Back in the day when rocks were soft and dinosaurs roamed the earth, people like me came to emergency management as a second profession. We brought with us a considerable amount of experience in our previous jobs but had very little real knowledge of emergency management. This was not a particular drawback as our focus was largely on the development of emergency plans.
Then came the great awakening. I remember reading a paper by Dr Enrico Quarantelli and thinking, “This guy has finally got it! About time someday figured this out.” I then looked at the date on the paper; it was written the year I was born. It was my introduction to a whole range of books, research papers, and articles on emergency management that I didn’t know existed.
This became more and more important as emergency management evolved from an operational to a strategic emphasis and sought recognition as a profession. One of the principal requirements of a profession is a specialized body of knowledge yet it is only recently that we have begun to recognize this and seen the emergence of academic disciplines designed to provide embryonic emergency managers with access to this body of knowledge.
This is incredibly important. The past is an indicator of what has occurred and may reoccur. Coupled with social science research, it shows how others have solved problems in the past and how people are likely to behave in a crisis. For too long we have been basing emergency plans on disaster mythology and how we assume people will react rather that what history and research teach us are more realistic and likely reactions.
In addition, there is evidence that increasing your knowledge base can improve your ability to make decisions in a crisis. In his book, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Dr Gary Klein argues that crisis decision making is based on pattern recognition. He notes that the patterns available in a decision maker’s knowledge base can be increased not only through experience but through simulation exercises, reading, and viewing videos.
Since the type of information of use to emergency managers is not always easy to find and may be drawn from numerous disciplines, I have found it useful to develop a personal reference library. The content of your library is your choice. There are numerous suggested reading lists floating around but the best reading list if the one you develop for yourself. For example, if you’re just getting started in emergency management, you might start with books and papers that form the foundation of modern emergency management theory. If you’re looking to improve your ability to deal with disaster, you might choice to look at books and studies related to historical disasters. However, the one thing to avoid is limiting your reading to just emergency management. There is a wealth of information available in other disciplines that have direct bearing on emergency management such as readings in politics, law, political economics, climatology, and so forth.
The obvious starting point in building your library is, of course, to buy books. But many of the books that we find useful are based on academic research and have a limited market and, therefore, a high price. Fortunately, there are opportunities to purchase books second hand and you will often be surprised at the relevancy of some of the older books you find. Never pay full price for a book if you can avoid it. Online and second-hand bookstores are your friends.
Don’t neglect your local library either. Many libraries make books available in electronic format as well as hard copies, making them easy to access when traveling or doing late night research. You can also access materials not in the local library’s collection through inter-library loans. If you are an alumnus or alumna of a nearby university, you can generally gain access to the university library and its resources. This may allow you to access academic journals that would otherwise be too costly to access. Another way is to access academic journals is to volunteer to serve on their editorial board.
Depending on your work environment, you may be able to help your organization build a small reference library for you team. I was successful in this for several organizations with whom I was associated. The plus was that my team had access to the materials, and it was something that could be useful to my successors.
Fortunately, some of the best material is readily available online for free. The University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center houses the E.L. Quarantelli Resource Collection consisting of hundreds of documents. The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado also offers access to disaster research papers. FEMA’s Higher Education Program used to have a considerable amount of papers and textbooks available for download but their webpage is under development at this writing and a selection of materials can be found at the National Emergency Training Center (NETC) Library. Aside from sites such as these, even a basic search will turn up many resources, including primary resources, after-action reports, and academic papers.
The advantage of internet resources is that many of them can be downloaded without the storage requirements of hard copies. The secret is to have a system that allows you to be able to retrieve a specific document. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve had to search for and retrieve a document because I couldn’t remember if or where I’d stored it.
Not everyone is a reader and not all books and papers are easy to read. But expanding your knowledge base increases your ability to deal with crisis. Remember, emergency managers are generalists, not specialists. We are expected to know a bit about a broad range of topics in way that allows us to engage in strategic thinking. The broader our knowledge base, the more effective we are.
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