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Life for people
formerly living and working in the Gulf Region may never be the
same. Neither
may education and the continuity of scholarly communication.
For in addition to the disastrous conditions for humans in Louisiana
and Mississippi, the infrastructure that has educated national
and international students, employed staff and faculty, preserved
collections in libraries, and fostered research, has been devastated,
though we hope only temporarily. We have all read of the wonderful efforts that the higher education
community has expended in assisting their sister schools in the
south. From westernmost Canada to southernmost United States,
hundreds of institutions have enrolled students and employed
faculty from the affected region. Library associations and consortia
have organized countless ways in which we may support our colleagues
and help them rebuild when circumstances permit. But numerous
conditions escape notice, and yet these conditions impede the
work of the academy unless we are able to furnish remedial action.
For example:
- Flooded libraries’ collections may or may not be
salvageable, depending on the degree of damage;
- Collections without flood damage nonetheless may suffer
from mold, which grows very quickly when climate control
goes awry for even a few days;
- Regional libraries formerly dependent on others’ collections
for interlibrary loan and resource sharing will need to
realign their operations to find new suppliers;
- Conservation and damage abatement specialty firms must
deal with special challenges because of the polluted water
from flooded zones;
- Agencies and vendors providing library resources must
suspend their shipments to the libraries in the area;
- Faculty working under research grants may have lost data
and entire research projects;
- Grant agencies must provide extensions to research reports
but continue to provide the funding;
- Specimens and laboratory animals may have been destroyed
in the floods;
- University committees reviewing tenure-track faculty
will need to put decisions on hold;
- Evacuated domestic students may swell the ranks of host
colleges, who may or may not have sufficient courses in
the students’ chosen disciplines without hiring more
faculty;
|
Ray Greenleaf, Answer the Red Cross Christmas Roll
Call,
1918. Produced by the Committee on Public Information, Division
of Pictorial Publicity. From the Georgetown University
Special Collections. |
- Evacuated international students may have lost their passports
in the chaos but must comply with regulations
under the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), including
enrollment
at another institution within 30 days;
- There
are few hospitals with intact facilities and patients for
medical students doing hospitalrotations.
The outpouring of support, resources and
offers of professional assistance has taken tangible form. Distant
libraries are filling
interlibrary loan requests for those institutions that had relied
on the affected Gulf libraries. Library and educational associations
have established sites for employment of transferred librarians
and professors. Archival and preservation organizations are mobilizing
centers to clean and refurbish salvageable collections. Information
vendors are extending agreements to libraries hosting relocated
students so that education may continue. Science and medical
laboratories, and their high-speed networks, are assisting displaced
researchers to rescue their data and writings to the extent possible.
What
lessons have we learned from Hurricane Katrina (and Rita)? Most
institutions have emergency plans for academic continuity,
and
most libraries
have
disaster
recovery
manuals.
Our plans
may be adequate when we have the opportunity to respond as soon
as the crisis has subsided. But few disasters are like this one.
Even libraries not filled with water have probably been without
climate control for too many days. Rapid and pervasive spread
of mold may render collections worthless and in need of complete
replacement, not restoration. We may hope that many research
libraries will have the current materials that the ones in the
Gulf Coast have lost. We may hope that scholars’ information
may still be resident on computer servers somewhere and that
their lives’ work can be rescued. But we are less sanguine
about those unique and special collections that nearly every
library maintains which, once destroyed, are lost to scholarship
forever. One of the worst effects of war or overwhelming natural disaster
occurs when the record of one’s civilization and history
are destroyed. Katrina and Rita provide the alarming lesson that
the scholarly record which libraries preserve is fragile indeed.
You need only recollect the time when you’ve accidentally
deleted your own work after laborious effort to understand in
microcosm how devastating the loss can be. Coping with the preservation
of physical and virtual materials takes international cooperation
and strategic planning. We can’t yet fathom the amount
of damage our sister institutions have suffered. We can, however,
accelerate our collaborative efforts to insure that the history
of scholarship and culture will be preserved for posterity.
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