Exploring
Preventing/Mitigating Disaster
Once you have identified institutional, take action to protect your collections. While you may need to guard collections against specific types of disasters (e.g., bracing shelves for earthquake protection, building window coverings in case of hurricane), it is generally most effective to begin with general prevention efforts, with a focus on those risks you identified as most serious in your risk assessment.
Facilities improvements, increased vigilance, and changes in procedure can all prevent or lessen damage to collections in a disaster. Be aware that you may need to devise both short- and long-term solutions to the problems you have identified. For example, you may need to relocate collections or cover materials with plastic sheeting until money is available for roof repair.
To help you consider what might be done to protect your own collections, sample scenarios and prevention checklists for some of the most common types of damage are provided here.
The preventive measures considered in this section overlap with some of the issues addressed in Session 4: The Building and Environment (e.g., building maintenance, fire protection, and security), so it may be helpful to return to that session and revisit some of the information provided there.
