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Engineer Team Report: Disaster Recovery Plan Development

The University of Illinois Library's Oak Street High Density Storage Facility is home to over 1.7 million low-use general and special collection materials such as books, journals, and newspapers. While the Library has a working Disaster Recovery Plan for its general collection areas, there exists an identified need for an alternate plan, one specific to the Oak Street Facility, that will focus on early detection measures, retrieval methods, and material organization in a High Density Storage (HDS) environment. Available statistics from various disaster scenarios have been used to determine the probability distributions specifying the damage from a variety of disasters that could affect the facility. This allows economic impacts to be obtained for each disaster. Tests recreating water damage were performed to examine the effect of book swell and tray integrity. In addition, possible “safe” locations that would receive little to no water damage from a disaster were identified within the shelves. A greedy algorithm was developed for the efficient recovery of high priority items. Recommendations include early detection methods such as water and smoke detection, additional stock carts with overhead protection, advanced suppression systems, and safe zones for future high priority items.

Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems

Project Team: Chris Manna, Ian Bradley, Tim Kennedy
Project Advisor: Professor Uday Shanbhag

University Library

Project Team: Heather Tennison and Laura Larkin

Table of Contents   

Introduction  ¦  Risk Assessment of Disasters  ¦ Facility Assessment

Facility Improvements/Hardware Additions  ¦ Algorithm  ¦ General Collection Zones  ¦ Economic Analysis  ¦ Conclusions /References

For comments on this page contact: Preservation & Conservation

Last modified by: Ryan Edge on 11/30/11