by Sandy Oelschlegel, Director, Preston Medical Library, University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine

We at Preston Medical Library had a taste of what it would be like if we had a disaster that resulted in loss of power. Of course, we did not have our “emergency preparedness plan” finished!

One morning our power was out upon our arrival at 8:30 am and remained out until around 12 pm; long enough to experience the discomfort of not being “connected”.

In random order, here are ten things we learned:

1. Wireless, battery powered laptops are great to have on hand, especially if they are charged.
2. Everyone on campus figures out that wireless might be available and suddenly the wireless system gets overloaded, resulting in slow or no signal.
3. IT departments shut down servers, even if they are on battery backups “to preserve the batteries”.
4. All our e journals are “run through” the proxy server, so we had no access to any of our e-journals through our open url linking software.
5. Off campus access was unavailable because the server was down.
6. Printers require electricity, at least those that we had. See link below to a battery operated printer we ordered thereafter.
7. Our faculty still expected us to continue to be able to provide information services, including lit searches and copies of articles.
8. There was no communication system in place for the administrators to communicate with us about what was happening.
9. We did not know each other’s home and cell phone numbers.
10. The ILL staff can work at home.

Here is a link to a battery-powered printer. We will let you know how it works after we test it. http://www.tiny.cc/C032K

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 10:31 am and is filed under Emergency Preparedness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.