Bioterrorism alert: reference and literature support for the CDC Director’s Emergency Operations Center (DEOC) and investigative field teams

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is developing and supporting various strategies for emergency bioterrorism preparedness and response. To assist response teams, an informationist participated in preparedness teamwork and developed an electronic reference library with books, journal articles, and CDC documents. This laptop reference library was structured to be completely autonomous but also updatable. The library was tested during an FEMA emergency response exercise that included the informationist librarian. The majority of response team members agreed that both the reference library and librarian were valuable during an emergency response. The exercise emphasized the response team’s need for information and a librarian to find the right information at the right time.