[Publib] COOP in the Library... was How bizarre is this?

[Phalbe Henriksen]

>COOP stands for Continuation of Operations Programs. It's gummint jargon but
>useful jargon all the same.
>
>David Karre says "know what to do." I think many administrators do prepare
>to a great extent--but there's always room to apply lessons-learned.
>
>For some of you these questions should be a walk in the park. But still...

Karen, I don't know about y'all *outside* of Florida, but, believe 
me, I would bet good money that most all Florida libraries have disaster plans!

When Florida started COOP plans I was all excited (in a negative way) 
about how much work it was going to take, but when I found out what 
it really was, I just copied our disaster plan and handed it in.

SOLINET is a good place to look for help with disaster plans:
http://www.solinet.net/workshops/Inventorylist.cfm#Preservation

Dr. Michael Trinkley and his wife present great workshops. New York 
has a lot of online information and so does Canada. And any Google 
search on "disaster" and "library" or any such combinations of 
such-like words, will locate tons of information.

CalPreservation.org has a template you can print out and fill in the blanks:
http://calpreservation.org/disasters/generic/plan_toc.html

Stanford University has a ton of stuff.

And there are other templates and samples online.

There is *no excuse* to say that the information isn't available or 
that it's too hard.

We learned the hard way, three years ago now, when "everyone" thought 
their cel phones would save them when the power was out. Little did 
we know that the cel phone towers would be without power and that 
many people would be without power for weeks, so couldn't recharge 
their cel phones. And many people couldn't recharge their cel phones 
in their cars, but it hardly mattered, since gas was in such limited 
supply. And many people discovered that they had no phone service 
even when service had been restored because they didn't have a POTS 
phone (Plain Old Telephone Service). Their phones were all PANS 
(Pretty Amazing New Stuff) and had to be plugged into an electrical 
outlet to work.

Many lessons learned.

Phalbe Henriksen
Director
Bradford County Public Library
Starke, FL