 Welcome to session three. Susan, you can go ahead and start whenever you're ready. Hi, everyone. As Mike said, it's session three for our collections management course with Johnson. I just want to remind you that if you are aiming to get the correctly badge, you need to do all the assignments and listen to the webinar. And you need to listen to the webinar before you can go to the next section. So it doesn't matter if you listen to it live or the recording, but you need to do both. And I have a few slides. They're not different from last week. So the best way to keep up with connecting to collections care is to join the CCCC Announce List. And I'd put announcements on Facebook and Twitter. And if you need to reset your password, you can contact info at culturalheritage.org. If you have other questions, feel free to contact me. This is my email address. And coming up tomorrow, we have a free webinar on copyright and cultural collections. And on March 12, we have another free webinar on natural disaster damage and botanical collection. So even if you have a historic house and you've got a garden or a special tree, this one is for you. It should be really interesting. And then we have another course that we're offering with CCI and ICROM on storage on this reorg project. So you can sign up for that. And that does have a fee like the current course that you're taking. So I'm going to turn this over to John. And we'll get started with webinar three. All right, thank you very much. And welcome, everybody, to webinar three. This week, we're going to be concentrating on more aspects of using the collection. And those will include things like documentation, data management systems, the objects used in exhibitions, some of the ins and outs of loaning objects. And then we will wrap up talking a little bit about research and collections management and access to collections. So I've been reading with great interest the essays that many of you have been contributing that you submitted last week. And those have come in already for this week. And I really appreciate getting to see many of the details of your collections. And I've tried to shift a few topics in the webinar to make sure I cover some of the things that you have brought up, but some of you I've responded to. Some I have not been sure. I have read every one of them. And I do appreciate your time in preparing those. This week's reading includes several things that I'll mention as we go along. There is one on reading on information, organization, and access. There's a handout on consideration for decisions concerning requests to borrow objects, and other on terms and conditions that may be specified in loan policies so you don't have to spend all your time while you're listening scribbling. There's one on categories of collection users and collection use. I have included the chapter on found in collections from museum registration methods. I think it's still one of the best things out there on dealing with found in collection objects. And the other reading for this week is Museum Property Acts and Abandoned Loan Legislation, which is a list of the laws state by state for abandoned loans. And so we will talk about all of these as we go along today. And you'll see where the readings fit in. For the essay this week, for those of you that are interested in doing the essays and getting an incredibly badge, this should be an evaluation of your museum's documentation data management system if you have one and how objects are used in your collection in exhibits and loans. So let's get right into it talking about documentation. Documentation is a fundamental task of collections management. And ideally, we should document everything we do with collections and everything that affects the collections. So this might appear to be a really circadian task, just too much work to do. But if you're properly organized and you get things lined up right, it's easy to stay on top of the documentation and do exactly that. Record the things you do in the collection and things that affect the collection. I'll start out with a question for the week. And this is, what do you think is the oldest form of documentation? And you can type your answers into the general chat. And Susan will compile those, and we'll talk about your answers in a few minutes. And I will define documentation as a means of recording information that can be accurately interpreted by someone else other than its author. So what do you think is the oldest form of documentation meaning a means of recording information that can be accurately interpreted by someone other than its author? So while you're typing, we will go ahead and talk about a few other aspects of documentation. The word documentation comes from the Latin word documentum, which means proof or pattern, which I find an easy way to remember what documentation should be. So proof, pattern, or example. So the collection documentation serves as the proof of what our objects are, where they came from, and of course, who is the legal owner. So this is a photograph I took in the fall, and I was in Munich. And it was an exhibit in a paleontology institute. And it's kind of interesting because this pretty much shows how documentation works. There's a tooth that they were puzzled for a while as to where it came from, but it turns out it is a fossil hippopotamus tooth collected in the 1700s. The red arrow on the label points to the catalog entry for it, so that's where it was written in their handwritten catalog. Beneath the tooth is one of the labels that was used at one point to identify in the storage array. And below that is a page from a publication that actually has an illustration of that same specimen. So these are some really good examples of how documentation supports an object and what an object means. So we can also say that documentation is the evidence that supports the identification of an object, its condition, the history of it in many cases, and its value. So documentation is an integral aspect of the use, management, and preservation of collections. And as my friend Sally likes to say, we can say that documentation is what gives value to an object in a museum collection, because, of course, without that documentation, what we have would just be things. But with that documentation, they are meaningful things, and we can record all of the aspects of visualization of those objects that are important. So this brings us back around to our question. And what is documentation? So let's take a look at some of the answers. Clay tablets. That is certainly a very old method of recording information. Index cards, cave drawings, oral communication, stone tablets, a lot of these. Many people went with pictographs in cave drawings, which I think is a fairly logical thing. And, of course, remember I said that documentation has to be interpreted by someone else other than its author. And in that sense, it's oral tradition. It's the oral history. And in the cultures that value oral tradition, the accuracy is very important. And many of the oral traditions we have of native cultures, particularly, are extremely accurate and precise. And this, of course, is something that the cost people can understand. The language can be interpreted by someone other than its author. So those of you who said oral tradition got it right. It's tempting to look at cave paintings, because, of course, these are very, very old. And often we can put dates on them. It's much more difficult to put a date on the origin of an oral tradition. But the oldest known cave paintings are at least 35,000 years old, probably a lot older. The problem with these is we can no longer read the information that's recorded and interpreted. We can guess what was meant. And many people have over the centuries, but we don't actually know, because that how to interpret those was not passed along. So these are intriguing forms of documentation. But unfortunately, we have not yet figured out a way to interpret how they are to be read. So there's a few examples that I like out of deep history about objects. And this is an example of a very early documented object, and maybe one of the earliest single documented objects. This was found in 1903 in excavations at Pileopolis in Egypt by an Italian archaeologist named Shepirelli. And what he found was a fossil sea urchin. And on the back of that, you can see on the right hand side, the urchin is inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. And those hieroglyphics give the date, the name of the original collector who was in Egyptian and the locality where it was found. And so those hieroglyphs themselves are 3,000 years old. And the fossil sea urchin, of course, is many millions of years old. But this object was apparently not part of what we think of in the museum collection. It was a one-off. But it was interesting that this is, as far as we know now, the oldest case of an object itself being documented in that way. But there is another example that's the oldest documented collection. And that goes back to the ancient city of Sumer. And it's about 2,500 years old. And it's from the Sumerian city of Urn, which is located in what is now northern Iraq. And there were excavations done there in the early 1900s by Leonard Woolley from the Royal Ontario Museum, who turned up what in effect was a museum of antiquities that belonged to a princess named Inagaldi Nanna, who lived at about 554 BCE. And the collection consists of objects that themselves go back much further, back 1,400 to over 2,000 BCE. And among them was a clay tablet documenting the objects that actually listed them out and said these were antiquities collected by the princess when she was exploring the remains of an ancient temple. And this is, of course, unfortunately not a direct ancestor of modernisms, because this is, again, a one-off. This collection existed. It had this tablet identified the objects, but you can't trace the formation of museums from that. But it is interesting to look at and to see that people have had this idea of documenting objects by recording information for a long time. One of the problems is many of our means of documentation are not permanent. They don't last very well. Papyrus is a good example. It's been in use for thousands of years, long before paper was in use. Papyrus has been in use at least 3,000 years, or since at least 3,000 BCE, rather, probably before that, but we don't have examples. It's made from reeds that were split, cut up into strips, laid across each other at right angles, and then hammered together and dried under pressure. And then the sheets would be polished with a stone, and then the individual sheets would be glued together to make the scrolls that we're all familiar with. Well, Papyrus being plant fiber, it survives really well in dry environments like ancient Egypt, where most of it comes from, but it is very susceptible to damage by relative humidity. So we have troves of papyrus manuscripts going from a few select places, and we do know from other evidence that papyrus was used much more widely in the ancient world. We just don't have any of those papyruses around anymore. The parchment and the column are a little more durable. They were both developed around 250 BCE. Both are made from untanned skins of either calves in the first instance or goats in the second. The skins are washed, they're soaked in lime, they're stretched out and dried, and they're shaved very thin and smoothed out. So much like papyrus, it's a very time-consuming process to prepare a vellum and parchment. And unlike papyrus, it's very expensive because you have to, of course, pay for the skin. So these were very good writing materials, the parchment vellum, but they were very expensive, and this made them relatively scarce. And again, they don't preserve particularly well because of their skins. In some environments, they preserve a little better than papyrus, but there's still many of these that are no longer with us. The situation's a little different with paper. Paper is much less expensive and it's less time-consuming to make, and it can be made from materials that are found pretty much anywhere. It was invented by the Chinese around 105, in the common era, 105 CE, and it's basically just intermeshed with wet cellulosic plant fibers. The Arabs learned to make paper from the Chinese after they defeated them at the Battle of Talus in 751 CE, and if any of you have ever purchased acid-free paper from Talus Company, that's where they get their name. The first European paper mill was built in Spain in 1266, and then paper mills rapidly proliferated across Europe. But paper is much more durable if it's made well and much easier to make and much cheaper. So that sort of changed the game on documentation. So that's enough on the background. We can spend all day talking about the history of materials, which is very interesting, but not really germane to what we want to do. I wanted to give you that background in terms of putting this all into a context of its importance. The same principles of documentation apply to any system, whether it is manual or whether it's electronic in a museum, and that simple test is the ability to retrieve information and then find the objects that go with it. So if you have a system that allows you to find the associated information in objects and locate your objects, then it's a good system and it works pretty well, and there are all sorts of variations on this, and of course some are better than others. So the real principles of documentation, all that documentation has to have clarity, have permanence, be legible, and be comprehensive. And so we'll take a look at these one by one and we'll start with an early example. So this is a very famous woodcut and this is the Ollie Worm Museum from Amsterdam and it's probably the most widely reproduced woodcut in any book or article in the history of museums. You'll run into this. Well this woodcut depicts the museum in 1655 when Worm's catalog was published. And as I said, it's very well known and according to testimony we have in terms of descriptions and letters written by people who saw the museum, the museum was depicted pretty accurately and people pretty much saw what we see in this woodcut. There was one object that puzzles people for years and that's this one at the very back. For hundreds of years this was presumed to be just kind of some stylized representation of a museum object because it looks like the job of an animal and a piece of wood. And sure enough it turns out that's what it is and it was relocated in 1985 in the zoology department of the University of Copenhagen where much of the Worm collection wound up. So these are a couple of photographs taken by my friend Greg McDonald from the Department of the Interior he was in Copenhagen and wouldn't ask to see it. So this is an actual object that wound up in the collection and there it is documented. The documentation and the object were separated for hundreds of years until they were finally reunited. Well we know a lot about it because the object is described in Worm's catalog. We know that it was a gift to Worm from King Frederick II. We know that he got it in 1649 and we have this description of the lower jaw of a horse where the trunk of an oak is grown around. It's written there in Latin. So this is how documentation can substantiate the value of an object. And this catalog entry actually also supports our principles of documentation. It is clear because it identifies the object without doubt. We have no doubt that is the object in question especially with the drawing to go with it. It's permanent because it has survived since the 1600s. It's legible because we can still read that description today. We can read the description of the object and it is comprehensive in the sense that Worm recorded all the information that at the time he considered important. So let's take a closer look at these four principles one by one. So in your documentation and no matter how you do this, whether you are manually writing on index cards or in a handwritten catalog or whether you're using a computer system you want to be clear. You want to write your information in plain and simple prose so that it's easy to understand. You should avoid excessive jargon and slang because these are things that can change over time and we can lose their meaning. However, it is perfectly okay to use technical terms and then many people go so far as to include a glossary of technical terms they use if that terminology is very specialized so that people reading this information in 100 years or 200 years will be able to understand it. And it's perfectly fine to include in your documentation drawings, photographs, digital images, sound recordings, any of this kind of information as long as it provides clarity. The documentation should be as permanent as we can make it and this means we should record our documentation using stable archival materials and by archival we need appropriate long-term preservation. So this is things like acid-free paper, light-fast ink, a non acidic ink and getting a good match between paper and ink because not all inks and papers will bond together properly. If your documentation is kept in the form of electronic data then permanence means you need to plan on a system for backing it up for saving it long-term. And we're gonna talk more about that a little bit later in today's webinar but basically your electronic files have to be kept up-to-date with format changes and over the long-term this gets very extensive and requires a lot of staff time to do. But as I say we'll mention this more as we go along. And it should be legible. Needs to be readable well into the future much like we can read forms inscription, we can read the hieroglyphics but we can't read the cave paintings. So you should write neatly and clearly. Printing is preferred over cursive writing because printing is usually a lot easier to read. This image on the page here is a page from Charles Darwin's notebooks and his handwriting was notoriously hard to read. Almost all of his biographers have complained about how difficult it is to read it. So that's not really, does it really pass the legibility test? And you should avoid small type fonts or exotic type fonts that can be confused that are hard to read. And of course if you're doing paper those need to be a good match. So these are all things that will keep your documentation legible well into the future. The big problem of course comes with being comprehensive because it's sort of a museum axiom that the information you do not record is the information that will be most needed in the future but on the other hand we cannot record everything about an object. So we strive to be as complete as possible. And something that I think some people overlook is we need to keep that documentation up to date as we discussed in the first webinar more information accumulates for the objects over time as they are musealized and used in our collections. We need to make sure all of that going on is documented and related back to the object as well. So the key thing here is to remember that collection documentation is not static, it's dynamic due to the musealization of objects. The documentation for objects increases over time and so our system needs to be able to accommodate those increases in information. So we can just kind of sum up this part of the webinar as we discussed last week. Registration documentation includes lots of things, needs of gift, letters about the object, the provenance research, permits, licenses, the accession documents, catalog entries, all of that stuff. Documentation should begin immediately when an object arrives at the museum and this doesn't matter whether it's an object its own loan or something that's been brought in to be identified or something that's coming in to be part of the collection. Any object coming in should be documented. That's recommended that you prepare an object in custody receipt for things that come in and this happens because people do bring things into museums, they leave them for some reason, the reason gets forgotten and the object winds up sitting around in a collection and people lose track of what it is. If you issue a receipt of custody then that won't happen. The receipt should have the name and contact information of the person who brought it in so phone number, address, email, what have you. A description of the object is sufficient to identify it and it should state that if you do not claim that object within a certain amount of time it will become property of the museum. The purpose for this is to allow the museum to legally get rid of it if no one comes to claim it. So if you have the person sign off on this document and it says you must reclaim this object within two weeks or it becomes property of the museum and they don't show up again, the museum can legally then sell it or get rid of it. If they don't do that you're in a bit of a bind because you have property now to get rid of that you don't technically own. The form should be dated and signed both by the person who leaves the object and the museum staff member who fills it out. This gets important because often these objects are brought in on the weekends or in the evenings when the museum is open when regular staff are not there and they wind up in the hands of people that are working part-time or volunteers who don't have the full staff training. So you need to work with people that are in your museum on times when you're not around to explain to them the importance of filling out the form and doing the paperwork and making sure that the one signed copy goes with the object, one signed copy goes home with the person who left it and that will in the long run save you a lot of trouble if you can do that. If the object is going to be kept it needs to be marked with a unique number and we discussed catalog numbers before and accession numbers and we use that number of course to link the object to its record. So if it's something we're going to keep in the collection at the point where we accession it will give it a number. If it's something coming in on loan it probably has another number on it in which case we can use the number that's already there. But that number then is used to tie the object to the documentation that tells us where it lives in the collection storage array and it helps us keep track of what happens in the collection storage environment. We can make notes related to that particular object if there are environmental problems if we have increases in humidity that might affect the object over the long term or something like that. And ultimately if we deaccession an object we have that number that we can still use to track it. Documentation is likely to involve more than just written records. It may wind up as audio recordings or video images publications certainly as electronically stored information if it relates to environmental monitoring. So the image here is a glass vessel that's on exhibit at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. And the accession number is not visible because it's written probably underneath. It's written on a place where you can't see it but it's on the label. And it's on the label in two different languages, English and Arabic and as well as a description. So this is a number that any visitor to the museum if they're curious about this object can write down the number and contact the museum and find out more information about it and it's the number that the museum also uses for all of its loan records and all of that other stuff. So the document, what we wanna do is document everything we do in the collection. Keep in mind that the documentation you create not only provides the proof of what the object is it also is a way of proving that you did things correctly because if you keep all of the accession documentation you can prove that you received objects properly, you processed them properly, you took pains to make sure you had all of the information that you needed and all of that stuff. Well documentation can be kept any number of ways and the two big divides are between manual and digital systems. There is nothing wrong with manual documentation systems and of course we use those for hundreds of years before we add computers. Documents that are written on archival quality paper and ink are going to last far longer than any computer generated document which we'll talk about a bit. The advantages though of digital systems are the great speed with which you can enter new records, the ease of manipulation of the records which means you can retrieve more information from those records faster, you can find the information you need much faster, it is far easier with digital records to provide access to those records on the part of the public or our scholars or whoever would like to see it and if you do it carefully there are also fewer transcription errors, you're not likely to make a mistake copying information over if you're doing it electronically. So there's some huge advantages to digital systems in that sense but there are also some disadvantages. One of which is the cost of hardware because of course buying a computer is not a one time expense, you are going to replace that hardware down the line as the machine becomes older outmoded, it's not the cost of your software because that will happen to it as well, it will become older outmoded and also the rapidity of duplicating mistakes. While it's true that electronic databases make it possible for museums to process and manipulate information far more faster and with fewer mistakes than they were in the past, if you make a mistake you can propagate that mistake far more rapidly and widely than you could anything written down with decent paper so mistakes tend to get into a database and they can be very very hard to get rid of. So that is a downside as well as a plus. Another problem is that searches are limited by the strict vocabulary and the computer only reads certain words so a human being looking for records would have in mind a wider range of variants than a computer would for your restricted by the vocabulary. And unlike paper records of course electronic records have a short life, they are not permanent like paper is. Most of your institutions probably either now use an electronic management system or they are likely to in the future so we're going to focus on that for a little bit. In the past museums were limited in their ability to handle large amounts of information because of the physical limitations of information storage and retrieval and I've been in the game long enough back when I started everything was manual and when I would be contacted by researchers for collection information it would mean long hours at the photocopying machine or sitting at a typewriter copying out information to send off to people so I know from first hand experience how time consuming it can be. Prior to the introduction of digital data systems in museums it was labor intensive and it was often an inadequate process. For example, the card catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York which is a very famous card catalog was located in cabinets. The cabinets were stored beneath the museum and they stretched for a full city block in length all handwritten and typewritten cards but the information in the files was arranged only by accession number so the only way to search those was to have that accession number. You could not search for art by artist or geography or any other way. But with computer system of course you wouldn't have that problem. Computers brought about a significant shift to the point that museums are now seen primarily as repositories of information not just repositories of objects. The process of making all this museum information accessible digitally has not been easy or inexpensive and it's far from complete but it has done a lot of good for people that want access to the information. And there are still some major problems stemming from lack of standards for many types of collections and enormous backlogs of information that is not yet digitized. The lack of standard is particularly problematic because what has happened if you look at the history of museum computing is that what were previously idiosyncratic specialized handwritten systems have now become in many cases idiosyncratic specialized computer databases that don't match up with other databases. So that's still a problem although we are making gradual progress towards resolving those issues. Nevertheless, in museums today managing information has become as important as managing the objects in the collection and it has increased the value of both the information and the objects to be able to manage it more efficiently. So this has led to what's been called some interesting sociotechnical interactions in museums as human beings, traditions, technology and information all intersect together and that's quite an interesting field of study all by itself. One thing to keep in mind is although we do wanna be transparent we do want to make our information available to the public as public institutions not all information should be made public. There are all these things which need to be kept confidential. Big one is donor files. No one's business except yours who makes donations to your institution particularly information on the donor's contact information for example. Another example is in-house appraisals. In collections that have objects of high value we need to know how much those are worth on the market in order to get insurance but it is a conflict of interest for museums to make appraisals of their own collections. So in-house appraisals should be absolutely confidential those should never be made available to the public. So there's some places where we draw the line. Some collection-based information can be used commercially. This can be problematic as it raises questions about whether the museum that has collected and preserved that information should profit from it as well as the commercial user. I think the museum should because that's payback for what they do but it gets to be a problem when a commercial operation requests information from a public museum. Information that you might make available to a member of the public for free. Why should you charge a commercial user? So there is just to be some real interesting things around aspects of this which are a little more sociological than we have time to get into now but just kind of raise that on your radar. In the readings you'll find a short article called information organization and access that discusses how electronic collection data management systems can be used to enhance the management of collections and how the collection is used particularly as it relates to exhibits. So I will leave that for the reading. A question I frequently get asked and one that I see posted all the time online is which collection data management system is best so which one works best for your institution? This is kind of a frustrating question because there is no correct answer and most people who answer answer from a very limited point of view. Most of us have only worked with one or two maybe three databases at most. So when someone poses this question on a listserv you'll see people chiming in saying well whatever database they use that either lover they hate. Well that's sort of useful information that doesn't really help you make a decision about what information, what kind of system you should acquire for your museum. If to figure this thing out you need to step back and look at several things. And I would start with your present system. What are the things that are strengths and what are the weaknesses? And it doesn't matter whether that system is electronic or manual. What are the things you like about your system? What are the things you find frustrating? What else would you like to do? You also want to think about how many objects you have. A database that works really well in a small collection probably will not work well with a really large collection. A database designed for a large collection is probably going to be too klutzy to use in a small collection. So think about that. Do you want to have online access down the road to your catalog or your electronic information? And if so, you need to look for a database that will allow you to pull that information that you want to make public out. How many data fields do you need? How many descriptors to describe your data, where things come from, what they are. Are you going to be adding image files and audio files? 10 years ago, most people were not adding image files. Now it is routine that those go in. Another question is, how many people be entering data? This becomes an issue because if you purchase a software system, you might or might not have to purchase site licenses to have more than one data entry point. If you want to have a data entry station set up in an office and another one in the collection, you might have to pay extra for that, depending on what system you get. So there's a lot of questions you need to think about before you start shopping to kind of figure out what sort of system it is that you need. Another thing is, will the database work well for things like handling accessions and loans? You want a system that is going to be able to, for example, print accession forms or loan forms directly from the database. A lot of systems come with pre-setup forms for all of these documents. Many of them are forms you can manipulate and tweak around to be where you want to. But this is a lot faster than inventing your own forms, and often these forms work with the database much better than an add-on. Do you want to print object tags and labels from the database? And if so, will it do that? Can you find other software that will? So you figure out all of the features you want because you want to have a better system than you started with, and you prioritize these. And you figure out which are the most important, which are further down the road. I would then talk to as many people as you could. Bearing in mind, most people know one or two databases pretty well, but they're not going to know a lot. And so talk to people in museums similar to yours, people who you know, your colleagues who you can rely on that you know are good professionals, and see what system they use, whether they like it. Talk to them about what features you want to keep in mind. There's those of you who studied physics, you know there's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics that says the act of observing a subatomic event changes the event. So we can never really observe an event because the mere observation of it changes it. Well, there's a similar Heisenberg uncertainty principle in data management. And that is the act of providing the users with the system they say they want instantly changes what they think they want. Because as soon as you get a system, you are probably going to realize, oh, I wish it could do this, or I wish it could do that. So you can kind of get over that by spending a little more time talking to colleagues and evaluating the systems that are available. So what should your system do? Well, you've got two very basic functions with a data management system. Those go back going back to the mid 1970s when systems first began to be developed for museums, simply mimicked what we were doing with paper and ink records. And it was a good start, but it was really not worthwhile. What you want is to make collection management easier. That means make access to the records more rapid and more efficient. You also want this system to give you new ways of accessing the information on the object so that you can rearrange things so that you can pull out correlations of things that you had not been able to do before. And you certainly want to reduce the amount of errors that would occur in a manual system and data copy. So you want it to do all of these things. The second suite of things is you actually should look for a system that makes collection management better. And one of the big problems I've seen in my consulting work is people tend to pick a database that duplicates what they're already doing with pencil and paper. And so you don't come out ahead, but think further. Wouldn't it be nice to have a system that would make it easier to produce inventory, that would prepare all the loan forms, it would print invoices, a system that would track objects in their own loan, that would track objects that come in on loan, a system that could track the location of where objects were if they got moved around the institution, that made condition reporting more efficient? That would be really nice. That could provide you the history of how the object had been used in the collection. Wouldn't it be nice to go to the object record, pull up the record for one object to know when it had lasted on exhibit, how many times before that it had been loaned out or been on exhibit? That can start information in new ways to make your collection more useful. That could be useful for integrated pest management, for example, by telling you which objects had been affected in the past by pests. And it could be particularly nice if this system could help you plan object moves by giving you, for instance, the size of the objects, telling you something about the cabinetry they're in. This could make it much easier to plan for moves and rehousing. So think ahead and think about a new system that can do far more than whatever system you have now. So it's computer databases are continuing to get better and better and do more things. So the other things to think about if you're getting a new system is you're going to need more time and more resources than you think you will, especially if you have never had a system before. This is the first time you're going to database your collection. It's going to take longer than you think. And this is something that's always grossly underestimated by administrations. Because they tend to look at, well, how long does it take to process a single record and then multiply that out? Well, that's not how it works. You run into problems. You have to solve things as you go along. It just takes a long time to do this. The biggest problem with instituting a new system in a museum is probably insufficient personnel for the project. You probably already have a staff, or maybe you are the entire staff, you've already got a full plate. And now you're going to add to this putting in a new system or converting from a manual to an electronic system. So you're already behind because you have all these other things you're doing. The next problem is inadequate budget because you did not budget for extra people. You didn't budget for an increase in supplies or updates to the computer database or that sort of thing. The next one I run into is poorly defined data fields. You didn't break your data fields down and describe them like exactly how do you put in information about locality of objects? And in what language do you use? This brings us to lack of syntax control because you didn't think long enough about what object names you're using. Maybe you have things in your system now under the names couch, sofa, divan, and sofa. And you can figure those out yourself because your brain works that way, but the computer is going to read those as different names. So you've got to think about syntax control. And the one that's the last one that I find the most often overlooked is failure to budget for data cleanup because this can be a major problem. So let's look at a few of these in a little more detail. And the first is data fields. The information in a database is organized in the categories that we call fields, and these have to be very carefully defined. They can be just alphabetic, just the name of something. They can be numeric, having numbers, or they can be a combination alphanumeric field. So these fields will include things such as accession numbers, object names, dates, places, donors, and so forth. Each field has to contain the information in a specific format. For example, here we have a whole bunch of accession dates. Now, if you're a human being, the first thing you recognize is this is the same date. It's just written in different ways. The month spelled out, the month abbreviated. All numbers, but the numbers the day may come first, the month may come first. But you may use dashes, you may use slashes. These are all ways to write the same date. So a computer, that would not. A computer would read all of those as either different ways or different dates, or it would only recognize one of them. And if you tried to put them in another format, it wouldn't recognize it. So this is the kind of thing you have to figure out on your data fields is exactly how to define it. So as you go along, you'll need to prepare a data dictionary that defines the information for each field in the format it needs to be in. And we discussed standard nomenclature and what have you in webinar two. If you look at some of the databases out there, a lot of these come with predefined fields which makes your life much easier unless you have a field that you need to redefine or that you need to add in. So you don't want to get caught up on that one. Make sure that you have control over how the data fields are set up. Syntax refers to the rules and forms that give structure to a language and in this case a computer language. And so in a database, this means using a standard terminology and a standard structure for all the data entries as well as standard nomenclature. And this of course is necessary for retrieving information. Otherwise you'll find yourself in the awkward position of knowing that you had entered information about an object in the computer and not being able to get it back because you couldn't remember exactly the names you used. So last week we pointed out that there were 20 various spellings of Peter Czakowski's name. And there were seven different words that all meant couch or sofa. If you use only one of these as your data standard and you put it in under another one, you wouldn't be able to retrieve that information. So you wanna review your current system in your vocabulary and define these deals before you begin. So overall, you don't want to just recreate your old system electronically. What you want is a better and more useful system. So don't rush the process, take your time, think about what you're doing and consult with colleagues. You're gonna find colleagues that have had good experiences and bad ones with databases and you can learn from both of those. And another big mistake I wanted to mention is data cleanup. Because no matter how careful you are, when you type information into the database, you will make mistakes. We all do this for all humans. So the data will need to be proofread. Every bit of information you put in will need to be checked. The person who enters the data should not be the one doing the checking because we tend to make the same mistakes over and over. It's just like trying to proofread your own writing. It's very hard to do. Ideally, you want a naive outsider to be doing the proofreading because they're going to recognize kinds of mistakes that you typically make and therefore you would typically overlook. So this is probably the step in the databases that is most often skipped and usually for budgetary reasons because the money's running out so we're not going to hire someone to do this. And in the end, it costs you more because cleaning up the data immediately right after the mistakes are made is much easier than doing it in the long run or only as you discover problems popping up with your database. So don't leave this one out. And eventually, of course, your system is going to die. None of these systems are permanent and no computer lasts forever. Sooner or later, you're going to have to change your hardware or your software or both. So this is another important reason for planning your data structure carefully to make sure that you can upgrade it. This is one of the big drawbacks to having a homegrown database where you hire someone to write a database just for your museum or just for your collection. These are really difficult to update. If you look for a commercial data management system for your collection and I recommend you do go with commercial systems, make sure that they have regularly supported updates and upgrades for the database and make sure that you adapt each one of those as they come out. I've worked with a couple of museums where they skipped an update because they didn't think they could afford to buy the software only to discover that when the next update came out, it could not update from two sessions back. It could only update from the last edition of the software. So avoid that temptation and avoid the temptation of using homegrown systems. So there's some parallels to electronic data. Paper records, as we know, are susceptible to most of the agents of deterioration that we discussed last week. Particularly, paper is susceptible to damage by fire, heat, water, and physical damage, and of course, you can lose paper records. Well, electronic data is susceptible to all of these as well, fire, heat, water, physical damage, and loss. In addition, the electronic information can be wiped out by static electricity, by magnetism, by power surges, failure of the software or the hardware or failure to upgrade software and the hardware. And so for these reasons, electronic data is not as permanent as paper data, paper information. All systems currently available to store electronic data use pieces of magnetized metal and plastic. Neither magnetized metal nor plastic is a permanent material. Both will deteriorate over time and we will lose that information. So even if you could save your electronic files for 50 or 100 years, you would not be able to read them because there would not be any machines available to read them in that long-term future. And so we can still read Worms catalog from 1655. I will guarantee you whatever electronic form you have your data in today, you will not be able to read that in 200 years in its present form and it has to be changed in some way. So this is an example of some of the technology that has gone extinct just within my lifetime. So these are all things that at one point in my life I was very familiar with and used IBM punch cards, cassette tapes, 45 RPM records, 35 millimeter cameras, all of these are essentially gone. I think maybe we have a photograph or this is about the only thing out of there that's really lasted. So looking at just my lifetime, which isn't all that long, this is one reason why I have no faith whatsoever in the ability of technology, in the ability of our electronic documents to be useful in 25 or 30 years because I've already seen all of this other technology disappear. So we have to think of ways of saving our data in other ways and currently, that means a lot of transferring from one format to another and spending a lot of money saving it and upgrading it. All right, moving on to another topic now. I want to look at exhibitions. As Freedom Matassa put it in her book called Museum Collections Management, exhibition and display are perhaps the most crucial forms of access to an enjoyment of our cultural heritage because this is where the public sees it. And then I'm also throwing in my friend Sally Shelton's comment that exhibition is another form of storage which we talked about last week. So we need to have the same requirements in exhibition for security and for the environmental standards that we do in storage. And this means the people in charge of the collections need to work with exhibit designers and explain what they need in terms of light, temperature or relative humidity and security. This can be tricky but a good designer will catch on and will work with you and you can make much better exhibits that are much better for your objects and doing display. So lighting, we want to reduce visible light as much as we can. We want to eliminate ultraviolet radiation. We want to keep the exhibit as cool as we possibly can. You want to look at the plans for the exhibit and think about how the object is to be supported but the temperature and relative humidity are going to be inside the case, how much they're going to fluctuate. So this is a point where if you're not involved in the exhibit work in the museum, if you're just involved on the collection side, you need to find a way to get into that system and grachiate yourself with the people doing the exhibit planning so that you can offer this information to them and come out with better exhibits. It's better for the objects, which brings us to handling objects. Before moving any museum objects or specimens, you should do the following. You should wash your hands. Even if you think your hands are clean, they probably have oil on them. Second is you should dress appropriately so you don't wear your best clothes and you don't wear real loose clothing that might interfere with your ability to pick up and carry an object. A lab coat is recommended to avoid having objects damage your clothing or your clothing damage the object. You should wear comfortable shoes. No open toes because open-toed shoes, you tend to trip or hurt your toes that way. You should remove any hanging jewelry or your watch. You should secure your long hair if you have it. You should not have a dangling ID badge or anything else that might appear with picking up and setting down objects. And of course, you should not eat or drink while handling objects. All of that, which is to say, do not dress like the person in this picture. This is an ad that came out back in, I think it was the late 80s from Nordstroms and it showed a bunch of people depicted as museum workers, working with museum collections. But of course, they were fashion models so they're all dressed in entirely inappropriate clothing, wearing high heels, moving things wrong and most of them were holding coffee at the time so that is definitely not what you wanna do. It's recommended for handling most, but not all objects that you wear gloves. For most objects, white cotton gloves are the best choice because they prevent you from transferring dirt and they'll give you some protection. But in many cases, neoprene gloves are going to be better, particularly if you're handling objects that have any kind of toxic substance or if they're moist. When you buy gloves for your lab or for your collection management area, make sure that you keep all sizes on hand from small to very large because people's hand size varies greatly and the only thing worse than no glove is probably wearing the wrong size glove. A glove that is too big means you'll drop things and too tight means it'll hurt your hands and you probably won't be able to pick things up as well. So both cotton that you could wash and nitrile come in a variety of sizes so keep them on hand and your cotton gloves should be washed in non-scented detergent. And that's because the scented detergents have more chemicals in them and you don't want any chemical contamination. So keep gloves around and use the gloves regularly when as soon as the cotton gloves get dirty, take them off and get clean gloves and take your old gloves home and wash them. You can buy reusable or one-use cotton gloves. I don't think this is a good idea. They're very thin. They don't give you a lot of protection and it's a bad waste of resources. I think you're better off to buy quality gloves and wash them. I recommend preparing a sheet of handling instructions printed out that says how to move objects in your collection. And then hand this to anyone who is a volunteer or a new staff member or an intern coming in to work in the collection and a lot of people go so far as to have the new people date and sign that they have read the instructions to make sure that you drive home the point of how important this is. The instructions should say things such as wear the appropriate gloves because you don't want to wear the wrong gloves. Preach each object as if it were irreplaceable and very fragile no matter whether you think it is or not because in many cases people don't know. Know the condition of the object before you pick it up. You should never pick up an object without doing a visual inspection. Even if it's an object you're very familiar with something might have changed. So look around the object before you pick it up handle only one object at a time. Think about how you're going to grasp and lift the object. You want to pick it up and handle it by its most stable surface not just grab it and pick it up. You want to think about where you're going to pick it up. Before you pick something up you should know where you're going to set it down. This is another really common mistake is people pick things up and then they start looking for a spot to put it. And part of knowing where you're going to set it down includes make sure you've got a clear path to where you're going to set it down. Use two hands to support the object or if necessary use two people. Lift the object don't slide it or drag it. Support the object's weight very carefully as you pick it up. You move slowly, don't hurry, don't overload carts or other wheeled vehicles you use. And if you can avoid it never walk backwards when moving an object. And sometimes I'm very heavy things using more than one person you have to but try to avoid that. If you have those instructions printed out it will make your life much easier and you can avoid accidents. Accidents are going to happen. So if you handle objects very much sooner or later one will be damaged. So what you want to do is don't panic because that only makes things worse. Instead think about this as a learning experience. Secure the area to prevent any further damage occurring to the object or to people in the area and document what has happened immediately. This means take photographs and write down a description and if it's an important because it's an expensive object or because it involves a chemical spill reported as soon as you need to. But make it a learning opportunity for you and the staff and if something has been broken do not attempt to repair the museum object until you've consulted with a conservator. Most of the repairs that people do are not done well or using the wrong materials. And so in some cases you can get a very quick answer back about how to do it yourself. In other cases it's willing to take professional work but always check with a conservator before making repairs or trying to make repairs. I wanted to talk a little bit about loans today. Changing topics again. There are three basic classes of loans and each has different legal responsibilities for who takes care of the objects. These are loans that are primarily of benefit to the lender, to the borrower or to the mutual benefit of both. And then under the law the liability for the loan is primarily on the primary beneficiary of the transaction. That usually means the party borrowing the loan gets the most benefit. There are examples of loans being for the benefit of the lender such as renovation is being done so a museum might loan out a good part of its collection to get it off-site and out of the way. But you need to figure out who has the primary, who's receiving the primary benefit because that party will take the primary responsibility. And liability in this case refers to providing good care and extraordinary diligence which you're required to do on a loan. So a loan document is a contract and like any contract the terms need to be spelled out on the loan document. So the duration of the loan should be specified in a return date provided. Loans should always have an ending date. The document should include the names and contact information of both the borrower and the lender and specify how the loan is to be packed and shipped. And the readings there are two useful tables to help you look through all this. One is considerations for decisions concerning requests to borrow objects. And another is the terms and conditions that may be specified in the loan policy. So these readings will save us having to go over all these details here in the webinar but those will help you figure out what should be on the loan invoice. Important to keep in mind that by definition a loan is a temporary arrangement because the ownership of the object does not change. There is no such thing as a permanent loan. Permanent loan is an oxymoron. If something is loaned, the ownership doesn't change. It is a loan. If ownership changes, it is not a loan. It is a gift. So permanent transfer can be a gift but there is no such thing as permanent loan. So loans should not be open-ended. They should, although in the past and anywhere, you should always have that renewal date or ending date on the document. What used to be the registrar's committee of the American Alliance of Museums which is now the Collection Stewardship Professional Network has published some suggestions regarding loans and these include that loan requests should be sent to your institution either in writing or in email. This way there's no ability to forget information or there's no chance of confusion. You'll have the things written down. You should respond to loan requests in a timely manner and that of course depends on how busy you are but it's best within a matter of days of receiving a request to either say we'll take that under consideration or no or yes to the loan but let them know right away. You should agree to the notification for shipment so that when a loan is sent out to a borrower, you tell the borrower it is now on its way to you and it should arrive on this date and they should do the same when they send it back rather than you just being surprised one morning to find a package at your door. You should agree on, oh, I forgot one here, you should only loan accessioned and marked objects. If the objects are not accessioned then you have not taken ownership of them and you have no business loaning them out and if they're not marked there's no way for the borrower to make sure that they get the right objects so make sure that only accessioned and marked objects go out. The loan document should state which party pays packing and shipping and of course packing and shipping is both ways. You pack them up and send them to the borrower and then the borrower packs them up and sends them back to you so that should be on the loan. There should be a provision that says you must be notified if there are any changes of the address of the borrower or the shipping address and then the standards of care should be stated in the loan contract and you can find many examples of these in loan farms that are out there and available so if you do not have a loan firm yet you can take a look at some of the examples and copy them. Lenders should send copies of any object condition reports with the loan and then this condition report should be used to verify the damage on the object when it arrives immediately. We had a case in our museum a few years ago where this came really important. We had a painting that was to be loaned to another museum. My wife did a condition report on it as she always does. She shipped the painting off the receiver, did a condition report when he got it when it was received and everything was fine. It was on exhibit. He then filled out another condition report sending it back. When the object arrived paint ships were missing and it turned out the paint ships were not in the packing crate and we immediately called the borrower and he had photographs. We knew that that damage occurred in transit and it was the fault of the shipper who had vacuumed up the paint ships to try and hide what had happened. So this is why the point where it suddenly becomes a very expensive and illegal manner because of this repair had to be made who has to pay for it. So that's a very important lesson on condition reports. When you have an object borrowed, repairs and conservation treatments should not be done without written permission except in a very dire emergency. So you should at minimum call the lender and say we've got a real problem do you want us to proceed with this? You should specify acceptable use. For instance, is it okay for visitors to take photographs of the object on exhibit? Is it okay for those objects to be used in advertising an exhibit that shall be specified? Appropriate insurance must be provided. Insurance is typically provided by the borrower and it's usually what's called wall-to-wall coverage. Wall-to-wall coverage means from the point where the object is taken out of storage and shipped off and then used and shipped back till it's returned to storage again. But the insurance can be negotiated between you and the borrower. Any specific handling, shipping and environmental requirements for objects should be specified. When we send loans out from our museum, we have certain couriers which are acceptable and others which are not. So we specify acceptable couriers only and if the museum that has borrowed it wants to use any other means to get it back to us, they have to check with us. The loan document should state that the lender reserves the right to call for early return of the loan in case some emergency comes up. There are a lot of other aspects to loans such as the use of the courier along with the valuable object and insurance that we really don't have time to get into, but you can find most of this information in museum registration methods, that's addition. So I'll leave it for there. Covering a little short of time today, we're going to move on to looking at research. Research on collection objects is increasingly overlooked and I think this is sad because we're still doing a lot of it. And the first issue of Museums in Motion, which was published in 1979, there was an entire chapter on research. In the second edition, which came out in 2007, the chapter was gone, but most of the information was still in the book and I was extremely disappointed to see the third edition of the book come out in, when it came out in 2017, research is not even listed in the index. So this is a good example of how research has been devalued. It's not that Museums quit doing research, but rather it's just been de-emphasized to a rather absurd degree. So there's still a lot of research going on with objects and that of course affects how we manage them, but museum workers don't seem to be under obligation to publish that research, which is too bad. So research on Museum objects can be roughly divided in three categories, basic research, programmatic, and audience research. Basic research is that that is done on the physical nature of objects, their associations, their origin, how they're used, and their significance. So provenance research, for instance, would be included in that. And so a lot of that information is very useful and valuable, a bunch of it probably should be published, but it's research that takes place all the time that tends to be just kept within a collection. So I encourage you to think about publishing your research. And here we have a class that my wife and I taught and museum studies students, and they're installing an exhibit based on their original object research, because they were given objects and had to do all the background research on them and then fit them together in a themed exhibit. Programmatic research refers to the research that goes into exhibits and public programming. And it often includes original discovery of knowledge that it was not known before. And it also includes studies on how to best communicate with museum visitors, including ways to make people-object interactions more meaningful, which we discussed as being the very essence of museums in webinar one. So here's an example. This is a visitor at the British Museum who is handling a real museum object as part of a program that was developed based on research they did at the British Museum on people's object interactions. And they discovered that people really wanted to come into physical contact with real objects. And so they identified objects that could be brought out and handled. And if they were damaged, it would not be too terribly bad. And this made a huge impact on the visitors. And there were long lines to take part in these activities there. There are some areas of research such as informal learning that have yielded a lot of important insights about how people learn from objects and how we interact with our objects when they're on exhibit. The last one is audience research, which rarely involves collection management. But this at its most basic is research done about how people behave in interactive museums. This is probably the most common kind of research that gets published these days. And we don't have time to go and do this anymore, but I wanted you to keep that again on your radar. So collection access, traditionally, museums have strictly controlled access to the objects information in their collection, but we do have as public institutions a legal and ethical responsibility to facilitate access. As public institutions, we should be as transparent as possible. And this includes letting people have access, but the limits on access frequently have to do with trying not to increase handling of objects too much, access often disrupts the storage environment, and can also increase our risk of theft or vandalism. So you want to think about how you do your access very carefully. Access to the collection then becomes a balance between object preservation and object use. So there is a handout that discusses some of these things, the categories of collection users and collection use. And some of the things that you need to think about are these, if you allow people to take photographs of objects either in your exhibits or in your collection, those photographs are likely to appear on social media. Is that okay or is that not okay? And if collection objects or information are used for commercial purposes, then should your institution benefit financially, and I think it probably should. Not everyone gets access to everything. Some examples of information that should be restricted include, as I mentioned before, names and addresses of donors, internal appraisals. You don't want to reveal information about your collection's security. Most museums do not make a big deal of deaccessioning and disposal information because that can lead to misunderstandings having these inoperates. There is some information on objects including loans and insurance that should be kept confidential. There are objects that should not be accessed very much, things that are very fragile, things that are valuable, are objects that pose a danger, for instance, by having off-gassing toxic gas or being radioactive. So there's always things that shouldn't be included in access, but we should try to be as open as we can. There are also some interesting, culturally sensitive objects for which access has been imposed. So a couple of examples here, the Macaw Cultural Research Center in Washington has an oral history program for tribal members, and they have made field recordings, and those are held in the tribal archives. And although this is a public museum, those recordings are only made available with the permission of a tribal elder because those recordings contain what is considered to be confidential tribal information. There is a museum in Newcastle, England, the Hancock Museum, which has a collection of materials from Australia, and after a consultation with some of the Aboriginal groups, they have decided that the female staff may not see the Oriente Charinga totems because these totems should only be seen by males. There is a set of Ethiopian tablets that are at the British Museum that are related to the Ark of the Covenant, and these tablets are kept wrapped in cloth and cannot be seen by anyone except visiting Ethiopian clergy, and this means they cannot be seen by the curators. The Victorian Albert Museum, on the advice of some faith groups, they separated the collections of Christian artifacts and Jewish artifacts and stored them separately. So these are interesting, and they have raised some questions. They have drawn criticism, and they have also drawn support. There is an interesting critic named Tiffany Jenkins, who is British, who has criticized museums for these accommodations on the cultural groups because she says museums have been too quick to restrict access to collections based on the requirements of one particular group. She wrote that, in British museums, faith sensitivity is endangering free access to our collections because artifacts are being hidden away from the general public and scholars. The UK Museums Association Standards of Practice requires museum professionals to consider restricting access to certain specified items, particularly those of ceremonial or religious importance, where restricted access may cause a sense of distress to actual or cultural descendants, which Jenkins says are terrible guidelines for anyone working in museums. The very point of these institutions is to open up the world to people and not lock one's inside or others out. So this is really controversial, and it's going to, how you handle this will depend on your museum, what kind of objects you have and what your dealings are with the cultural group that provided them, but it's, again, a heads up you need to know this is a controversial area. The last thing we wanna talk about today is found in collection objects, and these are things that you quite literally find in a collection that have no documentation or no other indication of who owns them. Maybe they belong in your collection, maybe they don't. You should not assume that the object belongs in the collection, nor should you assume it doesn't until you try to figure it out. So the first thing you wanna do is examine the object carefully, looking for any kind of number or marking or other clue as to what belongs to. Check with other staff members and former staff members. Could it be something that was once loaned to the museum that was not returned or something left as a donation that was never accessioned or left for identification? And, of course, search your collection records for any information about the object bearing in mind that documentation procedures and standards have probably changed over the years. If you find evidence that the object was accessioned in your collection, you can then restore it or deaccession it. However, if you cannot find it, you cannot deaccession it because you can only deaccession things that were accessioned. You can't deaccession an object that never was accessioned. At this point, you need to check your state whole loan law or abandoned property law. Not all states have these. There is a reading here that gives a list of them. If your state does not have a museum property law, you can follow. Then you need to seek legal advice and work with common law within the state. And a good lawyer can help you out there. And also, for the readings this week, I've included the chapter on found in collections from museum registration methods. So, to summarize today, we want to document everything we do, preferably using archival materials. The documentation should be clear, permanent, legible, and comprehensive. Your data management system should make collection management easier and better. Keep in mind, electronic data is not permanent. Use common sense when you handle things. Remember that a loan is a temporary transfer and a loan document is a contract. And you should engage in object research and you should publish what you find to just to be a good professional. Your assignment for the coming week is to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your institution, looking at your data management system, whether it's electronic or manual. Look at your loan policy and procedures and then how collection objects are used, particularly in exhibit and for loans. Next week, we are going to do our last webinar and we're gonna talk about collection management policies, what they are, why we need them, how they're developed, and that sort of thing. And we will also look at some resources and programs available for improving collection management, useful publications, and some professional societies. So that wraps us up for this week and brings us to questions. So take a look here and see what we have. So we've got people volunteering that have used TMS, NMARC, and MuseM Plus, and probably many others of you have used other systems and that's a really good thing to do, as I mentioned, talk to colleagues and share systems. Let's see, data cleanup was a true joy. I imagine that has said somewhat ironically. We migrated to a new system a year ago and we're still doing cleanup, which is pretty typical and I'm glad you're doing it. The fact that you're doing it is what's important. Extra spaces, of course, turn up in data fields and those can fool your computer as well. Remember, computers are only as dumb as you make them. See, does anyone have resources for the legal precedent for a loaned item from a lender who died 30 years ago? That's, resolving an old loan can be very tricky and you probably need to start by going back and checking the loan documentation at the time, looking to see what the terms were exactly so you know that going forward and then you're gonna start wanting to look for errors. Who is the legal heir? And you also should check the abandoned property statute for your state. It may be possible for you to take possession of that object and then either return it to the family or get rid of it legally. And so those laws vary quite a bit from state to state. Pennsylvania, where I live, has a law that only pertains, for instance, to state museums. Other museums have a lot better laws. And then there's the, if we are not a public institution but a private one, then we have as part of our policies what kind of access it's granted. I think that's good for, even if you're a private, just for transparency's sake and it also gives you the right to say yes or no without having to put out different rules for different people. If you think over what kinds of access you wanna provide and not provide and then have a policy for those, it's a lot easier to deal with. I think that's all the questions for today. Is that correct, Susan? No, there's one that just came to the chat box from Norris Schneider. He says, can we take items into the collection and the donor marked on the custody form that it was to be returned to them if we didn't accession it. Does that mean we can never de-accession it? No, it just means if you have accessioned it, you can de-accession it. If you never accessioned it, that doesn't matter. It should be returned to the donor. And yeah, so should we record in the permanent record the donor wanted it returned if it was not de-accessioned? Well, that should have been on the... It should have been not accessioned. Yeah, right. And that should be part of the record, but again, you've either accessioned it or not. And so if you have accessioned it, then there's no... You won't be returning it. If you have not accessioned it, then you can return it. I see someone had a mercury leak from the thermometer. Yes, those usually involve your health and safety people because that means you have to clean up the toxic chemical spill in your collection. Those can be a real problem. You can, depending on where your museum is situated, if it's in a university, they frequently have a health and environmental safety unit. If it's state, you can probably call your state agency or if you're a city museum, you might have a city agency, but you may need to check around to find out which agencies have jurisdiction over the kind of chemical spill that you have. Yeah, and you can also contact your state, what is it, environmental agency. They'll usually do cleanups like that. If they can't, they can probably point you to who will do it within your system. Yeah, and there's been a discussion about smallpox gaps that were in the Muter Museum and another at the Country Dofter Museum in Bailey, North Carolina. Probably no longer viable, but that's something that you need to check with an expert on. Oh, spilled Beledana, that could be another fun one. Yeah, we did a wonderful webinar on wet specimens with the curator from the Muter Museum last year. Yeah, it was with Anodody, right? Yeah. And some of these things are not nearly as dangerous as we might think they are. Others are more dangerous than we think, so you need to check with someone and find out. And yeah, Debbie Spanish says, is there a good way to dust frames on paintings on long-term display without taking them off the wall? We did a webinar three years ago, I think, on frames. You might look at that, Debbie, in our archive. You can listen to the webinar. And on all of you, if you have questions on caring for objects, you can join the Connecting to Collections community where we have discussions and they're conservators that will answer questions fairly quickly. So feel free to join that. That's open to all of you. The instructions are on the website. And this is a good example. Dusting a frame might sound like an easy job, but you need to check with a conservator first. It may be that frame is goalie for maybe flaking paint on it. There could be all sorts of extenuating things that a conservator would pick up on right away. So yeah, I do urge you to post questions to a conservator-moderated list. Might come off the wall. We don't want to have happen. Yeah. Yeah, so I will post the assignment on the education website. I'll do that right when we finish. I want to remind you, because this is our proposal of some of the things that came up today, that tomorrow we're doing a free webinar on copyright. And so you might want to sign up for that and listen to it. It'll be at two o'clock Eastern time. And you can go to our website and sign up for that. And I think that's it, John, unless you have something else to say. No, I think that's about it for today. If there are no more questions, of course you can always email your questions in later and do participate in the assignments if you have the time. And it's been extremely interesting reading them and we will have one final assignment next week which will tie all the previous assignments you have done together. And then also remember that you can use the discussion on the education website to ask John questions or bring up other stuff. And I will post the recording probably by tomorrow. But you'll know the website we're signed in today will say recording available or something like that. So remember that you need to listen to either the live webinars or the recorded webinars and you need to do the assignments if you're intending to get the credley badge. Otherwise, it's fine. You're welcome here and you can do whatever. I may ask for people who haven't been doing assignments, I may ask you if that's part of what you're intending, if you want to get the credley badge. But other than that, we'll see you next week. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. Thank you, John. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Susan, Mike.