Stephanie Ganic Braunstein, Jenna Ryan and Will Hires

How academic libraries compare to public libraries in a crisis

Further consideration of the specialized role of the academic library

When a disaster occurs in a community served by one or more universities, the research faculty of those universities becomes an invaluable resource for expert information on the local geography, ecology, social dynamics, and often on the disaster itself. As an example, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, faculty from Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, Earthscan Lab, School of Coast and Environment, and many other academic units and departments worked closely with federal and state officials in responding to the disaster. In contrast, as faculty and university administrators rush in during a crisis to lend their expertise to the recovery effort, the potential role of the university library is often overlooked. This apparent oversight of a campus resource misses a vital point: the library houses a wealth of information – something that is often in short supply in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Besides the millions of books, journals, newspapers, government documents, dissertations, multimedia, and other forms of physical information sources, academic libraries also make available hundreds of electronic databases with access to the latest research in almost any given field. In addition, the library can often negotiate with publishers and vendors to provide temporary emergency access to materials not normally available at a given institution.

Academic libraries are often centrally located within a campus, and in emergency situations, the academic library can become a gateway through which all the information and resources of its faculty, as well as of local, state, and federal organizations, other academic institutions, and of course the library’s own resources can be centralized, managed, and efficiently distributed (Sheldon and Hendrickson, 1987). Another resource often unnoticed when it comes to academic libraries is the librarians themselves. Academic librarians may or may not have expertise in a particular field of study, but what they do have is expertise in the art of searching for, locating, obtaining, organizing, and disseminating information.

Despite the obvious potential for academic librarians to take major roles in disaster responses, they often miss those opportunities, sometimes through their own lack of vision. Library disaster plans, when they exist, essentially focus on the security of the staff and building, and the conservation of the collection (Zach and McKnight, 2010). Outside of the university environment itself, academic libraries are perceived as serving only the faculty and students of their particular institutions (Sheldon and Hendrickson, 1987). As such, it may not occur to emergency managers to approach the library for assistance. Thus when the library wants to take a leadership role in disaster response, both within its institution and within its community, it is frequently incumbent on the librarians to proactively offer their services.

Case study: Louisiana State University

When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, 2010, spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the potential of the spill to become a major disaster was grasped almost immediately by local residents. At Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (LSU), there was no question that this institution, with experts in petroleum engineering and coastal ecosystems, among others, would be heavily involved, and the library was determined not to be an exception. Almost immediately, the Web Development Coordinator at LSU’s Middleton Library recognized the need for dissemination of reliable information to students, researchers, and the community alike and created an information page to guide students and faculty to dependable sources of information. The initial guide, consisting simply of a list of important numbers and basic information, went up on April 30 (Louisiana State University, 2010). The Web Development Coordinator then recruited a group of other interested LSU librarians to begin putting together a full subject guide dedicated to the oil spill.

LSU Libraries used a subject guide format powered by the Internet bookmarking tool Delicious (Kelsey and VandenBroek, 2010). The ‘Oil Spill Subject Guide,’ which went live on May 5, 2010, provided an interface through which patrons could browse, search for, and access web-based resources identified by the librarians working on the project. A tag scheme was created, including tags for the affected states; federal, state, and local government resources; format (such as maps, multimedia, etc.); and category tags such as health effects, engineering, environmental impact, economic impact, etc. Over the following months, the librarians participating in the project, which had been named the Louisiana Libraries Oil Spill Information Service (LLOSIS), continually updated the subject guide with reliable sources of information as these new sources became available. The Delicious tagging scheme allowed patrons to combine tags to narrow the growing list of resources to more specific topics – economic impacts on tourism in Florida, for example. In addition, each link was provided with a descriptor of a few sentences, and the titles and descriptions were fully searchable from the subject guide page. Later additions to the subject guide included self-updating RSS feeds from both Twitter and Yahoo News, and contact information for the various members of LLOSIS, along with their subject specialty.

The oil spill guide was publicized on the library’s website, on monitors on the first floor of the library, and on the library’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. Links to the subject guide were placed on LSU’s main page for the oil spill response, as well as on the webpages of the various participating schools and programs. A number of individuals, organizations, and libraries also spread the Twitter and Facebook announcements to their own audiences; and the subject guide was featured in an article in The Reveille, the LSU student newspaper. In addition, LLOSIS members reached out to a number of student groups, including SCHOLR (Student Coalition to Help the Oil Leak Relief), and encouraged liaison librarians to make the faculty in their departments aware of the new resource. Many faculty members responded, praising the subject guide and/or offering suggestions for additions.

Two members of LLOSIS took primary responsibility for adding resources to the subject guide, although resources were also added by other members of the group. In the beginning, the focus of the project was to provide as exhaustive a collection of resources as possible; as a result, a good many popular sources such as newspaper and magazine articles were added, although the tags always clearly labeled them as such. At its height, the subject guide included over 450 tagged and searchable resources. In October 2010, the decision was made to streamline the subject guide by removing many of the out-of-date news articles and popular sources and to focus on more scholarly content, a process that can continue as oil spill research evolves.

Because the LLOSIS subject guide was unique, the members wanted to make sure it would be archived for posterity. LSU does not currently have the resources to do this; but the LLOSIS members spoke with a representative from the California Digital Library, who added the entire contents of the subject guide to their Oil Spill Archive and will continue to do so as the subject guide is updated (Seneca, 2010).

LSU was not the only academic institution to respond to the oil spill crisis by taking on the responsibility of organizing and publicizing information. The Florida State University System, in partnership with several private universities in the state, created the Oil Spill Academic Task Force (OSATF). Much like LLOSIS, their mission was to provide a central repository of information and expertise to serve those responding to the crisis in Florida (State University System of Florida, 2010). In addition, the University of South Florida created the Gulf Oil Spill Information Center (GOSIC) to archive information related to the oil spill (University of South Florida, 2010). While the focus of the LLOSIS Oil Spill Guide was on web-based resources, both OSATF and GOSIC focused more on document libraries and data. Other universities in the affected states, such as Mississippi State University, University of Texas at Austin, and University of South Alabama, also posted subject guides or informative websites related to the oil spill (Mississippi State University, 2010; Texas A&M University, 2010; University of South Alabama, 2010).

The success of the Oil Spill Subject Guide encouraged the members of LLOSIS to think about establishing a collective body of oil spill-related research for future generations. It has long been desired to establish an institutional repository at Louisiana State University; during 2010, attempts were made to provide information to and start the discussion among interested and affected scholars, researchers, and potential users. In 2011, an appeal was made before the LSU Faculty Senate to enlist the support of the faculty. In addition, as a result of the Gulf oil spill incident, a decision was made to write a grant proposal to the LSU Board of Regents to get funding for the hardware and software needed to establish an institutional repository. It was felt that the specific research connected with the ramifications of the Gulf oil spill would offer a timely opportunity to appeal for a repository. Yet another opportunity to appeal for the establishment of an institutional repository is the National Science Foundation (NSF) requirement that, from January 2011, all fund recipients will be obliged to provide evidence of specific arrangements for data management and storage of the products of their research (National Science Foundation, 2010). LLOSIS members approached the LSU Office of Research and Development (ORED) to ask them to encourage researchers to work with the library on data management for their projects and to contribute the final results to the proposed institutional repository.

A secondary effect of these activities by LSU librarians is the hope that their participation with the oil spill crisis will provide an opening for the library to become more directly involved in the research being done at LSU and to promote library services among the faculty, as well as serve as an example to other academic libraries on how to get more involved on campus at any time – not just during crises.

The academic library as locus of disaster: response deterred and deferred

A final consideration of how academic libraries function and/or respond during a crisis is the proximity of the library to the locus of the crisis. Clearly, a library directly affected by a crisis on-site will function differently from a library indirectly affected by a crisis off-site – possibly many miles away. Many of the differences in function will by necessity involve basic safety and preservation concerns.

It is a wry observation that if you want to write about disasters, you would be lucky to live in the state of Louisiana. Between hurricanes and oil spills, most Louisiana institutions are exposed to a seemingly never-ending series of crises. Taking advantage of this preponderance of crises, the authors would like to point out that the hurricanes of 2005, which wrought havoc on southern Louisiana, can provide one model for contrasting the functions of an academic library located at the epicenter of a disaster with the functions of an academic library located at a safe distance from a disaster.

Case study: Tulane University’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library

In late August 2005, hurricanes Katrina and Rita were responsible, either directly or indirectly, for an unprecedented amount of damage to southern Louisiana, especially New Orleans. When Katrina precipitated the failure of levees, and large sections of the city went underwater, Tulane University’s main library, Howard-Tilton Memorial, took on approximately nine feet of water in the lower-level areas – areas that held substantial collections of government documents and music resources. In its October 2005 issue, American Libraries: The Magazine of the American Library Association (ALA) quoted Tulane’s Government Documents Librarian, Eric Wedig, reporting that around 90 percent of the Government Documents collection was destroyed by flood waters in the basement (Eberhart, 2005: 22).

In February 2006, Tom Diamond, Head of Reference and Collection Development Services at Louisiana State University’s Middleton Library in Baton Rouge, a city an hour away from New Orleans and relatively untouched by Katrina, interviewed administrators and staff from libraries directly affected by Katrina and Rita (Diamond, 2006). One of the interviewees was Lance Query, Dean of Libraries and Academic Information Resources at Tulane’s Howard-Tilton Library. Dean Query’s answers to Diamond’s questions reflect the difficulties that an academic library, used to being the source of helpful information as a service-providing entity, encounters when it is so damaged that it cannot easily fulfill its mission of providing service.

The first question in Diamond’s article, while not explicitly about service, sets the tone for the rest of the piece and addresses those previously mentioned basic safety and preservation concerns: ‘Did your library have an emergency or evacuation plan in place to deal with external contingencies such as hurricanes? How well was the plan implemented?’ (Diamond, 2006: 192).

Query’s response, that a plan had been in place for almost a year before the 2005 hurricanes, concludes that no plan – no matter how well conceived – could have anticipated an event like Katrina: ‘There are no disaster planning documents that deal with this type of disaster. What we talked about [in the September 2004 disaster plan for Howard-Tilton Memorial Library] were pipe breaks or fires. We don’t deal with a whole city that is underwater’ (p. 193).

Query goes on to explain that the university’s plan was implemented in lieu of the library’s plan: the crisis was greater than what the library’s plan could handle, so the university’s risk management division was called upon to pick up the responsibility. Interestingly, Query mentions that until it was needed, he was not aware of this university-wide ‘large-scale disaster’ plan (p. 193). Fortunately it was in place, but the lack of knowledge of its existence points out a potential communication problem for any academic library. Optimal circumstances would dictate that an academic library have a disaster/emergency plan that is seamlessly linked to a university-wide disaster/emergency plan and that everyone concerned, especially management/administrative personnel, be aware of this twofold plan.

Another question posed by Diamond addresses the problem of communication, communication being essential to an academic library’s internal – and external – reason for existence. Diamond asks, ‘How did the library staff maintain communication channels? What improvements can be made?’ (p. 196). Query laments the fact that there was no formal backup system for communication. With IT systems down, the library eventually relied on a Yahoo.com discussion board, but only about 20 percent of library staff participated. This low level of participation probably can be traced to the lack of functioning computers city-wide or to the staff’s lack of prior knowledge that off-site discussion boards would be implemented in case of emergencies.

In his answer, Query goes on to say that in the future Tulane plans to rely on a backup system provided to members of the Association of South Eastern Research Libraries (ASERL) (of which Tulane is one) by the Southeastern Library Network (SOLINET/Lyrasis) Consortium (Florida State University, 2007). While this is an improvement from having no backup communications system at all, it is not a panacea since one would still need access to a working computer with online connectivity in order to take advantage of the SOLINET system.

In November of 2010, just over five years had passed since Katrina. It seemed an appropriate time to revisit some of the questions posed by Diamond right after the disaster at Tulane’s main library. To this end, several of Diamond’s questions were presented to Eric Wedig, the librarian from Tulane who was quoted in the October 2005 American

Libraries article and who continues to be the librarian responsible for the library’s government documents collection, as well as serving as Chief Bibliographer for Social Sciences and Jewish Studies.

Specific questions revisited include the one about how effective the disaster plan was, with a renewed emphasis on the university’s plan. Since Query had given credit to the university’s plan as a viable alternative to the library’s plan, it seemed reasonable to question, five years later, just how well the university’s plan did end up working. Wedig’s comments strongly imply that although the university’s plan was the more effective of the two, it was still not up to the task of confronting such a massive disaster. As Wedig dramatically points out:

Another question yielding a slightly more optimistic answer five years after the fact was the one mentioned above concerning communication channels. Wedig explains that the university has made efforts to compile alternative e-mail addresses and telephone numbers for its employees – ‘alternative’ including contact information for employees’ relatives outside of New Orleans. Although this certainly is a step in the right direction, it must be repeated that without functioning equipment on the ‘calling’ end of the equation, e-mails and telephone calls will not be connected to the necessary infrastructure to reach those being ‘called.’

Case study: University of Hawai’i at Manoa’s Hamilton Library

As is evident from Tulane’s experience detailed above, the patron services provided by an academic library hit by disaster are among the first casualties. However, academic library patron services are in large part dependent upon the collections held by individual libraries. A second model for comparing the effects of disaster on academic libraries close to the disaster to the effects on academic libraries a distance away from the disaster emphasizes the loss of rare and often unique materials. This model focuses on the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Manoa’s Hamilton Library – a library whose disaster preceded the disasters in New Orleans by approximately a year and, coincidentally, involved the complete flooding of lower floors that held large collections of government documents, maps, and other local historical materials.

he coincidence ends there. In Manoa, the source of the water was an overflowing creek bed that sent a wall of water onto the campus and into the library. Damage from the creek’s flooding the areas surrounding the Hawaiian university was not as extensive as damage from the hurricane’s flooding within New Orleans and its suburbs. However, in the long run, the destruction of Manoa’s collections was probably worse than the destruction of Tulane’s collections.

Another notable difference in the circumstances of Hamilton Library’s flooding was its ability to regroup as quickly as possible to provide patrons with whatever library services could be quickly brought back. This ability to regroup was due to the relative lack of damage done to areas outside of the library. Acknowledging that services like those provided by LSU Libraries after the 2010 oil spill would be impossible to provide until much later, if at all, Hamilton’s service goals were necessarily limited to the return of some access to the collections not destroyed by the flood and to the librarians who intermediated those collections.

Four days after the flooding, UH’s website made the following announcements concerning library services at Hamilton:

In a November 2010 personal interview with University of Hawai’i Librarian Gwen Sinclair, she remembers that

To commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Manoa flood, the Honolulu Advertiser’s Loren Moreno interviewed University of Hawai’i library staff for an article updating the results of the flooding. Moreno states that:

What this article points out is the difference between an academic library’s providing ‘basic services’ and services offered only in major academic research libraries. This difference highlights one of the key elements that separate how a public library functions after a disaster versus how an academic library functions after a disaster – it is all in the dissimilarity of mission. A brief overview of Manoa’s mission is stated below:

Other articles written at the time of the flooding, and even later, recognize this particular academic library’s mission to include being a source of serious and sometimes unique research materials. On December 13, 2004, an article by the Advertiser’s Education Writer, Beverly Creamer, gave examples of some of Hamilton’s rare materials lost in the disaster:

In her article, Creamer goes on to paraphrase the previously quoted Gwen Sinclair, Head of Government Documents and Maps at Hamilton, in which Sinclair emphasizes the uniqueness of parts of the collection which were lost:

So far, the contrast between academic libraries not directly affected by a disaster and those directly affected implies that ‘directly affected’ is synonymous with losing almost all ability to fulfill one’s mission for a very long time. Conspicuously missing is any speculation on how quickly an affected academic library can turn around and get back to its function as a resource – its normal ‘comfort zone.’ In the following section, this ‘turn around’ is not only addressed but is also promoted as a goal.

Academic libraries post-disaster: lessons learned and suggestions articulated

Academic libraries have a great deal to offer both their institution and their community in a disaster situation. In order to reach their full potential, academic librarians must learn to take the initiative and get the library involved in response efforts early, preferably making themselves part of the disaster-planning process. One of the things LSU librarians learned from the recent oil spill disaster is that getting oneself involved after the fact is full of obstacles and pitfalls. Those already involved in the response are often overwhelmed both with work that needs to be done and with well-intentioned, but often inapplicable, offers of help. These responders may be difficult to contact and even more difficult to convince that the library has something worthwhile and unique to offer the situation. A library’s specialty is reliable dissemination of information, something that is frequently lacking in the first few days of a major crisis. If the library can establish itself early as a portal and clearing house for information relating to the crisis, it will be in a position to contribute considerably to the response effort.

For this to happen, the attitude of ‘take care of ourselves first, others later’ has to be modified. Even when the library is directly affected by the disaster, there are a number of ways in which library staff can contribute to the community response while simultaneously dealing with their own losses. Creating and publicizing a guide to important contacts and up-to-date news requires little effort in these days of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web editors and free blog software. Even if the institution’s webserver is non-functional, information compiled by librarians may be temporarily hosted on free sites such as Blogger or PBworks. One of the first things an academic library should do after assuring the safety of its staff is to make contact with university administrators, reminding them of the information management and communication expertise of library staff and making them aware of what the library needs in order to function to the best of its ability in that capacity. Make contact early with the Department of Research and Development (or the local equivalent) and request to be involved in any research projects or grants stemming from the crisis. Have liaison librarians contact specific faculty who they know will be involved in the response and ask them what information needs they have and how the library can help fill those needs. The library should be the designated place to collect and manage information related to the disaster as well as the designated place for its storage and preservation. An academic library that has proven itself invaluable in a time of crisis has made great strides toward proving itself a worthwhile and necessary contributor to the university’s mission.

A final way the academic library can be helpful is to establish links with other academic institutions in its state or within the region affected by the disaster. This network can serve to help sustain educational support services while sharing information pertinent to the recovery effort. Libraries have such a special capacity for service that their particular attention will be welcomed in organizing outreach activities that might teach people how to find and fill out forms or locate missing relatives and loved ones. Rather than wait until the library is completely back on its feet before reaching out to other parts of the university and to the community, academic libraries should make getting involved with the relief effort one of their highest priorities and reach out as soon as practicable.

References