The training wasn’t delivered in Welsh and Gaelic, as the
blog title might suggest, but there were excellent speakers from Aberystwyth
and Glasgow who talked about their experience of fire and how it impacted on
their buildings, archive collections and services. They were joined by a
representative from the local Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and the day brought
together a wealth of experience that those attending could draw and on and take
back to their own organisations.
The day of lectures and question and answer sessions began
with an introduction from Linda Ramsay, National Records of Scotland, who
highlighted the role of the SCA in relation to the preservation and
conservation of the nation’s archives. (If you’d like to find out more about
SCA, see their website on http://www.scottisharchives.org.uk/,
and for their group dedicated to preservation, http://www.scottisharchives.org.uk/preservation.)
The first speaker was Iwan Bryn James from the National
Library of Wales, who talked about their 2013 fire. The presentations will be
made available online – so look out on the SCA website if you want to find out
more - but the main thing that I took from Iwan’s talk was the need to be fully
prepared: have an up-to-date plan that sets out what you would do if your
building and/or collection was affected by fire, and make sure you have all the
materials and kit (especially protective equipment for staff) ready to go just in
case. Because they were so well-prepared, staff at the Library were able to
start co-ordinating their response while the fire service was still putting out
the fire – not a moment was lost, which meant that they were able to save the
vast majority of the collections that were affected by the fire.
We have a robust and detailed disaster plan in place, and
boxes of materials that we could use if we were ever faced with a similar situation,
but Iwan’s talk gave me lots of food for thought and has resulted in a list of
tweaks and minor additions that I’d like to make to our plan to make it better
still!
Susannah Waters then talked about the more recent fire at
Glasgow School of Art. Like Iwan, Susannah described how the fire started, what
damage had been done and what their response had been (and continues to be).
Also like Iwan, preparation was key to their response, but Susannah also highlighted
the need to think about how you would co-ordinate offers of volunteer help and how
you utilise, and react to, social media. So a few more things for me to add to
my list of disaster plan tweaks!
The day finished off with Gavin Gray, an experienced
firefighter, talking us through the legislation that governs fire safety and
our responsibilities within it. It was extremely useful to hear from someone
with a different perspective on the topic and his talk drove home the necessity
for high quality, up-to-date information, that you can give the fire service on
arrival, about your building’s layout and your priority collection items for
salvage.
I had thought that listening to others talk about threat and
damage to their wonderful collections would make for a depressing day at best
and cause me a sleepless night at worst – but that was far from the case! The
willingness of fellow sector professionals to share their experiences so we
could all learn from them was really inspiring, and much of what they talked
about was all the positives that can come from these difficult situations – a
surprisingly large percentage of collections affected by fire can be repaired, community
spirit can be fostered, current and new audiences can be engaged and,
ultimately, resilience and value can built in to the response in order to come
out as a stronger archive service.
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