 to pass the audio off to our host, Susan Barger. Go ahead, Susan Barger. Hi, everyone. This is the last session of planning a rework project. And so I'm pleased to see you all. I'm sorry if you had trouble finding in, but that's been corrected, so people should be coming in now. So this is the remaining schedule. This is the last webinar. If you are planning to get a badge, you need to have completed all of the webinars and all of the assignments by June 15. And then the following week, I'll issue the badges. When I checked last night, it looked like there were a lot of people that have done. If you were up to date today, you would have completed 10 out of 12 items. It looked like there were a lot of people that were still at 9. So I may send out a message in the next few days if people seem to be stuck there and let you know, because I'm assuming that those people are hoping for a badge, too. So you can look for an email from me. If you have additional questions about course mechanics or other questions, contact me. This is my email address. And you have questions about course content. Put them in the discussion box on the Education website. And to keep informed about connecting to Collections Care Join, our Connecting to Collections Care webinar. And you can find the instructions on our website. You can join us on social media or follow us on Twitter. And this is what we have coming up. We have a course coming up in July and early August on making the most of your assessments. So if you've had assessments and you don't quite know what to do with them when they were done, this is the course for you. And it will include different types of assessments using assessments to raise money, using assessments to do planning, that kind of stuff. And then in July, we're going to have a free webinar in HVAC systems. And the ad for that should be posted fairly soon. So look for that on our website. And for everyone who's having problems with flooding, wind, fires, this is the 24-hour hotline for the National Heritage Responders in the US. So feel free to use that. And I think that's all for my slides. I'm going to turn this over to Simon. So Simon Lambert from CCI, you're going to take over. Hi, everyone. I'm really happy to have you all here for the final webinar. I hope you didn't miss us too much. It's been about a month since our last webinar. So I know it's been hard for you. So without further ado, we'll begin today. The last webinar is about implementing a ReHORD project. And it's really part two of this Angels Project case study that we began about at the last session, where we had envisioned the project a certain way. And then now we have implemented it a couple of years, a couple of weeks ago. And we're here today to talk to you about how it went and what went differently than expected and what were some of the challenges that we faced. So today with me, I have Lisa Goldberg, who will be describing the work that we did. And possibly Susan from the New London Maritime Society, who will be joining us a bit later. If not, well, I thought it was important to mention her since she was such a huge part of this effort to reorganize her storage. So just a quick reminder that the course objectives, which is this webinar and the final assignment, you will have developed a basic ReHORD plan to improve collections access and care in one of your storage rooms. And some of you who are up to date in their assignments have this plan already. So congratulations on all those who are up to date on their assignments. The objective for this session, as I was mentioning, was that we'll review the implementation of the ReHORD project at the Custom House Maritime Museum. And we'll look at the various steps that we went through, the decisions that we made, and look at some of the challenges and lessons learned from this experience. So hopefully, seeing yet another implementation of a ReHORD project will give you some ideas for your own projects. A quick reminder that all the material that we're using and then talking about in this webinar series was developed by EECOM with the support of UNESCO and was adapted for distance learning through a collaboration with CCI, the Canadian Conservation Institute. All the materials are available for free for download online on the EECOM website and the addresses here below. And the material is available in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese for the moment. So let's begin with the Angels project. So as we mentioned last time, this was a pre-conference one-day project that we implemented thanks to all the volunteers who showed up to lend a hand to Susan and her team to reorganize their storage area before the AIC conference. Medicates, USA. Just a quick reminder where we were at when we started. I showed this in the last webinar, or perhaps Rachel did. So this is kind of a starting situation where most of our four components were in the orange and we're doing a little bit better with furniture and small equipment, although we did make a lot of changes in that area as well. So we're kind of in the area here mostly where it says you need a ReHORD project. And so that is what we did. We did a ReHORD project. So this is our storage area that is our starting situation. So this is the plan number four, the occupation plan. So that is the before ReHORD, how it looks like before. And just a quick reminder of some shots from inside the storage area so you can have an idea of what we were facing when we started. So now I'm just going to go through quickly, as a reminder, what the different mini projects were in this project. So those are like the little chunks of projects that we had to deal with. So we had some framed works. And we did not know at the time when we started how many we had. We knew that most of them were under one meter or three feet. So we didn't have any extremely large frames. But then we ended up finding a few of those, as one does. When one starts to empty a whole storage area, you find things that you didn't expect. So here, mostly, we had smaller to medium-sized frames. We had some flags. Some of them we intended on rolling. And some of them we intended on boxing. And the maps. Apologize for this picture, but that was the picture we had to begin with. So we had a lot of rolled maps. And in the end, the quantity of maps ended up being pretty much around 30. So that was great that we anticipated the correct number of maps to be rolled. Uniforms, we knew that we had some small ones that needed to be boxed and some large ones that needed to be boxed as well. And then paintings. We had some large rolled paintings that you can see here on the top of that shelving unit, which is actually a mural that is folded, that is rolled. And then we had some small objects that could be carried in two hands. And then some smaller, even smaller objects that could be handled by one hand. So much smaller items. And we didn't know the quantity either going into this project. So the priorities we identified for this project were to first, we needed to relocate or discard all the non-collection items to make room for the collection. We needed to create storage systems that were better adapted to the collection's actual needs because we had a lot of storage units in that space, but a lot of them did not have high enough shelves to allow us to fit objects inside. So we had to find another solution for a lot of objects. And we wanted to make sure that there would be no objects directly on the floor at the end of this reorg. And then we also wanted to create a new location system at the end of the project. So those were our four priorities. This is a floor plan of the space that we were working in. So here I highlighted where Susan's office is. So the office of the curator director is there. And this is our storage area right there in front of her office. And we identified these two other rooms, which are very similar. It's kind of a very symmetrical layout here. So the two other rooms that are of similar size. One was designated a rolling station. So everything that was going to be rolled was going to be happening in this room. And everything that was going to be boxed was going to be happening in the room there on the lower right side. And then in the basement, here I'm showing you the exact same floor plan. Because I don't have a floor plan of the basement, imagine the basement being exactly the same layout as the other level that I showed you. So this level that I'm showing you now is actually below the storage area. So in the sub-basement, as they call it, we have designated a room here for non-collection items that were props, so things that were used for exhibitions and things like that. And then we have another room here, which was also non-collection. We designated to store non-collection, but we were mostly storing display cases, and also some items that were going to be sold in a kind of tag sale, so like a sale to raise money for the museum. Some of the items that were donated to be sold by the museum were not part of the collection, but they were actually inside the storage area. And so we needed to find a space for those objects so that they weren't confused with the collection. So we decided that those could be needed to find a small corner for those things in the same room as the non-collection items here, the display cases. So this whole basement here was for non-collection. And then we also had a lot of empty frames, which were not part of the collection, but there was a significant amount of these empty frames, and so we needed to find a place for them that was outside of storage. And so a storage unit that was empty was placed right outside here in the corridor, and we just put all of the empty picture frames in there so that they were not in the collection storage area anymore. So again, this is the before, and this is what we wanted to do initially. This was our proposal. Now I'm going to show you how that changed a little bit and why. So the first thing is that we had, we received actually one unit, missing one unit in our shipment of units. So we were expecting to have eight, and we only had seven. But that wasn't so much of a problem, and I'll show you why. So our starting point was we are missing a unit. But let's talk about the units a bit later. The first thing that we noticed when we actually spent more time in the space, because I have to remind everyone that the only person that had actually seen the space, apart from Susan, who works there was Rachel, who was part of the team, and Rachel was there for only a few hours. So it was a very quick visit of the whole facility, and she took many photos, but sometimes there's always details when you're doing site visits like that with a storage area that's so full that you don't see. And so one thing that we did not anticipate was that this little nook that we had in the floor plan here was actually not usable for anything. So that was just a full wall. So we were not able to put anything into that nook. So it was just a straight wall. And here, in the middle, there was a radiator. So we were actually not able to put anything in front of it or we had to separate all the units that we thought we could group together. We actually had to keep them separate. So that was a bit of a difference. We ended up keeping one of these units, these cupboards, which I'll show you what they look like if you don't remember. So we moved that one there. And then we had actually seven of these units, that they were longer than we thought or longer than we had thought of in our first proposal. So we didn't really feel like we could add another unit here because we would have been so close to the wall that it would have been really impractical and actually not functional at all. And so we only felt like we could include six. So we only used six of them. And we had one of these cupboards here. We thought we were going to be removing it from the layout, but in the end, these units were really useful for storing trays with really small objects inside. And we had a lot more of those trays than we anticipated. And so instead of ending up with trays on shelves, we said, well, why don't we keep another one of these cupboards so that we can put more of the trays inside? So that's one thing that we realized when we arrived on site and spent a little more time looking inside the units. We didn't end up using that one that was there, so I removed that. But we found some units in the sub-basement here along this wall that we could repurpose for storing frames. And as you'll recall, we had a lot of frames that were stored in these units before. And they were stored horizontally. And we had a lot more frames to store. So we needed to find a lot more storage for frames here once I show you what these look like. So these are those units in the back here, which we ended up final layout. We flipped them 90 degrees so that we would have slots that were vertical instead of horizontal. And so that allowed us to store frames more safely. So stacking them on top of each other, we can actually slide them in. But then we did end up keeping one as it is. So we did not flip this one because there were some frames that were quite fragile. And we felt that if we just put, we could use some of those compartments horizontally. And it would be safer for some objects. So we ended up keeping one as is. And we flipped this one 90 degrees so that we would have vertical storage for those. Here, these are these slotted units that we found in the basement. And Susan had a lot of larger frames that were currently on exhibition that she would be taking down soon. And if we hadn't done this reorg, she would have had no place to put them. So at the end of our project, these were still empty. But Susan now has a lot of space to store those frames that are of different sizes. So she now has a storage location for those frames, which is great. And these here are those cabinets that were used for those trays with smaller objects. So when you open those doors of the cabinet, there's very small shelves in there that you can slide trays into, much like these units here at the top. So when you open it, it looks like that a little bit inside. So you can slide some trays in there. So the other thing here is at the end of these six units, we had some leftover space at the end here. And so we decided that that could be used to store some of the long, flat items that are typically found on shelves, but that end up using a lot of shelf height and wasting a lot of space. So since we couldn't add another unit here because there wasn't enough space for circulation, we still used this surface, which was available to hang a piece of coroplast that was secured in place with zip ties. And objects that were safe enough to be hung were attached with cotton twill tape. But Lisa will probably describe this a little bit more in detail after. So this was our sticky notes exercise that I showed at the last webinar. So this is what we started as an initial brainstorming activity. This is kind of what we had envisioned would take place during the one day workshop. But when we arrived on location, we quickly realized that there was a lot more non-collection than we thought in that space. So we felt that it would be very difficult for us to accomplish all of that in one day if all of the non-collections remained in the space. And so we did have to do a little bit more work on the day before, which was a Sunday, in order to make sure that the group could start working right away on the day of the reorg. So for instance, we had to identify all the collections and non-collections and unknowns. We did that on Sunday because if the groups all had to go through Susan to clarify those questions, then that would have probably slowed down the process a little bit. So we did all of that work beforehand. We did designate an area for rubbish because that was a very easy thing to do, so we just planned that ahead of time. We set up a space for non-collections in the sunny basement, which I showed you on the floor plan. So we did kind of identify where things would go so that it would be much easier to get started and to get the ball rolling and to hit the ground running, as they say. And then we also designated an area for all the unknown objects. We set up temporary storage locations for all of the different types of objects, like we knew where we were going to bring the flags. We knew where we were going to bring the large pieces of furniture. We knew where we were going to bring the maps. And so that was all decided beforehand so that we could, once we assigned a group to those tasks, then they would know what to do right away. We also removed what we could of the rubbish that was found in storage. There wasn't that much rubbish. There were mostly a lot of display cases, items like props, as I mentioned, some items that were to be sold in a tag sale. And so those items were just removed so that there were no questions. When we started, you know, is this collection or non-collection? Most of those questions were answered the day before. And then we did relocate what we could of the non-collection to the semi-basement. There were large pieces, very large display cases and furniture pieces that had to be removed with professional movers because it would not have been safe for us to do so. So those movers actually came the morning when the group was walking in, when the group of volunteers arrived for the day to start working. The movers also arrived at the same time. So while we were doing introductions and getting a sense of what we would be doing throughout the day, while we were talking, the movers were removing all the furniture, the large furniture, the display cases and everything and moving that into the basement. And then we also, yeah, that involved also relocating the unwanted units to the semi-basement. That's kind of what we had when we started. So we did all of those tasks on the Sunday so that when we were ready to start working on the Monday, everyone could work more smoothly. So instead of doing a rework chart, as you have done, the ones who have done assignments in the number for week number five, we decided to do a checklist and the reason why I thought this would work better is just simpler visually and since we were only working for one day, I think we only had four groups working simultaneously so it was very easy for group blue to go to their sheet and group red to go to their sheet and look at what they had to do. It's a choice, so at some point in your own project, you may switch back and forth between a project chart and these checklists. The checklists are really easy, simple, easy to understand for people. The progress chart, what's nice about it is you can visually see the project moving forward and advancing, but sometimes in past projects, we have started with a project chart and realized that we did not estimate when tasks would finish and others would end and things like that, so we ended up putting the project chart aside and going to a checklist. So, and other times we use the project chart from beginning to end, so it really depends and you'll get a sense when you're in the heat of the action, if it's best to abandon the project chart and to move to a simpler checklist. So, that's what we chose for that one day. And this is what the situation in storage at the end of that Sunday preparation day. So, we still had a lot of things in storage, obviously. This is one of these large display cases that was very heavy that needed to be removed by the movers. As you can see, we started tagging the objects that were part of the collection so that it was clear. Everything that was in the room and that had a post-it or was clearly collection. And then we also had some post-it notes for the movers to tell them where to move things. So, we have this one that says, remove to sub-basement. So, they knew when they were there in the morning, somebody could just tell them, okay, everything with a post-it note that says move to basement and that's what you need to take out and move to the basement. And then this is just outside storage. So, this is when we had started removing some of the display cases and boxes and all the things that would be then moved to the basement. So, we just felt like we needed to create some space for people to be able to work. And so, that's why we did remove all of those non-collection items before. Just to go back to our initial list of what could go wrong, this is what we had anticipated could go wrong. But actually didn't. So, we weren't sure at the time if we would be receiving the shelving units. And we did, so that's great. Insufficient packing, rehousing materials was not a problem. Whenever we used packing materials for projects that we didn't anticipate using those packing materials, we just adapted by using other things for other objects. So, we just, we felt like at some point we were thinking that we would use corrugated plastic for one thing and we didn't end up using it for that. We used it for something else and so we just used something else for that other thing. So, we just adapted along the way. Some tasks take longer than expected. That really didn't happen because we made sure to monitor as we were going along. One of the tasks was to roll the maps. And that, based on the solution that that team decided they were going to use for the maps, we saw that it could take a bit longer than if they had simply been placed on the shelf. And so, we just reacted to that by adding many more people to that team. So, that team initially had two people in it but since the solution was a little bit more elaborate and was going to take a little bit more time, we put six people or eight people on that team so that we just adapted, adjusted the resources to each team based on how we saw it was going. Fewer people than expected, that did not happen. We actually had a few more people than we expected so that's great. Someone brought their husband with them so we had a great team. Everyone was really great to work with and everyone contributed really positively to the project. Running out of swing space, we did not run out. We really used every single square meter, square foot of that basement. And we did luckily have an outdoor tent that we used and that was very useful mostly for building the shelving units because we would not have been able to build them anywhere if we did not have this tent. And it was raining that day so it was very useful to have it covered area where we could work and assemble the units outside. Other problems, while we thought that we didn't anticipate, well, as I mentioned, we had many more non-collection items than we expected and so we did have movers come in the morning before the workshop started and we had planned this ahead of time like we knew that that might happen and so Susan knew that there may be a need for people to move large things and so we were able to react quite quickly. There were a few more objects in certain categories than we anticipated and Lisa I think is going to talk about that a little bit with the textiles which always seem to appear out of nowhere. And Lisa also mentioned that we had no plan for pest-related issues so maybe she's going to talk a little bit more about that. So if we found objects that were actively infested, we hadn't really thought about that in this particular case so if that happened then Lisa can maybe talk about what they did to remediate that problem. In terms of bottlenecks, this is what we thought could be a bottleneck so I think it's not necessarily designating an area for the unknowns but it's how many unknowns we have is to identify what the unknowns are like things that you're not sure if it's collection or non-collection and that did take a long time and that's why we did it the day before. So if we had waited for the workshop to do this it would have slowed down the progress incredibly so we just decided to do that before everyone got there. And so you just kind of adapt like that it's very normal for this to happen because once you spend more time in the space you start seeing more things that you perhaps didn't see before. Assembling the storage units we thought could take a long time and what we did to make sure that that wasn't a bottleneck is we assigned about six or eight people to that team so that we had a lot of people building storage units at the same time so they were all by the time all the collections were ready to go back into storage all the units had been assembled and then adapting the units for the framed works ended up not being really an issue at all and so we were really happy that that went very smoothly. Now I'm going to hand it over to Lisa and she can talk a little bit more about the process. Hello, hi, I'm Lisa Goldberg I'm a Private Objects Conservator and I'm the editor for AIC News and also for the Stash C website and I've been involved in the process from the beginning but this is my first chance to talk to all of you so I'm going to describe the process. On Sunday we all gathered and as Simon Apley went over we reviewed the scope of work and determined whether the mini projects were still viable and set up for the onsite day that included setting up work areas unpacking cartons of donated supplies and assigning various workspaces to various projects. As you saw, we identified collection and non-collection items. Simon, I just want to point out that Simon is standing in front of a shelving unit where we had been told that all of the items in that shelving unit, all of the textiles, were non-collection. But when they were actually unpacked, a number of flags were uncovered that were actually collection items. I think there were 40 small flags and we had to sort of fold them into the work process. And again, we tagged various areas so that volunteers would know what was meant to go where. The hallway, which Simon didn't mention, was set up as a temporary storage area and also an area for tools. Rachel and I brought any number of tools, labeled them and shared them for the project but we had basically two community tool areas and we had to share tools. Some of them went upstairs, some of them went downstairs and there were various times during the project where there was a lot of running up and down the steps to figure out, to retrieve tools. We set up one of the shelving units on the first day as a place to store extra things and also as a place to start putting collections as they were removed out of the room. And the sitting room area was set up for boxing textiles initially but we actually ended up using it for the flat textiles so that we could lay them out and you'll see we had two NILFIS vacuum cleaners with variable speed control that Rachel and I brought and used and various people used them during the day. We also had a big roll of batting, a roll of acid-free tissue, a carton of coroplast and a set number of corrugated cardboard boxes that we had designated for folded textiles and for flat textiles. The tent outside was set up to set up the shelving units and as Simon said, we also used it, it was raining that day but we were able to use it. I also want you to note the two doors to the basement area. That is the access for large scale furniture that was moved out of the storeroom down the hallway outside and back down through the stairway. I'll have a slide of that later. We started with orienting all of our volunteers. This included an introduction to the space by Simon, an introduction to the process and people divided into four teams and we used this flow chart to direct our activities or checklists actually to direct our activities and you can see that some of them are already checked off because these slides were taken halfway through the process and there you can see a team member checking off part of the list. The furniture was moved out by three guys who showed up actually earlier than everybody else and but we're working through the morning while we were there and as I said, they moved things out of these double doors down the hallway from the storeroom, out of these double doors and then back in through the basement. So it was a little tight moving, little involved and people just worked around each other. The team working in the storeroom started unpacking things and moving them out. Anything that was tagged obviously went onto shelving units in the hallway. I want you to notice the long rolled mural on top of the murals. There were two of them on top of the shelving unit and on top of that is a linen backed flag, linen backed not flag, linen backed paper map that had to receive special treatment later on and it took a fair amount of time to re-house. So these are just some more pictures of emptying out the storeroom and hand carrying objects out. We moved the steel metal shelving units out and down into the basement. As things were moved out, team members vacuum cleaned the units that remained in place on all interior surfaces and this is the room with the team and actually a few other teams. In the storage space as it was emptied out, team members working in the room once the objects were out, moved the furniture to the locations that Simon showed in his plan and the units that were stored on their side were lined on the bottom with ethyl foam. We had a roll of ethyl foam donated by Rachel Aronstein and her company. We had initially thought that we would use coroplast. I think we did, actually we used coroplast on the bottoms of these and then we didn't have enough coroplast. So any slots that had more than one frame in them were lined with ethyl foam sheeting so that the frames could be leaned against each other back to back or front to front, prevent damage. Let me also go back and mention that we moved the furniture up onto the top of a storage unit in that little niche that Simon had thought we couldn't use but we ended up being able to put one of the larger storage units on its side into that niche. As I mentioned, objects were moved out of the storeroom and were put onto temporary shelving which was basically the shelving that we assembled. And I should also note that we thought we were getting steel solid shelving and this was a donation from Home Depot. We ended up with these metro shelves. So one of the things that we had to do when we were changing course was use some of the coroplast that we had been given to make liners for these shelves. But I wanted to mention here that as things came out of the storeroom we sorted them by size and by group. So you'll notice all of the banker's boxes are on one shelving unit and on the top of that shelving unit there are smaller boxes that are all grouped together. These things were not together by size necessarily in the storeroom but sorting them by size as they came out of the storeroom helped us when we were ready to repopulate the storeroom. And we used every available space. This is actually the bathroom in the basement and we ended up or washroom we ended up storing the framed items in there temporarily and again we sorted them by size as much as we could as we went along. Outside there was a team assembling the shelving units in the rain and the cold and they later cut the liners for the shelves and meanwhile inside in the flat storage or rolled storage room the room that was meant for boxing garments that became a flat textile room. The team that was dealing with textiles had some discussions to sort of figure out what their strategy would be for using the set number of boxes that we had to sort and store and rehouse the ever-growing number of textiles that were uncovered as the process went along. So the large box behind the person in a black vest with me was full of flat textile slags that we had designated for rolling and for flat storage depending on the sizes we were given in advance. The box actually contained more textiles than we thought and was a perfect fit for a number pretty fragile textiles that seemed to be grouped by type. So we opted to keep those in the box to reuse that box which freed up some of the boxes that we had previously thought we were going to use for those textiles for us to be able to use for other purposes. Meanwhile back in the room the room was cleaned the storage furniture was set up and I want you to notice in this photo that we used one of the slotted units which we had set aside for fragile frames also for some of the trade items that we didn't have any other place for in the cabinets with doors and we decided to put the murals back in the same place the rolled murals back into the same place that they were in. They were rolled on fairly heavy sonotubes sonotubes are basically used for concrete and they're not acid free. We were concerned about the fragility of the paint layer and we didn't really feel that we had the time to appropriately care for these textiles if we were to unroll them. So you'll see in later slides we took them outside we wrapped them in cotton muslin and we tied them closed and the special storage container that was made for that large linen lined map sits on top of it. I also want to note that we used the corner the back corner in the corner of the slide to store the large box that you saw in the previous slide the large textile box. Here's just a picture of the furniture stored on top of the upturn unit that's meant for larger framed items so Susan will take off display. We also ended up creatively using the space under the furniture to store other items. You'll see that as we get further along. Once the room was clean we started setting up our storage units and populating them as we moved them in so we chose to put the textiles in boxes on top of the units the banker boxes on the bottoms and we used the shelves of varying heights for objects of different sizes. Because we did not have steel shelving units as we had hoped that we could screw together we ended up using zip ties to make sure that they remained attached to one another and here's that large textile being moved out we set up bumpers to prevent it from rolling once it was on a long table and it was rolled in in fabric as you saw and then it was carefully put back on top of the storage unit. You'll notice that there's a gap between the two units we didn't feel that there was anything we could really do about that there's a radiator down there that's what we did for now. Back to textiles we decided to layer the textiles in that oversized box with tissue paper in between them and to roll the ones that would not fit in the box flat. So here is a description I mean a depiction of discussions about rolling the textiles we also we also photographed each one as we layered them into the box to make sure that Susan has a record of the textiles that are in that box and she'll be able to use it later on. The right you'll notice that we tried we were putting initially thought we would put the rolled textiles into boxes with bumpers under the ends of the rolls. We did not anticipate nor find a good solution for how to hang or store our rolled textiles. Towards the end of the project we realized we had more clothing items than we had initially anticipated and the textiles were taken out of that box and we made a very quick sort of roll support out of two wooden boxes and carved epiphone which and that unit basically sits under one of the pieces of furniture in the storeroom. And here we are rolling the textiles with tissue paper as Simon mentioned we had not made a plan for what to do about active pest problems and one of the flags we came across that was folded this flag in particular had fairly fresh pest debris on it it was soft it was sticky. We chose to vacuum it and we sealed it in plastic and Rachel Aronstein took it back with her to put in the freezer small institutions here in the U.S. often don't have solutions for what to do in the situation of a pest emergency. This could be one if it's active we don't know when it was active we're assuming we didn't see anything live but it certainly seemed recent enough that we thought it better to take care at the moment. There were other objects that had problems and were set aside or received sort of on the spot treatment on the right is a metal that is obviously chewed and there are rat droppings in the corner of the box as you can see the object was vacuum cleaned and had a special little tray made. We made trays for I'd say 10 objects out of scraps of blue board that someone brought to the project with simple hot glue gun secured corners and those objects were then put inside of trays and put into the units. In the room where the textiles the garments were housed garments were padded out as appropriate with polyester batting and tissue paper. Sometimes we used Tyvek sheeting we had a roll of Tyvek sheeting and because we only had one roll of tissue paper we switched back and forth between what was used. Items that were stacked on top of each other like folded t-shirts were separated with Tyvek or tissue paper that was folded around them sort of like a phase box but made out of that material. Some of the items had mold on them and that was vacuum cleaned and this is just a demonstration of some of the care that these uniforms had. I will also say that in addition to the extra flag signal flags that we found in the box at the very end of the day we were handed some hangers with fairly heavy uniforms that we had for we knew we were supposed to get but we had forgotten to account for them and those uniforms were padded out and quickly stored into textile boxes we basically made room for them. Other items such as hats were padded with internal supports and the four volunteers who worked on the garments and the textile did an incredible job of sort of moving through the items that kept appearing on their plates or on their tables. Upstairs in the galleries we set up a space for dealing with the the rolled paper maps and plans as Simon said and each of these was mounted on a sheet of coroplast or foam core and each was wrapped in tissue paper. The item was then tied to the foam core or the coroplast with twill tape or just cotton strips and the platform the foam core or the coroplast served basically to protect the edges and prevent crushing and then they were placed on the shelves in the storage room in those very narrow slots that you saw in the upper parts of the unit. This project was time consuming and as Simon said we assigned more people to it as we went along. The large linen and paper map had no support so a decision was made to unroll it provide a foam support for it re-roll it and then to make a box for it and the volunteers who worked on this project basically because the map was longer than our longest sheet of coroplast had to cut and paste pieces of coroplast together to create a triangular enclosure that was closed with twill tape. Downstairs in the subbasement other volunteers were cleaning out shelving units and wiping down frames so that everything could be placed back in its new location clean and secure and outside we had a whole series of long skinny objects that took up a lot of space on shelves as Simon said and we didn't have enough space on the storage solution board that they came up with. So this volunteer Greg came up with a basically an egg carton or an egg crate solution that he made out of coroplast using a wooden repurposing a wooden box that was lined with polyethylene sheeting. It was really ingenious it worked quite well it fit into a corner of the storeroom perfectly and created a very nice high-density storage area a safe storage for some fairly fragile objects like umbrellas and canes with decorative tops and meanwhile also under the tent and the other volunteers on the same team were creating this basically tie board that would hang vertically in the storeroom. As you can see not all the furniture fit on the on top of the storage unit and those that didn't were given at the phone blocks if they were piled on top of each other and these are images of our final product looking down the two rows and you can see that no object is on the floor everything is neatly on the shelves neat and clean and every possible inch of the storeroom is used and I forgot to put the after-in but the middle photo is the after slide the before after and Simon and Rachel posing to show you how pleased we all were that we finished our objective we completely reorganized the storeroom in one day so here's a before and here's an after just to give you a sense of the dramatic change we made in the space another before and after another before and after and again you can see that the larger the textile boxes are on top of the units we use the next shelf down for the maps which are fairly lightweight and don't need much much height the middle area was used for objects of multiple heights in the bottom shelves were used for the banker boxes and Simon wanted to show you the I can jump in if you want yes go ahead okay so this is the before the reorg this is what the self-evaluation looked like and this is the improvement that we were able to make in the management and this is based on the evaluation done by Susan herself of before and after this is the improvement to the building and space components and the improvement to the collection so there's a small improvement there but larger in the other areas and the improvement in the furniture and small equipment area so this gives you an idea of how you can use the self-evaluation to show the improvement before and after a project which is useful for reporting and for you know justifying investing those resources into that project oh yeah so this is again before and after and Lisa sure this is us at the end of the day happy faces happy tire faces a list of all the volunteers including the three guys from the moving company who helped us and we'd also like to thank all of our sponsors and partners we received an incredible outpouring of of donations in the way of packing materials storage materials cash donations and supplies from the long list ahead and in addition not up there Susan provided us with lunches incredible lunches camaraderie and a really wonderful sense of of accomplishment so Susan and there we are having fun oops so let's go back to this slide here yep yeah okay so at this time I'd just like to ask I know that some people who are in this photo are listening online and so I'd like to ask those people to use the chat box just to tell us one thing that they take away from this experience one positive thing or one you know one of the challenges that they faced or something that they learned just to share with the other participants in this course your personal views on the course so while while those people are writing their comments in the in the chat box I was wondering if our host for the workshop Susan Tamjolevic would share her personal experience and what she found more challenging about the about the experience are beneficial just her kind of overall impressions of the of the one day reorg Susan all right well Susan I think is logged into the system but not on the phone so in the meantime we have a comment from Barbara who was there and she says one thing I learned don't give up it can be done with great can be done with great organizing skill so that's great and I'd like to jump in and answer the question about who were our volunteers volunteers were people who signed up for the for the Angels Project through AIC and I think almost half of the group is taking this course as well we had some people who are collections care professionals we had conservators we had textile conservators objects conservators paintings conservators pre-programmed people a wide wide range so typing things we'll just wait so those comments come in in answer to Maggie's question about nodding of swing space I will say that when we first arrived at the site Rachel Simon and I were worried about what we would use a swing space but we adapted the hallway to use for storage of objects as they came out of the storeroom we used the kitchen as one of our textiles workspaces and we basically cleared out any boxes chairs kitchen supplies and we set up for a workspace in the gallery museum was not open during the day when we worked and so some other participants and for other projects have closed off a gallery to act as a temporary swing space when they didn't have a room that they could use some people didn't have that and so what they did is they cleared a small area within their storage that they designated as a swing space and they would move from space to space and move their swing space around as things filled up and so they had a kind of a floating swing space so there was always a little square where things could go into and as those things then went somewhere else and that swing space would move into space so there's various options if you don't have a conference room or something like that that you can use as a temporary swing space we do have a comment from Rachel I had a few takeaways in addition to all the important ones mentioned by Lisa and Simon one people really want to help and will feel great about donating their time as long as you keep them working effectively and two you can never have too many utility knives or tape measures and Barbara says poor scissors I guess some people were looking for the scissors someone said gives me great hope I hope my stuff is in us I'm not alone okay so this is someone else who was in part of the workshop Elizabeth who was one of our co-coordinators who you see in the green sweater on the kind of left side of the image with the stripes we had some synergy with the map wrapping project and that was so very useful you think it should be done one way and then useful comments and input improved the process streamlined it and allowed it allowed us to cross the finish line so it's always as Elizabeth is important to be flexible and to adapt because everyone has something to contribute and Susan at the custom house who is writing in her comment here says there were so many good ideas I'm I find I'm ripping up other areas for the museum so apply your tactics that's great as a result things are still pretty hectic here perhaps even more so than when you left but I am confident I can apply your techniques to redo the kitchen storage shelves etc so that's great so if reward goes beyond collection storage and can be used for other non-collections there as well so that's great to see excellent people look excited to start their own reorg projects which is kind of the purpose here so we're we're happy that if you're you're feeling motivated by this example I just want to end the session now by going through you know we've done so many different reorg projects this was the first one that we did in the United States and but there were so many others in Canada and around the world in Belgium in Nigeria in China and so many countries and over the past six or seven years or eight years there have been things that are common to all those projects and things that kind of constantly emerge as lessons learned and so we kind of listed those some of these that for us seem to emerge from a lot of these projects so Marjanin from Belgium is on the phone with us today and so she wanted to share one with regards to reorg as a way of strengthening the museum's team. Okay, thank you Simon do you I suppose everybody can hear me now I dialed in I was following the whole presentation I want to congratulate everybody for the beautiful work you did in only one day it's giving me a lot of strength too and it's to connect it to your first lesson learned also after teaching national and international workshop on the reorg method and after coaching some Belgian museums in their reorg project I am still super excited to continue to do this because the the team building and the team spirit you create by working together and I don't know if everybody hears me yeah you hear me Simon everybody here okay I continue this is one of the main reasons why I am so excited about the method because at the same moment you are reorganizing you're working with collections but you are strengthening the team spirit you are creating teams in your museum in your in your own surrounding and you are strengthening capacity building in your museum but also networking and getting to know each other and learning from each other so you get out of the isolation and you get out of the ID that you will not manage to do a work like that so this is why the first lesson I am happy to to add a little information from my side this team building is it's also it's also a whole it's also the whole first phase of the method is dedicated to this to this part it's the creation of a team and so it's reflected in the whole in the whole method to why it is so important to strengthen your team and to work on that that was my I could not agree more thank you Masu um as our second lesson learned that we found and this actually comes to us from one of our participants is when you you are in doubt double the time so people find it very challenging sometimes to estimate how long a project will take estimating how long the project will take to implement and so what they what kind of comes up again and again in the feedback that we get from the people who have implemented these projects is whatever we thought it was going to take we should have doubled that because there's always unknowns when you're doing a reorg project and in fact if you looked at the case study that we did that we just showed you we ended up working two days instead of one so it's pretty much it's pretty much true so there was a lot of things that that you you kind of discover things along the way and and that you can't necessarily anticipate and so it's always good to double the time but then again whatever you think will be doubled and that has to be double anyways the point is there are a lot of unknowns and so you should allow for some buffer space in your timeline to accommodate possible delays due to unknown objects or issues surfacing so that's one thing to keep in mind one thing that has come up already today is the need to be flexible and adapt as needed because there are like we said many unknowns and different perspectives and people bring their experience and they they perhaps they perhaps have tried certain things before and so they know that things might work better in a different way so it's important to remain open and be flexible and adapt the plan you know you design this really nice chart and then it falls apart and that's fine and that's why then we move to a checklist which is more easy it's easier and more flexible and sometimes you're able as in the case where you see here on the image we use this project chart all the way to the end of the project and this is a three day project but here after the first day we move to a checklist because the chart didn't we found didn't meet our needs anymore so that's what we mean when we say be flexible and adapt you know this is a contentious issue a lot of people feel that they should be doing the inventory before Reorg we really found though that it's it's much easier to do the inventory once you have done your physical Reorg it's difficult to imagine in the in the case study that we just saw you know doing the inventory in that space when there are so many non-collection items and so many quote unquote mystery items that we don't know if they're collection and non-collection it's very very difficult in those conditions to do an inventory of course if you're starting from a situation where all those things are much more clear and you know that everything in there is collection and the collection is accessible well either you don't need a Reorg or you might be able to do some inventory beforehand but it's usually in most cases and I'd say 90% of cases the inventory is best done afterwards swing space is mandatory so even if you don't have a conference room or a training room or a board room or something that you can use temporarily as I mentioned and Lisa mentioned as well you can use spaces we were using all the hallways as swing space one thing to keep in mind is when you're emptying storage area where things are on shelves you need to have as much surface as you had and so in this case on the left is an example of the railway museum in Belgrade in Serbia where they had a huge gymnasium type space where they can lay all of the collection flat on the floor and create a grid to mirror the storage location that's really an exceptional case and that happens in you know one or two percent of cases don't usually have this luxury and so you do have to set up some temporary shelving units such as what we did at the custom house where you can store things temporarily on there before you bring them back into storage and what we did at the custom house and in this case here which is at the Colchester historian in Halifax, Nova Scotia is that we use the actual shelving units that we're going to be going back into storage as temporary shelving and so while when you are bringing things back into storage you need to you always have to empty a unit in order to bring a unit inside so there's that kind of coordination that needs to happen when things are being brought back in but it worked fairly well for our team and so it's totally doable lesson six which you've heard many times during this webinar series is to think in terms of categories not types so we're thinking about big stuff small stuff heavy stuff flat stuff rolled stuff not necessarily in terms of the object types so we need to think about volumes and lengths and storage requirements rather than object types and that helps us plan the storage solution that will ultimately work in the actually not there really and lesson seven is when in doubt fill the floor space so we did mention that a few times where sometimes people or for for various reasons it's not practical to measure to do a very detailed space analysis and so the best thing if you only have one room to play with basically you have to work within that room and so there aren't many things you can do and so the best thing you can do as we did in our case is to fill the floor space as much as possible with units making sure that it's it's still safe to move around with objects throughout the space so that's the one thing that needs to be respected is the safety of the collection and the other people and so we need to provide adequate circulation space but usually it's about 50% of the floor space that you can fill with units if they are fixed units so lesson six expect a never-ending supply of textiles because if you have if your institution has a mixed collection with some textiles in it it's absolutely I guarantee you will find a box of textiles or two or three or a bag with textiles in a corner that you did not see before so as as as you know the situation that we faced at the custom house we ended up with more textiles than we thought and so this always happens and so it's good to have an extra supply of boxes or rolls just in case there are more textiles than anticipated then lesson nine don't let museum standards limit your creativity but the only thing is that we want to make sure that it's safe for the collection so we're using a lot of non-standard non- museum conservation grade type materials but we want to make sure that the interaction between these materials and the collection does not cause deterioration or any problems for the collection and so it's okay to use materials as long as they're safe and so there are resources in reorg where you can go through the different types of plastics or wood based products or paper products that has problems when they interact with collections and so it's you know you can use things as long as that's the whole point of your your making improvements on how the situation was in the first place and so you are not aiming for perfection we're aiming for better access to collections and optimized preventive conservation that it's not ever perfection so even the people and the museums and the institutions who say who you would think have ideal and perfect storage always have something to say about their their storage solutions so there's no there's no such thing as perfection but what we can do is try to make sure that our collections are safe and then as the final word I'd like to leave I'd like to pass over to Marjo who has a few other lessons learned that she'd like to show with us okay thank you Simon I just want to say I had a last a last tip or last lesson for all those people who are who did the webinar or followed the webinar and who are now keen on starting to work on on their own storage I would propose you to start small from the very start try to start small to gain confidence and don't see it too big because it's something you have to learn where are the bottlenecks and where are the problems and as soon as you as it's clear which storage or part of the storage of your own storage you are going to reorganize I would propose to double check your plan or to even redo the plan the plan one and two you know the plan one of the building and with the fixtures and to double check it and measure and re-measure because most of the time the plans that you get from the architects or some plans that you have in your possession are not completely right and so sometimes you can lose some time with this but start small and I hope I don't have the last word it should be Simon because you did most of the work and again congratulations and good luck to everybody bye bye thank you Marjou so this is brings us to the end of this this course I want to thank everyone for their participation I want to thank SAIC's Connecting to Collections care program I want to thank the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage Kikirpa one of our partners IKROM STASH the Science Museum of Minnesota and the course would like to thank CCI as well for developing this course along with all our partners I really wish you all of the really successful Reorg project and I hope that you will share your results on the Reorg International Facebook page we do have a final assignment for the people who are going for the badge but also the ones who are not doing the badge but are kind of perhaps following along with some of the assignments the last assignment for next week which says here June 12th but I think Susan said that you could the final final final final deadline for everything to be handed in is June 15th and it's it's a very simple assignment this week basically we're asking you to think about some of the details about your project so such as the timeline who you're going to involve and we're also asking you to list just three things that you can do in your space with a minimal minimal investment so assuming you know that let's say you can't get any funding for your project what are three things that you can do in your space to improve the conditions with minimal investment so that's the first part and then the second part of this really really short course evaluation to help us improve this course if we are going to be offering it again so there's just six short questions that we would like you to answer and that would be very very helpful for us and it going forward so that's it for me so I would like to thank everyone for your attention and we'll be answering questions I guess now okay I'm I'm gonna step in here there's there's an evaluation link up here that's for connecting to collections care so if you could do that please in the final assignment there are two things they're posted in the assignment when it gets to be maybe next Monday I'll check the number of assignments and if I see that there are people that are probably going for a badge but are behind I'll send you email and thank you Simon and Lisa and Rachel and Margella and Jose Luis for doing all this this is great on I will start the questions now Lindsay Ogles said I'm in this is but was the building open to the public during this process yeah so the museum was closed on that day where we did the reorg and so we didn't have any visitors as we were actually occupying one of the exhibition exhibition areas with the map rolling station and so now the building the museum was closed to the public okay I think we went over who the volunteers were but Jenny Eris says were there other museum people or people from the community that were involved other museum people while the volunteers some of them were museum people some of them were conservators who were attending who were attending the AIC conference people from the community I don't believe there were Lisa am I correct in assuming words I think that's right well there were the movers yeah the movers that were part of the project yeah so Lindsay Ogles says again if you use members from the public do you have recommendations for training before they come before they come into contact with collections so Rachel actually said something about this earlier she says it was also worth mentioning that a good percentage of our group was we're pretty sorry we're pre-program pre-program and there was a bonus husband volunteer so you can do this with smart motivated people and they don't need to be conservators so that's a good point I would you know everyone that participated in the workshop were was added so they they did kind of have to send their CV so we looked at those before just to make sure you know we weren't just taking people off the street and I don't really recommend that either you know if you can use volunteers that you're familiar with that work with your institution already I think that's better than just taking random people from the public unless you know that they have collections experience and that's been a thing that some course participants some some of our some of our participants in Canada here have said that when they involved people like volunteers new volunteers they had underestimated the amount of training they would have to do just object handling mostly because they might not have that sensitivity if they've never worked with a collection so they did that the training piece ended up being a little bit more expensive than they had imagined and so I would just keep that in mind in terms of who you're involving and mostly the you know the training that would be required is mostly sitting down with the team beforehand before you start and and going over some of the basic principles of object handling that that has been useful in some cases and it doesn't have to be you know a very theoretical PowerPoint type lecture but you should have people in your team that already is familiar with some of those principles like one object two hands and all those kinds of things so you know there how we've done it in the past is just kind of ask the team before we start so what are some some of the things that we need to keep in mind before we start when we're handling objects and then usually all of those things come out from the group and then if there's things that people have forgotten don't forget about this don't forget about this you know all of the health and safety personal protective equipment also making people aware that it's there if there's dust masks gloves and all that like showing them where things are yeah I think that's Simon can I sort of break in here I want everyone to know that you will have access to the to the education website for a year and so I think Simon's going to be posting some things in the discussion and if you have questions you can post them there I'll keep an eye on them I'll make sure that things get answered if you post them there and just remember to get everything done Rachel also says the baseline of what we wanted to accomplish could have been done with non-trained volunteers She also said you need to do more planning in advance can I can I also break in please this is Lisa yeah there are in terms of the question of involving volunteers there are many many models for involving volunteers in collections based projects and yes you can be more efficient and organized and come up with even better solutions by having people who have experience but many institutions who have volunteers who come on a regular basis like one day a week or have been involved in other projects or who are students at a university and may be taking a class can definitely be involved if you're doing the reorg project that has taken a more significant amount of time in planning than ours did because ours was a case study then you will have time to to figure out how and where your volunteer core could be effective and helpful so that's all I have to say I can see the time is up now so I just like to take this moment to thank you Susan Barger for helping us coordinate this course it's been really great working with you and I'd also like to thank Mike from Learning Times for all the technical support and his patience throughout this process so thank you very much for making this course really easy for us to do well thank you that's my job there's a question then I think we'll quit people want to have the directions for making the egg the egg crate for the umbrellas so I hope we can do that and then Sagita asked how did you raise the wooden storage off the floor to prevent damage from floods so the units were directly on the floor a lot of them had already were already raised from the floor there wasn't any there weren't any sources of water in that space and it was not the basement basement there was a subbasement so we weren't really worried about like large quantities of water accumulating in that space so for the time being the storage units were used as they were before directly on the floor and any items that ended up being my collection items that were close to the ground were elevated using either I think FFOM blocks so that's how we dealt with that yeah you can always use tin cans yep they work really well okay so I think that we've answered all the questions and so remember that the final assignment needs to be done by the 15th and that means that you have 12 things you have to listen to all the webinars at six and done the assignments at six um probably the beginning of next week I'll let people know who were who look like they're going for a badge because it looks like we have 40 or 50 people going for a badge but um some of you are lacking one thing I will let you know and and you have access to the the the course website for a year so keep that in mind you won't get a lot of feedback but it will be there so thank you Simon and everyone we'll sign off for now and that's it okay bye bye