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.