 All right, hello everyone again. I want to say hello. This is Susan from Learning Times, not the Susan that you're going to be listening to in a few minutes. I love that you are saying hello in the chat area. And remember to use that area as you have questions or comments for the other Susan today. But first, I want to turn this over to Jenny from Heritage Preservation. And Jenny, let you take it away. Great, thank you so much, Susan. Susan said, I'm Jenny Arena with Heritage Preservation. And we're so glad that you're joining us today. It looks like we have around 112 people with us watching this webinar. I'm going to start by giving just a quick introduction to the community and these webinars. And then we'll move right to our topic. So Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Times. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. And this next slide should look familiar if you've been to our website. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the C2C initiative, including the bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. Links to all these resources are filed under our topics menu on the website, which you'll see right here. In about twice a month, the online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource and hosts a webinar related to it. All these resources, including a recording of today's webinar, will be archived on ConnectingToCollections.org. You can find a recording of all our webinars under the menu option meeting room and then online event recordings right here. You'll see everything that we have recorded in the past. So today, I am so pleased to welcome Susan Dool. Susan provides preservation consultation and conservation treatment to institutions and private individuals, both in the United States and around the world. She has extensive experience working with smaller and mid-sized institutions and is a founding member of the Art Conservator Alliance. She was also named a professional associate of AIC in 1990. And in addition, she serves as a member of the Certified Emergency Response Team and most recently has been involved in Superstorm Sandy recovery. Today, she has kindly agreed to talk to us about lower cost solutions and creative problem solving when it comes to collections care, which I know everyone is interested in. Susan, thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything I missed in my introduction that you want to share? Oh, thanks, Jenny. And welcome to everybody who's there. I see I have some friends and close colleagues on the attendee list as well. Nice to have everyone join us. As Jenny said, I work with small to mid-sized collections to improve collections management, preservation, and access. And I'd like to just say that many of my clients feel that they're understaffed and underfunded, which is a feeling I'm sure some of you also share. And because of that, they feel like achieving museum quality standards is unobtainable. But my talk is about taking progressive steps towards achieving your goals in museum, library, and archives management. Great, thank you so much. So before we get into the PowerPoint, we just have three poll questions, which will give us an idea of who's joining us today and some of the needs that you might have. So our first question is, what's your annual operating budget if you know it? And of course, this is anonymous, but we'll all kind of get an idea of who's with us. And like always, on our past webinars, these poll questions are actually door prize questions. So we'll choose two people at random to win a fantastic resource from the C2C Bookshelf. So we have a lot of folks who aren't exactly sure, and some folks who are even under the 3,000 or less. So this is a particularly helpful webinar, I hope. Our next poll question that I'm pulling over is just how large is your staff? And we start with no full-time staff, five or less full-time staff, 10 or less, 20, 30, and over 30. So as we might have all expected, the folks joining us today have five or less full-time staff. OK. I'm going to go ahead and pull these off. And our last question, we're just interested in finding out what topics are of most concern to you, and Susan's going to hit on a lot of these topics. But it'd be great to see what you guys are all interested in. Fundraising, strategic planning, assessing collections care, assessing your building, environmental controls, disaster planning and preparedness, storage and access, and then volunteer and staff management. So it looks like more overwhelming responses of storage and access, and then assessing collections care. I'll give that a few more seconds. OK. Great, thank you all. I'm going to pull this off. And I'm going to pull over Susan's presentation. So during the presentation, please feel free to type in your question in that Q&A box. And we'll be very accurate of all the questions that we get. And at the end of the presentation, we'll try to get to as many as possible. So Susan, I'm going to hand it over to you. Thank you. We'll start with the first slide. And I'd like to start by saying anything you do is a great step towards improving your collections maintenance. I'm going to go through the slides fairly quickly. Please know, as Danny said, the talk will be available online after this. And I hope to leave plenty of time for questions at the end of my talk. This is the Staten Island Historical Society before and after consultation and work that the curator did with very minimal funds available. I think it's very important to understand the priority order of museum management and goals. And that funding is often awarded in that order. There's a lot of really great grants available on their building. They build on your successes. And I think that one of the things that you can do for yourself is find a lot of resources, find the resources that are available for you. I have a handout available with web addresses and resources that we're going to refer to in the talk. So you probably don't need to write them down too quickly. It's important to create a basis for museum management, mission statements, policies, procedures, and planning are primary goals in any process to improve your collections management. I'm sure a lot of you have mission statements. They're very similar throughout collections that's collect, preserve, and protect your collections. And the following four items are the things that are needed to protect and access the collections safely. Fundraising is a constant problem for all of us, and especially in the last few years when funds have been limited. And I think that there's a lot of ways to seek funding. Mostly it's working in creative ways within your community. I think that there's a lot of private individuals that would be happy or willing to provide funds or volunteer services. And I think that's successful when you can approach the right person with the right project. Also know that your local services, fire, police, and some of your commercial companies will provide free services. For example, the fire and police will do assessments of your safety and security. One under tapped area are local and state political representatives. And I would like to say that there's never any harm in asking for assistance. And here are three websites at the bottom of the slide that are great sources of small to very large grants. I also like to say that the project managers that each of these organizations are very helpful and they welcome your questions. So even if the application seems somewhat overwhelming, there are people to assist you. And there's some wonderful classes available also that will help train you in writing grants for small to mid-sized institutions. One of the things I tried to explain is the difference between short and long term goals. Short term goals are those things that I, excuse me, short term goals are projects I know that can be accomplished with your staffing and budget. Those should be things that can be done with a minimal amount of money and could be small to large scale projects. I see the things in the parentheses have been switched. Long term goals are things that can be done that are large scale projects that might involve capital campaigns, such as increasing the size of your building or improving and heating, ventilating, and air conditioning system. So in your planning, you should determine what your priority goals are, either in building maintenance, collection storage, or collections use, and have fundraising milestones. Understand that a lot of these things are run consecutively or leapfrog each other. But if you think back to the first slide that I showed you on fundraising, I think that's the general order that things are funded. Assessments are a great way to get started. Heritage Preservation has a CAP survey program. It's conservation assessments. And it pays for conservators and architectural conservators to come in and do an assessment of your collections. It includes all facets of collections maintenance from policies to storage facilities, environmental control, safety, and security, and staffing. There's a similar program also offered by the American Affiliation of Museums. It's called a MAP survey, M-A-P. And both of those are available online on the organization's website. A CAP is a very important beginning to your collections assessment, having a professional come in and help you identify priority needs from a conservation point of view can be balanced with what your needs are as curators and directors of your institution. And it helps create the basis for preservation planning and strategic planning. Instead of learning how to write everything from scratch, there's templates available on the website listed on the slide. And I also recommend that you find similar institutions to yours. You can often borrow other people's policy documents and edit them to meet your needs. So if you're a Maritime Museum, you might find another Maritime Museum similar in size and mission, and see if you can borrow their policy documents. I know in my area there's a number of organizations, the Small Museum Association, Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. And these are wonderful forums to find more information relevant to your geographic area or type of institution. I strongly recommend that you create cooperative relationships and share your resources with institutions in your area. Purchasing co-ops are becoming increasingly popular. Of course, the more quantity you purchase from any supplier, the less expensive things will be. And often when you're applying for grants, granting agency will be looking for how far the information will reach out into the community. And so by doing a cooperative training program with several institutions in your area, you may be able to reach a bigger audience that includes both staff and your own audience and participants in your organization. We're going to move on to collections, care, and maintenance. And I think it's very important that you understand that it will always be a conservator's goal to reach ideal standards in temperature, relative humidity, safety, security, and disaster preparedness. But I would be personally happy for each of my clients to make progressive improvements in collections maintenance through building control while maintaining your goals of ultimately balancing environmental conditions and seeking funds for equipment upgrades and eventually replacement to high standard equipment. It would be wonderful if you could afford professional assessments. And again, the cap is a useful thing if you can have an architectural conservator come in for historic buildings. Or if you can afford to have a building inspector come in and do your assessment. But if you can't, I think that you as staff people are capable or you may have friends or relatives that you can ask to come in and help do assessments of the building. It's very important to have a controlled building envelope, which would be the structure of the building, a secure roof that doesn't leak, good gutter systems and water runoff. Your mechanical systems are sound and that you're using your space most efficiently to show off your collection and for the safety and security of collections. There's an excellent article called 10 Agents of Deterioration, available from the Canadian Conservation Institute. It covers each of the topics in great detail, relative humidity and temperature, light, housekeeping tests, and a number of other important topics. But these are the key things in good collections care and learning how to do good housekeeping test control, light control, and temperature and relative humidity are the most important things in preservation of collections. For those of you who are unfamiliar with standards and I apologize to the Europeans, this is the next section will be in Fahrenheit, ideal relative humidity should be somewhere around 55% plus or minus 5%. I think that these conditions are difficult to achieve even for major institutions. But if you can strive to have seasonal changes rather than daily changes, it will be a big success, sensitizing yourself to the fact that humidity will rise significantly on rainy days when there's a large number of visitors will help you control the environment by controlling the visitor ship and having people take off their wet coats. And also placing your most sensitive materials in the most stable areas of your building. On the left is a picture of a pastel with mold on it. And on your right is a picture, it's a photograph with a photo emulsion that's cracked because the humidity was too low. Both of those are considered irreversible damages from the conservators point of view. And by controlling the environment, you could control the damage that might occur. Environmental monitoring is extremely important to conservators and to heating, ventilating, and air conditioning engineers. It helps us read the building and find out where troubled areas are. And while the standard now is to use data logging systems, a lot of people can't afford that. As you can see, this is a range of equipment that's available. They're available for most conservation suppliers. And I think that it's a good idea to pick something within your budget and you should place them throughout your institution wherever there are collections. I'm sure most of you have environmental control equipment that's not brand new. And I'd say as a disaster responder, one of the reasons that there are so many disasters is inefficient equipment that's not regularly maintained. It's important to spend money on your heating, ventilating, and air conditioning equipment and systems. That would be a place that I would suggest that you dedicate funds. One of the most important things is to undertake regular inspections. And I do recommend that that's at least twice a year and in extreme climates four times a year. They should come in and check that everything is running efficiently, change air filters, and make sure that the equipment is in good running order. All your equipment should be run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That will not only help the preservation of your collection, but also makes it less expensive to pay for utilities. You can see some other recommendations by using window coverings. You can modify temperature and light infiltration into the building. And again, there's a range of available filtering materials, which we'll see on an upcoming slide. Oh, the images are not, are missing on. It may take a second to load. And if it doesn't, I'm sorry. See if those come up. These two photographs are a picture of a tabletop with a hat on it. And the first picture is just the table with the hat. And the second picture, the hat is removed. And you can see that the hat protected the color of the wood, the stain, and it significantly bleached where the light could hit it. And the most important thing is that, I'm sorry, I'm being distracted by a presenter chat note, light damage is cumulative. And it's very important to control your light exposure as much as possible, whenever possible, to keep your light levels low. There are the pictures. So light control can be done in a number of ways. You choose your lamps for the least damaging light emission and use filters and window coverings of all kinds. Two things I think are very important are to remove all light sources from inside of display cases, which are probably too close in proximity to collections materials and can produce quite a bit of heat. And one of my favorite inexpensive suggestions is to use motion detectors and timers to turn on light. So that when a visitor enters a room, a light will go on for a timed amount of time. Likewise, if you have less money, you can put a drape over a sensitive material and put a sign next to it that explains why you're trying to control light levels. It's an opportunity to be educational and for the visitors to be interactive with the collections. I have one slide with science. Again, I'd like to draw your attention to the same article I mentioned before the Canadian Conservation Institute's 10 Agents of Deterioration. On the left you see the spectrum. It's important to choose lamps or light bulbs that are in the middle of the spectrum as infrared produces a lot of heat. And ultraviolet light of course produces tanning like your skin and will increase the rate of deterioration. Strong light can either fade media or dark and sensitive materials like paper. On the right is an example of a graph that shows how light is emitted from a particular kind of bulb. And again, you wanna make sure that the emissions is somewhere in the middle of the graph. Generally, when you're buying lamps, you can request or this graph is provided and if it's not, you can usually find them online doing a web search for the particular light source that you're trying to use. I hope that's clear to everybody. If not, please ask questions at the end. As a disaster responder, I do like to mention strongly about disaster planning and preparation. Disasters can be all sizes, whether it might be a fire flood or an equipment malfunction. It could also be a spilled cup of coffee or a health emergency from a visitor or staff person. There's some wonderful resources for preservation planning that you can undertake yourself. And a good place to start is the Heritage Preservation website, which is on the bottom of the slide. Also, I happen to see that this is an area of training workshops available now that are being funded nationally here. And there's a lot of conservators, especially trained in emergency preparedness and response who can help you. It's very important to train your staff and have regular updating workshops so that people are constantly reminded how to use equipment. When I teach workshops, I often ask for a show of hands how many people actually know how to use a fire extinguisher. So I recommend that you now go, learn how to use a fire extinguisher and make sure that your extinguisher is up to date. Another issue that recently come in for disaster preparedness is to make sure that you have adequate insurance coverage. Most of the institutions I've worked with are underinsured, and this is another place you might consider not cutting corners and spending the necessary money to make sure that you have funds available should a disaster occur. We're going to move on to collections control. Again, I hope you remember the first slide. This is also the Staten Island Historical Society before and after in their library and archives. It wasn't an old school building, and those are old cardboard boxes filled with extremely important and rare documents that were irreplaceable. After undertaking a CAP survey from Heritage Preservation, we came up with priorities for housing the collections, and the curator was very creative in finding shelving. We located shelving from a restaurant supply house of the same quality conservation suppliers do at about 30% less cost. And she actively went after members of her historical society and local businesses and had shelving banks donated to her organization and another company provided brass plaques with people's names, the donor's names on each shelf as a thank you. I particularly like this wire shelving because it can be expanded, it's modular, and so you can reshape it to meet your needs as your storage needs may change. There are a lot of shelving options available, and while we all might like to achieve condensed storage, I think that it's out of many people's budgets, and if all you have is wood shelving, by all means use it. I think it's not ideal, but if you keep things clean and well organized and you seal the shelving appropriately, you can use the wood shelves until you locate funds and install new shelving. There's a number of products available that are commercially available as barriers, but some of my clients will scavenge by going to frame shops and art supply stores and getting mat board cutoffs and trimming them down to the size of the shelving. Also for large format storage files, flat files are often available at auctions for businesses going out of business, use furniture supply, and you can also build your own. I'd like to thank the person I pulled the diagram from the internet for how to build a flat file system. And frame racks, again, it would be very nice to have sliding frame racks, a lot of people can't afford it. And so the three images you see are some alternatives. One, it's fencing that's bolted onto the wall. Another is marine quality plywood, which would be better perhaps if it was painted and lined with short pile carpeting. And the image on the right are two L brackets. Covered and short pile carpeting. And it's a great way to store frames that have to be kept. And that can be installed inside of a storage area in an otherwise unused wall space. Collection storage and housing is a place where a lot of institutions spend a lot of money. Again, it's less expensive to buy in bulk. So if you can buy cooperatively with other organizations, it's very useful. I also like to tell people to choose as few sizes as possible to store your materials. So if you have works on paper, you might choose three sizes of boxes that I'll say are small, medium, and large. And you'll always have a fourth size of unique and unusual pieces that won't fit into those sizes. But if you can buy a limited number of boxes with similar dimensions, it will be less expensive to purchase and much more efficient to house on your shelving unit. An option is to construct your own housing. And that's useful when you have funds available for staff, but not as much funds available for buying supplies. And you would need to look at your line item on your budget. For those of you who have directors or financial managers, you might talk to them about how your money is spent. And this is an excellent place to use volunteers. Volunteers are wonderful in contributing to collections maintenance. And I think that you can use them by matching their skills and abilities. Senior citizens are often very good in historic societies for identifying materials, especially photographs. And it's a nice activity for them to sit in one place. They can label folders and fill out accession form or cataloging information. High school students, college students, interns and graduate students are also excellent. My one caution is that each volunteer is as good as their individual ability. And so you need to find volunteers that work for you and use their skills to the best of their ability. It's important to continue to train your staff and volunteers. And there's a number of really wonderful resources starting with connecting to collections like today. There's online resources available for online learning. And there's a number of places that you can take classes and workshops that are often funded externally. If you start with these four websites on the slide, I think that you'll see additional resources that will help you locate training programs that are available, that are relevant to your own organization. It's important that you build on your own successes. When people see that you're successful, they're more likely to give you additional funds. One of the things that I often recommend is that my clients pick one particular project and then use it for public relations. So the astronomical map you see in this slide was used in newsletters for public relations and also for future grants. So they self-funded one conservation treatment of this astronomical map number six and they were able to get funding for an additional, I think, six map. And what was very interesting about this project is that they got enough public relations that another institution borrowed some of the collection for their own exhibit and in doing so provided housing free of charge to the Loaning Institution. Well, I hope that that was useful. I'm sure that you all have a lot of questions. I see some of them on the screen and I think I'll turn this back to Jenny. Sure, great. So let's see, one of the first questions we got early on in this presentation was if you could recommend grants for collections, care for smaller libraries and institutions that don't have a way to match funds. I know that's a huge issue. There are a lot of grants available but a lot of them require a match. Do you have any recommendations? Well, I think probably the... That is a hard question. Depending on the size of your institution, you may be able to fundraise locally with private donations also to ask your local and state politicians for funds. And I think, again, I'm a real champion of Heritage Preservation Cap. Well, there is a match, it's very minimal and I think that that's a good place to start. Okay. And I really loved at the beginning of your presentation you talked about making connections with community members and organizations in the community. Do you have any examples you'd like to share with someone you've worked with who has done something creative to make a partnership with someone in the community to help fund conservation? Well, I know originally there's a number of groups so there's a... Sorry, I'm not gonna get the name correct but there's a Rocky Mountain Purchasing Co-op in Colorado. For example, there's another group of people in Erie, Pennsylvania who funded a series of training workshops and there was one museum director who spearheaded the grant writing and grant proposal but everyone contributed to the agenda and then advertising the workshop series and doing community outreach. We have another follow-up question about funding from Jessica in Chicago. She's curious, are there grants? Did you really foundational stuff like funding assessment? So not just conservation but building the groundwork. Well, can I... I'm not gonna answer that question. Two of my colleagues have written in a couple of really good things. Thank you, Kim. It says local and regional foundations and corporations may have small grant funds available and that's a really great idea for any time you need money, especially if they're doing something relevant to your collecting area. It might be a similar industry to your collecting area. For example, an engineering firm might like to fund a railroad museum or it may be that they have supplies, equipment that you could get as a donation. Then I also saw that Frank McKelvie said to use volunteer hours to match for grants which is also an excellent recommendation. So I'm sorry, Jenny, can you ask me that last question again? The question from Jessica was just about doing really foundational stuff. Are there grants to do that groundwork and not just for conservation but to work on these basic issues? I think the MAP, which is a museum assessment from the American Alliance of Museums is a really good place to start. And then we can also, Jessica, we'll do some research and we can include some resources when we post this onto the online community. I'm going to jump to a question that we had about LED lights. So we had talked about reducing the lighting inside exhibit cases for heat and to care for the objects. And somebody asked if LED lights are okay inside of cases. Well, I don't believe any lights are good inside of cases. Again, some of my colleagues may argue that especially if you can have appropriate air exchange and cooling devices, but I think for small to mid-size institutions it's probably best to have lighting outside of cases whenever possible. Inside of cases, the only thing that I've seen is used are fiber optics which don't produce any heat at all. Okay, and I did mention in the room too we had a webinar a while back about an introduction to LED lighting so I've included that in the comments box. So another question we had, you had mentioned earlier, covering wooden dividers with carpet. Is there a worry about off-gassing? Yes, there is a worry about off-gassing. I think it's important to, if you can get older carpet that's had a chance to age, that's very useful. The other thing is in general, covering with short pile carpeting is a temporary storage option. So I think I showed an image by force covered with the short pile carpeting. That would be just for removing a framed item, resting it on the floor temporarily before it gets moved back into storage and I would hope that would be less than a day, hopefully even just a few minutes, but that would be used. The other place that short pile carpeting is used is sometimes on table tops and again that would be a temporary contact with any art or artifact. Okay, and we're going to jump back to fundraising. Obviously a very popular topic. We had a question about Kickstarter. Do you happen to know of any organizations that you've worked with who have used Kickstarter to fund projects? I'm not familiar. Those are those online websites where you can post a project and ask for funding. They close at a certain time. So we'll do some research and figure that out for you guys. One other question about fundraising is from Ashley in Boston. Her question is, any advice about how you can get funding for that fifth tier level of single-object conservation projects? So funding from foundations would probably be based on the groundwork that you've done in preservation and other activities to stabilize your building, but those monies are often concurrently given when there's an exhibit that is going up and there's a lot of funding sources available for things like that through NEH, for example. And again, I think local fundraising with your constituents is a good way to go for single items. If it's groups of items and the expense is going up, I really recommend that you start as far in advance as you can so that funding a conservator gives you treatment proposal and cost estimates so that you know what level of funding you're seeking. That will help you identify the funding sources that are available. And just as an example, NEH has several grants available that may meet your needs, but you would have to define your project clearly to be eligible for those funding sources. Okay. We had a question from Lisa Foster earlier. She was curious, let's see, is there a better diagram of how to build a flat file somewhere? She said they have crates and exhibit cases made in-house with wood, but never anything made of metal. Oh, those were made from wood. The diagram that I showed, it was made from wood as well. Okay. And let's see. We have a question from Ashley in Boston. How should you care differently for an education collection versus a permanent collection if they're both stored in the same area? I am going to make an assumption that the educational collection is handled more often. And in which case, I learned from actually one of our participants, Frank McKelvey, that it's good to have a secondary collection available that's not inventoryed as part of the primary collection. It could even be a tertiary collection that, again, is not inventoryed, but maybe sample objects that you buy at garage sales thrift stores antique malls that meet your needs and that are considered expendable rather than accessioned into the collection. Okay. So we had a few questions on here in a small conversation about insurance. We were talking about emergency planning. And of course, we can give insurance for our buildings, but the question is always, how do we ensure something that's not replaceable? And we had a few comments about having insurance to provide the resources necessary to conserve those things if something were to happen to them. Do you have any suggestions about ensuring crisis items? I do. That's such a long and complicated answer. So it is important to have your collections and specific items in your collections appraised for value. Now, value is only what it's worth to somebody who wants to purchase such a thing. So in general, appraisers look for items that are similar in content and construction that have sold within the last, I believe, seven to ten years. Right now, that's really hard. Also because of the change in the economy, it's changing the value of materials. So the second option for someone in a curatorial position would be to go to a sister institution, see if they have a similar object in their collection to get an idea of that value. Insurance companies are not always happy to give funds even if you appraise it properly, and so this is something that is a good topic for people to explore further if they're doing disaster preparedness. Okay. We have a question from Deb Wood in Florida, which is my hometown. She's curious if there's no designated historic space. Where would you start to find it? For her personally, her choices are in a historic house. So it's either the museum or in a busy office area. Well, so we do like to use interior spaces that are not attics or basements. Interior closets, it would be terrific if you could choose one room in the house that you could take out of an exhibition area and make it into solely a storage facility. The second option would be visible storage, which would be to create a storage room that people can see, a quantity of materials that are well organized and hopefully documented on shelving units. And again, that would be to choose a room in the historic house that is designated for storage. Okay. Let me just say a second option is always off-site storage facilities. And while that is a viable option, you have to exercise great caution and safety security and maintaining environmental control. Okay. Another question we have is from Claudia. She's curious if you know of any studies with preservation guidelines specifically geared to very poor museums, she says places that can't even afford cotton gloves. And this kind of leads to a question I had about how do you prioritize when there really isn't the funding? What's your first step? What do you think is one of the more important things to look at? I think one of the most important things is staff training, because I think if you can educate yourself by reading web resources, it's a free source of information that will help you prioritize your individual institution's needs. We generally suggest that environmental control is the single most important thing. It also happens to be probably one of the more expensive things. If you can, then, tap your local resources, perhaps HVAC heating, ventilating, and air conditioning company, would donate some of their services in exchange for advertising their own company. It would be a great place to start. So I think it's important that you think creatively outside of the box, as they say, and look for every possible alternate source of funding you can. Okay, so we have about ten more minutes left and keep your questions coming. I'm just going to pull over. We have a survey. If you guys don't mind filling it out for me, we read all your responses very carefully, and they really do help us shape our webinars in the future. So please just take a moment to fill it out and keep the questions coming. We have Susan for another 10 minutes. We have another question, Susan, from Janine. She's curious, what do you recommend painting on wooden shelves to protect a collection from acid? So is there something that you can paint on the wood to help protect collections? Sure. A lot of museums use an alkyd or alkaloid-based paint, which feels and neutralizes some wood. The other thing that you can do is drill holes in closed cases so that there is some air change. If you do that and you drill a hole, you should put a cloth covering over that hole so that it reduces the amount of dust and dirt that comes in. You've got a number of questions coming through. Our next one is from Sarah. She says, her collection storage area is in an above ground basement room in an old church. There are several windows. Since this is collection storage, would you recommend covering the windows with foam board insulation to cut down a light and temperature exchange? Well, that's a really good idea. We do recommend that you limit the light source as much as possible. I think you said it's above ground, but I would exercise great concern for potential mold growth. Underground areas or even areas with low air exchange can be host sites for mold growth. You need air exchange, a certain amount of light and humidity control to make sure that you don't get mold growth. You would have to balance out the environmental conditions. I would hate to recommend that you cover the windows to find out that it increases your humidity. If you had somebody who could come in and review the building with you, that would be a really useful way to start a project like that. It looks like we're having a conversation in the Q&A about Tyvek. I'm not following it all, but Susan, what's your opinion on using Tyvek? Are there different grades that are appropriate in collections care? I'm sorry, I'm trying to go back and read on what people are using it for. Tyvek was recommended by a conservator for housing collections. First of all, let me say that there are grades of Tyvek available, and Builder's grade Tyvek from hardware stores is not as high a grade as a supply in museums. I personally find it to be very expensive, and I will say as a paper conservator, I am a firm believer in high quality paper, storage enclosures whenever possible. Tyvek is great if you can afford it, but I'll also suggest that one thing to keep in mind is the increased storage space required when you thick storage materials. So something just as an example, like Mylar may triple the volume necessary to store a collection. I know one of our participants, Kim, and I were looking at a collection recently where we were looking at a 200% to 300% increase in storage requirements that they store things properly. So it's something to be aware of. Okay, and then I just had a question. You had mentioned getting some of these materials from conservation vendors. Do you have any preferred vendors in some places that people can go to online to start doing research about where to get some of these materials? Conservation supply vendors were so lucky in the United States. We have a lot of vendors. Probably won't mention all of them, and I'm not certainly endorsing one or another, but there's Gaylord's Brothers University product, Hollinger Metal Edge, and TALIS to name just a few. Okay. One of the reasons that it's a good idea to look at the websites or the paper catalogs is there's a lot of very useful information available that explains what the benefits of each of the materials are, and it will be a good source of training yourself on what to buy. Okay. Let's see, do we have any more questions? Well, I just want to make a note, too. This was a lot of information to cover, but we really wanted to just kind of lay it all out there and start getting everyone thinking about the different things they should be thinking about. So this was just a great way to introduce some of these topics, and throughout the rest of this year and this winter we'll be trying to go into more depth with some of these topics. So keep in touch. Susan, do you have anything to add? Well, I see that there's so many good questions that we didn't get to, and I guess I'll do a plug for connecting to collections and say that it was fun for me to go back and look at some of the topics that have already been covered and some of the topics that are coming up because that will be some of the questions to be covered in more detail. Definitely. Well, thank you so much, Susan. I'm going to pull this survey over again. It looks like it's getting lost in our chat box. Please take a moment to fill it out and let us know what you thought, and also give us some ideas for new webinars. Our next webinar is going to be on Monday, February 11th at 2 p.m. It's the Tara Kennedy, and if you are signed up for some of our courses and our last course called Collections Care Basics, you'll know that Tara hosted one on mold, and this will be basically a redo of that webinar, so it'll be a full hour and a half, and she's going to cover the topic of mold, which I know is important to everyone, so if you missed that, here's a chance to catch it where you can just drop in and you don't have to register, and again, it'll be slightly longer. So this webinar, as soon as we conclude here today, will be on the website. A recording will be up, so you can catch this again as well. Susan, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you to all our participants. I hope everyone has a great afternoon. Thank you.