 Susan Berger on behalf of the FAIC. Hi everyone. I want to welcome you here and I'm glad to see that we have even people that are suffering from Jose and we'll get started here. Remember if you need disaster assistance you can call the National Heritage Responders. They have a 24-hour hotline and they've been very busy but they can respond to floods and fires and hurricanes and anything else that comes up so remember that they're there for you. And if you have a question and you want an answer about caring for your collections please use our forum. You need to register to use the forum but it takes a few minutes and it's free. And you can keep up with us on Facebook, on Twitter. And you can also join the CCCC Announce List which is only for announcements. And I know that I promise people that we won't do more than two or three announcements a month and I've abused that because of the hurricanes but I think you'll forgive me. And you can contact me. This is my email address. If you have anything you need to say to me please go ahead. Whether it's good or bad I enjoy hearing from you. And coming up next week we have a webinar on the steps program from the American Association of State and Local History. And in October we're going to do a webinar on founding collections. So please join us for that. And then in November we are going to have one on imaging and metadata for digital image capture. One on NAGPRE and in December we're going to do one on ivory and issues with ivory. So please keep looking at the website as soon as they're ready I'll post them. And now we're going to start with today's webinar. And Tiffany Amig is the first person to start. So go ahead Tiffany. Well hello and good afternoon or good morning to all of you depending on where you're located. I am fortunate to be with you all today. My name is Tiffany Amig. I'm the CAP program coordinator at the foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. If you were paying attention earlier you may have noted that that is also who is responsible for administering and connecting to collections care. And we also administer a number of other programs and services related to collections care and conservation. Before we start the MAP and CAP program we want to learn just a little bit about who is with us today. It's great to see you all introducing yourselves and the questions and comments chat box. And I'm happy to see that we have representatives from all over. But we want to ask you a little bit more about the types of museums that you represent. And so if you could take a moment to let us know by answering the question in the poll that should have just popped up on your screen. It will just give us a little bit of an idea of who we're talking to. It looks like we have a good number of libraries and archives, some art museums, history museums, historic sites. Great. Okay, thank you all. And then I have a second poll that should come up in just a moment. And this one asks if you have participated in either the MAP program or the CAP program in the past. And this could be with your current institution or with a former institution or maybe you came to your institution and they had previously done a CAP. But maybe you know a little bit of something about the program. So we're just trying to get an idea of who has had some sort of touch point with MAP or CAP. Excellent. Good. I'm happy that this is going to be new for a lot of you. Great. So today you're going to hear from myself and from Danielle Rickard, who is over at the American Alliance of Museums. I'm actually going to give you just a little bit of an overview of what you can expect to hear from us today. And then I'm going to hand it over to Danielle. Danielle will talk about the MAP program, which is run by AAM. Then she'll throw it back over to me and I will talk for a bit on my program, the Collections Assessment for Preservation or CAP program. And between each of those sections, we want to take just a short amount of time to answer a few questions specific to each of them. So after Danielle speaks, she'll take maybe three or four questions directly about the MAP program. Then after I talk about CAP, I'll pause for some questions specifically about CAP. Then we'll come back together and talk a little bit about the two programs back to back and how you might make a decision of whether one program or another is a better fit for your institution. And after that, we'll be able to have a little bit more time to consolidate questions and have some generalized questions about both programs. The first thing I want to just mention is why are we even talking about assessments to begin with? Danielle and I both believe that assessment programs can really be beneficial to museums for a lot of different reasons. One would just be that they give you the opportunity to improve your professional practice. They help you understand and provide a path toward meeting standards. It can also be helpful in re-energizing your board and staff. Sometimes we all get caught in the day to day, we have a million things on our to-do list, and we forget about the big picture of why we're all here and doing all the things that we're doing every day. Assessments can also be a foundation for planning. So it could be a foundation for long-term strategic planning or policy planning or other types of long-term planning that can provide a direction for your institution. And then one of my favorite benefits of assessment programs is that they provide non-judgmental support. I know sometimes people are reluctant to kind of open themselves up to criticism, either internal or external. The great thing about MAP and CAP is that they're both specifically designed to kind of expose those slight vulnerabilities so that they can be addressed. They both do so with the assistance of outside consultants who have experience working with small museums and provide non-judgmental feedback. And there are a million other benefits and we'll talk about some of those as we talk specifically about our programs. And to start that off, I want to turn the mic over to Danielle. All right. Thank you so much, Tiffany. I really appreciate it. That was a great intro. So, everyone, hello and good afternoon. As Tiffany mentioned, my name is Danielle Rickard and I am one of two program officers for the museum assessment program at the American Alliance of Museums. So MAP is run by the American Alliance of Museums and before I do a dive into all things MAP, I just want to make sure to share some information with you about the American Alliance of Museums. AAM proudly represents over 30,000 museums and museum professionals. This includes a variety of institutions from art museums to zoos. AAM is a membership-based organization for the field and as you can see by this graph, we serve many different size museums with the majority of our membership in the museums that have one to three staff. We're not only a membership organization, but we also spend a great deal of time and effort advocating for the museum field. All right. So some of you may be familiar with this and you'll hear me refer to it as AAM's Continuum of Excellence. This graphic shows the roadmap of this continuum starting with membership and the pledge of excellence and then it moves to core documents verification and onto accreditation, all programs at AAM. Now in between these larger sections, you will see those smaller circles and these are programs that are represented not only by AAM through MAP, but also CAP and steps which are run through AIC and AASLH respectively. These are programs that, through self-assessment, help guide museums towards best and professional practices. All right. So I'm here to share with you information about the museum assessment program. The program is 36 years old and it's conducted through a cooperative agreement between the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the American Alliance of Museums. MAP is a consultative program that has several different components, including the application, the self-study workbook, peer review, a site visit, and a final report. And the program takes 9 to 12 months to complete. There are three different assessment types within MAP and they're listed on the screen, organizational, collection stewardship, and community engagement. Through engaging in these assessments, institutions will often find these impact points and results come from the hard work and process that's put into the assessment and the implementation of the recommendations. They are alignment of mission, operations, and resources, new policies and plans, a more engaged and educated board, increased fundraising success, and stronger community relationships. And these are just a few of the potential takeaways, but it's important to keep in mind that you get out of the program what you put in it. Here you're going to see some of the eligibility points that the institution must meet in order to apply to be a part of the museum assessment program. This includes having at least one professional staff or the full-time equivalent. They must be a non-profit, either private or public. Be located in a U.S. state or territory. Be open at least 90 days a year and care for, own, or use tangible objects. And one point of clarification here is when you're talking about your staff, your professional staff or full-time equivalent, please understand that this does not need to be paid. Many museums that come through MAP are all volunteer. Their hours do count, paid or not, they're staff. MAP is a low-cost program. It costs anywhere from $750 to potentially being free for your institution. All of this pricing is dependent on the museum's operating budget. All right, so here I'm going to get into just a little bit, I'm going to touch a little bit into the weeds of what the actual program is in the process. So after the museum applies to MAP, they receive an acceptance letter and jump in feet first into their self-study workbook. This workbook has questions and activities that are specific to the type of MAP that the museum was accepted into the program for. While the museum works on this, on our end, the MAP staff work to line them up with an appropriate peer reviewer and site visit dates are set. So you actually have a peer reviewer who goes out to your site for one to two days and does an assessment after this self-study workbook has been completed. All right, so the final result of this entire process is that the peer reviewer provides a report for the museum that's an honest snapshot of their institution at the time of the visit. It will highlight good practices as well as those that need improvement. That being said, it's important to stress that these reports are not all rainbows and uniforms as per my graphic. Even the best museums will likely have room for growth and improvement. These reports have manageable recommendations and resources that the peer reviewer thinks the museum will be able to use. We really make sure and want to make sure that all of the reports are usable documents and that they are living documents once they make their way to your institution. So just a little bit more about who is involved. There are three main players in the MAP process and they are of course the museum, the peer reviewer and MAP staff here at AAM. At this point, I want to take just a few minutes to share with you a little bit about the one player that we've really not yet discussed, the peer reviewer. So peer reviewers are museum professionals who volunteer their time to support both our accreditation and museum assessment program. They have been vetted by AAM and accepted into this position. In a museum assessment, they review the museum self-study and other self-assessment materials. They conduct site visits and write the reports. Their service is critical to the success of both of the programs. So here are some of the qualifications that we require from our volunteer peer reviewers. They must have five years of experience in a museum setting with decision-making authority. They must be knowledgeable about standards, ethics, practices and operations and engage at the field at large beyond their own museum. They must be good communicators, critical thinkers and committed to the highest level of professionalism. These are the peer reviewers who are sent out on-map site visits. And just as an aside to this, we're always looking for new peer reviewers to join our ranks. So if you feel like you need these qualifications, please consider giving back to the field and participating with AAM as a peer reviewer. There are many benefits to becoming a peer reviewer, and some of them are listed here. You gain professional development and have the opportunity to give back to the field. With each site visit, you interact with fellow museum professionals, and you learn how another museum is meaning its challenges. Our peer reviewers often reflect that they learned many new things when participating in a map site visit. The experience is valuable for the reviewer as well as the museum. And just a few more details about peer review. As I mentioned, AAM's peer reviewers are volunteers. For the museum assessment program, peer reviewers can expect to spend 40 to 60 hours per assignment. And AAM does reimburse the expenses and pays a $400 honorarium to the peer reviewer at the end of the assessment. As more and more museums apply to be a part of the museum assessment program, we find we have an increasing demand and need for peer reviewers. Here's a quick list of the type of institutions we're seeking that new peer reviewers have experience in. And it's important to remember that if you're considering being a peer reviewer, we do also take in to account your previous employment. So this peer review information is good, and I wanted to share it for twofold. So the museum who would be doing the map understands what qualifications and vetting do go into our peer review team. And then also to make you aware of the program in case you want to volunteer your time. So just remember, map is a learning experience for absolutely everyone that's involved. And I wanted to take a quick moment to share with you a quote from Jamie Berry, who is the director of the toy and miniature museum of Kansas City. Jamie says that participating in map has been among our best decisions. Map has given us the depth of knowledge needed to develop a plan for the museum's long term viability and sustainability. If you're interested in adding your name to the map notification list, please see this email on the slide and send that to me. And we will put your name on that list. And as soon as we have application release information that will be forwarded to you. And to learn more, because this was a very quick overview of three very involved assessment types. Please feel free to go to our website, www.aam-us.org slash map, or send me any questions that you have. All right, so now we're going to take that pause that Tiffany mentioned, and I'm going to take just a few questions if there are any that are specific to map. And if not, we're going to go ahead and move right along to CAP. And we can answer any questions you have about IGAP program after that. There is a question about whether map is open to tribal museums. I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time hearing you Susan. Oh, there's a question about whether map is open to tribal museums. Oh, thank you very much. That's a wonderful question. And yes, we have many go through map. The main thing with map is that you check out on our website that eligibility that I mentioned, and as long as you meet them, or a few questions about maybe if you are actually meeting those eligibility requirements. Just send us an email or give us a phone call and we can go over those with you to see if you are eligible. And then Judy Knight asked, do you have to belong to AAM to request a map? No, you do not have to be a member to be a part of map. And Nancy Mazimer asked, can you be more specific about the areas that a map assessment will cover? I can do that briefly because I am sharing the time with CAP. I don't want to take too much time to dive into any one of the three assessment types specifically. You'll get a lot more of that on the website. But they are basically what they sound like. So there's an organizational assessment which does look at each and every piece of your operation, your board, your finances, your collections, your exhibits, your education. It touches on all of those things. We then have a collection stewardship, which is obviously a much more focused on your collection assessment and community engagement, which looks at your community engagement, obviously. And that often deals with possibly your development team, your education team, your frontline staff. And each of these are addressed very differently in their self-study workbook. So your questions and the answers and activities that you would be doing in an assessment are geared to that type. And that is how your peer review would write your report. It's based on the goals that you give within your application and your self-study workbook. And then they flush it out when they're on site and write about it in the report to give you after that. I hope that was helpful. I just don't want to go too deep into any one of the three. And then Mary Olson says we're a town commission and an all-volunteer group that manages our local historical museum. Do we need a full-time employee or would cumulative volunteer time count? So, Mary, I would want to speak to you directly. A full-time equivalent absolutely can work. It does not have to be one person doing all of the time. The full-time equivalent we're looking for is 35 hours. We don't want it to spread out amongst too many people because if you're dealing with two hours here, two hours here, three hours there, you really need to make sure that you have one person who is working for the direction of the museum and for the organization. So usually you'll see a lump of the hours to one person and you're making up to the other 35 with one or two others. And in that full-time equivalent, I should mention your board member's time serving as a board member does not count. We're talking about specific museum operations, but any clarification that you need on that or your specific situation you can run through with me. I'd be happy to help you with that. Okay. So I think now we're going to go over to Tiffany. Great. Thank you, Danielle. So I am going to talk to you about the Collections Assessment for Preservation Program, which is a program that supports general conservation assessments for small and mid-sized museums. What is a general conservation assessment? That would be a review of all of your institutions, policies, your procedures, your practices, your collections storage, your exhibit space, every site that you have that touches on collections, basically everything that you do as an institution to care for your collections. The goal of the assessment is to provide specific recommendations on how you as an institution can improve the care of your collections. We like to talk about the CAP process involving a team, and the team consists of two groups of people. One would be internal members of your museum, and that's typically run and managed by a member of the collection staff, so a curator, registrar, or someone like that. But it also involves the facility staff, your director, your board or governing body, and then other stakeholders. In some instances, all of those roles may be covered by a single person, and that is absolutely fine. But in many museums, there are separate staff members that play these different roles, and it's important to us that all of them have role in the CAP assessment process and are involved from the beginning. And just to note, other stakeholders, for those of you who may be in museums that don't own your own building, maybe you rent or you're given city property or some other space that you don't own, we may ask your landlord to be involved in the process. We may ask if you're a university museum for someone from the department to which you report to be involved in the process. But the goal is to have anyone who's involved in major decision making in your museum involved in the process of the assessment. And then the other two folks who would be involved in a CAP assessment are outside consultants. There's always a collections assessor who's usually a trained professional conservator and a building assessor. And the building assessor may be an architect, an engineer, someone in historic preservation, but someone who can approach the care of your collections from the viewpoint of your building and the building envelope. For those of you who – there were a few of you who said you had participated in CAP previously. The program was actually previously administered by an organization called Heritage Preservation. And in the past, there was not a building assessor requirement. We believe that it is important to have that building viewpoint in your assessment. So all museums, regardless of whether your building was built 150 years ago or two weeks ago, will have a building assessor as well. The CAP process is multi-stepped. We start with assessor selection. So every institution that participates in CAP is allowed to select their own assessors. We provide a list of our approved assessors, which we have about 100 and I'd say about 65 collections assessors and 65 building assessors on our list. They're located all around the country. And we provide you with a lot of background information about them. There's specialty areas, the types of museums they've worked for in the past. We provide references from other museums that they've worked with. And we spend some time during the orientation process talking to you about things you should consider when selecting assessors. Once your assessors are selected, our staff will send you a site questionnaire, which is not like the map workbook. It's very short, but provides a little bit of background information about your site in terms of the structures on your site, in terms of the types of collections you have, the staff that you have, and some of the policies and procedures that you have or don't have in place. And that's just to provide your assessors with some background information. So it's an online site questionnaire. You can complete it at your leisure. And then we share those results with your assessors so that they can begin learning a little bit about your site. You then schedule a phone conference with your two assessors at the same time. It's a time for your CAP team to really get to know one another and begin planning for the site visit. And that site visit is really the heart of the assessment. That's the time that your two assessors come together and spend two full days visiting your site. They will take tours of any sites that you have that hold collections. So if you have off-site storage, they'll want to visit those storage facilities. They will obviously visit your main facility, your collections area, your storage area. They'd like to see at least one day of operating your site in operation, if possible, because it's interesting for them to see how visitors interact with your site. And they also spend a lot of time just interviewing your staff, talking with your board, and just getting a sense of the different players and how your team interacts with collections. Then they go home and begin working on a comprehensive report. And the two assessors will work on this report together coming at their recommendations for you from different angles, materials angle versus a building angle. But work together on this comprehensive set of recommendations on what you can be doing to improve the care of your collections. And I will give you a few examples in just a minute of the types of recommendations that they may make. And then to me, the most important part is once you've got this beautiful report in front of you, this is really just the starting point. Then they pass it back over to you, and it's your job to start planning a comprehensive plan for implementation. And what I don't have on here is one year after the site visit, there's a follow-up phone call with your assessors in which they speak to you about your progress to date and provide the opportunity for some follow-up advice. So once you start processing the report, sometimes it just raises more and more questions or maybe you've tried to make some implementation changes and you've hit some bumps in the road and need some additional advice. And that follow-up phone call allows your assessors to kind of help you out as you begin to implement the recommendations in your report. So I told you I would give you some examples of what your assessors may recommend. I'm not listing a comprehensive executive summary the way that a real executive summary would be, which would be two pages or more, but these are just kind of little ideas of some things that may be covered in a CAP assessment. These have actually been condensed versions of ones that I've seen over the past year or few months as they roll in, but these don't all come from a single report. So your assessors may say that you really need the first thing you need to do in order to improve the care of your collections is sit down and write a comprehensive collections management policy. They may say that you should take time to caulk gaps around the windows to prevent air and water from entering the building. They might say that you have some light issues in your building and that you should invest in some UV filters or rotate the items that you have on exhibit periodically to reduce light exposure. Or they might say that you should plan and fundraise to add a full-time collections manager. These are all suggestions that may come. It's really impossible for me to say here these are normal or typical recommendations. There are no normal or typical recommendations because all of the recommendations are going to be tailored to individual institutions. So every report looks completely different based on the museum that is being assessed. But I also wanted to show you this example because it shows the prioritization that we think is really important in a CAP report. Every assessor approaches this a little differently. This is one way by saying there are critical high priority, medium priority and low priority recommendations. Some assessors choose to use the term short term, medium term, long term. And they may define that short term may be things that you could implement within the next six months or the next year. And the long term may require several years. But we think it's important to not just provide you with this book of here's a thousand things that you should be doing differently. But to be able to say here is what you can approach immediately and deal with or here are some things that you're going to need to spend a little bit more time planning to implement. I wanted to pull out some additional ways in which CAP can help museums. First, I think it's important it can provide a path forward. So I used to work at a small museum in Pittsburgh as a curator of collections. And I, like many collections folks, would walk in every day and look at the tables of materials that needed to be processed and my phone message blinking and things that would land on my desk that I wasn't planning on doing for the day. And sometimes it was easy to get lost in that overwhelming sense of, oh my goodness, there's so much to do. I need to tackle the things that are right in front of me that I didn't take the time to plan long term the way we should. And so CAP can provide that opportunity. It can also be a very helpful tool in showing the need for grant funding. So we can all write grant requests that say, hey, we would like to, let's see in my example two slides previously, we would like to have funding for a full-time collections manager. But if we can make that grant request and attach our CAP report and say, we've gone through a CAP assessment and we've had two outside consultants come in and tell us that one of the best things we can do to help improve the care of our collections is to hire a full-time collections manager. Can you help us with that? It gives it just a little bit more power in that request. And then also outside perspectives can help sway your board to support projects. So I hope none of you are in this situation, but occasionally, I hear stories that folks sometimes can say for two years straight, I really, really think we need to do X. I really think we need to do X. But then you get an outside consultant coming in and making that same argument and all of a sudden it gets some traction. So who's eligible for CAP? So to begin with, you need to be a smaller midsize museum. And that can be a little bit difficult to define. I'm going to make it even more difficult by using our explanation, which is we think a smaller midsize museum is a museum that can be reviewable in two days. Meaning if your two assessors are going to be spending two days on your site, they need to be able to see all of your collections, not each individual item in your collection, but they need to be able to spend time in your collection's areas. Visit all offsite storage and interview the important stakeholders in the CAP team, which we talked about earlier, in two days. If you have a question and you're in between sizes and you're not sure if you fit that or not, I always encourage people to contact me directly. We'll do our best to try to fit you in that smaller midsize museum category. You have to be a nonprofit or a unit of state, local or tribal government. You need to be located in the United States, although state territories and districts do count. The museum has to own objects and make them available to the public and need to have at least one full-time staff member or one full-time equivalent. So, similar to MAP, I do think that CAP has made an intent to be a little bit more open to smaller museums in that we are open to the idea that you may have 10 different volunteers who each spend four hours a week working on site. We would accept you into the program. We actually have one existing museum going through a CAP this year who's done a fabulous job with all volunteers and has, I think, they spend more time this past year and will continue to spend more time as volunteers than they expected, but we're very open to how we end up with that full-time equivalent. And then the other thing I wanted to just back up and note is that in order to be eligible, you have to make your collections available to the public, but we don't specify a certain number of days per year that you need to be open to the public. We just need to show a consistent commitment to public access. And again, if there's some sort of gray area there that you want definition for, I'd be happy to talk to you specifically about your individual situation. So the fun part is the money. CAP allocations are a little bit different from MAP allocations in that we don't say that we don't charge for the program. What we say is that we allocate funds for you to participate. So it's all based on your budget. If you are a museum, let's say your annual budget is $100,000 a year. We would say that's great. Here is $3,900 per assessor, so a total of $7,800 that you can use to hire two assessors. So again, you're choosing your own assessors from our list. One of the things that we think is important is that each of our assessors, many of them are already independent consultants. We say they are able to maintain whatever existing professional fees that they have. And so every assessor charges a different amount for their professional fees. The allocations cover a large part of that. We do encourage everyone to budget some amount of funding toward their assessment. Just before the webinar, I did a quick review of what our 2017 CAP participants are paying toward their assessments. And it looks like the average that museums are paying is around $700 per museum total. So that would be around $350 for each assessor. So one of the things that I like to think about is, or I tell museums to think about, is at least think about paying for the assessor's travel to your site. That would be travel in a hotel stay. So if you're thinking about budgeting, that's about the amount that you can expect to be spending. But it really just depends. And as you're interviewing assessors, asking them about their professional fee structure and what it's going to cost will certainly be part of your decision making. So we do have a cycle date for our 2018 CAP program. Applications will open on November 1st and will close on February 1st. If I could give you one piece of advice in terms of how to position yourself well for a CAP assessment, it would be to open that application on November 1st and begin filling it out right away. That's not saying that you should submit a sloppy application, but we do review applications as they are submitted and preferences given to those who apply early. Again, we don't want sloppyness because if we have additional questions, if things are not clear in your application, we will pull that out of the pile and come back to you with questions. But I do encourage everyone who is serious about going through the CAP program in 2018 to apply early. I'm going to back up here and just clarify to the 2018 program cycle. Museums will be notified of their acceptance beginning March 1st. And you can begin as soon as you've received notification, you can begin contacting assessors and beginning the process that we talked about earlier. All of the assessments for 2018 CAP museums need to be completed by December 31st of 2018. Again, the application cycle is just around the wintertime, and then CAP needs to be completed by December 31st. I want to encourage you to visit our CAP website at conservation-us.org-cap. And then I also wanted to let you know that we do maintain a notification list for museums that are interested in receiving information about CAP. That's usually maybe two or three emails a year. One would just be an announcement of when applications are going to open, and then probably more hopefully on November 1st, I will send an email link to our notification list that will take you directly to our application. You don't have to join the notification list. You can just visit our website. The link will also be directly on our website. There's a little apply tab that is not active now, but it will be on November 1st. So if you'd like to join our notification list, you can just shoot me an email and request. Okay, I am going to move on to some CAP questions. It looks like we had a few roll-in here. Do you want me to read them out loud? Sure, that would be helpful. Okay, the first question from Esther Burns is, how does AAM and also FAIC apply the CAP and MAP program for work with institutions whose holdings contain classified materials? Are there any assessors who maintain certain clearance levels? That's a really good question. It is a great question. Danielle, do you have an answer to that? I will admit that since this is our first year doing MAP or CAP, or doing CAP, I'm sorry, we haven't faced that situation yet. I would expect that we, in terms of FAIC and our vetting process, that that would not be a normal question that we would ask of our assessors, but we would ask each museum who would fit in that category to bring that up in their assessor interviews. Yeah, so this is Danielle. Just a comment on that is a great question. It's not something we've necessarily run into, and I actually had kind of a follow-up question for Esther on that. Are you talking about your collections material are classified? So maybe your archival material can't be released publicly, or are you talking about the end product of your report? What part of your institution is classified? Because that makes a difference. Our peer reviewers are not coming in and looking through classified materials. They do not get to that depth or level of your collection. It's much more general, especially if it's collections. You know, you're going to talk about light levels and humidity, archival boxing, that type of thing. Not a piece-by-piece assessment. And I know Tiffany, you mentioned CAF also does not do piece-by-piece as far as assessments go. And then for our peer reviewers, it is not a standard question that we ask, though we do have peer reviewers who work in military or government organizations. So we could inquire. I think that situation would just be something that you would want to bring up, I think, on either the CAF or map application. So we would be aware and we could accommodate your situation, which I'm sure either one of us could do. Okay. I see that Esther is talking something and I'll pay attention to that. But in the meantime, Bo Harris asked, is that $700 the total that's paid to each assessor or in addition to the allocation amount? That's a good question. Let me go back to that slide. So when I said $700, that was total for two assessors. So it's an extra $350 that is paid in addition to that allocation. So what I was saying is that on average last year, assessor's professional fees and travel expenses totaled around, on average, $4250. So I hope this can be a little bit confusing and it also, with the different levels of allocations based on budget, I'd be happy to try to talk specifically to any museum who may be interested. But it is hard for us to provide an exact amount of an estimate of what a museum should budget just because there's such a variety of different factors that play into that. Another issue may be you may find that even though you are located in, let's say, Florida, that there's a really great match for an assessor in California who you want to bring in and you really like this person, their travel expenses are naturally going to be significantly higher than if you'd hired someone in your own community. So there are a lot of factors that play into the cost of an assessment. Okay. So let's go to ask, is there a process for contracting an assessor? Do we run an ad or is there a place on AIC? Yeah, there's a process. So we maintain this list, the approved assessor's list, which is a kind of complex Excel document that contains a lot of information. And we send it to museums after they're accepted into the program. And we also always do an orientation with new museums that are participating so that we can talk them through using the approved assessor list and how to look at the list, how to determine what factors in or what should factor into your decision-making process. And we maintain a sample contract and basically as soon as you've made a decision that, hey, these people look good, we encourage you to interview maybe two or three assessors in each category. So a couple of building assessors and a couple of collections assessors. And usually after those interviews you have a pretty good understanding of who's going to be the best fit. So then you can use the sample contract template to contract with our assessors. Okay. Before we go into Judy Knight's question, I'm going to tell you what Esther Burton said. She said yes. Some but not all of our items are classified and they are sometimes requested by the public via FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act. I think incorporating some assessors with clearances would be helpful. So that's something to keep in mind. And I'm going to go back to Judy Knight. She says, can we review the list of assessors prior to deciding if we review the names and locations of assessors before deciding whether or not to apply? I think that's great. Actually, we don't list that on our website because we like to do a little bit more of an introduction to the tool before we send it out there. But if anyone who's interested in seeing that list, please email me directly. I'd be happy to share it with you. Okay. And I'm adding two questions that were mailed into me before this. Can I just take a break because we were talking about cap questions. And before we get to those kind of overall questions, I have one more slide I want to share. Okay. And I just want to point out to people that there's an evaluation link up here. So please do the evaluation. Great. Thank you. So I wanted to share this slide because I think sometimes, especially the map collection stewardship program and cap can be a little bit confusing. And we get a lot of questions, both Danielle and I, about how someone should choose between one and the other. They are similar, but there are some differences. I think in the second line there, map is definitely has a more focused internal process. And I think that if one of your goals for participating in an assessment program is to really re-energize and rally your staff and your board, I would maybe steer you toward the map process. It's really more dependent on your external assessors. The time to complete is about the same. You get about a year. But the final products with map, you have both yourself completed workbook and a report from your peer reviewer. And typically with map, you have one peer reviewer, though you may choose to have two. If I'm not mistaken, Danielle. Yeah, you're correct. Absolutely. And with cap, you have just the report from your two assessors. So there are subtle differences, but they are a little bit different. And certainly if you're looking at overall organizational structure and not focusing on collections care, if you're looking at organizational structure or community engagement, I should say, then map is the program for you. Okay. Melanie Alexander said, my organization went through a cap many, many years ago and has made great progress in addressing those issues. We're ready to figure out our next steps. How is the process different for recap? Well, Melanie, I'm so happy to hear that you've made progress. So recap is an old term that the former cap program used to use. There used to be a time period in which you had to wait before you could apply for a second cap, and then it was slightly different. We said there are lots of reasons that a museum may wish to have a cap assessment when they've already had one in the past. Maybe enough time has gone by. Maybe there's been significant change in the organization. And so we've kind of done away with that recap language. And we've said, if you meet the other eligibility requirements, you're eligible for cap. And we do encourage you, of course, to share your old cap reports and some updates on your progress with assessors that you would hire this time around. But anyone, if you've done a cap report in the past, it doesn't matter when it was done, you're eligible now. Okay. Mary Olsen says, would it make sense to do both a cap and amount? And if so, which is recommended to do first? That's a great question. If you don't mind, I'll pop in first, Tiffany. I would say that they're as similar as they can be. They're still very different. So I have had many museums who have gone through a collection of stewardship also go through cap. And many of my peer reviewers actually suggest it in the report that their next step is cap. So what I tend to see is folks who are really not sure maybe what's going on in their collection or know that they need more staffing, know that they have these needs. As Tiffany mentioned earlier, sometimes getting in that external person having them write it in a report really helps move that forward. So you have the whole assessment that you go through with MAP. You have a report that has very strategically placed recommendations and one of them can be to go to cap. I think that's absolutely something that happens a lot. And I would suggest that to anybody. You can't go through them or I would not suggest that you go through them at the same time. I'm not sure if you've run into that, Tiffany. If anybody has asked, we always tell folks to focus on one thing at a time since they are different and time consuming. Yeah, I will agree with Danielle on all of that. And so much, it's hard for us to provide universal answers to questions like that. So there may be certain reasons for your museum to prefer MAP before going through cap or vice versa. And so it's really helpful to talk to either one of us. We're pretty well-versed in each other's programs. And we'd be happy to provide individual advice that in general everything Danielle said is spot on. Yeah, and the other thing is, too, and the only time I can think of just recently that I've suggested somebody go to cap, they came to me for MAP, and they needed cap first because they were having building issues. That is not something that is so detailedly addressed through MAP, and it was clearly in need of theirs first. So this is when Tiffany and I do a lot of recommending to either our program or to the other's program, depending on what the museum needs most. Okay. Heidi Bon asked, would MAP take the place of strategic planning or position an organization to more effectively engage in strategic planning? Would it buy us time to postpone strategic planning, which can be very expensive and perhaps more time consuming? That's a great question, Heidi. So MAP does not take the place of strategic planning. That's an internal process that your institution would really need to engage in. You are having someone come out appear reviewer, and we do use that language. It's not a consultant. If you want to on your own hire a consultant to implement some of the recommendations that are made in the report, that is up to you. But this is someone who's coming on site for one to two days. So a strategic plan would take longer than that and getting together different groups of stakeholders. What it can do is if you're getting ready to start that strategic plan or you want to know how to approach it, you could definitely do an organizational assessment, list that as your goal, and then talk to your peer reviewer about that and they can give you advice in your report on how to move forward because it doesn't have to be expensive. There are other ways to approach it. So really you can kind of pick the brains of the peer reviewer to see what is the best set forward for your institution. Okay. Well, we're waiting to see if there are other questions. I'm going to read off these two questions that were sent in before the webinar. One is this is for both. Actually, both of them are general. What are the safeguards that you have in place that assessors so that assessors do not produce a report that's just obvious or even common sense with no specifics or ideas for implementation or follow-up that would help an institution achieve something better than they could have gotten to on their own? I can talk about CAP first. So one thing that we think is important is having so many different stakeholders involved in the process to begin with. We hope that by starting conversations early in the process we can make sure that the museum is clear about what their goals are for the assessment so that assessors are addressing those goals. That's actually something we ask in the application is what are your goals? And so we need the assessors to be addressing those goals in the report. Sometimes we do have museums who have common sense information that they want in the report because they want it to be used for leverage for things. And they request that some of that common sense advice get put into the report. But before a report is accepted the assessors can send a draft to the museum. And the museum can review that draft, make suggestions, comments on any questions that they have, make corrections if necessary, and send it back to the assessors before they complete the final report. And FAIC, myself and my colleague, Elizabeth Hanwick-Curt, we review all of the CAP reports as well. So it's both the museum and our eyes on draft reports before they're finalized. So we really do get the opportunity to make adjustments when needed. Okay. And then what ideas do you have for people whose management or board has not bought into the idea of a map or CAP? How do you help institutions get buy-in by all their personnel? And this is mine out. I said, I know that in the new incarnation of CAP there's some follow-up to the process. But I've seen plenty of institutions who thought that a CAP report was a good doorstop or it was something to collect, like, good marks in school so that they could get accredited. And they didn't see the reports as a call to action. Do you have ways to avoid those situations? Danielle, you're always really good at answering the question about what reservations, what to do to convince your board or management. Thank you. I'm going to let you start. Thanks. No, having come from a collections background and dealt with boards who maybe weren't at all involved or knew what was going on in the collection, I like to think over the years I've come up with some really good ways to get them involved, whether or not. So really, I think what you have to remember is, and I mentioned it before, map and CAP are what you put into them. So if you are not during your process engaging your board or your management in the process and you're keeping it to yourself, there's no way that they can be a part of it. So that's really your first step, letting them know you're applying to one of the programs. Why? Do a little presentation. What do you want out of it? And then keeping them up to date in different, you know, meetings or through map, it would be in the self-study workbook. So we ask our participants to fill out an assessment team. And on that team should be a representation of your stakeholders. It should include staff. It should include volunteers, board members and community members. So if you have a large enough pool of people, now manageable, right? So we say, you know, maybe six, maybe eight people. You're not only dividing up the work, but you're dividing up the knowledge and really making sure your board is knowledgeable and understands why you're doing that is the first, and it seems like very common sense step, but a lot of folks don't want to or think they don't have the time or any number of things come up. So I know I troubleshoot a lot with my museums when they reach that point in the program where they're saying, you know, I'm filling out my self-study workbook, but no one's showing up to my activities. Well, there's a lot of ways to work around that. And I think it all starts off with education as you're applying and keep them engaged through the whole thing because in map, we expect the board and management to be available on site when that site review happens. Whether or not it is an organizational assessment if it's collection stewardship or community engagement, we expect them to be there and to give their thoughts and ideas and to hear a little bit about the program and what's going on. And it's even easier for your peer reviewer to do their job right when they have folks who know what's going on and what's happening in the process and have buy-in and excitement for the report. And it's all about keeping that excitement up. Yeah, I know I once did a cap and between day one and two, I put together a little program for the board because the board had no buy-in, but when they saw what I was seeing, they got buy-in right away. Yeah, and I will say one thing that's come up recently that I have noticed is a lot of the board don't always know who the peer reviewer is. They just know someone's coming. So what's been very successful is to let them know that not only does it just appear in the field but tell them about your peer reviewer. I know with MAP, we give little bios. Some of them actually give their resumes over to the museum that they'll be working with and share their expertise because often your board members are maybe not from the field. So for them to see the background of these wonderful peer reviewers that are coming in to help them, they'll boost the excitement as well. And then Gary Burnett asked, do you have examples of cap and or MAP, excuse me, requests from board members? Or I guess we're initiated by board members? MAP does. I mean, you mean applications that were put together by board members, I'm assuming. We have it come from all levels of staff. It all just depends really on what kind of staffing they have because sometimes there are only board members and volunteers at the very small institutions. So we do see that across the board. Yeah. So are there any other questions? And one thing, Susan, I wanted to just bump back to if we could that first question that you had about safeguards in place to not produce a report that's obvious or common sense. I want to make folks aware that sometimes that's the best report that you can get. And that's because very often in these situations we see it in MAP a lot. Museum professionals are in their job and you're doing your every day and there are other things that are larger than maybe your department or whatever plan you have on your mind. And to have someone else come in and reiterate those, whether they're obvious, whether you've brought them up before, whether it seems common sense to one person does not mean it's common sense to another, particularly when it comes to collection, to crossover with CAP to the collection stewardship. If you are not trained in collections management, a lot of these things are not common sense. So to the collections manager registrar, the report may look very obvious, but to your board members, to your collections committee, and to the granting agencies that you attach that to, it's going to look a lot different. So be aware that your report from either MAP or CAP is going to be looked at by a variety of stakeholders and they all have a different level of understanding of the field. So the clearer the recommendation and the clearer the speaking within it is, I think the better report you have. Yeah, I think that part of that, what motivated that question was, I know at one time in the old CAP program, there were people that would sort of have a check with and they gave most people just a standardized report, not a report that was even tailored to the institution. I think that stopped a long time ago, but I think that's what brought that question up. But Brad, I think all of us have had experience, having an outside expert say the same thing we've been telling our institution can add validity to our reputation and advice, that's right. Absolutely. The other thing I just want to add quickly is that at least with CAP, you may have a list of 100 things that you know you need, but with most smaller and mid-sized museums, well, hey, with any museum that I know, even the big ones, you don't have unlimited resources. So you may know all of the things that you need to do, but you may not know how you tackle those, what is most important, what's urgent, and what can you just put aside and try not to worry about for now. And CAP is helpful in that it creates that prioritization for you so that you can say, okay, we can do this. We can approach these things first. It's okay if we don't have millions of dollars falling into our laps every day. These are some things we can do. These are some things I'm going to just chill out about. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's a great point, Tiffany. And within MAP, too, so we encourage the prioritizing of the different recommendations. Something else we provide to our peer reviewers is a manual, and we do share it with the museums that are going through as well. So they know what we're asking of the peer reviewer and what we're expecting of the report. So we do also, like CAP, review our reports before they go out. We do not, however, send the draft to the museum. What we do is we review it, we package it up, send it to the museum, and if there are corrections, factual corrections, we do update those. But one thing I will say that I think happens a lot on our MAP reports is a peer reviewer will get on site and have maybe different closed-door meetings with different staff and maybe find out that, well, one set of staff think the mission is one thing and one thinks it's the other. So you can have this prioritized list or, you know, like we all do, hundreds of lists, you know, a hundred lists long. But if it's not the priority of your management or everybody thinks it's the priority and none of it actually is, that's sometimes the problem. So there's a communication issue and that type of thing sometimes comes out in our reports, which we find incredibly helpful. So it's not only tackling the practical, but saying from an outsider's perspective, hey, I noticed I had these four different responses to this same one question. Maybe we need to relook at your mission or see how that's aligning with your current collections plan and policy. So really, for MAP, it's a little bit more overall, even if you're within one of the sections like collections stewardship or community engagement. It's really looking at the operation of the organization. Yeah, I think that's a good point. Yeah, so if there are no more questions, do you two have anything else you want to ask? I would just encourage anyone with specific questions. Again, I know I've said it five times, but contact us individually. We're always happy to talk to you specifically about your individual case. Yep, and I will echo that as well. And if you call one of us and it turns out that it's the other one you wanted, that's not a problem either. We will happily direct you to the other and share with you the information that we have. And I usually post an announcement that CAHF or MAP applications are open just because I think they're so important for small and mid-sized museums. Thank you. Yes, thank you very much. Okay, so please fill out the evaluations. I do look at them and we do think about them. And thank you so much and join us next week, next Tuesday. We're going to do a webinar on one of the other programs for small and mid-sized museums to help them get going. And that is a workshop webinar on steps from the American Association of State and Local History. So please join in for that. And thank you all for coming and we'll see you next week and maybe in October for Founding Collection. All right, okay. Bye-bye. Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Daniel and Tiffany. Thank you.