Emergencies relating to theft, flood and fire for example can have a catastrophic effect on archives. Having reduced the risks to the collection you can further reduce the impact of catastrophic events by planning how you would react and preparing for the eventuality. Read more detailed advice on protecting archives and manuscripts against disasters (PDF, 53 KB).
Initial steps should be:
- Develop a plan that describes how you will manage catastrophic events and make sure that staff and volunteers understand their roles in delivery. Provide training in emergency response for archives, recognising that this may only happen after the emergency services have evacuated a building.
- Understand the building your archives are held in, who is responsible for the facilities and what should happen in the case of a disaster. In a shared building ensure that custodians have the necessary contact details of your staff and volunteers.
- Be prepared by storing equipment off-site that will enable your disaster response. This should include paper copies of collection location indexes/records and basic equipment that will enable your response such as mops, blotting paper, boots etc.
- Be prepared by having back ups of digital objects in a different geographical location.
Sometimes the development of an emergency plan highlights further risks to the collection that need management. For example, in one company an important collection was stored off-site in third party storage.
During the development of an emergency plan it was identified that the manager of the site had no responsibility to advise the collection owner in an emergency and they would make all decisions without recourse to the collection owner. As a result, the collection owner made arrangements to move the collection.