The librarian's disaster planning and community resiliency guidebook

Librarians fulfilling their role as information first responders

This toolkit is designed to help libraries increase their crisis coping capacity through easy-to-use planning and training aids that will reduce vulnerability to many types of disruption. This aims to increase resilience, where the library is able to successfully manage through difficult situations and continue to operate with little or no interruption.

This toolkit follows a two-step strategy. First, the guide and workbook will help make libraries more resilient, so that they can return to operations quickly. Second, this toolkit provides guidance on how libraries can help speed the recovery of their community.

A resilient library provides the local community with a key resource that increases its ability to cope with emergencies. Having a library that can quickly recover from an emergency helps ensure the rapid and successful return to normalcy for all aspects of the community, including businesses, households, schools, non-profits, municipal agencies and others.