Educational facilities in the Caribbean often serve roles as shelters during natural hazards, but they often sustain as much damage as other buildings. This study investigated the physical vulnerability of schools located on Antigua and Barbuda to wind forces, torrential rain, and seismic forces in order to provide relevant local agencies with…

Describes Disaster Child Care (DCC), a nonsectarian ministry, which trains and mobilizes volunteers to care for children of families suffering from a natural or man-made disaster. Specifically addresses: (1) comfort through familiarity; (2) behaviors and approaches to lessen anxiety; and (3) care and caregiver training. Provides examples of care…

Describes the experiences of school librarians with organizing volunteers, assessing the destruction, and recovery and rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Andrew. Information gathering, record keeping, public relations, public service, communication, and organization are highlighted; and the value of storytelling in coping with disaster is…

New Orleans will probably never be the same after Hurricane Katrina. But when it comes to schools, many educators and analysts say that might not be all bad. Both in Louisiana and beyond, the wreckage in the Big Easy has sparked thinking about how the city might reinvent its beleaguered school system, in difficult straits long before the storm was…

Seeking to grasp what she called a "golden opportunity for rebirth" out of the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco asked the Louisiana legislature last week to embrace a plan that would give the state control of most New Orleans public schools. This article talks about the governor's plan to let the state…

The date is September 9, 2005. This article is set in a rural Wisconsin community, a thousand miles north of New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina is about to make landfall. The four- and five- year- olds in Mrs. Olson's classroom have never experienced a hurricane or seen flood waters rise to cover the farms and houses they know, but they cannot…

An estimated 370,000 schoolchildren were displaced last year by Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster ever to strike the United States. One year after, hundreds of thousands of these displaced students remain scattered in schools across the nation. In Houston, which has the largest concentration of evacuees, two schools continue helping…

During the time author Pauline Leonard was writing this paper, Hurricane Katrina thrust itself upon the Gulf Coast, including many communities in southeast Louisiana. In the wake of the storm, reports emerged of the devastation, loss of life and destruction to property. Writing about personal experiences with developing and implementing…

In building an emergency management library collection within a training institution, technical data become secondary to identifying common goals, methods, and systems found at the federal, state, and local levels for responding to and planning for disasters and crises. These goals help identify emergency management skills public officials should…

Discusses emergent citizen groups at the local community level: how they operate in disasters, their characteristics at emergency and nonemergency times, other types of emergence, and implications for emergency management. (CT)

Reviews history of California Academy of Sciences and its library. Financial problems, the James Lick bequest (1879), the 1906 earthquake and fire, legal complexities, and postearthquake developments are discussed. Statistics provided include date founded, director, collection and staff size, and main subjects collected. (EJS)

Texas A & M University at Galveston is the only marine and maritime-oriented University in the Southwest. Its computing policy/direction, academic computing, administrative computing, and library automation are described, and hurricance emergency plans are also discussed. (MLW)

Describes how the library staff at Stetson University in central Florida coped with flooding. Offers recommendations on storage; carpeting; fans and humidifiers; emergency phone contacts; labeled keys; protective coverings for books; safe storage for "disaster" materials and equipment; removal of less valuable materials; sandbags;…

Outlines the problems of the National Museums of Canada libraries that led to the decision to implement a preservation program and describes the program and its impact. Areas discussed include policy formation, disaster contingency planning, storage monitoring, collection cleaning, binding and restoration, rare book identification and…

Discusses emergency plans for dealing with disasters in information centers and describes four information centers' responses to various disasters. Topics addressed include authority and leadership; money and insurance; information resources, including computers and software; alternate locations and forms of communication; and testing. A list of…