1 Rethinking Disasters: Our Possible Future and Recent Case StudiesEira Tansey Rebecca Elder Kate Crowe Peter Brothers Jeremy Brett, Moderator Session hashtag: #s308

2 The Winds of Change: Archival Adaptation and Resiliency in the Face of Climate ChangeEira Tansey, Digital Archivist/Records Manager | University of Cincinnati Society of American Archivists, 2016

3 New Orleans (SAA/CoSA, 2013)Image: M. Schleifstein, 2012, New Orleans Times-Picayune

4 Washington DC (SAA/CoSA/ NAGARA 2014)Image: Washington DC, Department of Energy and Environment, June 2015,

5 Austin (CoSA/NAGARA, 2015) Image: K. Hayhoe, 2014, “Climate Change Projections for the City of Austin”

6 Cleveland (SAA 2015) Image: Union of Concerned Scientists,

7 Joel Pett, USA Today.

8 Sustainable Short-Term Choices for ResiliencyAppraisal /Acquisition Minimizing backlogs in a disaster Arrangement/ Description Minimal processing effects on HVAC systems Preservation Identification of vital records Reference/Access Informing users of damaged/inaccessible records Outreach/Advocacy Educating disaster management professionals on importance of archives Sustainable Short-Term Choices for Resiliency

9 …But What About the Long-Term?Image: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014, Fifth Assessment Report, Synthesis Report, Figure 2.1

10 This talk is based on my article, Archival adaptation to climate change (2015, Sustainability: Science, Practice & Policy) The Onion, April 1, 2016.

11 Today I will share the experiences that the Archivists of Central Texas had assisting a community photo salvage project in Central Texas. According to the standards in my field (conservation) and the ACT’s field (archives), we did a lot of things wrong: we didn’t use the Incident Command System, we jumped into the project without time for advance planning, used minimally trained volunteers, posted photos online and made treatment decisions without owners’ consent, worked in potentially risky environments, and stored materials in non-optimal conditions. Despite these failings, we feel our project was a success.

12 The El Nino of the spring of 2015 brought steady rain to Central Texas and saturated the soil, meaning that additional rainfall would quickly run off into local rivers. On the evening of May 23rd, a “rain bomb” fell over the headwaters of the Blanco River, with the area receiving between 6 and 12 inches of rain in just a few hours. The result was some of the worst flash flooding in the state’s history. In the town of Wimberley, about 45 minutes from Austin, the Blanco rose from 5 feet to over 40 ft in three hours--at one point, it went up 20 feet in just one hour. The Blanco’s flow is usually just a trickle, but at its peak, the river raged at a rate of 223,000 cubic feet per second, two and a half times times the flow of Niagara Falls. The flood damaged about 1,000 homes and completely swept away about 350 of those. The flood also destroyed about 12,000 trees, including most of the river’s old-growth bald cypress.

13 This is really two tandem stories that converge into oneThis is really two tandem stories that converge into one. The first takes place at the UT School of Information. As soon as we heard about the flooding, the iSchool sprang into action. To start, we set up a hotline phone number and an iSchool address where people could contact us for advice. We also created a web page with some tips and resources, which is what you see on the slide. We enlisted our development director to help us get the word out, and she was able to get our press releases out to UT’s lists. Then the calls started coming in. We decided early on that we were only going to work with personal collections. If any institutional calls came in, we would refer them to the National Heritage Responders. An immediate task was to set up some salvage workshops for students and other interested parties. Our students were asking how they could help, and we knew we wanted to get the students into the field, if possible. We opened up the labs, and set up a mock disaster. Students came, as well as local archivists and a few community members. We were careful with who we selected and monitored closely to make sure folks weren’t working beyond their level of expertise.

14 As recovery started, thousands of family photographs were found and began to be posted on social media. Carolyn Manning, the director of the Wimberley Village library, offered up her community room as a place for depositing found photos. The local news picked up the story--this is how Amy Bowman from the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History found out about the project. She has family in Wimberley and was devastated by the damage there. She also saw our press release about the iSchool salvage hotline and their plans to give workshops, and it seemed like a natural fit to see if we could coordinate a workshop at the library. Amy and I had met recently doing a talk at the Society of Southwest Archivists conference that happened a couple of days before the flood. This pre-existing relationship where we knew that both of us got what we said we would done allowed us to trust each other as we began to work together on this project.

15 The scene at the libraryThe scene at the library. While the iSchool folks ran their salvage workshop, Amy, Daniel Alonso and a few other ACT members began to figure out what to do with the photographs. They spent the day organizing, salvaging and assisting flood survivors in finding their photographs. Amy was a trooper and couldn’t leave the project in the state it was at the end of the day, so decided to stay a few more days and figure out what to do next.

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17 The volunteers began taking pictures of the photographs and posting them to several groups on Facebook so that people could come claim them. 
We estimate that we ended up with about 7000 pictures overall, and of those about half have been reclaimed so far.

18 ACT decided during our initial assessment to assist the project by packing the photos in album sleeves to provide stabilization for longer-term storage. Daniel Alonzo, an archivist at the Texas General Land Office, wrote a grant to the Society of American Archivists National Disaster Recovery Fund for Archives for supplies, and we were grateful that it was funded. In addition, our friends at Hollinger Metal Edge got the ball rolling by donating several document boxes. A month after the flood, 10 ACT members from several local archives returned to Wimberley to pack the photographs for their return to the library. We cleaned each photo and labeled each sleeve with its album and page number--we planned to photograph each page and post these online, and knew this would make it easier to track back to the originals when owners came forward. After our service day, Amy photographed the albums and uploaded them to a Flickr site. Unfortunately, the claiming of the photos has stalled, but we hope to find a local student who’ll take this on, perhaps as a scouting project.

19 We also had a small grant from the Texas Library AssociationWe also had a small grant from the Texas Library Association. Since the SAA grant covered all of our supplies, it was decided to use the TLA money to offer some classes to help people begin to work on their photographs. These would focus on the same basic cleaning techniques that we had been using all along. We bought minimal supplies that would be easy to acquire-- everything on this table was ordered from Amazon so that it would be in reach of the layperson. The library began publicizing the workshops through their usual routes and we started. At the first, one woman plus her granddaughter showed up. For the second, we added some paid social media advertising to the library’s publicity. Again, only one person showed up. We’re not sure why. Are people suffering from flood fatigue? Was everything destroyed? Are we not finding a way to reach our audience? At any rate, I’ve been able to work closely with a couple of people, and now one 10 year old girl in Wimberley wants to be a conservator when she grows up. The site visits also give me a chance to check the condition of the photographs regularly for the first year. I’m happy to report that there are no signs of mold. We have one more rescue workshop to go, and we’ll conclude in October with an emergency preparedness workshop. We hope the folks in Wimberley will never need these skills again, but we want them to be prepared.

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21 I talked with the archivists on the team to ask what they learned and the first couple of points come from them. The idea that the safety of people came before the safety of materials was something that hit home with a lot of the archivists. The knowledge that you can’t save everything helped the archivists remember to schedule times for breaks and to leave at the end of the day so that they could also take care of themselves, which is crucial in an emergency situation. For the conservators, one of the lessons was in managing expectations. People who called the hotline often thought they could drop things off to us and we would fix them, which wasn’t possible. Some people in our workshops thought we could make anything better and we had to break the news that some things were beyond salvage. A lot of diplomacy and tact was involved. The same was true with the volunteers. Once we had an idea of who had hand skills and who didn’t, we had to figure out ways to gently assign people to tasks where they wouldn’t cause damage. My colleague and I were also so impressed with how the archivists were able to mobilize and organize themselves. As conservators, we often like to think of ourselves as “experts” but I think we’d both argue that the work of the archivists had the greater long term effects on saving the photographs. Finally, we’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying again-- the shared experience has brought the iSchool and the Archivists of Central Texas closer together and we have a solid foundation in place for the next time that there’s a project. We’re still tying up the last details on the project. As we look forward, we’ll be completing two more workshops and replacing the crummy three-ring binders with good quality storage boxes, since unclaimed photos will be at the library for the long-term. And my pet project to come out of this is organizing a UT iSchool emergency response team. Starting in the fall, we plan to have a salvage training early each semester so that if it’s needed, students already have been exposed to emergency salvage techniques. It’s beneficial for the students, and for the community to have us able to go at a moment’s notice.

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23 Climate Change, Shared Collection Management & Disaster Planning in the Rockies: A Case StudyUniversity of Denver is a medium sized private liberal arts institution with a museum of anthropology, art gallery/museum, and library/archives, where I am the Curator of Special Collections and Archives. Over the past three years, Colorado’s particular ecosystem has seen its summer season lengthen, pine beetle infestations (thanks to the warmer months) increase, forest fires become more deadly (due to dead pine trees) and the storms bringing floods become more extreme. Denver has been less affected than mountainous areas and cultural heritage sites, which are often only reachable by single mountain roads, and near to areas at greater risk of floods and fires – however, floods hit us in 2015 as well. As a result, the library’s collection storage facility has become a shared space for some collections from the art gallery/museum and the museum of anthropology, utilizing the same system and space that we use for our own collections. #s308 @kcrowe

24 2013 & 2015 Colorado/Rocky Mountain Region 2013 Fires & Floods & 2015 Floods Warmer spring temps Earlier snow melt Longer fire seasons Larger areas at risk of wildfire More intense storms/flooding Pine beetles: Longer/earlier breeding seasons due to warmer temps Multiple breeding possibilities per season, up from one per. Pine beetle infestations = dead pine trees Warmer temps + dead pine trees = recipe for fire More fire than is typical for environment = erosion 2013 saw both fires & floods was wetter (few fires) but the flooding affected the DU campus, including several collection areas managed by both the Museum of Anthropology in less than ideal storage areas (i.e. “The Pit”), an older basement classroom that had been used for storage for decades. This cluster of natural disasters convinced me to join with the “Colorado Historic Resources” group (a shared effort to combat state/region-wide natural disasters), as well as for the library/archives, Museum of Anthropology, and Art Gallery/Museum to move toward shared collection storage and shared collection management between library/archives & anthropology. Photo credits: 1. Peter Brady, “Little Church in the Pines” (Salida, CO) from Reporter Herald 9/13/2015. 2. Pike Interagency Hotshow Crew, “West Fork and Windy Pass Fire” (Pagosa Springs, CO) 6/20/2013. 3. Brooke Rohde (Anthropology Curator) “Anthropology Graduate Students Recover Flooded Artifacts.” 8/2015

25 University of Denver: Shared Collection StorageWe are currently in the process of outlining an MOU between lib/archives, art gallery/museum, and anthropology museum. Lib/archives receives, ingests, stores, pulls, and monitors facility, including anthropology collections. The art gallery is divided with its own alarms and keys, but we share same HVAC system, roof, etc. All materials retrievable through central library facility, managed by lib stacks maintenance. All subsequent photographs by Kate Crowe

26 Shared Approach to Collection ManagementOur shared collection storage uses a single management system, our library management system. Each item (box, crate, wrapped object, volume) receives a unique barcode, as well as a location-specific barcode, assigned according to size to maximize storage. Facility is climate controlled, secure. All collections in archives are managed as bibliographic entity and all boxes are “items” in lib system. All anthro collections are org by site #, and then numbered accordingly). All are barcoded uniquely and then also given a location barcode. Anthro collections have distinctive local call # pattern (DUMA [DU Museum of Anthropology] 5JF321 vs. MS [manuscript] U114 [unique call # for Board of Trustees records]). We have a system that works for us for our collections, we were able to easily extrapolate it out to manage other collections without adding any additional work, just additional storage space.

27 Protecting Shared CollectionsJoin state/regional coalitions (Colorado Historic Resources, etc.) Join forces w cultural heritage units across campus to share resources/disaster preparedness Leverage existing systems to scale up more easily Create agreements (MOUs, etc.) between all parties so expectations are clear

28 [email protected] 303-871-7944 Twitter: @kcroweQuestions?

29 RETHINKING DISASTERS SAA 2016Disaster recover for over 30 years

30 OVER 300,000 TAPES EXAMINED

31 DISASTER TRAINING Presentations, Seminars, Workshops SAA AMIA FIAF JTSLOC MUSEUMS BROADCASTERS UNIVERSITIES

32 DISASTERS DO HAPPEN It’s easy to assume that if you don’t workin hurricane or earthquake territory, you’re fairly safe

33 90 % of disaster recovery work we now doNO ONE IS IMMUNE 90 % of disaster recovery work we now do is weather related Most disasters involving magnetic media are of human origin or associated with human technology, not mother nature

34 KATRINA

35 KATRINA

36 KATRINA

37 SANDY

38 GRAND OLE OPRY “1,000 Year” Flood

39 GRAND OLE OPRY “1,000 Year” Flood

40 CLIMATE CHANGE SEVERE AND UNPREDICTABLE WEATHER

41 CLIMATE CHANGE - IT INFORMATION ACCESS AND RELIABILITY

42 CLIMATE CHANGE - IT INFORMATION BACKUP GREATLY IMPROVED

43 CLIMATE CHANGE - IT INFORMATION RELIABILITY NEEDS FACT-CHECKING

44 since “wet tapes can’t be saved”.KATRINA Government “experts” advised people to throw out wet audio and video tapes since “wet tapes can’t be saved”. WHAT?

45 Much of the information was bad.INTERNET Recent Google search on “fungus removal from videotape” had 456,000 results. Much of the information was bad.

46 AS SOMEONE WHO DEALS WITH DISASTERS EVERY DAY:Don’t assume it can’t happen to you. Have some basic supplies on hand. Realize that your “plan” may need modification. Backup your data at a geographically distant location. Fact-check your “experts” before you need their advice.

47 Jeremy Brett, ModeratorThank you! Eira Tansey Rebecca Elder Kate Crowe Peter Brothers Jeremy Brett, Moderator Session hashtag: #s308