Disaster Recovery Manager Functions

Restoring the Service

Space

• A PC and printer
• Telephones lines
• Network connections
• Heat
• Light
• Basic office furniture
• Kettle
• Access to sink and toilet facilities
  

If more office space can be provided quickly, so much the better. This will be easier in vacation than in term-time and easier in a large or multi-site institution than in a small one.  The Business Continuity Manager will need to decide how to deploy staff (some may be sent to another building or campus) and consult with the Library Director as to whether some members of library staff (or whole teams) will be sent home until space can be provided.

Once the Business Continuity’s interim HQ has been established, information should be sent quickly to the rest of the institutional community, so that they know that efforts are being made to restore a service as soon as possible and that there is an office they can contact for further information.

Emergency financial procedures

The Library Director must quickly establish with senior institutional managers arrangements for approving necessary expenditure for the restoration of service.  If business continuity has been built into the library’s disaster preparedness plans, a list of the key members of library staff who should be empowered to authorise emergency expenditure should be already available.  This might include expenditure on:

• furniture
• equipment
• removal firms
• crate hire
• temporary shelving
• van hire (for stock retrieval service)
• printing or photocopying  (of notices and posters)
  

It is essential that accurate records are kept of all expenditure necessitated by the disaster, as this will form part of any subsequent institutional insurance claim.

Library staff

In a large or medium-sized institution the Business Continuity Manager may find that, rather than not having enough library staff, he or she has instead too many members of library staff to hand than can practically help with the early stages of recovery.  If the library building is inaccessible, most library staff – enquiry staff, counter staff, shelvers, subject librarians, cataloguing staff and inter-library loans staff – will be unable to reach their offices and perform their normal duties.  Some may be sent to other sites, others may be “stood down” until the position is clearer.  The library may also decide to invoke the M25’s Mutual Support Agreement (see below).

Most staff will want to help as much as they can in restoring some level of service as soon as possible.  The Library Director will need to be visible and encouraging, to lead by example and to give clear instructions as to the authority of the Business Continuity Manager and the Disaster Recovery Manager in this time of crisis. Staff may be allocated to one of these two teams and it must be understood that their normal duties and role may be suspended for a while until a reasonable service has been restored. 

Post / unpacking area

The Business Continuity Manager should also have identified an area that can be used for the reception of post and for the unpacking or new stock and the processing of invoices and other mail.  If this can be near the Business Continuity Manager’s HQ, so much the better.  

The library management system should be restored as soon as possible and installed on a networked PC in this area.  This will enable library staff to process incoming stock. If this is not possible, paper-based systems will have to be used and the data transferred to the library management system at a later date. 

Retrieval and reference service

If the library building has been badly damaged, it may be necessary for the bulk of the library stock to be removed to secure storage elsewhere until it can be returned.  This will require careful planning and monitoring by the library staff, who will be called upon to oversee the packing and labelling of crates.  It may be possible to have some material stored on shelving in a temporary location, either within the institution or near enough for some kind of retrieval service to be offered.  The Business Continuity Manager will need to consult with colleagues as to which areas of the library’s stock should be selected for this location.  In term-time the overnight or short loan collection, plus other heavily used areas of undergraduate stock might be the first priority.

A quick reference collection, if small enough, might be transferred to the post / unpacking area, in which case the library staff there, equipped with networked PCs and a functioning library management system, could open a reference and enquiry service for library users, while also offering a retrieval service for those areas of stock that have been unpacked from crates but are stored elsewhere.

Circulation of stock

If the disaster occurs during term-time most undergraduate students will be keen to see a lending service resumed as soon as possible.

This is likely to be a partial service initially (e.g. just the overnight loan collection).  It is advisable for the library to restore access to its library management system before offering this service, if possible.  If this cannot be achieved within a reasonable time, the Business Continuity Manager may decide to ask staff to introduce a paper-based circulation management system, but this might not be the best option. Keeping a track of overdue books may not be as effective with a paper-based system, for example, and some students may take advantage of the obvious disruption to fail to return core items on time.  In these circumstances the library might decide to suspend lending until the library management system has been restored.  The Business Continuity Manager would then have to ensure that an appropriate area for reference access and study space –  secure, supervised and with study furniture installed – is provided as soon as possible instead.

Some libraries cater for a wide variety of users, not just to members of their own institution.  In the aftermath of a disaster the Business Continuity Manager is likely to advise that access to the interim library service should be provided to members of the institution only.

Study space

If possible, the library should attempt to provide a study area near enough to its interim reference and enquiry area to enable students to consult those parts of the book stock that can be made available on-site.  However, this is unlikely to be adequate for user needs, so the Business Continuity Manager will need to liaise with the institution’s senior management to identify other areas that can be used for this purpose. At a multi-site institution users can be referred to libraries at other sites.  

However, unlike some other aspects of the library’s operations, such as the circulation of stock to its registered users, the provision of study space is not a service that cannot be met elsewhere and the library may decide that, until the library building is open again, it is best to recommend its users either to study at their places of residence or to use study areas in public libraries. It may also decide to invoke the M25’s Mutual Support Agreement.

Access to networked resources

Every effort should be made to restore institutional access to networked resources as soon as possible, if these have been disrupted by the disaster, and to provide some networked PCs near the library’s interim service point for the use of library users. Library staff can assist users in identifying electronic resources with which they may have been unfamiliar;  many library users are unaware of the range of electronic resources to which their institution has access until these are demonstrated to them.

An increasing number of electronic resources in the humanities are available at public libraries and library users should be encouraged to consult these.

Mutual Support Agreement

All members of the M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries are signatories of the Mutual Support Agreement, the full text for which can be found at:

http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/mutual_support_agreement.html

In essence the Mutual Support Agreement enables a library that has been affected by a disaster to ask fellow-members of the consortium to provide study space for its students and some accommodation for its library staff for up to one month.  A multi-site institution is expected to make this provision at its other sites, rather than invoke the agreement.

The agreement does not confer borrowing privileges on the members of the invoking institution, nor does it provide access to networked resources.  As academic staff and research postgraduates will often have borrowing rights at many M25 libraries under existing co-operative schemes (SCONUL Research Extra, the M25 Consortium Access and Borrowing Scheme, etc.), the main user group likely to experience immediate major disruption to their studies after a disaster is undergraduate students.  The Business Continuity Manager should bear this in mind when planning which areas of stock can be restored to circulation first and try to make those which are most heavily used (and most difficult to gain access to elsewhere) by the undergraduate student body the priority for restoring to circulation.

Communication

At all stages of business recovery, communication with users, with partners and suppliers and with supporters and friends of the library is vital.  From the day of the disaster – when library users turn up with overdue books to return, worried about incurring fines – to the formal re-opening of the library building clear and comprehensive communication must be maintained.

The Business Continuity Manager should ask a group of members of library staff to act as a Communications Team. They can take responsibility for keeping users up to date in a timely manner.

The library must tell its users:

• what has happened
• when and where a service will be restored
• what that service will compris
• what it will not comprise
• how they can contact the library
• where else they can go to consult book stock, access networked resources, find study space
  

Forms of communication might include:

• posters and notices
• global emails to members of the institution
• a news flash on the institutional and library home pages (these may link in time to a dedicated web page on the restoration of the library service)
• a staffed telephone line (with an automated message when staff are unavailable)
  

The library will also need to communicate with partners, suppliers and other organisations, such as:

• book suppliers
• equipment suppliers
• other members of the M25 Consortium, in particular those whose libraries are nearby or cover subjects represented at the affected institution
• other nearby libraries, such as local public libraries
  

While the Disaster Recovery Manager is likely to liaise with the Library Director and the institutional press officer with regard to communication with the press and broadcast media, the Business Continuity Manager should concentrate on communicating with library users and with those organisations which can help with the restoration of an interim service.

Conservation of Stock

Depending on the nature of the disaster and the salvage policy of the library, recovery will start with the conservation of damaged stock. Once stabilised the stock will need to be shelved away from the disaster area so as to reduce the likelihood of mould growth. Water-damaged stock must be checked regularly for any signs of mould for the next twelve months and preferably should not be re-shelved in its original location for 6 months after the disaster. Freeze dried stock should be laid aside in a room at normal levels of temperature and relative humidity to allow it to reacclimatize. It should be handled with caution, as its unusually low internal moisture content will make it brittle. Where stock is in need of interventive conservation treatment or repair, library staff should liaise closely with the selected conservation firm(s) to identify priorities for treatments, the benefits of batching similar types of work together and the likely timescales for treatment. A comprehensive conservation programme should be drawn up.

Restoration of the Disaster Area

Once all the damaged stock has been removed from the site of the disaster the area must be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected to discourage mould growth, where water damage has occurred. This work can be undertaken by commercial industrial cleaners and should include all surfaces and shelving in the affected area. Take temperature and relative humidity readings until they stabilise within normal limits as specified in BS5454 : 2000. The area should then be monitored for 6 months to ensure that there is no sign of mould growth before any material is shelved there.
If a major re-fit of the area is required (as the result of a fire or flood for example), this may be an opportunity to redesign and upgrade an area to make it more user friendly or disaster proof, without having as many constraints as previously. At this time the outcomes of previous risk management exercises should be reviewed for implementation. This may also represent an opportunity to re-think holdings and equipment policies. Do not forget to plan for the replacement of telephones, telephone points and data points (Thorburn, 1993), plus any other equipment destroyed in the disaster, and for the servicing of this equipment.

I.T.

Recovery from an IT-based disaster may be a matter of restoring the system from backups. However where theft or vandalism or other damage to hardware has occurred new hardware may need to be ordered and assembled before backups can be used. Ordering of new hardware may be delayed by negotiations with the institution's insurers. Local procedures for service continuity will then have to be implemented for the intervening period. It should be noted that in one case, equipment which appeared to be undamaged failed to work a few weeks later as rust patches appeared and some equipment which continued to function, did not do so as well as it had before the disaster (Benson, 1998).

Insurance Claims

Lists of material, equipment and furniture damaged in the disaster will need to be collated and insurance claims prepared. Order replacement items and equipment as soon as local circumstances allow (e.g. insurance payments). Inventories will have to be updated to reflect losses and new purchases. In the case of Special Collections material expert advice should be sought as to the replacement or conservation value of lost, destroyed or damaged stock. The major antiquarian booksellers and auction houses can provide advice on the former, as can the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, while binding and conservation firms should be consulted on the latter.

Counselling

The recovery phase of a disaster can take much longer than initially anticipated and the impact on staff morale can be long lasting. In some cases, staff counselling may be appropriate (Disaster and After, 1999).

Learning from the Disaster, and Revision of the Disaster Management Plan

Every disaster should lead to a re-examination of a library’s policies and procedures to make sure that lessons are learned and that the likelihood of the same disaster occurring again is kept to a minimum.
Each time the Disaster Management Plan is implemented, the procedures followed should be analysed and a report written, which assesses the success of the operation and makes recommendations for any necessary changes to the plan. Fresh risk assessment exercises should also be undertaken for relevant areas and activities. All updates should be signed and dated by those responsible.
Sometimes a library can turn a disaster to its advantage; a fire or flood caused by poor quality accommodation can result in a library securing funds for a new and superior building. Public sympathy may be aroused by the loss of collections of cultural significance or local value; good collaboration between the library and the parent institution’s Press Office and / or Development Office may result in helpful press coverage and the launch of a successful fund-raising campaign. Skilful cultivation of the library’s existing friends and supporters, within the institution and further afield, can bring long-term benefits.