Today I’m participating in International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day, an initiative designed to disseminate as much information through the online networks. The idea is that everyone posts some constructive information about disaster relief.
For libraries, I’ve seen several resources emerge. Yesterday we published over a dozen resources in MPOW, including ALA’s website for information about libraries. Also see the Louisiana Library Association Disaster Relief Fund. However, in checking Technorati, I see that j’s scratchpad had already built a good collection of library-related resources. Update: Rochelle Hartman also published a page of resources.
(I also saw a more traditional webpage collection appear yesterday, but without an RSS feed or similar dynamic weave into the biblioblogosphere, it’s hard to relocate. Interesting observation.)
Hats off to the amazing people at Nola.com, publishing online without a stick of dead tree to work with, who have the best missing persons database. But librarians from New Orleans Public Library have also posted pleas for information to PUBLIB; yesterday I republished a request for information from Tony Barnes, and today PUBLIB heard from Jennifer Creevy, a cataloger who had evacuated to Florida and is now looking for staff. Their alternate, non-work email addresses are tbarnes56@yahoo.com and jfcreevy@hotmail.com.
I tip my hat to George Eberhart at American Libraries, who by Monday had the ALA website up. (It would be a bit more informated if it were delivered via RSS, but no matter. However, it still needs to be linked from the main page!) I wrote a column for AL for over seven years, and still consider these people the most honest, decent group of writer/journalists I have ever met. Sometimes ALA is slow to respond… this wasn’t one of those times.
I’m trying to determine the best keyword to tag MPOW resources related to Katrina, disaster relief, and emergency preparedness. I see MPOW doesn’t have a section on disaster relief–that really surprises me, because we have a lot of resources on this topic, as well as on emergency preparedness.
Find other blogs participating in in International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day; this event also has its own feed.
Posted on this day, other years:
YPOW uses LC Subject Headings, right? Unfortunately, “Emergency preparedness” isn’t used by LCSH. Instead, they have “Emergency management,” “Disaster relief” (which comes after the emergency), and “Hazard mitigation” (a new term for what you can do before an emergency to makes things less bad).
Yeah, I’m pretty much not thinking about LC at all… I’m thinking primarily about our LII topic headings.