Disaster and after

Disaster and after: an Introduction.

Derek Law Director of Information Services & Systems, King’s College London

Although a number of people here may recognize me from contacts within the UK, whether through the Library Association, or the Library and Information Commission or the JISC, can I stress that I am here today to represent and to bring to you the warmest wishes of IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. IFLA particularly wished to be represented today in recognition of the singular importance of the theme of the conference and the discussions you will have as part of it. This is a significant topic and one where national and international action is overdue.

Disasters and their aftermath have been part of the fabric of mankind throughout history, but it is only relatively recently that we as information professionals have seen that this is an area which can benefit from a studied response rather than a set of random responses based on after the event requests for help, goodwill and good fellowship. In recognizing this, IFLA wishes to see an agenda set for dealing with disasters - and meetings such as this begin that process.

In contemplating how to introduce the theme of the meeting I very quickly settled on what for me makes this an appropriate topic even for the charmed setting of an English provincial town, where disasters are what happen to other people on television news bulletins. The point I want to make is that we tend to think that disasters happen to other people and not us. I don’t believe that to be true and a catalogue of disaster from Aberfan to Lockerbie shows that even in the UK any community can be touched and this reinforces my view that we must act collectively and see response to disaster as a common and communal responsibility. As I reflect on my career it has been touched at least at second hand by many disasters over the years and I suspect that this will be true of anyone attending this conference.

I suppose that the first Disaster with which I had any association – albeit tangential – was the great flood in Florence. In the early hours of 4th November 1966 the level of the river Arno rose sixteen feet sweeping water through the city at forty miles an hour. Within 24 hours the water level had dropped, leaving behind a city whose cultural riches had been devastated. Five years later I visited Florence where a colleague from St Andrews University was working as a binder under the Churchill Fellowship Scheme repairing and restoring damaged treasures. The ravages of the floodwater were still all too evident even after that time. This was my first experience of the suddenness of natural disaster and the length of its aftermath.

The next two experiences relate to my time as a medical librarian. Some of you will remember the terrible earthquake in Armenia in the 1980’s in which tens of thousands were killed and injured. As is normal, medical and surgical teams and news reporters quickly converged on the scene of devastation. Operating in the ruins and in makeshift field hospitals surgeons for the first time used mobile satellite transmitters to send images of wounds and operations and in reply to receive advice on treatment from surgeons in New York, Paris and London. The powerful images of the link between technology and information were instrumental in the setting up of the Satellife Programme, which even now aims to use cheap satellite communication to take medical information to communities in developing countries. This left an abiding memory of how technology and information can be a powerful tool in the recovery from disaster.

Later, in 1989 I was at an IFLA Conference when I was asked for advice by a fellow medical librarian from Iraq, with a classic Catch-22 question which haunts me still. You will remember that at that time the Iraqi Government was suppressing a Kurdish rebellion and was using chemical weapons to do so, but denying vigorously that it was using such weapons, which are, of course, banned by international treaty. Nevertheless patients with dreadful wounds caused by the chemical warfare were arriving in hospital and the doctors did not know how to treat them. They did what all doctors do and sought answers through Medline searches. The medical librarian’s dilemma was simple and stark. In order to treat the patients and save their lives searches had to be conducted on the effects of chemical weapons. However since the government had denied that chemical weapons had been used, victims of chemical warfare could not, by definition, exist. Therefore, to conduct a Medline search about something which the government said had not happened was an act of rebellion or treason and would lead at best to imprisonment. And so my young Iraqi colleague asked whether it was better to let the Kurds die or risk prison. I had no answer and am only grateful that I have never had to face such a stark choice. Armed conflict can raise the most fundamental ethical issues for us.

Almost prosaic by comparison was the destruction of the Norfolk Record Office and Library of my fellow Library Association Councillor Hilary Hammond. It was clearly a heartbreaking experience for him and although a wonderful new library will rise from the old, much cultural heritage has been lost. What is even more remarkable is that there is a major library fire on average every five years in the UK and yet we do little to protect ourselves. Parenthetically I might add that I went to Norfolk to the Public Libraries Group Conference last Easter. A knowledgeable taxi-driver took me from the station to the conference and having discovered my library connections regaled me with the tale of the fire and the rebuilding even making a small detour to show me the building site. “Ah” he said as part of the tale “and of course it was an insurance job. You’d be surprised how many secrets there were in the County Records”. The fire was officially and more routinely ascribed to faulty electrical wiring. A case in which natural disaster is the result of human error or human folly.

Kosovo is not really a disaster I can claim true association with. It was recently remarked that it has become the first web war, with over forty websites purporting to offer the truth about what is happening. How does a librarian support and give access to the truth – and which truth - in such circumstances and where do loyalties lie? It is an old maxim that in war truth is the first casualty, and we have to have a professional view of what obligations that places on us. With Voltaire we will all leap from our armchairs to say that I hate what you say but defend your right to say it. The truth may look a little different under artillery fire. But the sad history of the Balkans over the last decade shows many facets of information services. It shows librarians in small towns struggling to offer a semblance of normality by keeping libraries open, even from libraries with walls pitted by sniper fire. It shows British and other colleagues visiting libraries in Sarajevo to assess for UNESCO how they can be rebuilt while wearing flak jackets, travelling in armoured personnel carriers and in range of snipers. It shows columns of lorries taking books to rebuild libraries and information services because of a belief that information has the power to heal. A very good friend of mine who worked with me in Edinburgh has become known as the mad Englishwoman of Cluj in Romania. She is Sally Lamont-Wood, one of that small but distinguished band of Library Association International Librarians of the Year. The friendships she made while delivering the books she took there, persuaded her to settle in Romania and help in the rebuilding process. This is one very personal response to tragedy.

But for IFLA and for all of us who were at the 1991 IFLA Moscow Conference, the seminal event in understanding disasters was the coup which removed Gorbachov and the resistance of Boris Yeltsin, then the hero of the hour, while we stayed in Moscow. I could talk for half an hour alone about that amazing week. About word of mouth and rumour. About distinguished foreign correspondents approaching us to ask if we had heard anything, then hearing the rumours rebroadcast as truth by ITN or CNN. About most citizens trying to carry on as normal with the burdens of daily life. About the ultimate failure of the coup because of its inability to seal its information borders, allowing almost anyone to telephone or fax the West with at least personal news of what was really happening. Of the endless showing of a film of Swan Lake on television which betrayed the lack of control of information dissemination. After Tiananmen Square Ronald Reagan perceptively remarked that the growth of electronic information would bring down dictatorships more surely than guns and that was what happened in Moscow and where IFLA saw at first hand the power of information in shaping history. I hope you will forgive me one Moscow anecdote, since it tells a little of how information should perhaps not be used. You will remember the famous parochialism of the Aberdeen Press & Journal which reputedly carried the famous 60 point headline “Aberdeen Man Drowns” with a 12 point sub-heading “Titanic Sinks”. I have a cousin who works for the equally parochial Scottish Sunday Post based in Dundee, twenty miles from my home town of Arbroath. When I returned from Moscow she quickly interviewed me and I treasure to this day the resulting article with the headline “Arbroath Man Dances in Kremlin. Gorbachov returns to power”.

So what is the point of all these anecdotes you might wonder. I suppose just to remind us from the comfort of an English provincial town that disaster is always ready to strike and takes no account of place or wealth and that everyone in this room has at least some chance of being involved in the aftermath of disaster. Just in passing I might mention that in 1940 King’s College London, based in the Strand in London, chose to disperse its library collections to various distant towns lest bombing destroy them. The Law collections came to Bristol. By one of those wonderful ironies of life, the College in the Strand was hit by a single bomb, which failed to explode, while the law collections here in Bristol were totally destroyed when the Library was burned out in one of the Baedeker raids. Not even the best of planning can prevent disaster.

Disasters are usually unexpected, but may reasonably be divided into two categories – the predictable and the unpredictable. The predictable are largely natural, but occasionally man-made disasters and tend to revolve around fire, flood and earthquake. Exact times and places may not be predictable but the creation of earthquake proof buildings and procedures in Japan or California is little more than simple prudence. We can as a profession usefully spend time examining ways of surviving and assisting in the wake of those natural disasters likely to affect us. We can ensure that we have plans to protect our buildings and collections and that we have plans to offer information services and support for those less prepared.

Much more difficult to deal with is the unpredictable in the shape of the violence that has scarred the entire globe in the twentieth century. Armed conflict has little space for the disinterested and impartial professional. Censorship, historic hatreds and the need to support one’s own group make the neutral voice a still and small one. Curiously, there is a persistent turning towards culture in troubled times. Whether it is the soldier’s knapsack perennially stuffed with Tolstoy or Proust, whether chamber music in the ruins of Sarajevo, or whether Folk Music on the radio, culture defies the ugliness of tragedy and deflects despair. Librarians have a powerful role in providing some of that activity. Most of us however can offer little but the knowledge of mutual professional support while the conflict rages. But afterwards we can help with information sources that aid the healing process. Some of that may be medical information, at other times it may be information on how legal or parliamentary systems operate at others rebuilding library collections.

But these things tend to be done at the personal or individual level. In a sense this has also been true of efforts by international bodies such as IFLA. For many years our responses to tragedies and disasters have tended to be very much ad hoc and in response to pleas from individual institutions. It has begun to be recognised that this is neither sufficient nor appropriate and that bodies such as IFLA must begin to create policy rather than offer ad hoc response to tragedy. Co-operation has begun with other NGO’s in related domains and the first tangible evidence of this is the creation of the International Committee of the Blue Shield. You will hear a full account of this from Marie Therese Varlamoff, but I will mention it very briefly here. It was set up in 1996 by the major NGO’s in the field – IFLA, ICA, ICM and ICOMOS, representing Libraries, Archives, Museums and Monuments. It has a number of aims ranging from public awareness raising and promoting standards for risk management, to providing expertise and rapid intervention teams. Perhaps more importantly it wants to see work carried out at local level linking National Blue Shield Committees with civil defence, police fire and army units who might have to deal with cultural heritage materials in the event of disasters. The UK has at present no national committee. This is an important initiative and one that IFLA urges you to support here in the UK.

We can also respond in other areas of difficulty. At this years IFLA conference in Amsterdam Klaus Dieter Lehmann from Germany and Katya Genieva from Russia proposed a professional resolution. It reads in part:

Both of the proposers are members of IFLA’s Executive Board. More importantly as senior professionals in Germany and Russia they have first hand experience of the difficulties associated with the seizure of cultural heritage items as war trophies. Although it is always dangerous to predict the outcome of IFLA debates, this resolution represents the growing understanding within IFLA that it has a role and a voice which can be used to mitigate the effects of conflicts and disasters in a planned manner. Every disaster should be seized as an opportunity to improve people’s lives through the development or improvement of information services as a keystone of the recovery process and the preservation of cultural artifacts may well be one symbol of hope and recovery.

IFLA is taking the first small steps to using our information skills as part of the professional response to disaster. Throughout the conference you will hear many examples of why information is important in such events. And finally, every disaster should be seized as an opportunity to improve people’s lives through the development or improvement of information services as a keystone of the recovery process and the preservation of cultural artifacts may well be one symbol of hope and recovery.