Collaborative Disaster Preparedness in New Orleans

FAIN: PG-233707-16

Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, The (New Orleans, LA 70118-5698)
Annie Peterson (Project Director: May 2015 to December 2015)
Donna Capelle Cook (Project Director: December 2015 to December 2015)
Annie Peterson (Project Director: December 2015 to January 2016)
Donna Capelle Cook (Project Director: January 2016 to January 2018)

Workshops about disaster preparedness and response for New Orleans cultural heritage institutions and the launch of a New Orleans Alliance for Response.  Six New Orleans cultural heritage institutions would collaborate on this project: the Amistad Research Center, the Louisiana Division/City Archives of New Orleans Public Library, the Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Tulane University Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, the Louisiana State Museum, and the National World War II Museum.  Collections span many subjects including jazz, southeastern architecture, Catholic history, the African Diaspora, civil rights, the history of the Second World War, and the history and art of New Orleans and Louisiana.  Highlights include the Carnival Collection of original floats and costume designs from 1873 to the present, oral histories of New Orleans musicians, the records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans dating back to 1769, Orleans Parish civil and criminal court records, and comprehensive documents of French and Spanish colonial rule from 1718 to 1803.  This award would support three workshops on collaborative preparedness and response and hands-on recovery of book, paper, and audiovisual materials.  A fourth event would launch the New Orleans Alliance for Response. Assessments in 2014 and 2015 funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services identified the need for collaborative disaster response planning and training in New Orleans, which is highly vulnerable to natural disasters and where collections at nearly all the participating institutions were affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Tulane University is seeking funding to support a series of disaster preparedness and response workshops in New Orleans to serve multiple cultural heritage institutions, with the ultimate goal of establishing an ongoing network for collaborative disaster preparedness and response in New Orleans. The project will consist of a series of three workshops and an initial meeting of a New Orleans Alliance for Response (NOAR). The three workshops will focus on collaborative disaster planning and preparedness, hands-on recovery of book and paper materials, and hands-on recovery of audiovisual media. The workshops and establishing the NOAR will help cultural heritage institutions in New Orleans be better prepared for a disaster in this vulnerable area of the country and build skills, vocabularies, and agreements amongst participants to make a collaborative response effort proceed more efficiently in case of an actual event.