The Informational Inferno: A New Disaster Recovery Training Tool for Archives
Chair: Rebecca Elder, Amigos Library Services
This session will give conference attendees a first look at an exciting new disaster recovery training
tool under development at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. In the
Spring Semester of 2013, iSchool lecturer Karen Pavelka will lead a class of students through
burning a mock library and archives containing a wide variety of deaccessioned materials. The fire
and subsequent recovery efforts will be filmed and web‐accessible training videos created to help
archivists and librarians all over the world recover from disasters. The three papers presented will
discuss the rationale and process for creating the videos and associated website. The session will
conclude with a screening of the first videos from the project and a discussion about what the
archival community would find useful as the project is expanded and refined.
- Starting a Fire: Genesis of the Project - Karen Pavelka, University of Texas at Austin School of Information
- Playing with Fire: The Burn and Recovery Process - Anne Kofmehl
- Fighting Fire with Fire: Creating the Training Materials - Brittany Ann Jurica