Hawaiian library disaster
From Library Underground
On Saturday night, a flash flood swept through the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus in Honolulu. The flood crested at about six feet on the ground floor of the main library, where the government documents and map collections, as well as our technical services departments, are located. The force of the flood water was so great that it knocked out walls, broke windows, moved fully loaded map cases, and knocked over our stacks. Fortunately, the flood occurred at 8:00 p.m. and the library was closed. The few people inside were able to escape.
Needless to say, our collection suffered extremely heavy damage. At this point, we are trying to salvage our air photos and rare maps. Almost everything was under water as only the top shelves of the few stacks left standing are dry. It appears that we will be able to save very little of our collections.
We will be working to rebuild our collections over the coming months and years. We have been a federal depository since 1907 and a regional since 1977. We are also a United Nations depository. If at all possible, I request that you hold onto large runs of material on your withdrawal lists, as we will undoubtedly be requesting documents on a grand scale.
Our campus servers are still down, including email. The library servers were also on the ground floor of the library, and we are trying to cleanthem up and recover the data.
Here are a couple of pieces of advice: (1) Make sure you have your staff members’ phone numbers at home so in an emergency you can reach everyone to make sure they are safe and to mobilize people for disaster response. (2) Back up your office computer and take the disks home with you. All of our computers went swimming, so we don’t even know if we can find them, much less recover the data on the hard drives.
In a situation like this, all you can say is, At least we don’t have to worry about retrospective cataloging now!
Gwen Sinclair
Head of Government Documents & Maps
University of Hawaii at Manoa Library
temporary e-mail: ouz09ges@earthlink.net
