 Sure, thank you so much, Mike. And thank you all so much for joining us. It's so exciting to see. We have about 180 people on to this webinar, and it looks like from all over the place. So thank you so much for joining us. Before we get into our topic, we have a great one scheduled for today. I just want to do a quick introduction to the online community for those who might be joining us for the first time, although I recognize a lot of the names. So the Connecting to Collections online community was originally created in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It is moderated by Heritage Preservation and Learning Times produces both our website and webinars. The goal of the online community has always been to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and to network with their colleagues like you're doing right now. And to help you do that, we've compiled an extensive list of resources. They're broken up by topic on the online community. You'll see those resources under, of course, the topics menu at the top of the page. We also have a recording of all of these webinars, including today's, can be found under webinar archives again on the top of the page. So today I am so pleased to welcome our speaker, Rachel Perkins-Arne Stein. Rachel is a professional associate member of the American Institute for Conservation. And she has over 15 years of museum and conservation experience, including work at the Smithsonian, the Peabody Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum Art. She's had a private practice for the past four years, and is the co-founder of AM Art Conservation LLC. She's also been a very long supporter of the online community, and you'll find her on other webinars, and she has another one coming up this year. So we so appreciate her help. Now, Rachel, I know you had two questions you wanted to ask the audience right off the bat. And so I'm going to pull those over. And our first question, it's a little out of order. But because it's open-ended, I wanted to give you some time to fill it out. So feel free to type in here. If you had the resources, the first collection that you would re-house is fill in the blank. In our second question, let me pull this out. What is the greatest barrier to improving storage at your institution? You're not sure what to do. You're not sure how to do it. There's no money and materials. There's no staff. Feel free to fill that in. I'll give you some time to enter in information there. It looks like there's a ton of different collections. I know I'm seeing this girl through, and it's really, really varied. So I have to admit, as an object conservator, by training, a lot of my photographs here have sort of an object, archaeological, and textile bent to them. But ultimately, the resources that we're talking about, I think the whole point of what I hope will come across today is that a lot of things sort of cut across the various disciplines, how we see our collections. And so you can really get good ideas from anywhere. So OK, so it's interesting. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Rachel. I was going to say it's interesting that for the second poll, that no money for materials is really the big winner. Well, I'm going to go ahead and pull this off. Feel free to, if you want to add more into the chat box, feel free to. And throughout the webinar, if you have questions, go ahead and put them in that chat box, and I'll hold on to them as soon as we have a break or a pause, or by the end of the presentation, we'll make sure to get to them. So Rachel, I'm going to pull over your PowerPoint and hand things over to you. OK, terrific. So good afternoon, everyone. As Denny mentioned, today we're going to be discussing storage. I think this is a topic that the Connecting to Collections Online community has covered before, but it's so broad that it's almost problematic of how to approach the topic in a one-hour webinar. My partner recently did four-hour, four webinars of one hour. And it was a stretch to sort of jam it into that. But what I'm going to do today is just sort of focus on the approach that we're taking to storage in a new resource that I hope you guys will find helpful. But before we do that, I just wanted to just underscore the challenge that the vast majority of institutions face in following best practices for storage. There's 132 of you on the line now. And I think it will not come as a surprise that adequately sized and appropriate storage spaces is a huge issue. What you're looking at here are some graphs from the 2004 Heritage Health Index, which was published by Heritage Preservation in 2005. And this was the first comprehensive survey to assess the condition and preservation needs of US collections. And if you haven't looked this over, I highly recommend you go to the Heritage Preservation website and look at either the in-depth analysis or their really readable summary. And also, I'm sure Jenny can put a plug-in at some point for the now it's 10 years on, and Heritage Preservation has started to gear up for their follow-up. And hopefully, we'll see what has happened in the last 10 years. But what we're seeing on the slide is that the Heritage Health Index found that 59% of cultural institutions report that the majority of their collections are stored in areas too small to accommodate them safely and appropriately. Unfortunately, as we strive to maximize limited space, we often end up storing artifacts in less than ideal conditions. So there's other things that came out of the survey. 26% of collecting institutions responded that they have no environmental controls. 53 reported damage from moisture, 59 from light. Damage is more likely to happen to objects and storage than those on display because the majority of our collections are in storage. So taking all these factors into account, Heritage Health Index survey found that only 11% of all institutions really considered that they had adequate storage facilities. So you are not alone. Worldwide, the collection storage situation is even more dire. In 2007, UNESCO forged a three-year partnership with ICROM for the preventive conservation of endangered museum collections in developing countries. And the focus of this partnership was on the documentation of collections and access to storage in museums. The results of this worldwide study on the securities museum collections in 136 countries show that 25% of museum storage areas were so overfilled that one cannot get from one end of the room to the other. One in three museums, it's not clear exactly who's responsible for the storage area. And in one in 10 museums, thefts are reported as a major problem. So these numbers are pretty alarming. And again, 90%, I think the statistic is that 90% of our collections sort of live in storage rather than on display. So some of these pictures would look familiar to you. A lot of you may have something that looks like this in the upper left. I think we'd all love to have storage that looks like this in the bottom left. But what I'm hoping that you'll take away from today's presentation is that just starting somewhere and working towards small incremental improvements is a big deal, and it helped. So I can pick out at least five things in the picture on the right that are not ideal, but it's an improvement over the situation on the left. So taking a bite out of this problem and working away fully is really just what you need to start doing. So before we get into specifics, I want to think big for a few minutes. I hope that most of you are familiar with CCI, the Canadian Conservation Institute, perhaps from their very clear and helpful CCI notes, which are a great reference for tackling particular storage issues. And they are available for free on the CCI website. CCI has long promoted a holistic approach to preventive conservation and has outlined agents of deterioration that affect museums and archives. And the goal for museum storage should be to improve how well you protect your collections from these risk factors. And the risk factors can be broken down into four general categories over which custodians have varying degrees of control. So category one is the environmental agents listed up in the upper left, so incorrect or unstable temperature and relative humidity, light levels, particulates and gaseous pollutants. Category two is biological agents, such as insects, mammals, small mammals, and mold and fungi. The third risk at the lower left is human factors, so things that result from human error, like fire, theft, vandalism, disassociation, et cetera. And the fourth and final category is natural disasters. So while we have the least control over that, even how we house and store our collections has a major effect on how quickly or well we can recover from these kinds of disasters. This is definitely seen in places like emergencies like Sandy. So protecting our collection starts from the outside in. Their collections will benefit from a multi-layered collection storage system, one that adds a series of enclosures to buffer the objects from the agents of deterioration, serving to mitigate room conditions that are less than ideal. And we all have room conditions that are less than ideal. The more layers you can employ, the better the protection. Different component materials and storage setups will require varying degrees of protection, but all artifacts will benefit from this kind of PLC. Even if your building is a historic home lacking climate control, you can still work on some of the inner boxes here. This diagram comes from the National Park Service Museum Handbook, chapter seven, and that's also an excellent resource for some issues having to do with recapping. So when you employ a multi-layered approach, you can make modifications at the building level, the room level, the shelf or drawer level, and the object level, according to your specific collections, preservation, and protection needs. I'm dead there. So just to sort of give some specifics to this, a building level improvement could include repairs or structural upgrades to the building on slope and environmental systems. Routine building inspection and maintenance is a low-tech example of preventive care that can benefit collections. Examples of a room level storage improvement would include the use of dehumidification, something like portable units, light filtering films, ceiling gaps or holes that might allow pets to enter the space or improving your housekeeping. A drawer shelf level modification could be adding foam dividers to prevent contact and abrasion between objects when the drawer is opened. And object level interventions include adding a custom insert for a pair of beaded leather moccasins or creating a microclimate corrosion intercept bag with silica gel for metal tools in poor condition. One idea to remember is that if you are, as was clearly demonstrated in the poll, worried about the cost of materials, the material in direct contact with the object or with the artifact is the one that should be the most stable. So if you're using something like tissue or foam, that's the one in contact with the object. That should be the highest quality material. And then if you need to use a lesser quality box, that's the reality of the world we live in. So what I'm going to do with the rest of the presentation is sort of talk about some tips and things to think about according to these, the levels of those boxes that you saw. And then also link them up with some of the resources that are out there. So hopefully most of you are familiar with the conservation assessment program, that heritage preservation runs in cooperation with the Institute for Museum and Library Services. And if you're housed in a structure more than 50 years old, you will qualify for a buildings assessment, which will help you with some of these top-level issues. So the kinds of things that really are issues with your building and the facility itself and its systems would be covered by a building cap and probably by the collection successor to some degree as well. For room-level resources, I wanted to make sure that you all know about this other site. This site called ReOrg is a significant result of the recent UNESCO and APROM partnership that I mentioned a few minutes ago. It's just both an online resource and a community, just like connecting to collections. And ReOrg has a useful self-evaluation tool for museum storage that you can download as a PDF. And this focuses on your overall storage organization so at the room level. They estimate that the self-assessment will require one to three hours to complete. And it should be useful for identifying your storage issues and demonstrating needs for grant funding if you have re-housing or other projects in mind. About a year or two ago, I worked with a client up in Canada who had used the survey tool here to justify a grant request that she was successful in receiving. Upon completion of the assessment, the tool gives you a grade for your storage and suggestions for next steps. One thing to remember is when you're doing the assessment to consider all of your current storage locations your institution is using. That includes any off-site storage or mixed-use areas. For example, the administrative or office areas that due to overflow may have become de facto storage or temporary storage areas for you. So the research that I'm really going to plug today though is a brand new site and it is called STASH which is an acronym for Storage Techniques for Art, Science and History Collections. The URL is stashc.com. If you forget to see you'll wind up with a whole variety of other interesting kinds of sites so stashc.com. So unlike ReOrg which really focuses at the sort of higher level organization of storage, stash is really aimed at the sort of object level although we do have some bigger stuff going on as well. And I'm gonna sort of give you a quick sort of tour through the site. Stash is free and it was really just launched last week so it's very much a work in progress and I hope this isn't in some ways premature but hopefully when you guys all start to visit the site, I'm hoping also some of the more experienced people whose names I recognize and are seeing in the roster here will actually have examples that they can load up and share on the site. This site was created by the Foundation for the American Institute for Conservation or FAIC with a grant from the Crest Foundation and we are very grateful for their help. Okay, so stash is created to create a community really focused on sharing storage solutions across disciplines. It's the core of it and what if you go to the site now you're going to see our articles from the 1992 book published by the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections affectionately called Spinach. And the book was called Storage of Natural History Collections, Ideas and Practical Solutions. This book has been a key resource for the field and University products which is its vendor still has some copies but it is soon gonna be out of print and it was also thought to be a bit dated. So rather than reprint the book or reprint it even with updates we thought that this website would not only allow people to share solutions but also to communicate with each other and sort of share how they've used or modified some of the solutions on the site and discuss these things in detail. So when you go to the site you'll see that there's if you click in the solutions section there it will bring up this long menu and rather than organize the site by sort of media so you know works on paper, paintings, decorative arts, furniture it's really organized by storage type and the goal there is to get people to sort of transfer goods ideas from one discipline to another and hopefully during the rest of this presentation you'll start to see what I mean. But the organization of the site goes from room and structures down to storage furniture and then containers, supports, we have a section on covers and labels and then as you enter the next section you get sort of the next breakdown and each page, each sort of landing page gives you a little bit of information on that storage type and then you can access the article. Again what you're seeing now are all the articles from the 1992 Spinach publication but we already have a couple of things in the queue. The recent AIC meetings had a whole stash session so those materials will be going up and two years ago the Spinach meeting at Yale had a whole poster session so we have about another 20 presentations from there that will soon go up. And so when you go to click on one of the articles here, the blue links, it will take you to the full text and each article basically is formatted in the same way. There's sort of a purpose or an abstract of what the storage solution was developed for and the special considerations or constraints. A complete description of the storage solution with accompanying diagrams and images. It will have a listing of all the materials, tools and supplies that were used. There should be step-by-step construction techniques and tips and then sort of a general comment section at the end with other helpful hints. And the landing pages, these pages here, it's not quite visible in the right place yet but there will be a comments box here and this is where we hope people will start sharing. Oh well, I tried this but here's how I modified it. Okay, so when we talk about practical storage tips, what are we really talking about? Unfortunately, practical storage tips don't necessarily mean cheap, quick or convenient but what we're really focusing in on is that this isn't rocket science. Practical storage solutions can be readily implemented by staff or volunteers with some training but they don't require major changes to the building systems or to your structure. No matter what, we all have a lot of stuff and so you're still going to have to prioritize. With a limited collections care budget, you still have to think about assessing the risk for your collections and tackling your most valuable or your most in need stuff first and that was what our first question sort of was getting at. Okay, well, this is a picture of the storage, the purpose-built storage space for the National Museum in American Indian. Not everybody can do this but hopefully we can talk about some other more sort of realistic options. But here's storage furniture on the stash site includes information and ultimately will include hopefully solutions for cabinets, shelving units, racking systems, carts and crates. Again, some of these are new areas for the site that were not covered in the book so if you go there and see that there's nothing yet on a particular system, I hope you'll check back again on seeing because stuff will be going up all the time. So let's talk about what may be realistic. People sort of often ask me and my partner what can they sort of go out and buy locally and so we did a bit of research about what you can find sort of at your local big box hardware store such as Home Depot or the container store, my personal favorite. This is a photo from one of the aisles that sometimes shopping online is actually better at least at first because you can get exact measurements and information on the materials used. If you're looking at sort of cabinet and shelving solutions, what you want to be looking for is powder-coated steel. You want a heavy-duty product that are all steel and not say, oh, somehow my symbols got changed here. This is supposed to be the green, that's supposed to be check marks and the red here is supposed to be an X. So what you're seeing here on the right is powder-coated steel but it has some sort of like composite board which is less than ideal. This middle solution and the one on the left are fully powder-coated and also can withstand heavy weights that wind up being placed on these shelves. There's also another solution, anodized aluminum. It's also not reactive. It doesn't require a coating although it tends to be more expensive. And then the other solution that we see commonly employed is chrome-plated steel shelving. Again, here are little symbols dropped out that the chrome-plated steel shelving can be purchased at places like Home Depot but the metro shelving that you can find online or in the container store is a slightly heavier gauge. So depending what you're going to be putting on that, that's something that you'd want to check. The solution is lightweight. It's open and it allows for air circulation and also light can pass through shelves to provide some better visibility. The cons for this stuff is that it's good for box material but objects can't be placed on it directly. And also while you can use it on wheels which is great in certain circumstances, you must have locking casters otherwise things can go flying around. So what you're seeing on the left is some really good example of the use of this kind of shelving things that are boxed or are on pallets. On the right, some less appropriate uses. Here, this is a painting resting directly on the shelves. If something falls off, it's going to fall down to shelves underneath where it may or may not ever be discovered and seen here on the right. This is sort of a better example of the use of similar kinds of shelving. This is also shelving from the container store but you can see that there's some sort of shelf line or pallet that allows this to be used safely. For storage furniture, if you're talking about gasketed cabinetry, this is a trickier area and I don't recommend trying to save money here. You're better off not having a sealed cabinet at all than placing sensitive materials in a closed cabinet which off gases. So if incorrect material has been used in a cabinet, it can provide a microclimate that becomes concentrated with harmful acids or volatile organic compounds called VOCs and these will damage the artifacts that you're trying to protect. So the museum vendors, the museum approved cabinetry is the way to go for this kind of thing but that said, if your institution has this sort of all purpose metal cabinetry that you're seeing at the last and if you're unsure of its origin or suspected safety in terms of gasketing or sealing, you can use archival boxes and bags to protect materials inside from the harmful agents or you can choose to store less vulnerable materials such as decorative arts materials made from stone, ceramics, or glass in these cabinets. So here we're gonna move into some wrapping. These are images from CSI system and this is sort of the high tech that everybody would love to have. There's all sorts of different options for this. But what's interesting is that while most people have seen these kinds of things for painting, things can also be adapted for textiles. So you see the same kind of wrapping solution here where the bars are used to support the textiles. Here on the left is actually a nice example of what was done with the textile storage at the National Museum of the American Indian. It's hard to see but there's actually a roll of clear mylar covering the textile and then they have a print out from their database under the tie there so that you don't actually have to unwrap the textile to see what, if you've got the right one. So if those kinds of racking systems are a little bit out of your reach, there's other kinds of things that, some of which you can build yourself or can be purchased in sort of modular sections like these powder coated steel painting storage bins that are sold in increments and can be adjusted. Again, we jumped as far as, this is someone's adaptation of that technique but with rods instead. And here you can see some sort of home made solutions here. Now these though I think would be very simple to upgrade but we saw in this one site the set they were using carpeting to pad out the bottoms here and we suggested that they switch out the carpeting that can be an attractant for pests with some museum quality foam and rather than using this kind of a stick cardboard interleaving between the paintings with acid free board. So if you don't have the money to spend on the shelving, spend the money on the material in contact with your objects, the interleaving and the foam support. So other kinds of solutions that we can see at the sort of racking cabinet level are these wall mounted racks. So here you're seeing them used for paintings using the S hooks to attach. But these kinds of systems can also be used. This is a, we thought a creative one for some rolled items where you've got this S of foam blocker here and this can either run all the way through the tube or in this case it just unhooks when you need to get the tube off. So again, some of these systems can be used for different kinds of collections. Here we're back to these kinds of metro shelving carts. This is used for textile collections and you can see some nice covers here. They're all on some sort of support or pallet. Okay, before we get into now sort of more objects level solutions, I just wanted to go over a little bit of the kinds of tools that you might find useful and just sort of talk for a second about rehousing in general. Rehousing is improving storage conditions by identifying items that are stored in inappropriate material either on archival or not sufficiently supportive for the object and providing a safe and stable storage mount or space. This is an activity that with a bit of training can be done by a lot of staff or volunteers. Let's face it, there are some people who just are not good with their hands and if you want to identify them and maybe this is not the task for them. But there are a lot of people who can work on this given a little bit of training. If you have the ability, you might have a consulting conservator or collection manager who's experienced with this help get you started on a rehousing project, you know, bring them in for a day's worth of training or, you know, a day and a half, a day to get you started and like a half day once you've been working for a while and have questions. Conservatives strive to design mounts that will enhance artifact safety and minimize unnecessary handling and promote good handling of objects. So for example, one of the things that when you really think about it, you want to leave space for your fingers or hands of, you know, how you take something out of a box or a tray. So what you're looking at here are some useful tools and equipment for rehousing. At the upper left you have a heat sealer that can be used to make custom bags from polyethylene sheeting or films such as Marvel Seal, which is what you see here in Tyvek. At the upper right is a hot melt glue gun and then we have a bunch of other implements. You're like the box cutter for blue board, shark scissors, a spatula of bone folders and some twill tape. So let's talk now about materials. So as I mentioned before, I'd encourage you at least to the material in direct contact with your items to use conservation-approved materials for storage. Archival paper and board should be acid-free and lamin-free. If you're unsure about a paper product you already have, you can purchase a pH testing pen like you see in the bottom right corner here from an archival supply company. Boards will often have been buffered but they lose this property as they age. And for tissue paper we recommend when in doubt sticking with unbuffered tissue because it's better for more kinds of materials. The specific storage solutions I'm going to start showing are made from a variety of foam and synthetic film, papers and boards, as well as things like the cotton twill tapes and hot melt glue. The conservation grade archival storage materials are more expensive than other possible foams and wraps and fabrics but you can't be fooled by the look-alikes. The ones that are generally used have been tested and approved for use in conservation labs. Materials aren't developed solely for use in museum storage so we're constantly looking for other stable materials that can be adapted for use. And at the recent AIC conference there was a lot of focus on renewable and recycled materials and some recent testing has shown that a wider variety of these than previously thought may be appropriate for use. And that kind of information we hope to have up on the stash site as we get to more information about them. The other thing that people ask a lot is why do conservators like white? Why do we want all this white stuff in storage? And we generally do this because these materials are free of dyes. Natural colors are sort of like the unbleached muslin, that kind of stuff is good too. Also, white allows us to easily detect staining, flaking or leaf bits or insect activity such as brass or insect excrement. And this helps alert attentive collections care staff to new problems should they arise. So just very quickly to show you how is it that conservators wind up testing this material. We use something called the Audi test. This test is not perfect but it's one of the general ways that we subject a sample of the material with under heat and moisture for a period of a month. So you're basically doing an artificial aging test. And in with the sample are metal coupons of copper, silver and lead. And each of these reacts to a different kind of material or gas. And so this is the control above that would have come out after a month in the oven. And what you're seeing below is a test that failed and completely corroded away the lead coupon. So this would be a material that would not be appropriate for use in storage. Oh, did I skip something again here? So yeah, so just to let you know that the STASH site has a material supplies and tools list and you can jump to entries quickly by the alphabetical listing. So anything that is mentioned in an article will be mentioned here. What we're hoping over time is that some of the preservation suppliers will help sponsor the site and will also include links that will make it easy for you to find exactly the product and purchase that should you be interested. But right now what you'll see are the things that are mentioned in the original publications. And we're working our way through and updating these as right now. So let's just do a quick tour of some of the materials that you'll see mentioned on STASH and in these other slides. This polyethylene foam comes in a number of different forms and thicknesses. Some are cross-linked, some are closed-celled, some are open-celled. And that's going to affect the finish if they're soft to the touch or if they're a little bit rougher and how easy it is to cut them. So what you're seeing here in these various boxes are sheet forms of epiphone and sort of thicker pieces and larger blocks. So this is used for padding and for carving out. One of our favorite materials is triangular backer rod foam. That's what you're looking at in cross-section here. It comes in different, sort of I'm wrong to say diameter because it's triangular. And here, what you're also seeing is other forms of, clicking on the wrong thing, of the round backer rod. So here in the upper right you're seeing someone making a very quick pot ring using twill tape, cutting the backer rod in half like a hot dog and serving the twill tape and tying it together. So these create some really great shortcuts for quick support. We're also a big fan of Teflon tape. This is the theme stuff that your plumber uses to fix your profit. It comes in a variety of widths and thicknesses, everything from thread to your hardware store. And this now, the thicker kinds are being called, sold now by some of the preservation vendors. I think they call it very often, things like artifact wrap. And it sticks to itself rather than to the object and it's great for securing specimens to mounts or securing loose elements to themselves. And again, we like the white rather than some of the colored versions. This is Marvel Seal. Marvel Seal is a barrier film. It's composed of laminated nylon, aluminum, and polyethylene. And it's used for bags and linings. It's also used as a vapor barrier to prevent the transmission of water vapor or atmospheric pollutants. It bonds to itself so a heat sealer can be used to form an airtight seal. And so if you have metals that need a really low RH storage, you can create bags with something like silica gel inside. It can be used to line inferior materials, so acidic tubes can be wrapped with Marvel Seal. And so if you don't have money to buy an acid-free tube, you might invest your money in a big roll with Marvel Seal and use that. Tyvek is a material that you know probably from driving by a construction site where you'll see it. They'll say, you know, Dupont Tyvek house wrap. Also UPS or USPS envelopes are also Tyvek. And it comes in sort of thick and thin. For rehousing, we like this, what's called the thin or soft wrap. And very often we will wash it in a washing machine on a cold water setting. You don't even need to use any kind of detergent. You can, you know, just wash it and it comes out really, really soft. When I air dry it, don't put it in the dryer. And Tyvek is extremely versatile for object mounts. It can be sewn, it can be heat-sealed, or what you're seeing. So here's an example of bags that are being created to heat-seal it together. What you're seeing down here is it's being used to create a really soft support where it's literally just tucked in. There was a slot on the sides of the epiphone and the Tyvek is just tucked in. Here it's being used as a liner for this very fragile basketry. Again, stumped ahead. Here we're using Tyvek to create these little pillows and they're being stuffed out with polyester batting. And we prefer polyester batting to things like cotton wool or cotton batting or things like that because it is not yummy to pest. Okay, for plastics, we want to avoid plastics with additives like plasticizers or fillers, again, because of off-gassing. The safer plastic choices for containers include polyethylene, low-density, which is the LVPE or polyethylene PET, or polypropylene PP, and also acrylic. Acrylic is a much more brittle plastic, so acrylic boxes usually will not have the snap-on pops, which makes them a little bit less versatile. We have core plastic. And here what you're seeing are some, like, pre-made boards and then acid-free corrugated boards, which come in a variety of corrugations and thicknesses, depending on the weight. And our favorite is the hot melt glue. You just need to know what it is that you're gluing together. And so low-temperature glue is appropriate for the paperboards and phones, but if you're using something like core plastic, you need to be using the hot melt glue. And this is something that you just need to be very careful for yourself or for your staff, because the majority of entries in rehousing come from inappropriate use of box cutters and even more minor burns from the hot melt glue. Okay. So the next session of the stash site are containers, which would include various kinds of enclosures, bags, boxes, drawers, and what I'm going to do here is run through some of the kinds of things that hopefully you're going to start seeing coming through on the stash website. So this is a collection of silver spoons, and they're all bagged, which was an improvement over their first storage. But if they did something like what you're seeing here on the right, where there's a bit of volara, one of the polyethylene foams, they also had a spot in here for their barcode. This bag allowed them the stiffness to be organized a little bit better. For boxes, what we're mostly talking about is something with a lid. The advantage to the boxes is that it can provide a more protective microclimate. And when necessary, you can use layered trays inside, which can allow you to increase object density. This section of the site will also include trays. So a tray is obviously like a box with lower sides and without the lid. And what you're looking at here is a coroplast tray, and all of these little bumpers were made out of the trirod. So this took only a couple of minutes, because really all you were doing is slicing and gluing down the pieces of trirod. Here's a few other examples of trays used for the trirod. This one has Tyvek liners, which allowed for easier and safer handling of these very fragile bone implements. Other ways to outfit trays or, in this case, boxes includes use of the trirod bumpers, so you don't need to support the whole object. You don't need a lot of tissue surrounding and obscuring your pieces. A few appropriately placed bumpers to sort of lock your piece in, so it's not going anywhere is sufficient. The next section of the site focuses on supports. So supports includes things like pallets, tubes, rigid supports, malleable supports, mannequins, hangers, and taxidermy, which is its own sort of special section of supports. So, you know, a pallet is basically like a flat sheet or a stiff board and can be the foundation for securing an object. In this case, you've got sort of twill ties securing these necklaces down. Here, these are pallets placed inside of boxes, and you can see the corners have been cut out to allow for the easy placement of your fingers to lift or pull the pallet out. This is a drop-front box. But this arrow is pointing to is the use of the backer rod to prevent creasing of the textiles on these puppets. See? Also, you're seeing the twill tape ties down here. Tubes is considered an internal support while we saw some things for hanging tubes. Here, we're looking at ways where you can have the block support and even with this sort of creative adaptation of a cavity mount begin to stack things. Here, it allows you to place them in drawers, orange elves. We have, again, more malleable supports. We have things like these Tyvek pillows. Instead of stuffing out things with tissue where you're sort of constantly grasping inside and handling things, just these two-part pillows as an internal support were sort of a safer solution. Another example of some malleable supports was bean bags. These are made by heat sealing the Tyvek and filling them with polypropylene beads like you would for little bean bags. These can be found in any hobby store. So they can be used to support sort of regular objects or even just for protecting things, moving them in transit. Here's another couple shots of using the backer rod to prevent creasing. So, again, instead of stuffing things with tissue, using just small pieces of it to pad out the folds. One of the things I did a little bit of help after Hurricane Sandy with a couple of institutions, one of which was the Martha Graham Dance Company, which had their costume collection, their costumes for their dances. And when everything got wet, the tissue was of no use and in fact was a bit of a problem. But the things that lasted well were the Tyvek and if they had had something like this backer rod, some of that would have helped in the event of some sort of disaster as opposed to just sort of melting away. The site is going to have some and we'll have some more of some innovative padded hangers, things where you can take off-the-shelf hangers and pad them out with a little bit of batting and some stockinette. Again, these are things that are really easy and cheap to do and just take a little bit of practice to get your technique right. And hopefully the step-by-step solutions on the site will help you do that. Here's another couple of adaptations for this. This is using some things like, you know, the backer rod over the hanger. Here's another example of how they modified something like this clip hanger to be much safer across the top of the skirt here. The next section of the site is covers and includes some nice solutions for covering whole banks of shelving as well as individual objects like you see here. In fact, I'm not sure that I like this solution as much, even though it looks quite beautiful, but it's sort of hard to see what would be going on inside should you have anything like a pest problem. Other kinds of covers include some things like the corrosion intercepts bags for metals. These bags are impregnated with their protective reactive barrier and they protect against growth of gases. Also, they say fungus and bacteria. In this case, copper particles are bonded to this polymer matrix to form the film and so the film will deteriorate and then protect whatever's inside. However, I think there is a little bit of overkill. In this case, they were very worried in this unprotected storage space, so this is sort of a temporary solution. But over time, I worried that they wouldn't be able to see what was going on here, but given the environment they were in, it was a good solution for the time being. This is another material that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, this is the Pacific Silvercloth. What you can see here is the object on the left was wrapped in the Silvercloth, the light and tissue, and you can see that there was some significant tarnishing. So the kinds of covers that can be used also to keep things safe in less than ideal environments is covered on the stash site. In addition, the site also has a glossary to define terms. We have a nifty conversion tool here where you can sort of convert from one unit to another, and then there's a sort of a cheat sheet down below. So if you're trying to translate from international measurements to U.S. or vice versa, that will help you out. And I also want to make you all aware of the submission form. So this is, if you have a solution that you'd like to share with the community, this is the form where you enter all the information. All the information is held and is reviewed by the stash editorial board. We're actually still looking for a few volunteers, so if you're someone who loves storage and likes to do a bit of reading and editing, this is a position for you, and we'd love to hear from you. But every solution will be vetted by two editors on the committee, and they will get back to you if they have questions or feel that there needs to be clarification. So the site is, in a sense, curated and peer reviewed. You can find out more about who's involved in the About Us section, as well as who you need to thank for all of this. And I would like to thank all the people who contributed images, and thank you all for your attention. Thank you so much, Rachel. So we do have a few questions. We're likely... Mike has given us a go ahead to go over about 15 minutes, so we'll be able to get to those. If you can't stay with us, of course, we understand a recording will be available in the online community, so you can skip ahead to this next section. Before I start throwing out questions at you, Rachel, let me just pull over our webinar evaluation. If you guys don't mind feeling this out, it really does help us figure out what to do next and how to improve our webinars for the future. And I will say our next webinar is July 17th at 2 o'clock. We're talking books and paper, so make sure to join us, and we'll put more information on the online community about that as well. Okay, so I'm going to go all the way back to the beginning. If you can remember, Rachel, we had a few questions. Victoria in California, she was curious when you were talking about gasketed cabinets. Can she use a gasketed cabinet that has scavengers for emissions? Yes. It's the short answer. I think what makes people feel nervous about scavengers is that a lot of them, you know, sort of, they don't come with it. They're like, I'm used to that. Change me out. But yes, you know, that is a good solution if you're worried about going on inside to use, you know, a combination of activated trickle and potassium permanganate scavengers. Okay, and then Cindy had a question. She needs... It looks like she needs to use secure locked cabinets. Her storage space is open to a lot of different people, but there aren't funds to purchase, you know, tons and tons of stuff. Do you have any recommendations on kind of building out that security? That's a tricky one. Yeah, I think, you know, I've seen some creative solutions for how, you know, people are even, you know, using powder-coated file cabinets and, you know, inserting a bar above and below. It's hard to... You know, this is exactly the kind of thing that I think the staff site is meant to do for people who have done this kind of thing to be able to share pictures. Because even if I could, you know, it's hard to explain anything that will be useful, but I'm happy to talk with her offline. And then maybe we can find some people who are willing to upload their solutions to the site to share for everyone. Great. Let's see, our next question comes from Janine. She is curious if you have any recommendations on the best way to store glass canes. She says she has one in their collection, which is eight feet tall. Am I reading this correctly? Eight feet tall, a glass cane. Huh. Well, I would say that. In fact, this is one of the areas where there is some stuff on the staff site. And I'd have to... You might have to surf around to try and think there were a number of entries that talked about things like long arrows and spears. And so I think she might want to take a look at that. And again, you know, glasses is sort of like a generally sort of stable and non-reactive material, but it's, of course, you know, very delicate. But the kinds of solutions that were being used for these spears and arrows, which also has been a fletching the feathers at the end that were very delicate, might provide at least sort of a way to start thinking about what she might be able to do. And ultimately, at least for one institution, all of those things, you know, again, some of them were at least a good six foot long, were placed up on top of the cabinets. And so they needed lids to protect them from dust and things like that. But that was the only place that an institution was able to put something horizontal that was six to eight feet long. So, you know, there are going to be times when you just sort of have to break the rules. And I think you covered a bit of this as you went on to talk about storage containers, but we did have a question of, how do you protect items from dust? So, you know, I think that is, you know, the advantage to using a box over a tray or palette, but some of the things that you saw in the last few slides, like the, you know, the Tyvek covers, I had one picture that I think may have dropped out of the presentation of the same kind of thing sewn out of, you know, muslin. You just need to make sure that you're not falling a foul of any fire regulations with using something like that, but sort of thinking then outward from the object to sort of covering your shelving or, you know, or putting something in a larger container that you can cover. And then good housekeeping is, you know, it's also, you need to sit back and sort of, you know, think of your general work practices. Okay. Let's see. Julie in Washington was, uh-oh, I lost my screen, but she was curious about where to get a reliable source for epiphone. So, I think, you know, as I said, we're working on updating this materials and tools and supplies list, but I think a lot of the vendors that go to places like the AAM and AIC meetings supply the reliable forms of the phone. So, I can get you, Jenny, a list that we can maybe put up along with the presentation that includes, you know, a list of some of the vendors that have been at these conferences, but they'll also be on the website. That would be great. And a lot of folks have put links up in the chat box, and I'll make sure to pull those out as well and get them to this webinar page. I am back online, so I can see all the great questions. We had a small conversation going about being a little green. So, we go through a lot of different materials and products to make sure that where you're storing everything correctly, Jessica in Mexico City was curious if you could talk a little bit about, if you've heard about policies for recycling materials to be a little greener. So, this is something that has become an increasingly discussed issue within the conservation community. I think we recognize that our practices are not truly green or sustainable, and so one of the presentations at this flash session that we had at AIC looked at some of, you know, not the foams made just from virgin resins, but also foams that contained a recycled component. And again, some of those are turning out to test better than had previously thought, but I would encourage her to check out the AIC blog. We've had people blogging about almost all of the sessions that were held at the AIC meeting, and there was a whole section on sort of sustainability and those posts are slowly going up, but she can start to search on some of the terms like sustainability and foam and rehousing and hopefully she'll be able to find maybe some of the blog posts from these sessions. The other resource to check is the AIC Wiki, which is, let's see if I can remember the address offhand. I believe it is www.conservation-wiki. That's W-I-K-I dot com. And if you go to the AIC's Conservation Wiki site, there is in the section on work practices a whole section on sustainable practices. And that's where AIC's Sustainability Committee is putting up all of the material as they research it. So they definitely have started to look into those kinds of issues. Okay. We had a couple questions about moving collections, but I think our audience did a great job of sharing some resources that I'll make sure to also include on the webinar page. So I just have two more questions for you, Rachel, if that's okay. Absolutely. So Judy in Philadelphia is curious, do we need to worry about manufacturing residues that might be present on materials that weren't made specifically for museums? She asked such as a backer rod. Right. So the backer rod isn't an interesting case because some of those, the trilod and backer rods were actually, I think, first created for chinking things like log cabinets and pavements. You know, like who knew that there were enough log cabins in the U.S. that they created a whole form of film just for them. So this is exactly the reason why we're sort of cautious about stuff, especially when we're, you know, buying from non-preservation vendors. But those kinds of things tend to get passed around, and every once in a while you'll hear about like a bad batch of film on something like the conservation diss list. So that's a good place to sort of keep an ear out for these kinds of things. So the short answer is that anytime we're buying sort of, you know, material not meant for our community, it's something that we need to be concerned about. But if you, generally, vendors will be, they sort of think it's neat if you call up, you know, the log cabin supply company and say, you know, I'm a local museum, and here's how I want to use your product. And I just wanted to check, like, is there anything other than polyethylene foam or, you know, how else is your stuff manufactured? And, you know, generally people will be more or less forthcoming. But it is a reason why, let's say, for instance, we encourage people to buy, like the preservation grade polyethylene, you know, the Ziploc type bags rather than purchasing the ones at your supermarket. You know, those are made with plasticizers, and there's other stuff in that plastic. So after a couple of years, you'll see that they can get, like, a little tacky or a little slimy, whereas, you know, the preservation grade bags will hold that better. So the short answer is that, you know, the backer lives, for the most part, has fared very well, but it is something to keep an eye on. Okay, one last question, and I've actually heard this before. You know, when your resources are tight, you make sure you don't buy necessarily more than you need. Patricia is curious. She's coming in from Rich in Virginia. She wants to purchase FFOM to line a box that will hold a heavy Torah. Is there a standard that she can use for how much to buy? And then also the secondary question is, she wants the item to be supported and nestled and not crush the FFOM. So if there's a certain density she should look for. Right. So the FFOM generally doesn't come in different densities. Other kinds of foams do come in different densities. So if you, you know, are working with a company that, you know, does packing or shipping, like they choose their foams based on the weight of the object and, you know, that the issue of foam density is, you know, is more of an issue for them. For general storage, you know, you want to be using, let's say, if you're looking for something to line your shelves, you want to make sure that you're using something with, you know, maybe you want to use the quarter inch instead of the eighth of an inch, depending on how heavy or you might want to go with, like, Bolar over at the foam. The Torah is an interesting issue just, you know, for two reasons. I mean, one is also you have a religious issue here. And so, you know, sometimes with sacred objects, you just might want to check with your rabbi author to see how, you know, they would advise some things to be stored sometimes. With the issue of ordering, very often with the preservation suppliers, if you call them and give them, you know, the size of something that can help you figure out how much to order, I think with something like SFOAM, if you buy more than you need, you will always find the use for it. The other thing is that I would imagine that there's, in a place like Richmond, there's got to be another institution, and sometimes you can split the cost of a larger order, which, you know, there's always, for these kinds of things, some sort of price rate for ordering in bulk. So it may be worth it to order, you know, a bit more than necessary. It may not, you know, wind up wasting too much money. All right, and I lied to you. We have just one more question. Okay. So, Christine is curious if you need to worry about bad microclimates when using plastic and zip bags? I think there's sort of differing opinions about this, but it, you know, as often, you know, conservators will say it depends. If you are worried about, you know, problematic microclimate, either, you know, there's two things. Some people will punch, you know, use something like a wooden skewer so that they can punch, you know, small holes in the bag, which will let, you know, more air flow through. The thing to know about polyethylene is that it will slow down the, you know, air exchange, but, you know, the air will pass through, you know, a polyethylene zip lock bag. Like if you blow that up and zip it, you know, you won't come back 24 hours later and see that it's still inflated. Whereas if you do that, you know, with a Marvel seal bag and it's, you know, it's properly sealed, that's going to hold it, you know, in there. So I think it depends on, you know, how bad your climate is, what you're putting inside. You can always use something like silica gel to, you know, to buffer within a bag. But if you're really concerned, you know, doing a few puncture holes won't hurt. All right, well, those are all our questions and it looks like one might be coming in, but I'm going to have to close our session. Rachel is kind enough to put her email address up there and you're also welcome to email the CDC online community. We have that contact form if you have an additional question that you don't feel got answered. Thank you all so much for logging in today. And Rachel, this was wonderful. Thank you so much. I know it's late where you are. That's okay. You know, my kids are asleep and everything was quiet. But I really hope that people will check out the site. Remember that it's a work in progress and what we really need is for you guys to participate. And you know, if it's something that you are proud of or you think was neat or you think, you know, other people might have objects like that too. You know, no solution is too small. We really want to hear from you. And if you have any questions, you know, if you're concerned about it, you know, everything gets looked at. You can email me directly or put it into the site and we'll take a look. All right. Thank you so much. Everyone have a fantastic afternoon. Thank you, Denny. Thank you all.