 OK, thanks, Mike. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Elsa Hook from Heritage Preservation, and we're so glad you're joining us today. I'm going to give you just a quick introduction to how these webinars work, and then we'll move on to the heart of today's meeting. Heritage Preservation, moderating the Connecting to Collections online community, in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History, and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This site is designed and produced by Learning Times. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies really locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the Connecting to Collections initiative, including the bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. And we have links to all those resources filed under the topics menu on the site. That's at www.connectingtocollections.org. And we will also file a recording of today's webinar there within this afternoon or tomorrow at some point. About twice a month, the CTC online community particularly helps with the helpful preservation resource and hosts a webinar related to it. The resources we provided for today's webinar can be accessed by clicking this photo on our home page. So today, I am very pleased to welcome R.P. Burt, Stephen Lane, the founding director of the International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection, and also the principal consultant at Lane Consultants International. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself, please? All right, thank you, Elsa. As you mentioned, I'm the CEO of Link Consultants, and we're an independent consulting firm specializing in the protection of cultural institutions. The International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection works to promote research and education and networking throughout the cultural property community and provides a number of training programs for management and security officers and others involved in taking care of collections. Also, the author of the Cultural Property Protection Manual, former police chief, public safety director, and spent a considerable amount of time with cultural institutions throughout the US and abroad. Excellent, thank you so much. To start us off, we're going to bring over a couple poll questions that you can give Stephen idea of who is joining us here today. Let me click that off. OK, so I'm just going to pull these over and fit as many of them as I can on our screen at once so we can get through them and start talking. So what type of organization are you from? And then we're going to learn a little bit about security at your institution, what's involved now, what you'd like to have, what is your primary concern for security needs at your institution? Poll number one, we see there's 66% of our people are joining us here from a museum. And we do say, so let's all it apply because some people identify their institution as more than one of these things. This gives us, I think, a pretty good idea of who we've got here with us today. Very good. Poll number three is, does your institution have an electronic security system? And a lot of people, I'm surprised by that, are you? No, actually, I'm surprised that there are that many that don't. OK. Poll number four, does your institution have any uniformed or designated security personnel? OK. We see more in the negative. And not everybody on here is answering, so we'll have a couple that are different. OK, so I'm going to take away poll number two. There we find out the primary concern for security needs at the institution. Looks like most of people are worried about external loss, some internal, and damage to objects. Is the answer that people selected most often? I think you're just surprised, yeah. Special events protection. I think we'll talk about that a little bit. OK, there goes poll number two. Poll number three, we've discussed that. Poll number four, you saw that. We've got 64% say that they do not have that. OK. Two more. Poll number five, does your institution have a plan for how to de-escalate confidentiality in all situations? And our last one, does your institution perform pre-employment screening of staff members and or volunteers? We wanted you to select one there, so we gave you some pretty specific options. Now, it looks like the majority do not have a plan to de-escalate those types of situations that we've talked about, but it's pretty close. 43% do. I'm sure that's good. Is that about what you would have expected to see? Actually, I would expect more to have not a detailed plan unless the plan is to call law enforcement that we don't have to consider the major plan. OK. Poll number six, about screening. They do screen for staff members at 47% of the institutions represented by our participants today. Almost nobody does for volunteers there, and I wonder if that's related to the kind of work that volunteers do if they're hands-on with objects or... OK, 32% for both, 15% no. All righty, so I'm going to clear these away and pull over your presentation. Now, I just wanted to say, during this presentation, feel free to type in any questions that you have as they arise into that chat box. We may address some of them during the presentation, but some of them may be held to the end, but don't worry, we will get to everything. So if you don't hear an answer right away, don't think that we're ignoring you. OK, there we go, Steve. Here we go. Great, I'm ready to go. I think we are. Thank you, Elsa. I wanted to make one point as we get started, and that is to tell you that this is not to be intended to be legal advice in any manner. You're from different countries. You have to choose. You have different local laws. Your lawyer needs to be comfortable with the position that you take in any one of the policies or procedures that you pick up from here. So our recommendation is, if you feel like you want to change something based on some of these in here, please talk to your lawyer and hear about it and make sure that they're comfortable with it. They're the ones that you have to do so. And please don't accept any of this. What you hear today is legal advice. We're going to talk about things in terms of threat levels, and we didn't have the question and the poll questions, but the greatest threat is definitely fire. I listed the greatest threat is fire three times in a row because, in other words, in terms of external threat and internal threats. And all the other things you hear about fires happen daily in cultural properties, including museums and libraries and historic sites and all the others. And in fact, we had a couple this last week that were fairly spectacular. You have to think about what you are in the job of protecting about what you have to think about in terms of material, in terms of personnel, in terms of what your long term and short term goals are. So I wanted to make sure that we identified the threats. I was surprised in the polls to see that external theft and damage of objects took so high listening when, even though fire is the greatest threat to all cultural institutions, over 90% of losses come from inside, whether it's a present employee, a farmer employee, a friend, or a relative employee. So the concern about external threat is certainly justified, but your effort should be concentrated in the direction of what goes on with the people who have access to the collections. Terrorist threats, we do like to talk about, mainly because it's a popular subject, but the truth is we have seen evidence of attempts not just cultural institutions, but any public institutions. So it's something that needs to be taken into consideration. Computer crimes, we haven't had a whole lot of experience within cultural institutions. They do happen. Identity theft, once again, is a rare occurrence. In order to mitigate the threats, you've got to think about what the steps are that you have with your ability to stop. And as far as fire protection is concerned, you have to enforce the same steps in fire prevention that you've been hearing since grade school, which you have to do with the use of magic and smoking and having a lot of these things plugged into an outlet and a number of other things, and code violations which are almost identical throughout this country and its neighboring countries. So a strong prevention effort really does make a difference and I can't be emphatic enough about it. It's as simple as asking people not to let clutter accumulate and taking out the trash at night. And the biggest number one threat that's listed by the National Fire Protection Association at CNFBA is the use of small appliances and we're talking about coffee pots and floor heaters, a little plug-in floor heaters and humidifiers and dehumidifiers, all these things that have a tendency on occasion to go wrong, whether it's a wiring problem or an overuse problem. But they do start fires in cultural institutions and the other item that we don't mention that often and we should is the welder's torch because we have fires during construction and renovation projects that are very often related to welding on the project that even after the contractor's long gone, things smolder and so forth. So fire prevention is really worth your efforts and is really worth thinking about in your protection plan. Because of the relationship with internal theft, it's necessary to have a very strong pre-employment screening program. I was interested in seeing this on volunteers. Volunteers have almost the same access as in many institutions, especially where you have staff. And the one answer that we're given often when we ask if you screen volunteers is no, we don't screen them because then they wouldn't volunteer. And our response to that is that you're not explaining it properly. Volunteers need to feel safe and they need to feel safe by knowing that the people they're working with have been properly screened and you also need to know that your liability has been reduced by not hiring people with something in their background that could lead to the causing of harm to either staff or visitors or other people on the property. You need to have a system of employee monitoring and by doing what goes in the building, what comes out of the building, what goes on when people are in the building and it's not big brother watching, it's a reasonable attempt because you have valuable collections because you have entities that are irreplaceable of knowing who has access to them and what goes on during the day and after normal operating hours which is a particularly vulnerable time. You need to think about having sound, physical and electronic protection and the electronic protection and particularly just because you buy an alarm system or just because you have electronics that are installed in the building doesn't mean first of all that they're doing what they're supposed to do, second of all that they'll work and third that it's the proper device that should be in the proper place. A lot of these systems are inherited from previous administrations or their systems that have been added on to over the years because they became outdated or because someone chose the wrong vendor who didn't really know that there are particular methods of protecting cultural properties and valuable properties and some devices don't get the job done and there's a possibility of employees having access to the systems to deactivate them so that they can do what they wanna do without being detected. But all those things come into the purview of electronic protection and it means having someone on your staff who's knowledgeable who at least has an idea what the systems are, how they work, how you maintain them and so forth. And then you need to really review all these things because just because you check it once and it works doesn't mean that it's always going to be that way and I'm talking about all of these different elements including screening, we find many museums in particular now are conducting a lot of research on their employees annually because just someone has a clear criminal history when they're hired doesn't mean that they're going to be very good for the rest of their lives and people do get involved and might lead to them causing a problem within the institution so that's a consideration that you may wanna make. Collections, plan involves a number of elements and we're not gonna take all day into every one of these but I wanted to mention them briefly and I'll be happy to answer questions later. I have some friends that object to the term of securities everyone's business because they're professionals and they don't think everybody out of their business but the truth is especially after seeing your responses you don't have uniform security and some instances you may not have security professionals on your staff so who's responsible for keeping you safe and the truth is it's you and everybody you work with. And the truth is responsible for keeping the collection safe. Once again it's everyone's we like to see you make it clear from the first day that somebody's hired telling them that security's part of the job. It doesn't mean you have to stand up and say halt or stand up in accordance say I swear it means that you have to keep your eyes open and your ears open and report irregularities and suspicious acts as a part of the security plan. And that really involves everyone including pool and bar time staff and volunteers and even long term contractors need to be included in that aspect. You should in one manner or another provide an initial visible deterrent and all you're thinking about is thinking about what the visitor sees or what anyone sees walking into your main entry into the public entry. If there's no one there to greet them it's kind of the Walmart philosophy there's nobody there they get the impression they can come in and do anything because nobody's watching. If there is someone there and they're not paying any attention it has a negative a negative effect. If there's someone there who is busy talking to someone else or talking on the phone or half asleep sitting at a desk once again it gives that impression that you really don't have the wherewithal to see what's going on within the institution and how the people in the front entry look pretty much is the thought of the visitor the first time or the person entering for the first time that everybody's like that. So they have someone who's not properly attired or they're not practicing high standards of personal grooming and hygiene. These are important aspects to the image that you want to make of somebody entering your institution you want it to be a warm and friendly place that's welcoming but at the same time looks professional. So that's the so visible deterrent. Certain barriers are necessary if nothing else and then to control the traffic and how it enters the property and how it enters the areas that you do have to control for protection of the collections and protection of the people working within the building. We say regular and irregular patrols have someone that goes around on the clock every 15 minutes. And of course visitors can just stand there and watch look at their watch and decide I have 15 minutes to do what we're going to do before someone's gonna catch them. So we strongly recommend that the patrols are not necessarily timed but that they change their routes and they change their times. And that not just the security person is the person that patrols the maintenance person wearing a uniform as a representative of the institution and they their eyes open. The volunteer, the visitor service, anyone who can be identified as a member of the staff to understand that's part of their responsibility is to talk to visitors or to greet them or say hello or to at least give the impression that they're alert and watching what's going on. You need to have a certain amount of electronic protection. I'm sure that there are certain facilities that make it difficult particularly remote facilities where there's no electricity or there may be no telephone service but there are devices that have been manufactured that are able to operate including solar operated devices to give you the capability of at the very least having something in the form of fire detection, smoke detection to send a signal to let someone know there's a problem at that location. I have visited some that are so far remote and so far removed that they couldn't get a response in the middle of a winter because it's no accumulation and that's understandable but for the most types of facilities you should be able to have some type of protection unless you have someone standing there 24 hours a day wide awake, seven days a week watching everything that goes on. You need to have the assistance of some type of electronic protection. It's not a guarantee but it's a tool in your inventory. As much as electronic protection helps and staff members who are alert, you need to have policies and procedures for them to follow. And I say I got a typo also I hope you know this second on policies. I apologize for that. It says, police's but it's policies. And this simply means that you cannot expect a staff member or anyone to enforce something that doesn't exist and you can't expect a visitor or someone else on the property to go along with something that you request them to do unless you can say that this is a published policy that we enforce on everyone that we're not picking on yours not a personal confrontation. It's simply a policy that we follow here for the protection of people or for the protection of collections. So that means it's necessary to have a full list of policies and procedures and to use those that are reasonable and can be properly accepted by the public. And then you also need to have checks and balances on the system to make sure that those things that you are enforcing are working and that those people that are supposed to be doing their jobs are doing their jobs and so forth. And this is a constant problem. You can't just hire a security company or individuals who are working in a security position or anyone for that matter and expect them to do everything that you want them to do without telling them that it's a part of their job and showing them how to do it and properly training them monitoring them in the daily performance of their jobs and then letting them know what they're doing right and doing wrong. And it's a constant need that's part of the system of checks and balances. As I mentioned, fire protection is a major concern and I wanted to provide some easy checklist for you and it starts out with actually having a checklist. Everybody does their job in a different manner. It's really difficult to expect two people to do something in the same manner. And closing the building, particularly in those areas that we were talking about earlier about coffee pots being left plugged in and small appliances, you need to have some assurance that it's checked at least in certain areas the same way every day and a checklist does that but it needs to be a checklist that requires someone to sign off on each area. As I checked this particular area at this particular time, there are electronic means to guarantee that you use the proper closing procedures are called electronic guard tour services. There's a large variety of those available on the market and these are where someone carries a scanner with them and scans a designated station to see that they've checked it at a certain time. They can also indicate whether there was a light out or water running or what have you. A strong closing checklist, strong closing procedures are really necessary to help us. The patrol portion of closing down the building is the strongest deterrent to preventing fire, more so than smoke detectors, more so than sprinklers. A person is going to see a condition that exists long before a device will. You need to be in code compliance with the local codes and the national codes as I mentioned earlier. And the primary code requirements are that your exit signs are well-lighted that there are marked exit routes and that exit routes are kept clear and museums and pre-exit routes where a lot of materials are received through a loading area and you have a lot of accumulated storage of boxes and cartons and shipping crates and so forth. It's very common for those exit routes to get even partially blocked and that is a fire code violation. And of course, if it's dark and the building's filled with smoke that could impede somebody from reaching an exit. So it's something that's important that needs to be looked at on a regular basis. We recommend that you take the extinguishers that you use within your building and you train the entire staff on how to use them. Usually if you call the local fire department, they'll come out and do that for you. They'll start a small fire in your parking lot in a metal container and show you how to use your extinguishers. If you don't, people not only don't know how to use extinguishers, in some cases, they don't even know how to remove them from their mounting. And it's a fairly simple procedure and somebody using the extinguishers is not gonna put out a fire that saves the whole building. They may stop a fire from spreading, they may assist in giving you time to evacuate but it's a necessary part of the procedure and you should take advantage of it because it's something that actually could stop the fire from spreading immediately. Disconnecting the appliances, I mentioned. Flammables are present in just about every cultural property because you use them for cleaning. There are things that are in the cleaning fluids. All you have to do is look at the can and it'll say whether it's flammable. If you have lawn mowers or snow blowers or any other kind of outside equipment, they operate on gas and not a lot of people store their gas on the outside of the building. There are specific containers that are vented for storing gasoline and for flammables and all these products should be stored in those containers. It's not happening, so that's something you need to be aware of and try to make some suitable arrangement or reasonable arrangement for storing these things separately because they're a great fire enhancer. In some cases, start the fires through spontaneous combustion. Also as I mentioned, clutter and trash should be taken out daily and understand that it may be a budgetary item on whether or not you have people available to do that but trash allowed to accumulate within a building once again, it's a fire enhancer and something that you need to take into consideration and that protection of the collection. I call it counter blessings but these are really the assets that you have working toward your benefit to secure the property and it starts with the physical barriers that you have, the natural barriers like walls or the trees and it shrubbery around the property and then the walls that are erected in these areas, the perimeter walls of the building and doors all these things fall under the category of physical barriers and it's how you utilize them if a door has a lock on it and it's meant to be closed and it needs to be closed and locked and if only certain people are allowed to have the keys and it makes sense to hold the issue of the keys and use the physical barrier as it was intended and the same with electronic systems if you have electronic access controls, door controls that allow people to enter using a card or a keypad, having one person use their card or operate the keypad and then hold the door for five other people just throughout the entire value of your system so these are the types of things that we're talking about in the proper use of electronic systems. If a system has alarms that go off that you can't determine what the cause was, there's something wrong and it needs to be replaced. It's like having a closed circuit television system, video surveillance and the picture's not a good picture. If you can't clearly identify the people in that picture and even see numbers on whether it's a license plate number or the kind of detail that would help you win a case in court if you prosecute someone, then you're not getting your value from the video system and it needs to either be upgraded or replaced. And then the other blessing which is actually the strongest asset that you have is the staff and volunteer people who have it in their understanding and their employment agreement or wherever you place it that part of their job is to help you secure the collection and the building and to keep other people safe and they do this by simply being observant, by being friendly and very customer service oriented and letting people know that they work there and reporting suspicious circumstances. It doesn't take much more than that but it's a major benefit. The electronic systems that most cultural facilities have include intrusion detection and I wanted to make sure if anyone has a question about the definition of these systems, intrusion detection is a burglar alarm. Those are things that let you know when someone has entered a doorway, whether glass has been broken, whether someone is moving throughout the building but your intrusion detection system as a minimum should protect the perimeter of the building which means that every building penetration including ventilation shafts and elevator shafts and skylights and skyways and doors and windows, everything that could allow someone to enter the building needs to be monitored in one way or another. And why do we say this is necessary? It's because the value of the collections that you're protecting far outweighs what's kept in a bank overnight. And a bank keeps all their valuables in a vault. So your building in essence should be considered a vault and should be protected that way which means that no one should be allowed to enter at any time where you're not under control. So that means you either have to have someone standing there watching them come in or they have to have electronic access that's tightly controlled or some other method of stopping them from using that particular access point. So that's the whole purpose of intrusion detection. We strongly recommend that you use panic arrest signals. These are emergency buttons. I do not personally recommend that they be mounted under a desk because that means if you have an emergency and you need to call the police and you're not at your desk, you've got to say, excuse me, I got to go to my desk and use the emergency button, which you know you can't do. So they have wireless devices that can be worn around the neck or worn on the belt. That's what we recommend to be used at your main entry for anyone who is working the main entry for people who are working in your loading entry and actually anyone who's working after hours moving throughout the building that they have access to an emergency signal. The purpose of these signals is to call the police and for no other purpose. If you need an ambulance and somebody's had a medical problem, you can pick up the phone or you can use a radio. This is to be used when there's some situation where using a phone or a radio would cause you harm and therefore you need to have a means of notifying the police. That's what emergency buttons are for. Fire detection is different than fire suppression and fire detection are smoke detectors and heat detectors. They need to be prevalent because sprinkler activation means you are hot enough to melt a fusible link, which is a very fire. And at the same time, people in the building could be killed from smoke inhalation. So smoke detector is an early warning system. That's the best form of detection. And in many cases, we find that these systems either are not properly installed, they're not adequate to protect the entire building, they're not maintained properly. They don't transmit an alarm properly or the alarm submittal, the alarm transmission system isn't properly protected. So all these things are a serious consideration. You also have the capability of environmental sensors for humidity, for water and so forth that would assist in protecting the collection and those should be a part of your electronic systems. Video surveillance is gaining more prevalence. If you watch television on a regular basis, you'll see that a lot of crimes are solved by someone going back and seeing what took place. It may not even be on the surveillance system of the building that's being protected. Often it's a building across the street or it's someone who had a camera mounted in a particular location that just happened to pick up the action that took place. For your purposes, you need to be assured that you are observing certain things that take place. And we recommend at least take place in your main entry and you're going in and out of collection storage and you're loading entry and in the collection areas themselves. Because don't forget you're not just protecting from people from the outside, you're also protecting from people from the inside having access or removing that may be in storage. More items are stolen from collection storage and they are on exhibit. And if that gives you a further indication about the number of thefts that take place internally. And we survey this on a regular basis. It is rare for thefts to take place from museums in particular. From exhibits it does happen, but it's rare that thefts that take place from museums are internal. And the places that they take that they are sourced is either in collection storage from people who don't think that the theft will be discovered or while items are in transport or in transit or while they're being prepared to move in transit. So cameras may be alarm activated. Cameras, excuse me, may be mounted in a number of different locations. There's a concern about how this looks in a museum and a gallery setting and how intrusive it may be. Many cameras are mounted in domes. They're concealed. Some of them have been mounted in light cans. There's a number of different ways to mount. Our preference is that the camera is visible to let the visitor know and to let employees know there's a camera in here. And anything that you do in this area is going to be observed and recorded. Your parking area, we recommend that you consider that for video surveillance, primarily for liability. Some attorneys feel that if you put a camera outside the building, then you're liable for anything that happens outside the building. And I don't believe that to be true. I haven't seen any successful cases where that has been the case, especially if you post signs saying that you are being recorded by a video surveillance system, not monitored, because if somebody expects you to sit in front of a monitor and watch everything in their parking lot, they have unrealistic expectations. Interior access to collection storage and critical storage area should be under video surveillance. All systems need to be protected on a 24-hour basis. The systems need to be operating on a 24-hour basis in recording or archiving events. They need to be high resolution and they need to have the capability of instant retrieval. This is the digital systems that are available today give you that capability of transmitting images to a number of remote locations, to having an unlimited number of cameras on the system to be able to retrieve information on an instant basis. The bottom line here is if the picture that you see on the screen of your video surveillance system, if it isn't as good as what you see on your home, high definition television set, then you haven't gotten your money's worth because the systems have that capability. And in order to have a successful prosecution, you need to have that kind of capability. We have a tendency today in our policies to be a little lax and a lot of it has to do with money. And in that regard, the picture shows a kid fighting a tank, I kind of feel like that's the gist of the battle because a lot of facilities are making do what's in place and don't have the money to replace it or to upgrade or to use additional staffing to protect different areas that should be protected. We have a tendency to reduce training. You cannot expect an employee to do the job unless they're trained properly and having them trained by somebody else who's already been on the job. What it really does is it allows them to have someone who knows all the shortcuts, teach them what they don't have to do. I understand that there's some things you do have to train in that method on the job training, particularly locations of exits and stairwells and where the extinguishers are. I'd appreciate the alarm system. All those things require someone on the job to train them. But if the majority of your training program is done by someone else, you don't know that that person was properly trained themselves. So it really needs to be professional training. We also tend to cut equipment expenditures and reduce staff. All of these things have an effect on a protection program. The types of policies that we recommend that you have in place in writing so that employees have something to refer to starts out with theft reporting. And this is a simple policy to basically say it's your job to report theft. Whether you suspect it or see it, we want to know about it. You need to document it. Particularly if there's another employee involved that it's every employee's responsibility to report these things. This is the format to do it. If you want to do it anonymously, that's your prerogative. But regardless, thefts are not part of our program here. You're not allowed to take things home unless they're authorized by a supervisor and so forth. That's the type of policy that that policy needs to be. We recommend you have a workplace violence policy to simply say that you're not expected to work under conditions that are threatening or potentially harmful to you and that anyone who violates this policy, we maintain zero tolerance for their activity and they will be removed from the job. The employees need to know that and they need to know what the reporting procedure is and that they'll be protected in the reporting procedure so that they don't have to stand up and say, I swear and risk any retribution. Substance abuse is present in almost 90%. In fact, in many cases more. So of those people who commit crimes, especially violent crimes, we often find that substance abuse, either drugs or alcohol are tied into circumstances where theft is taking place or where assaults have taken place or any number of other violations. So substance abuse needs to be regulated. You start by doing it in your screening process and having a very strong policy that gives you the capability of having people either remove from the job or test it if you're suspicious of them being involved in substance abuse. You need to have a policy that tells you what you do about rules, but what are the rules and what happens if you violate them and those need to be equilaterally enforced and consistently enforced. Key control is very important because it doesn't do any good to lock things up or have systems, alarm systems or anything else if anyone can have a key or anyone can have access and all you have to do when you want to think about these things is take a walk around your building at any given time and see where people have left their keys on their desk or left the key in a lock or left the key laying somewhere or that the key box itself is left open with all the keys hanging in it where anybody can walk by and pick it up. We do this on a regular basis and I know that it's not done just for our benefit. That's the way things are. Those are the things that you need to think about in your protection program. Package inspections, we do recommend both incoming and outgoing incoming so that people don't bring contraband or harmful things into the building. It's reasonable to do that at your main entry. It doesn't have to be a tedious search. It doesn't have to be an airline type of search. It has to be the type of search that restricts the items that may be harmful to the collection being brought in and gives you a reasonable opportunity to look inside of containers and see what people are bringing in. By the same token you should do a more detailed inspection going out and out of the public but the staff taking things out of the building particularly contractors during construction periods to see what's in toolboxes and to see what's going out of the building whether or not it has the proper authorization to be taken. You need to have a strong evacuation policy and the bottom line here is when you conduct an evacuation whether it's a drill or the real thing it should be mandatory for your staff to leave the building. During a practice evacuation it's a major consideration because people who say they're too busy and don't want to go during a drill those are the people that think it's a drill when the real thing happens and that risks the life of an emergency responder to have to go in and get them out. So we feel that the top authority in your organization needs to say when we hold a drill or practice evacuation you will go. And by the same token if you hold a real evacuation because of an emergency the ruling should be that the building's closed and if you refuse to leave you're now a trespasser and you will be arrested. So those are real strong considerations but they need to be controlled by policies that you have in place. Most effective tool that you have in your protection plan as I mentioned that's the staff. It's letting everyone know exactly what their responsibility is and how they're to go about assisting and protection in the building. Your staff and others need to know who's in charge every day and we're not talking about the director we're not talking about the business manager or the security manager we're talking about the person who is the ultimate authority in your organization to determine what's going to be done particularly in an emergency. And the top person in the chain of command may designate that to someone else. You may have someone who operates especially well under stress and it may be their job to coordinate emergency efforts that are necessary during different types of crisis situations. So everyone needs to know it's called incident command that's the popular term today and that's what is recommended by the Department of Homeland Security is that you have a designated incident commander and backup people. I'm not going to go into the whole incident command structure because it's quite lengthy but it's something you need to find out about and think about designating. Employees need to be involved on a regular basis by patrolling the building by simply walking through their areas of responsibility and reporting what they see and being suspicious of certain activities and making sure that they know that and report it to the proper authority. You need to consider having an anonymous reporting system so that people can't tell you things that they're concerned about particularly if they're workplace violence incidents or substance abuse incidents and so forth. We recommend that you consider something like a suspicious incident report form which is to do just exactly what it says instead of waiting until something happens if someone's suspicious of something there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to put that in writing and let you know about it. Staff members should have assigned areas of responsibility of observation particularly the areas that they work in but maybe in other areas that they have to pass through. You can designate floor warden's or floor wardens or monitors or whatever you want to call them but these are the people who have the responsibility during an evacuation and seeing that everyone gets out and goes toward the proper assembly here and uses the proper evacuation route. You need to publish the chain of authority that says who's in charge and who's in charge if they're not there and who's in charge of certain entities or certain activities that take place during various emergencies. We recommend an emergency action guideline which is actually a reduction of your emergency operations plan and it doesn't have to be more than a page or two that simply says fire, here's what you do. Lost child, here's what you do. Running water, here's what you do. A very simple statement because the person that sees the emergency may not have a clue and they only know to pick up the phone and call and the phone lines may be out so there are a number of different steps that can be taken and that's the purpose of this guideline. You need to coordinate all of these things that I'm talking about and you can't just publish it and put it in a book. It'll stay on the bookshelf and when the smoke starts filling the room, it's too late. So you really need to take all of these things we're talking about and go through them step by step in a live training exercise so that everyone understands what their responsibility is and how they're to get it done. Anonymous reporting is not that difficult to do. It really means that you have open lines of communication to the top authority in your organization. It should eliminate fears of retribution or labeling. It should go to the highest authority available and it should require an immediate investigation or follow-up and accurate documentation and one small tip I'll give here is if you don't wanna pay a commercial service to provide an 800 number, if you don't have some means as you can encourage people to report anonymously call Crime Stoppers or the Crime Stopper chapter in most areas. They will provide you with information material you can offer a reward for the reporting of information that leads to someone being convicted of a crime. That can't help you for rules violations but for the commission of crime it can be helpful and it's something you can utilize that doesn't cost you anything. The suspicious activity report form provides a place to fill in the time, date and location, the type of activity, who was involved, any vehicles, any other comments, who were, you know, people that may have reported it to you and any new agencies notified. It's a simple form that you can make up yourself where you can get them from other locations. Assigned areas of responsibility should include all exterior access doors, interior access doors, any unidentified objects or containers that are found in the area. That's something that all staff members should note at any given time. Reporting suspicious activity, checking storage areas, lounge areas, utility areas, all of those fall under that assigned area of responsibility. The floor marshals and wardens are actually the line of authority that is the in-charge person for that particular area and especially if that area becomes isolated because of a fire or some other condition like a natural disaster. They should conduct briefings on a regular basis and share information throughout their department or their assigned area so that people know what's going on. They assist in the conduct of a physical evacuation exercise and they provide accurate documentation as to the conduct of the exercise. Back to that term of incident command, it's the published chain of authority. That individual who is in charge every day needs to have direct access to emergency contact lists, up-to-date communication numbers, where to call for different things that may be necessary during an emergency. Who is on that list? What's the evacuation plan? Where are the operations plans? All those things can be reduced down to a DVD and placed in a possession of that person in charge and they should have it when they're on the property or off the property and there should be at least one other person who has access to that because someone may be disabled or someone may have an accident and not be able to respond and that puts the next person in charge on the list they need to have that information. This is really critical and if you've talked to anyone who's been involved in any major incident, they'll tell you it was critical that they had that information available to them right now. If the buildings collapse or the buildings the middle of a flood or other natural disaster you can't get through the information. That was an awful lot jammed into a few minutes. I'm not sure how we did on time, I think, close but I want to make sure that you have the information if you didn't get it all and you need some more if you'll contact us by email we'll be happy to respond. And also that's as far as I have for this portion. That was great Steve. And also I want to mention that Steve said that we have his permission to take this presentation turn it into a PDF and post it on the community's website because I'm sure a lot of people will especially want some of those last slides that show examples of how they can build those vital programs about the chain of authority and the reporting sheet and everything else. I was wondering about that and saw that thought that was great. So we have a little bit of time, we've got about 18 minutes and if you all want to start typing in any questions that you have for Steve about it can be specific questions about your institution and what he has recommendations about a particular thing that's been troubling you there. I see a couple people are starting to type in and I've got to leave this page up with your contact information I think but if anybody wants to see anything else I can go back. I'll also mention here we've had a webinar on working with emergency responders. That's video, I mean it's recorded and we've got it available in the archives. So people may if they want to delve deeper into that idea I caught my attention talking about having the fire department come out and start a little fire and show everybody how to use the fire extinguishers and just to make sure everybody was on the same page with that. Okay, looks like we've got some questions coming in. Let me start here. Anna Scott in Colorado High Anna says, any good places to get a standard incident form or suspicious activity form to work from? I don't know, are there samples or is that slide you had? They can get them through the IFCPP, they can't, there's a whole policy packet actually that has a number of different things that are available for individual ones. Those are usually sent without any cost. If it's a bunch there, the packet has a charge on it. I would talk to other cultural properties, particularly large museums and if they're an IFCPP member, they have these in their inventory. If you can't find any, if you let me know by email, we'll help you out. Okay, great, thanks. It looks like our next two questions are about management buy-in. The first from D'Subs Lee, saying how do I get management buy-in to enforce use of the code check? Let's address that one first. You're cut out of the front. That's a good one. You threw me with the first one. Really, I guess you have to talk about what your liability is and letting people take codes with them and being able to conceal items and also in your liability and what happens if they lose their outer garments, if they just leave them, if they just put them in a code check, and it's not a man code check. I don't know any way to really convince management other than to tell them that you are liable for property that may be held liable for a property that's left or taken while they're on your property and that having codes that are not checked also and can cause damage to collections by people not, you know, they're bulky and people don't really see if they're carrying something, if it bumps up against artwork and so forth. I'm sorry, I can't be any more clear than that. I gotta think about that one for a while. Okay. Erica Blumenfeld in New York says, I think the hardest part is to make the management take, I'm sorry, is to make the organization take this seriously in terms of continual training and updating. So what's your advice about that? I was thinking about that too because it's so much time invested in running these exercises. What's your advice for that? You know, all of these things aren't published, but a lot of them are. And if you Google art theft and you Google incidents involving security in a museum or in a historic setting or in a cultural property or fires in museums or whatever, all the statistics come up and I don't know anything that's more convincing than to show someone here is what other people are suffering and call them and ask them. We sent out a survey to every member institution that we could find about where their theft took place. We did this last year and 100% of those respondents came back and said they were all internal, 100% of them. And that should be able to get somebody's attention. The American Association of Museums doesn't give it that much attention. They, even in their newsletters, they brought it up on occasion when they thought it was unusual that a curator stole or that a registrar stole whatever. So there are organizations that can help you. I'm not trying to push the IFCPP, but it is a networking and educational resource and it doesn't cost anything for the information. There are the other organizations or the Museum Association Security Committee for the AM and then there's a Cultural Properties Committee ASIS International used to stand for American Society for Industrial Security. If you want to go through us and get resources on who to talk to, but I don't know anything that speaks stronger to administrators than the loss of money, the bottom line. And it's very easy to show just by showing what's happened to other institutions. Okay, next question from Lori Benson in Maine. Do you have any special thoughts for museums who are moving collections as far as I guess the security up those collections while they're in transit? Absolutely and I'm gonna try to make it quick. The standard approach if you're moving an entire collection is to hire a local company to do the transport and on occasion to get a contract guard service or someone that says that they can provide security. It's rare if you have a security professional in the organization registrars usually don't even talk to that individual when moves are concerned. We've just gotten done with two of the larger moves of artwork that have been conducted in the US. It needs to be handled by professionals. There are companies that specialize in this. They're very well presented and it's very easy to get the information. But primarily we recommend that you take a look at everything that has to do with the transport which means making as few people aware of it as possible and moving it as quietly and unnoticeably as possible. And in making sure that you control both ends of the move and the times that the move takes place and so forth, there's so many very elements that are involved and the biggest factor I think is keeping it as quiet as possible and not letting many people know about it, particularly if you're moving the entire collection, if you're only moving a few pieces, you need to think about who are the people that are doing the escorts and what services are involved and so forth. The thefts that have taken place from transport happened just because of sloppy security and people not paying attention to who was involved. Okay. I can point, if you wanna contact me online, I can point you towards registrars who have recently conducted some very large art moves and they'd be happy to help you out in that regard. Oh, great. I'm sure that'd be useful. Deez simply said thanks for the coat check answer and also she has a question. She says, we have some collection storage areas in which staff especially contract and students work. Any advice? I'm assuming that means there's a computer and a phone set up in an area that is also storage. So what do you say about that? Yeah, well, first of all, you're letting people into the vault and we hope you understand that and that you restrict it as closely as possible. But it would be helpful to have video surveillance inside that area that they're working. It would helpful if you don't even have electronics for your collection storage, you should at the very least have a sign-in sheet that shows you who came in and who was with them and when they left and so forth. It's the honor system, but it's better than nothing. If you ask us to investigate a theft, we're gonna start with asking you who had access and who was there on that particular day or who was the last one there. So all those things are important in controlling and in an investigation. And then how your collections are stored and how the key control to collection storage cabinets are kept and so forth are all important. So we understand that you have to let people even maintenance sometimes gets into collection storage but restrict it as much as possible, make sure that you have some means of identifying who was in there at any given time and make sure that if you haven't done a background investigation on them, they don't go in. I understand that some people take visitors or guests in that should be very tightly controlled by the escorts that are with them. Okay, now if someone was uncomfortable, this is my thought, but if someone was uncomfortable with the idea of having a video camera on a workstation essentially, would it be helpful to at least video the door? Well, at the very least, we like to see the access from the outside on who used the access card or who used the key or what have you. But in this day and age, you've got video cameras everywhere that you go there in your gas station when you go up to the counter. Well, there at your ATM, when you use that, there's a video camera right inside that ATM that's recording every move. You don't go into an airport without being under video observation at any place except for restrooms. So my answer to that is if you wanna work in this environment where we have valuable collections, you have to be used to being a video. Good point, though. Let's see. Anna Scott said, Erica, we do an annual training for staff and summer interns, which we include the emergency training. So I think that was the question of, okay, so I think she's saying if you have a regularly scheduled emergency training session. Yeah, it's better than that at all. You know, everybody says they do a fire drill once a year, they don't always include everyone, and then you gotta wonder what about the people that were sick that day or that were on vacation or whatever. So we like to see a training take place any time that there's an incident. If something happened, like someone was injured or there was a part of the building that was threatened and you had to get people out, and maybe it's not a bad idea to go through the training on how you should have gotten people out, what was done wrong, you know, to make it better next time. After the World Trade Center was attacking in 1993, they had a number of practice events that definitely saved lives on September 11th because more people knew how to get people down. I mean, it was a long way to take people downstairs and so forth. There's a number of different philosophies on how it needs to be done, but our recommendation is that as often as you have the time and as often as you can get people to participate, you need to practice these things physically. They recommend, you can sit someone in a classroom and say this is how you do it as not even close to the effect that walking them through and having them put their hands on something in their memory and retaining what their job is. It's a tough turnover too, I guess. All of those things. You're never gonna have 100% participation. All right, well, it looks like we have about seven minutes left. If anybody has any more questions, you can go ahead and type them in here and you have Mr. Lane's contact information. And also, I think most people here by now familiar, I recognize a lot of your names, with our group discussion boards that we have on the ConnectingToCollections.org website. But if concerns or thoughts come up after this and you want to post them there, if you have any questions, I can see if they get around. And we'll be posting the recording shortly too if that's something that you'd like to share with colleagues or management or anybody else that get your institution. You think that could be helpful? We'll have the presentation shortly. I'd like to mention one thing that we have in just a minute, Lelsa, is there time for that? Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely, go for it. In the poll questions, I did see that there wasn't a whole lot of concern with dealing with the possibility of violent confrontation that was mentioned in there. But I have to tell you that this happens more frequently. If you watch the news, you see that these things do take place and there really is little to no preparation in dealing with those events. I think the poll question said that about half the people do. I don't know if you're not providing some type of martial arts training or self defense training for your entire staff. I don't know what your other preparation could be other than calling the police. However, there are methods of dealing in it. A lot of it has to do with the approach that the staff takes in the public relations or customer service type of approach. There is a system and it's called Moab Management of Aggressive Behavior. It's been in existence for about 30 years throughout the U.S. and it's a training program for regular staff on how you avoid and de-escalate how you recognize potential problems and de-escalate and I strongly recommend that you take a look at something like that if you need information on where that's available. We can also help you with that. What if that could be approaching an individual who entered the institution with behaving irrationally in a way that you thought was gonna damage collections or the people there? Yeah, you know, how does a maintenance person respond to it? How does a visitor services person respond to a personal threat if someone, you know, is either under the influence of alcohol or drugs and they've acted out of it, they're mentally unbalanced and there have been some recent incidents that have taken place. They have not been well handled by the staff because no one told them how to or whether to expect it and that's something for personal safety that we recommend that institution consider. And where would you recommend de-escalating? Where could we point them toward the place where they could find more information on Moab? Do you have that over there at the... Yeah, we have that information there. There are about 200 instructors who are certified throughout the United States to present that particular type of training through various organizations. And it's something that's becoming more prevalent. It's not a self-defense, it's not a fighting force, not a physical self-defense program. It's a combination of things that include the term that you've heard, verbal judo, how you approach people and how you recognize whether they're aggressive and anxious and what they may be likely to do and what you do about it. We have two more questions, I'm hoping. We can get through them. Ann Miller is asking, any suggestions for protecting exhibits and historic houses that are right out there in the open, no stanchions or anything, separating the public from them? There's a number of different things that you can utilize. There's some wireless electronics that will show you if someone's getting too close and all that does is sound an audible sound to let your staff members know to be in that area, but you can also use monofilament to tie things down. We recommend taking the accession number and putting it on the object itself and also putting it on whatever it's mounted on so that if something's removed, anyone passing by knows immediately that there's an item missing and what that item was by the accession number, but there are a number of other tricks and there's so many different variables involved in living history collections and so forth that we really have to see what the collection was to be able to make that recommendation. We have a key control question from Katie Walker in Richmond, Virginia. How do you deal with institutions where maintenance crews have master keys? Limiting master keys is not an option, we've been told. Yeah, somebody has to have a key and obviously it's the people that need to have access in an emergency which may include that maintenance people or even contractors in some occasion. And what you can do is to make sure that those areas that you're particularly concerned about like collection storage, that they're under video surveillance, the screening practices for screening that maintenance people needs to be absolute and I would consider that for renewing on an annual basis and also having the capability of having other employees report when they see suspicious activity or maybe someone for maintenance or whoever that's in an area at a time that they shouldn't be. It also has to do with your policies regarding visitors. Can maintenance people bring their families on the property? We see that very often that cleaning crews will sometimes have their families come with them at night or other visitors come at them at night and that should be precluded by a policy that's strictly enforced. So there's a number of different methods in tightening it up and it doesn't mean that they can't have keys. They've got to have keys to go to work. You can also consider an electronic access system which will tell you exactly what time different doors were open and closed and it doesn't have to be part of a major access control system. You can have doors that are independently recording that information but it really is best handled by electronic management system. Those are access controls. Okay. I'm gonna pull over a link for an evaluation. This is a very brief evaluation. I have a variation of it that I post at the end of every one of these webinars but we pay very close attention to your responses to these. We ask for an evaluation of how you think this webinar went but also for your suggestions for future ones and we're always looking for new topics and we wanna make sure that we're tailoring these things to be useful to our participants in our community. So if you have a couple of minutes just to fill that in, it doesn't take a long time and we really appreciate it. All right, well I think that we are at our time. Let me see, I just think that I needed to tell people about our next webinars. We have Wendy Clark, a museum specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts joining us on Wednesday, June 6th. That's in two weeks to talk about how to submit an artworks grant to the NEA for collections, care and conservation. The deadline for that grant is, I don't know it off the top of my head but it's in August so it's particularly relevant to right now if you're thinking about submitting for one of those. We have a webinar on the care of plastics. That's on June 13th with Christine Frohner who's a conservator of contemporary art, modern materials and media. And Odeon Madden, a research scientist at the Museum Conservation Institute at the Smithsonian. And our next webinar for the summer is on Tuesday, July 17th on wireless data loggers. That's following up on an earlier webinar we had on data loggers in general and I think that was very useful to people so I hope people will join us for that. Steven, thank you so much. That was a fantastic presentation. I know it was useful to our participants and it'll be useful to people going forward too. I'll be posting that recording and letting everybody know that it's up within the next day. And Mike from Learning Times, thanks so much for all your help and to our participants, thanks for the great questions and interactions and answers to the polls and everything else. I hope that everybody has a wonderful afternoon. Thank you, Steve. You bet, thank you also, I appreciate it.