Workshop on disaster planning

"The best laid disaster plans of mice and men often go awry - now
    what?"
Socratic Dialogue
AIC 44th Annual Meeting / CAC 42 Annual Conference
Montreal, Canada
Sunday 15 May 2016
Lunch session, 12 noon

In the past two decades, conservators, collections managers, and
other museum professionals have benefited from increasing experience
with risk analysis and disaster planning methodologies.  With proper
training and practice, many more valuable objects and collections of
cultural heritage have been saved than ever before.  The 2016 AIC
annual meeting provides an ideal opportunity to share and review
this experience in disaster planning and management, review the
success and failures in practice, and discuss how approaches to
disasters and the unexpected can be further improved.

However, disasters by definition, don't follow plans.  What should
we do when confronted with the unexpected?  We won't know until we
are actually confronted with the situation.  This conference is thus
also providing an opportunity to pause and take some time to reflect
about what it is we want to achieve in disaster planning and
management, and why.  With that in the back of our minds, we can
perhaps better cope with the unexpected when it does happen.

In the continuing series of so-called Socratic dialogues at AIC
annual meetings, a Socratic dialogue will be conducted to help us
investigate our thoughts on these questions on disaster planning.  A
Socratic dialogue is a structured form of dialogue in which all
participants actively contribute.  The purpose of the dialogue is
not to solve the question at hand, that is, specifically determine
how we should react in an emergency and what to do when the
unexpected occurs, but to investigate each other's experience, and
concerns about how to handle unexpected situations, concerns such
as,

    Disasters don't always follow disaster plans.  What do you save
    if you only have a few seconds or minutes, and why?

    How much damage is acceptable in order to save as much of a
    collection as possible?

    Do we let bystanders or volunteers help save and initially
    stabilize (large numbers of) objects if the professionals can't
    get there on time?

The Socratic method provides a safe, open environment for
participants to investigate what the essence behind these issues is,
and to understand their own points of view as well as those of
others.  In practice, it provides a better foundation for that
moment when the best laid disaster plan goes awry, and one then has
to make split second, gut decisions about what to do.

Dr. W. (Bill) Wei
Senior conservation scientist
Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands
Hobbemastraat 22
NL-1071 ZC Amsterdam
+31 33 421 7183
Mobile: +31 6 5273 2101


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 29:44
                   Distributed: Friday, April 8, 2016
                       Message Id: cdl-29-44-017
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