Thursday, July 1, 2010

Today was our first session on disaster planning and preparedness at the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission Office for the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange in Ostend, Belgium. This is a five day course. One of our activities was to dry a wet book.

Each student pulled a book out of a tub of water. Although all books had been sitting in the tub for the same amount of time, some books were only wet around the edges and others were very, very wet. The books were interleaved with plain paper to wick the water out of the pages. For the glossy print books, a paper was inserted between each page; nonglossy paper books were interleafed every 10-20 pages. The papers in the books were changed 3 times during the day. By the end of the day, several books were dry enough to stand up and fan out to enhance the drying process.

More information about IOC/IODE can be found at
http://www.iode.org/