no,i do not have

I recommend on this issue to contact the colleagues from the Natural History Museum in Vienna. There, over 15 years ago large parts of the valuable collections were relocated in underground storage rooms, several stories deep and next to the main building. I have visited these locations and was impressed by the high standard of safety.

Thank you very much Mark and Guenter for your comments. I doubt that storing collections in underground storage rooms would be a wise idea. It would be very interesting to see how the guys in Vienna will cope with large (and I mean LARGE!) amounts of water. Water has the nasty habit of following gravity and thus accumulates at the deepest available point. In buildings this point will mostly (if not always) be the basement. Be sure that the water will find its way - it is simply a question of quantity. Some examples:

 - Bremen, September 19th, 2007: After leakage of a district heating pipe outside the Ueberseemuseum, the basement is completely flooded. The water is 1.5 meter high in the storage rooms, destroying a huge number of collection specimens.

- Copenhagen July 3rd, 2011: A thunderstorm downpour is flooding the basement of the Geologisk Museum, where parts of the collections are stored, among these the geological type specimen collection and the trace fossil collection which is partly destroyed.

- Münster July 28th, 2014: Torrential rainfalls with exceptional precipation of 300l/m² within just a few hours cause flooding of large parts of the city, also affecting several museums.

This list could be extended haphazardly. The last flooding catastrophe in Berlin was in April 1902 when masses of hailstones jammed the sewage tunnels which caused a flooding by the following torrential rainfall. The water level was 2 m high in some streets. Such events are rare and occur in long time intervals. The problem is that the memory to these events is fading and so the danger is underestimated. At my opinion, disaster preparedness means to be prepared for exceptional events but should include avoidance of predictable catastrophes. Thus, collections DO NOT belong in the basement! Flooding will occur more frequently in the future. Meteorologists claim that severe hail events multiplied by a factor of four in Germany during the last three decades.

Dear Christian,

Dear Mark,

In my first reply I have avoided to present any quick fixes. During my professional career as curator of the Geoscience Collections of the Technische Universität München I have visited most major natural history museums in the world. Many of those collections are for historical reasons concentrated in a single large building complex. This of course is to be regarded as very critical. That you have clearly stated in your reply. But there are also examples of the increasing decentralized storage of large valuable collections. Here should be mentioned the Munich science museums and collections, where different topics are distributed in separate buildings in the urban area. In addition, the Bavarian State Library is to be mentioned that recently engaged in special separate storage buildings outside the urban area.

Everything built by human hands whether above ground or underground is an extreme imbalance in nature. Water, gas, wind, cold, heat, vibrations etc. to work with great joy at our stuff. Therefore, the decentralized storage in special resistant buildings seem to be afflicted with the lowest risk of total loss.

Best regards,

Guenter

Thank you Maria, good comment!

Documentation today almost always means digitalization of collection data. This is a big issue for all natural history museums. It is cost- and staff-intesive, so many museums (including the one I am working for) only just started. A big problem is to receive funding for collection digitalization projects.

We moved parts of our palaeontological collections two years ago due to refurbishments and construction works in our main building. The collections also have been completely evacuated during WW II. Three removals are as Bad as a fire!

Documentation and digitization are a fine thing. But just the vast majority of natural history museums have comparatively very small staff and much less financial resources for these projects. In recent years, the experienced scientific personnel has been considerably or dramatically shortened. Therefore, these professionals can document only a vanishingly small fraction of their collections, since they mainly engaged in research and public relations. Volunteers often do not  have the necessary qualifications. Even today's digitization poses great risk of total loss in itself. Most computer experts warn strongly against the limited durability and above all their limited readability in the future.

I'm afraid we have to hope for better times, where the historic nature objects in the museums get more attention. In any case, the public must provide significantly more financial resources at its disposal.

I know this is now a pipe dream!

Thank you. In truth, it would be very desireble to gather all opinions and methods to make a standard guidelines book which could serve to any museum building. Ideas to make other museums safer than they are today. I let the idea here (I doubt if Mr. Christian Newmann had not thought about!). 

There is a network here in Delaware (USA) called the Delaware Disaster Assistance Team (DDAT) which exists to assist museums, libraries, archives and historical societies of all sizes to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies and disasters that might impact their collections.  The website is https://sites.google.com/site/ddatdelaware/  and it includes a number of great planning resources.

In addition, the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center has an extensive library collection of materials on all aspects of disasters including disaster planning in general and disaster planning for collections.  If you are interested in examples of plans and related resources, you can contact the Center at http://drc.udel.edu/elq-resource-collection/

Here's some related resources specific to museum & library disaster preparedness (the first 4 are the most useful & complete:

https://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/pdf/emergency_plan.pdf

http://www.archives.gov/preservation/emergency-prep/disaster-prep-primer.html

http://www.ala.org/advocacy/govinfo/disasterpreparedness

http://www.aam-us.org/docs/continuum/developing-a-disaster-plan-final.pdf?sfvrsn=2

http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/Guidelines/guidelinesdisasters_eng.pdf

http://www.loc.gov/preservation/emergprep/emerpubs.html

Regards,

Scot