The Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library has redirected its web traffic to a specially designed disaster resources page.  The page allows access to only the library’s core electronic resources.

While most of us wouldn’t consider our libraries to be businesses in the traditional sense, we do have some similar features and some shared needs, especially when it comes to planning for business/service continuity.  The Homeland Security website has an excellent “Plan to Stay in Business” list for businesses, and if you click on the Continuity Planning link from that page, you will find a more detailed list of activities to help you prepare for an unplanned service disruption.  Also available from the Continuity Planning page is their Sample Emergency Plan.  It is available in PDF format, which you can quickly fill out right there and then print.  Network members will have to do some adapting to make it fit their needs, but it is certainly a great way to help us think through what we need to do.  Everyone who has been in any of the training sessions already for the NN/LM Emergency Preparedness & Response Plan will recognize most of what is presented on the Ready.gov site, so the site is helpful as a review, also. 

On Tuesday, July 15, Dan Wilson presented an overview of service continuity planning to over 70 members of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM). The presentation was hosted by the Middle Atlantic Regional Office of NN/LM and was delivered via Adobe Connect. Topics included are risk assessment, determining core services and resources, strategies for maintaining services from a remote site, and protection of unique resources.

Click here to view the slides from Dan’s presentation.

Click on the link below to view a PowerPoint presentation on service continuity planning. As the title implies, the presentation is designed to be a simple, relatively quick, approach to creating a service continuity plan. The content is based on the eight-step approach to service continuity planning document that can be found by clicking on the Service Continuity Planning tab beneath the title banner.

PowerPoint Presentation (for Office 2007): simplified-approach-to-service-continuity-planning