Disaster Planning

Effective disaster planning is essential for ensuring the safety of a digital repository's staff and the sustainability of digital content and services. Disaster preparedness is also a primary responsibility of trusted digital repositories.

Community Standards and Practice

In researching the area of disaster planning, ICPSR recently compiled an extensive list of Disaster Planning Resources, some relevant to ICPSR's location at the University of Michigan and others that are of broader interest for those undertaking disaster planning activities.

ICPSR's Approach to Disaster Planning

To protect its staff and digital resources, ICPSR recently put into place several components of a comprehensive disaster plan. Below we provide a series of these disaster planning documents with the objective of offering examples to the community.

We provide a series of documents to demonstrate ICPSR's approach to disaster preparedness and to serve as examples to the community of what effective disaster planning involves.

ICPSR Disaster Planning Policy Framework, 2009: This is the high-level policy document that defines the purpose, scope, and components of the disaster planning program at ICPSR. The framework used a model document (PDF 92K) based on a scan of community examples.

Disaster Planning at ICPSR: Short-Term Action Plan, 2009: This plan identifies core areas for development and attention in implementing ICPSR's disaster planning program.

ICPSR Roles and Responsibilities: This document defines the roles and responsibilities for ICPSR's disaster planning program, as informed by a scan of community examples (PDF 69K).

ICPSR Crisis Communications Plan: The plan addresses requirements for internal and external communications during and after an emergency.

ICPSR Disaster Planning Training Plan: This document provides guidance on appropriate training for current and future staff at ICPSR using a model document (PDF 105K) of community examples.

ICPSR Web Services Continuity Plan: This is a three-phase plan to deploy a replica of our Web server to ensure client access during a failure of ICPSR's primary Web services; redeploy ICPSR's primary Web services to another location; and explore alternative methods for delivering ICPSR Web services.