Help@SUNLINK

We hope you never experience a disaster in your library media center, but if you do, SUNLINK is here to help.

Data Recovery and Redundancy

It doesn't take much to lose the data in your online catalog or circulation system. It can occur with any natural disaster—a hurricane, a severe storm, a lightning strike, a fire—or it can happen with a surge of electricity or some other smaller accident. Keeping backups is always a good idea, but sometimes the back-ups are destroyed as well.

SUNLINK can serve as a backup for your inventory data, formerly known in pre-electronic times as a "shelflist." Contact the SUNLINK office and we can order a subset of your data from our automation vendor that you can use to restore your systems and your collection. You may also be able to use it for insurance purposes. It is a record of what your collection contained at the time of the last SUNLINK update. We can also work with automatic transfer vendors to update your data as well.

The SUNLINK staff will work with you to determine the best way to be sure your collection is correctly represented after a disaster. In some cases it will be easiest to remove all the records from SUNLINK and start over. In some cases, only some records will need to be removed. It depends upon how much damage has occurred. The SUNLINK staff will make this as easy as possible for you. We know it is a stressful time and we want to help.

SUNLINK can also provide a printout of your SUNLINK data for FEMA or insurance in shelflist order. (Note: The SUNLINK data does not include barcodes.)

The last thing any library media specialist wants is for students and teachers to be without the instructional and informational resources they need at anytime! That's why SUNLINK has interlibrary loan -- so that anyone in your school community can access information wherever it may be located.

In the case of disaster, other SUNLINK schools are there to help! After the horrific 2004 hurricane season, schools within impacted districts were overwhelmed. However, many non-impacted schools throughout the state asked what they could do to help, and SUNLINK coordinated the response. Your SUNLINK project provided resources for interlibrary loan via UPS at no cost to either the borrowing or loaning school library media program.

If you have a special need for interlibrary loan services due to a disaster, let us know and we'll do our best to make good things happen for you and your students.

Prepared at the request of the Florida Department of Education, Office of School Library Media Services,
for Florida's K-12 school library media specialists.

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SUNLINK is funded by the Florida Department of Education and administered under a grant
to the College of Education at the University of Central Florida.