-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Massive destruction at University of Hawaii at Manoa Library (fwd)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 08:18:27 -0600 (CST)
From: Aimee C Quinn <[log in to unmask]>


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Colleagues,

Some terrible news from our friends in Hawaii.  Please read further --

Aimee Quinn
a GOVDOC-L Moderator

---------- Forwarded message ----------

On Saturday night, a flash flood swept through the University of Hawaii at
Manoa campus in Honolulu. The flood crested at about six feet on the
ground floor of the main library, where the government documents and map
collections, as well as our technical services departments, are located.
The force of the flood water was so great that it knocked out walls, broke
windows, moved fully loaded map cases, and knocked over our stacks.
Fortunately, the flood occurred at 8:00 p.m. and the library was closed.
The few people inside were able to escape.

Needless to say, our collection suffered extremely heavy damage. At this
point, we are trying to salvage our air photos and rare maps. Almost
everything was under water as only the top shelves of the few stacks left
standing are dry. It appears that we will be able to save very little of
our collections.

We will be working to rebuild our collections over the coming months and
years. We have been a federal depository since 1907 and a regional since
1977. We are also a United Nations depository. If at all possible, I
request that you hold onto large runs of material on your withdrawal
lists, as we will undoubtedly be requesting documents on a grand scale.

Our campus servers are still down, including email. The library servers
were also on the ground floor of the library, and we are trying to clean
them up and recover the data.

Here are a couple of pieces of advice: (1) Make sure you have your staff
members' phone numbers at home so in an emergency you can reach everyone
to make sure they are safe and to mobilize people for disaster response.
(2) Back up your office computer and take the disks home with you. All of
our computers went swimming, so we don'tt even know if we can find them,
much less recover the data on the hard drives.

In a situation like this, all you can say is, At least we don't have
to worry about retrospective cataloging now!

Gwen Sinclair
Head of Government Documents & Maps
University of Hawaii at Manoa Library
temporary e-mail: [log in to unmask]