When flood waters threatened to breach the banks of the Brisbane River last Wednesday, the State Library of Queensland looked to be one of its first casualties.
Fortunately for the library and Queensland’s bookworms, management had a well-developed disaster recovery plan that went beyond simple data backup and that included all the minutiae of surviving catastrophe so that librarians didn’t have to make it up as they went along.
As the water started flowing into the basement levels, the library’s client services director Rory McLeod and staff swung into action.
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McLeod, who was also evacuated from his home, said mobile devices presented a new crimp because so much information was stored online or people could not be contacted when there was no landline alternative.
McLeod said the best approach was to keep multiple copies of documents in various locations and to keep redundant providers and networks so that in times of near-total devastation there were alternatives paths. Another lesson was to keep redundant lines of communication: “We found that when one provider was down, another was up”, allowing workers to stay in touch with each other and their families, he said.
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