State Council of State Archivists Releases New Emergency Preparedness Documents

From the Council of State Archivists:

A new series of four emergency preparedness guidance documents was released this month by CoSA with the generous corporate support from the Polygon Group.

 

“These resources are based on CoSA’s work for the Intergovernmental Preparedness for Essential Records (IPER) Project, which trained state and local government officials in every state and territory in emergency preparedness and ensuring the safety of essential records,” said Lisa Johnston, CoSA’s administrative coordinator and a former IPER trainer, adding, “We are pleased we’ve been able to repurpose this information.” Johnston and a group of volunteers created the new materials with the goal of providing handy references for the “4 Rs” of emergency preparedness for records: risk, readiness, response, and recovery.

 

Risk: Recognizing that records can be damaged or lost due to a variety of factors, it is critical for agencies to identify their essential records and the potential risks to their long-term preservation. Doing so paves the way for developing and implementing policies and procedures for mitigating those risks. 

 

Readiness: Essential to an agency’s ability to mitigate disasters and emergencies is having written plans, policies, and procedures in place that not only reduce risk, but also address courses of action to respond to emergencies.

 

Response: Because response time for imperiled records can be critical, identifying immediate and short-term actions to be taken during and after an emergency or disaster is imperative.

 

Recovery: The Recovery phase involves the actions necessary to bring things back to normal to the extent possible, including full damage assessment, insurance claims, salvage and stabilization of records, and the resumption of business operations.

Each guidance document includes a best practices checklist along with links to additional materials.

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Filed under: News, Preservation, Reports