ANCHASL meeting in Raleigh: Disaster Preparedness and Response for Medical Libraries
Dan and I attended the ANCHASL (Association of North Carolina Health and Science Libraries) meeting in Raleigh on Friday, June 15 (click here to see the program). The meeting was held in the beautiful Andrews Conference Center at the Wake Area Health Education Center. Robert James (Duke University) is the president of ANCHASL this year, and had organized the meeting, which was well attended by both academic and hospital librarians. In addition to the North Carolina members, a hospital librarian from Lowell, Massachusetts attended, as well as Beth Wescott from NN/LM. The program for the day included a short business meeting for the organization, but otherwise focused on raising awareness about disaster preparedness and educating attendees about writing disaster plans, developing contingency plans for maintaining services, and salvaging collections. The meeting featured informative and entertaining speakers on several different aspects of disaster preparedness and emergency response. The information presented engendered some very productive discussion and questions. Here’s a list of the speakers:
- Mark Schell, Durham County Emergency Management, on working with first responders and emergency managers
- Robert James, Duke University Medical Center Library, on writing a library disaster plan. As part of his presentation, Robert outlined use of the Heritage Preservation’s Disaster Wheel, and distributed copies of the wheel to all participants. He also referred to the Field Guide published last summer by Heritage Preservation.
- Walter Cybulski, NLM, on salvaging water damaged collections
- Angie Santiago, of the Contingency Planning Association of the Carolinas, on service continuity planning for medical libraries
- Dan Wilson, chair for the SE/A RML Emergency Preparedness Task Force, on how the RML can provide support to health sciences libraries in emergency
