your equipment supplies. Oh yeah, restock. Restock, and that's the little disasters are what gonna eat up your supplies. You know, you use two baggies here and you use three sheets of plastic here and then those things and then pretty soon in here you don't have any and also make sure you replace those at every instance. And then keep the water damage stuff separate from the other holdings. We're gonna look at the evaluation materials. We salvage them, we've made them stable. We have to think about what we're gonna do with them. Are we gonna just gonna discard them? Are we gonna duplicate them? Are we gonna try and replace them with a copy? Are we, and you notice as we're going down here, we're gonna go up in costs. We're gonna repair, we're gonna refine or we're gonna rehouse in the case of archival materials. We're gonna be pulling things out, actually have to replace the storage containers for each of those. And that's good if those boxes until just protected the stuff, the actual item, you only need to replace the box. Right, but you make a mistake if you said, oh, this box is gonna be dried out when if it's that important material, just replace it and just go on there. And of course, with everything, we have to talk about assessment, okay? What went wrong? How did that work? How do we fix it? How do we... You've done something different, right? So for next time, we're better prepared. Was there something that I didn't have in my disaster plan? That phone number for the guy with freezer, not work or those things and would be back. So when I said I'll date your plan after disaster, that's an automatic update. And ask your staff, ask the people who worked with you, what do you wish we would have known or should have done that you think we did? And be honest with me, tell me the things that we did bad because we need to know that. You could have written that for a bullet point. Yeah. What are you doing? It's just a bullet point. So the couple of things I wanna say is we wrap this up. Okay, this is an ongoing process. It's never gonna stop. Don't expect it to stop. Every time you respond to a disaster or how large or how small, it gives you more information and go from there. The plan's a guide. What I'm saying is that no plans arise contact with the enemy, right? That disaster is just like that. It's just going to get you started. Every situation is gonna be different. You can't write a plan for everyone. You're gonna be able to have to work on the fly. Right? Adjust on the fly. On everything. We talked a lot about this already. We need to update nearly and be prepared. That's why we spend so much time on prevention when it comes to our disaster planning processes. It's thinking about our prevention. So be ready for it and it's easy. Yeah. That's what I got. Great, awesome. If anybody has any last minute questions you wanna ask, we're only at a little after 11. We started a little after 10, so we're good. If you guys have your questions in, I know some of you have been already. Let us know if you wanna know anything more about anything specifically that Michael talked about today. I think this is something that's like many things that we work with that it's gonna take time to create one of these and work it out. Like you said, this is a daunting task. But I get, as I've been listening and thinking about all the things that you mentioned that could happen and what you need to do, I can see that doing it is hard, but once it's done, this sense of... So it's almost a piece of mind. Yeah, piece of mind, yeah. That, okay, I'm good, if something happens, this makes me feel better, I feel more confident that I know what I should be doing and my staff knows what to do. So it makes you feel better about it, just like having strategic plan for your library rather than just doing things willy-nilly. You've got an idea, why are we here? What are we doing? This is the same thing, it's gonna take time to put it together and think about it, and it's gonna make things so much easier, whatever you have to use it, and just to make you feel safer about what could potentially happen that, we figured it out, we got it, if something happens, yeah. Good thing to do. And we'll have my contact information on this as well. So feel free, and I'm open to any questions. You can email me or contact me at the university and I'm always happy to talk about it. So Michael said he does these kind of workshops for our, if someone wanted to, in Nebraska contact you. Yeah, we'd be happy to talk about it. Yeah, or as he mentioned, the library systems, we have four regional library systems in Nebraska that they've done these kinds of sessions regularly. Honestly, I haven't done one in a while, reach out to one of them and say, hey, let's do a new one, it's an update. And Michael might be the guy to do it. I'll try off some of the things that's writing notes or some of the things you mentioned where people can get information, like Balfour, the sort of conservatories. It's an example of one of these organizations, deep plan and things. So I'll include some of those links to some of the specific things just to help you get some ideas about. Okay, sounds great. When the archives goes up, let me set it down. All right, doesn't look anybody had any other desperate questions as they're asking right now, so that's great. They're out of the fellowships. Yeah, no. Some people have, I don't think that's okay. So I think we will wrap it up for today's show. And they said that the show has been recorded. The recording will be out probably later this afternoon, as long as you too, when everything cooperates with me. And the slides will be available as well. And I'll show you now, this is your last one. Where we have, the Encompass Live website. This is the library commissions website. You can search on our site or you can use the search engine of your choice and look for us. We are the only thing called that so far. So if you just Google the name of our show Encompass Live, you find us and all of our other links to things about us. This is our main page. We have our upcoming shows, but to look for the archive, there's a link right underneath all of our upcoming shows. We even click on there and the most recent ones are at the top of the list. So today's will be right here. As I said, later this afternoon, it should have posted up there. I will email everyone who attended and it would registered and post out to all of our various social media and mailing lists to let you know that it's available. This is where it will be. This is our archives. I'll talk about this while we're here. We Encompass Live, this is actually the 10th year of Encompass Live. Yeah, I know I was stung when I was cleaning and I'm doing that long. So we do have all of the archives. We went back to very first show, which is January, 2009. If you scroll all the way down this, which I won't do because it's a lot. Everything is here. So there's gonna be some old information here, outdated, we'll call it historical. We are librarians, so we archive everything. So it's still out there if I don't want to need, but everything as you can see does have a date and you will know what date and year it was actually originally broadcast. So you can take that in consideration when you're watching a previous show. We do have a search feature here now because there was so many sessions that you can search through the entire history of the show or just most recent 12 months worth, came up something totally up to date and it will search for the, in the title, the presenter's names, the descriptions, all the wording in the descriptions of the session. So any of those, it'll search in there so you can narrow down and find a topic that you may be particularly looking for in here. So that will be where the archive will be. So I hope you'll join us next week. Where's next week's show? Where our topic will be engaging your community. This is about Rochester Public Library District in Rochester, Illinois. We're gonna have, as I mentioned, the most speakers come in. Janet McAllister's director, there's gonna be talking about patron-driven programs that they have done at their library. So if you're interested in doing some more cool, interesting, fun things in programming at your library, sign up for that show or any of our other shows coming up here. We've got all of our other shows posted. I've got September ones in the works so we'll see more added to this calendar as it goes. And come as live is also on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, give us a like over there, there we go. And we have reminders. Here's a reminder of, no, I don't want to log in anymore. Today's show, log in for today's show on the fly. When our archives are ready, here's a recording from last week's show we posted about. So if you are being on Facebook, like us and you'll get notifications of what we're doing over there. And that wraps up your day. Thank you very much. It was a wonderful day over here, joining us. Thank you everyone for attending and we'll see you next time on Enfieldless Live. Bye.