Abstract
One hopes never to be faced with an emergency in the workplace, and it is easy to push contingency plans to the back burner. Author Dodson, who works for a leading British document restoration service, makes a convincing case here for the need for every library and cultural heritage institution to have an emergency plan in place. As a new supervisor of a university library’s preservation operations, and having no preservation or emergency planning experience myself, I found this book to be a thorough and useful introduction to the subject.
Dodson methodically takes the reader through the steps involved after an incident, from roles and responsibilities of the response team, to immediate actions, to collection salvage, to post-mortem review. She starts by making the case for having an emergency plan in place, provides definitions and terminology, and points out pitfalls that prevent plans from functioning effectively. She goes on to present case studies of emergency situations at various libraries and museums written by staff from the affected institutions. These case studies cover damage from fire, earthquake, power loss, and flooding. While case studies might normally come at the end of the book – giving us real-life examples of theory being put into practice – presenting them early on helps Dodson make her case for having a plan in place before an emergency happens. This chapter is followed by one in which Dodson describes the ideal composition and roles and responsibilities of the emergency response team, which will vary depending on the size of the institution.
The heart of the book consists of chapters on incident control, planning the recovery operation, and collection salvage. Of note here is the need to resist the temptation to immediately start salvaging collections before carrying out an overall assessment of the situation. The chapter on collection salvage goes into the nitty-gritty details of rescuing different types of materials from different types of damage, with an emphasis on water damage, the most common threat in libraries and museums. Though the subject of collection salvage could easily be treated by its own book, Dodson presents a sufficiently detailed summary here. It might have been more efficient to organize this central part of the book by type of emergency (flood, fire, etc.), rather than sequentially (incident control, then recovery operation, then collections salvage). The chronological organization is somewhat artificial (in a real emergency, there would be no clear-cut delineation between the three phases of response) and leads to unnecessary repetition.
The remainder of the book deals with supplementary content to the emergency plan (personnel contact lists, priority lists, floor plans, emergency equipment, external suppliers, and utility companies); dealing with the building; business continuity; and ensuring the plan’s efficacy. Again, most of these issues have been broached earlier in the book, so there is some repetition.
Several themes recur throughout the book. One is the need for flexibility and balance - locking up emergency supplies will ensure their availability but slow down access to them. Other themes include the need to put human health and safety ahead of collections; the importance of record-keeping and documentation for insurance purposes; and the fact that a disaster that affects a wide area will result in competing demands for limited resources.
Unfortunately, Dodson’s writing style tends to be flat, even after making concessions for the dryness of the subject matter. Reading this book feels a bit like eating one’s peas, with no salt. For example, on air-drying photographs: ‘If finessing the process and limiting the curling is at the expense of first-order drying for wet photographs that have yet to be even assessed and may deteriorate pending treatment, the ultimate outcome is not desirable’(p. 130).
Finally, vocabulary was sometimes an issue for this American reader. While some Britishisms were easily understandable (for example, ‘torches’ for flashlights, ‘snatch lists’ for priority lists, or ‘stores’ for collections), others were more opaque (‘ready reckoner’? ‘strongroom’? ‘issue desk’?). A glossary might be useful in a future edition. Similarly, it would be helpful to have photos of unfamiliar salvage supplies such as blotter paper and Melinex.