Today is May Day. In the archives world of late, it’s a day we try to celebrate by doing something to mitigate the effects of a disaster on our collections. For more information, see the Society of American Archivist’s May Day page.
Since we had a lot to do today, and only one person to do it, our May Day effort had to be quick and easy. Since we’ve been rearranging collections in our vault stacks lately, it was time to print out a new location list. Not only does that make it easier for us to find collections for researchers, it also means that in the case of damage to the stacks and loss of access to our electronic collection management database with all the current locations in it, we can still quickly identify the location of every collection in our holdings. And since our database also lets us create that report as a pdf, we can save it to a flash drive and look at it through any of our laptops–as long as they’re charged up, of course!
Yea! Disaster preparedness and location lists are very important.