 Dr. Susan Barger from the FAIC, go ahead Susan. Hi everyone, I'm going to welcome you today and we'll go through my introductory slides fairly quickly. Remember, if you put questions in the Questions, Comments box, I'll collect them and Fletcher Durand, who's our speaker today, will answer them when he finishes his thing, so don't worry about it. So I just want to go over that the website has lots of materials on it that are available free for you. There's the discussion forum where you can ask questions and there are people that will answer them fairly quickly. And we have over 120 webinars in the archive switcher available to you free. In addition, there are many links in the resources and I just wanted to give you some tips about the resources. There's a search element in the resource tab and it only searches the resources. The search that's on the rest of the website searches everything but the resources. And I wanted to call your attention to this one category, tools, calculators and guards. There's lots of materials in there for calculators for determining light, dew point, stuff like that. There are also guides and after the management 101, we had a lot of questions about founding collections. There's a really good founding collections guide under that tab. So look around and see what you can find. There are over a thousand links here and they're all really designed for smaller cultural institutions. So take advantage of that. You can like us on Facebook. You can follow us on Twitter. And we also have a list that is sent out maybe two or three times a month. And this is the email, the website address so you can sign up. So do that if you're not already on it. And you can always contact me at connecting to collections at c2cc at conservation-us.org. And I will answer your email. I'm sorry I'm sort of croaky today. And for everyone that was in the Management 101, I'm working on who gets the badges. There's a lot to sort out with the groups. But if you attend at all four, you're fine. Just give me another week or so. If you have emergencies, this is a 24-hour hotline. And there's the emergency response and salvage mobile app. So you can download that too. And next month we're going to have something on food in galleries. So it's food in events, food in collections. How do you manage food? And in December, there's going to be a webinar on data loggers. But I don't have the information on that yet. So without further ado, we have Fletcher Durant who is going to introduce himself and we'll get started. So remember, if you have questions, put them there. I'll answer them. All of the websites that are located in the slides are in the handout. So you don't have to worry about whether or not you wrote them down. They're there. And we'll get started. Welcome, Fletcher. Well, thank you, Susan. Thank you all for coming here and joining us for caring for archives, fundamentals for everyone. As Susan said, my name is Fletcher Durant and I'm currently the preservation librarian of the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries. Prior to that, I held preservation and conservation positions at New York University, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives among many other organizations. And I know that each of these places where I've worked and other places that I've seen and visited, they each have their own very distinct preservation concerns and differing levels of maturity in their preservation programs. I say this because I know that one of the biggest stumbling blocks to preservation is this fear of being overwhelmed by all the possible actions that you can take. You can freeze and instead of moving the ball forward inch by inch, we sort of just freeze and hold and don't do anything. But I know that, you know, every institution, no matter how big or how small, can take steps to improve the conditions of their collections. You know, nobody's perfect and we're all better off if we can all be honest about the challenges that we face. So hopefully I can provide some of you with a nudge to start to care for your archives. Others can maybe have a few new ideas that can be implemented in their collections. And maybe there are a couple of you here that won't hear anything new. But then, you know, you can leave the webinar feeling really good about yourselves and your collections and plotting out what an advanced level webinar in archival collections care might need to look like. So I'm going to start out with some sort of conceptual approaches to preservation that I find helpful to guide how we think about taking care of our archives. Then I'll walk through sort of what I think of as a hierarchy of general collection care basics and finally dive into some of the more commonly encountered issues that we find in archival storage. But first, let me answer everyone's most pressing question. You know, what are we supposed to do about the paper clips and staples that we find when we're processing collections? Sadly, I don't have a perfect answer for you. Unless the paper clips and staples are stainless steel, they will rust and cause damage over time. And depending on where on the page this is, you know, it might be a loss of vital information, or it may be the loss of a blank corner that really doesn't detract from the informational value of the item. But is it worth the time and effort for you to go through every single box and every single folder in your collection and take out all of the paper clips and staples? You know, I can't answer that for you. You know, do you have a flood of eager volunteers who need a never-ending and thankless task? You know, if so, you might have just found the perfect job for them. But otherwise, I'm going to suggest that you might have more productive ways to spend your energies and your time. And so hopefully we can talk about some of those. And maybe at the end of the day, you find that you want to remove those paper clips and staples. And I'm certainly not going to get in your way from doing that. Without other way, you know, here are a few mantras that I just like to keep in the back of my head. Preservation is for access. We do all of this so that researchers or genealogists or someone, anyone, can actually use these materials that are in our collections now and in the future. Collections care is a process. It's not a single action. Caring for archives, it's like having a house plant. You could never fully preserve them and be done with it. Even, you know, the spider plants and the cacti that I have at home, they need someone to check on them every couple of months and water them. And every couple of years, something more intensive might be required. You know, you may rehouse something now and then you find that you need to go back and revisit it again in 15 or 20 years because something's changed. You know, you've had a new accession that needs to be, you know, changed the format of the boxes. So, you know, we don't do something once and then walk away forever. We always need to be thinking about our collections and how we deal with them and preserve them. Good intentions need good practices. I think hopefully that's why everyone's here and hopefully there'll be some good practices that you can take home with you. Every institution can improve. We talked about this already, but you know, don't ever think that you're alone in struggling with caring for your archives or that you're being a negligent curator because not everything's perfect. We all have problems and hopefully we can find ways to solve them together. Finally, there's no one right way to do preservation and this is in some ways the hardest point from my perspective as a presenter. The best way to care for a collection is really whatever you and your institution can manage. And so there are different levels of care and that's totally fine. One way to approach preservation is to think of it as risk management, you know, a strategic approach to managing your resources and the collections under your care. You look around. You analyze what risks there are to your collections. You assess how great an impact each risk might have on your collections. And then finally, you take remedial steps to reduce those threats. We'll cover a lot of ground today, but I do want to tell you a little secret. The biggest risk to archival collections are almost always major disasters, whether that be fire, flood, earthquake or tornado. That's how we lose entire collections. So our friends at the Canadian Conservation Institute have come up with these 10 agents of deterioration. These are sort of how we frame the 10 primary threats to heritage items. And, you know, I think most of these you look at them and they're pretty familiar to all of us. Perhaps that last one, dissociation or curatorial neglect, isn't always a risk that jumps to mind. But, you know, picture someone sorting through a deceased grandparent's family photos. You know, you might look at the photos and without any information on who the strangers in the images are, someone might very well decide to throw away what happens to be the only picture of Grey Antsilia or Crazy Cousin Sal, because they've lost the intellectual association with the object. And so, you know, we always need to think about the people that come after us. And so we know what a label means. We know, you know, what a little note on a finding aid refers to. But unless there's clear documentation, the people that come after us, they might not have that information. As a former co-worker of mine always said, leave your projects at the end of the day like you might be hit by a bus. And that's a little dark, I know, and we want to be happy in light and don't worry, we'll get there. But you do have to know that we need to be able to have things tracked through the generations of our organizations. At the top, physical forces are sort of another major risk for archival collections. And not just, you know, we're not just talking about if you live on the San Andreas Fault. This also includes wear and tear documents when they get used in the reading room. Or when they get brought out to show donors or potential donors. Or just things that are brought out to holiday parties to show how great our collections are and build morale. So we have to think about all these different possible ways that our collections can be impacted. And when you're thinking about your collections and how you care for them in light of major risks, you have to consider both risks associated with your geographic region. Here in North Florida, you know, we've had two hurricanes come through this summer and fall. And so that's, you know, obviously for us, that's a major concern. And, you know, there are other secondary issues like floods that come with hurricanes that our coastal areas are still dealing with. But it does save us from having to think too much about how we respond to earthquakes. So, but obviously, you know, I see those participants are from all over the country. And I see it looks like someone's here from Puerto Rico at least. And, you know, we recognize that there are different risks everywhere. And those risks come from our geographic regions, as well as our specific locales. As if, you know, if you're a historic home that's in a flood zone, you probably want to, you know, make sure that you're not storing collections in the basement or, you know, on a first floor that's prone to floods. But also there are specific format risks that different archives bring with them. And so, you know, if you're a film archive, you'll have a very different set of concerns than sort of a traditional paper-based archive. And so, you know, you do, you have to know your collections, and you have to know what your specific risks are. And that's, you know, that's only something that you guys can do. And hopefully that can help you along. But, you know, a lot of these issues are things that you have to grapple with independently. But I will say, you know, the single best way to reduce the risk to your collection is to be prepared. Make a disaster plan. There are resources here that can get you started, and there are more resources in the handout on how to develop a disaster plan. There is also a whole series of Connecting to Collections Care webinars that cover this. I think there are four or five of them. So, you know, if you have questions, that's a great place to go. I will say that the simplest plan can really just be a phone tree that is activated in case of an emergency. You want to make sure that you include numbers for local police, fire and emergency responders. And you want to keep that list up to date. The worst thing to have is an out-of-date phone tree in case of an emergency. And I will say May Day is the Society of American Archivists Annual Day for Emergency Preparedness. And that's always the perfect day of the year to make sure that your phone tree is up to date. You can also put together a mess kit, and that's just a fancy word, to have some essential emergency supplies on hand, like plastic sheeting, duct tape and paper towels, empty buckets, so that, you know, in case of a leak or a small water emergency, because I know that is frequently what we deal with, that you have those materials on hand and someone can respond right away. You also, you know, when thinking about a disaster plan, a basic disaster plan, you want to be clear about who in the organization has the proper authority to make decisions in the case of an emergency. Just because a volunteer or a junior staffer is the first to discover a leak or fire doesn't mean that they have the authority to, you know, go on and direct recovery operations. You want to make sure that that's, you know, that's very clear. As Susan mentioned at the beginning, the National Heritage Responders are a 24-hour hotline run by the American Institute for Conservation to provide immediate guidance and assistance in case of an emergency. That's another great phone number to have on that phone tree. You know, it's good to know that you're not alone and that help is out there when a disaster strikes. And, you know, if you do find yourself responding to an emergency that needs outside help, there are also guides for first response measures to minimize the damage to collections, like NYU's recovery procedures or the salvage at a glance document that is in the handout. If disasters are the sudden immediate threats to collection, the collections environment is at the opposite end of the spectrum. It's the tortoise of potential damage, slow moving and inescapable. Temperature and humidity drive the chemical reactions at age and damage collection materials. Obviously, you know, I think we can think of some material types that are more vulnerable to others or than others. And, you know, different environmental conditions also bring risks with them. High humidity in particular can lead to mold growth and pest infestations. But you can also find that in, you know, in very low humidity situations, paper might be less flexible and more prone to breaking. Magnetic media and videotape, you might have some loss of the binders. And so, you know, there are dangers at all ends of the spectrum. And, you know, there are some materials that you can't freeze. Whereas other materials like photographs and film, we think of ideal storage as being cold or frozen storage. So we do have to, you know, again, this is know your collections and do the best for them. You know, we have here the ideal, the traditional targets that we, you know, we have in place for collection storage. And that's 68 degrees Fahrenheit and 35 to 55 percent relative humidity. And then, you know, with 247, 365 days a year use of some sort of climate control systems. And, you know, I won't be the one to argue that these targets aren't ideal for most traditional archival collections. But as many of you know, it's very difficult and can be very expensive to actually maintain these goals in reality. It's been a point of major research by the Image Permanence Institute, among other organizations, to look at the collections environment. And this research has shown that broader ranges of temperature and humidity might not damage collections as much as we fear. As long as you can minimize the extent of daily fluctuations. Which is to say, you know, if it's warmer in the summer and cooler in the winter, that's okay. But if you're seeing that, you know, you're getting into the stacks in the morning and it's 55 degrees and by the end of the day it's 85 degrees, then you have something to worry about because your materials will be going through this expansion and contraction cycles. You know, the reason we have potholes on our roads is the sort of the freeze-daw cycle in the winter time. And, you know, so we should think of these seasonal shifts where we allow our collections environment perhaps to be warmer and more humid in the summer and cooler and drier in the winter to be acceptable. And we should focus our energies and our efforts and our financial investments on reducing or eliminating the temperature and humidity extremes. The other major concern with environmental conditions can be mold growth and pest infestations. Both of these issues are fairly directly tied to high levels of relative humidity. Most mold that we see in archival collections need a relative humidity above about 70% to activate the mold and germinate and cycle through their life cycle and growth. And it can be, you know, if the humidity level is above 70%, it can be a very rapid expansion of mold and sort of explosive and very dangerous to collections. Pests like silverfish and cockroaches prefer a similar level of humidity above 60, 65, 70%. Oftentimes that's how they get their moisture to survive. And so if we can keep humidity levels low in our storage environments, we can keep out many of those pests that are the biggest threat to our collections. Again, because it can't be said enough, focusing on keeping your RH below 60% or 65% is well worth the time and any money that you can invest in it. Of course, you can't understand what is happening in your collections without monitoring the environment. An environmental monitoring program doesn't have to be an elaborate technical endeavor. At a minimum, you want a sensor that tells you the temperature and humidity. You know, these basic sensors are available at Radio Shack, Amazon, Best Buy for, you know, $15. It's not a major investment to get something that you can put on the stacks and check once a day or once a week to see what the temperature and humidity are. I would suggest, though, if you're doing that, that you do track it in a spreadsheet just so you can have a sense of how things change over time. You can even move that monitor around to different areas you might have in your facility. It might be helpful to know that the building in the southeast corner is always much hotter and drier than the building that's on the opposite corner. Or that, you know, the storage area in the basement has higher humidity levels, so maybe you want to keep your more valuable items out of that area. Ideally, though, you know, I think you do want to have an environmental data logger that is constantly recording if that's an option for you and your organization. You may find that there are very different temperature and humidity levels at night. Or, as I once did, you may discover that your facility staff turns off the air conditioning over long weekends. And, you know, you never notice it because you're not in the office, but it turns out that over Memorial Day weekend, your stacks got up to 85 degrees. And, you know, that's something that you're not going to know because it's pretty unrealistic for someone to always be in your stacks. But, you know, with constant recordings of modern data loggers, you can find that information. And it's not – it costs a couple hundred dollars usually, but it can be an investment that's pretty worth it. I think Susan said that there'll be a seminar or webinar on data loggers later this year, so I would definitely recommend looking into that if it's possible. Very briefly, there's a link here at the bottom of this slide that hopefully made it into the handout that takes you to the National Park Services Comparison of various data loggers on the market. I am not going to recommend one over the other, but I think typically in organizations that I've worked with, sort of the most widespread types are the PEM2 and the Hobo, and they both work very well and, you know, very similarly. I do like having the LED screen on the data loggers, so you can go and just check what the temperature and humidity is without having to actually collect the data, but, you know, in the long run that can be a pretty minor difference. I'm also going to suggest, you know, if you are – if you do have data loggers that you look into using a platform like eClimate Notebook to track your data. It's – there are – eClimate Notebook has – there's a free-level account level. It's been – it's been developed by the Image Permanence Institute with funding from the National Endowment for Humanities, specifically for cultural heritage organizations, so there's a free level that you can sign up for that lets you track up to three different data loggers, I believe, and that should be enough for most smaller organizations. And if you're a bigger organization, there are bigger subscription levels that you can pay for on an annual basis that let you have, you know, I think the next one up might be 20 or 25 different locations. So, you know, if you're getting serious about this, it's a pretty modest commitment to tracking how your storage areas are doing. You can see, you know, even in this little picture, there's a little chart there where it's following the temperature and humidity swings, and you can see that at some point there towards the end, the blue line drops off. And it's, you know, maybe that's where in the winter someone, you know, turned off the heat or something like that, or maybe they brought in a technician to fix the air conditioning. Things like that happen, and they show up pretty clearly in the data when you have it. We talked about bugs and pests a little bit, but I want to talk a little bit longer about integrated pest management. This is just sort of a phrase that describes a holistic approach to preventative and pesticide free pest control. The focus of integrated pest management or IPM is on monitoring your spaces and being proactive about reducing the ways that bugs, pests, and rodents can get in and damage your collections. You know, these can just be sticky traps that you have that, you know, capture bugs that a staff member checks once a month. You can hire out companies if those funds are available to do the tracking. But then there are other sort of just bigger ways or, you know, bigger conceptual ways. You know, thinking about reducing the roots of entry into your spaces for pests. So this might, you know, it might be if you have, you know, steam radiators in your storage area, taking steel wool and stuffing them around the pipes to make sure that mice can't get in. Putting door sweeps on your doors to prevent rodents and bugs from crawling into your spaces. Is there an old water fountain or, you know, sink in your storage area that sometimes cockroaches like to crawl out of the pipe or perhaps there's a leak that's, you know, very small but there's always a wet spot underneath it? Looking at those issues and dealing with them really do help prevent pests from getting into our collections. You know, it's all about controlling the environment, eliminating water sources, and reducing food sources. You know, people love having their house plants and I don't want to be a downer and tell people that they can't have greenery around, but not in collection spaces, please. And, you know, you want to make sure that no one's throwing away their morning coffee in the stacks, and that, you know, after the holiday party that no staff member leaves out a plate of cookies for Santa Claus that no one, you know, picks up until after the holiday season's over. These are just sort of simple common sense things that you can do to help keep the bugs out of your collections. And I do, I will say here at the end, you want to check all new incoming collections for bugs and pests and mold. You know, especially mice, roaches and silverfish. This is sort of a way that, you know, you're oftentimes, I know, we're bringing collections that people have stored in their attics or their basements or their garages or, you know, in a storage unit. Perhaps they're coming from places that haven't had climate control, and so there could be sort of big issues when you bring in new collections if you don't take, you know, the time. And it's really, we're talking a minute a box to check, look in, make sure nothing's crawling around, make sure there isn't a mouse nest in, you know, a bunch of old newspapers, something like that, because you don't want to bring these guys into your spaces. And I do actually, I realize I left out a link here, but a great web-based resource for learning about pests and IPM is museumpest.net. Sorry again for not having a link on this page, but if I were to, if I had a, you know, a major question or if I found a bug in one of my collection spaces and I wanted to find out what it was, there's a listserv involved, you can just send a picture up and some pretty good pest experts will usually get back to you right away with identification. Let there be light, or not perhaps, much like, you know, heat and excessive high levels of temperature, light is a source of energy that drives chemical reactions. Ultraviolet light is a bigger concern than visible light because it is a higher energy wavelength and energy is what drives the aging reactions in both our skin and our collections. You know, those freckles don't just come from nowhere, sadly. So obviously, you know, dark is better than light, but since archival collections, you know, generally are housed in boxes and drawers, it's usually not a major issue for most collections. You'll want to consider minimizing light exposure in reading rooms and exhibit spaces, but, and, you know, some formats in particular, blueprints, color photographs, colored paper, some inks and some media markers, things like that, are particularly vulnerable to light damage and fading, and oftentimes, you know, once that damage occurs, it's irreversible. So you do want to be very mindful about items that get a lot of sunlight or direct light if you have, you know, high intensity lights in an exhibition area, and I think we will talk a little bit more about that later. But, you know, we're all familiar with the color photographs that our parents and grandparents have on their walls, and they've been there since the 1960s or 70s, and it's hard to tell what's happening in them. So you want to make sure that, you know, that your collections are readable and visible for generations to come. So again, you know, as I said, you want to avoid direct exposure to daylight when possible. If you have exhibits, you want to rotate them regularly and possibly use replicas or surrogates. And again, you know, if you have a reading room space that has big, beautiful windows, they're south facing, they let in a lot of great light, and you know, on winter mornings, you love standing in front of them and then soaking in the view, you might just want to consider putting some curtains on them for when researchers are actually in the space. Storage furniture, you know, I realized that, actually, sorry, I skipped some of my notes here. Sort of the one other quick note on lighting is, you know, we're in a point in the technological development, I think where we can say that LED bulbs are good and economical and efficient, and you know, not only do they give us light that looks good these days and is typically without any ultraviolet rays, they can also actually reduce the heat load in our spaces, because incandescent bulbs, so much of the energy that they use is put out in heat, they actually warm our spaces. And so, you know, if you have incandescent bulbs that are burning out, I do suggest replacing them with LED bulbs. You'll see it not only in the lower energy costs, electricity bill that you'll have, but you may also find that your air conditioning system is having to work less to deal with all this excess heat that's coming out of your old light bulbs. You know, a couple years ago there'd be a healthy debate about whether LED bulbs would save you money, but we are now at a point where, you know, bulbs are commercially available that are cheap enough that they're worth the investment. Storage furniture, you know, I recognize that most of us are stuck with the shelves that we have in our spaces and we're going to use them for the foreseeable future. But when the opportunity arises, you do, you know, you want to acquire powder-coated or stainless steel shelves. If possible, or really when buying new shelves, stay away from any wood or fiberboard, as they can off-gas compounds like formaldehyde which can damage collections. You also want to make sure that shelves you are buying fit the boxes that you use. This is a major issue in a lot of collections. This means first and foremost, you don't want to buy library shelving for archives. Library shelving just isn't deep enough and doesn't make use of the space in the way that archival collections need to store their materials. You need shelves that are at least 12 to 15 inches deep. And when you think about it, you want to use the sizes of the boxes that you have in your collection to best plan for your shelving size. This means if you have a significant number of 18 by 24 inch boxes, you want to make sure that your shelves are either 18 inches deep or 24 inches deep. You want to avoid having shelves that your boxes overhang, that someone might bump into in the aisle and knock them over. But you also want to be efficient with your shelving. You don't want to buy shelves that will have a couple of wasted inches around every single box. You know, I don't think I've ever seen a collection that wasn't facing space constraints and so you don't want to be wasteful. You know, if you have the space and the money, compact shelving is great. It works really well for almost all archival collections. One thing to be mindful of in your spaces is if you are putting in new shelving, you do need to be aware of the floor loads. Typical archival shelving requires at least 150 pounds per square foot. Compact shelving and map cases often require upwards of 300 pounds per square foot for compact shelving. So some of our historic houses that have archival collections, you know, this probably isn't a realistic option for even if, you know, that initial money is there. You know, I also said I said avoid wooden fiberboard. You know, I know again in many of our older collections, we already have wooden shelving there. And I'm not saying stop using them, you know, especially, you know, if the wood is 20 years old, 50 years old, 100 years old, most of that off-gassing has already taken place. But, you know, when we look forward to improving our storage areas, you do want to think about going with metal. There also, I know, in the past people have discussed wire shelving, things like metro shelving, baker's racks. And I'd say for wire shelving, it's great for temporary use, especially if you get it on wheels. You know, if the archival processors like to have those racks, they can store a lot of collections on and move them to different workspaces to work on them. That's wonderful. You know, in the short term that wire shelving really probably shouldn't cause much damage to boxes or anything stored on them. Over the long term, if you have particularly heavy boxes, you know, you could start to see damage. One thing people do if they have wire shelving is they oftentimes lay, put down a layer of either card stock, folder stock on the bottom, or a corrugated board so that there's a layer of material between the wire shelving and the box itself. Similarly, with primary houses like boxes, you want to be consistent and plan for something that's sustainable for your organization. You know, on a basic level, you really want to try and use acid-free boxes and acid-free folders. Record storage boxes and half-foot document boxes are likely going to be, you know, the basic style for most of you. But I would encourage organizations to try and select a limited number of box sizes that they use, especially for flat boxes. You know, this will save you money by avoiding excess backstock of, you know, odd-sized boxes that no one's ever going to use. It saves space for not having to store that backstock. It makes pulling and reshelving collections easier because the boxes are generally the same size, so they can go, you know, you can shift boxes to different places. If you want to rearrange things quickly, you don't have to worry about these odd stacks of boxes that are teetering and look like they're going to fall over in your collection. You know, it also, frankly, makes housing selection easier for your processing staff. You know, if a processor finds an odd-shaped newspaper, you know, a tabloid-sized paper in their collection that needs flat storage, you know, they don't have to go to their supply shelf and look and see, oh, we have eight different sizes of flat box. Which one of these should I use for my collection? And then they pick out a box that they think is perfect and they discover that, oh, we don't have any folders in that size. You know, it's this little thing that we try and, you know, we want preservation not to be a stumbling block for anybody. And you know, if you can save money and you can save time and you can save the stress of having to make a different decision every time you're working on a different collection, it's a pretty easy and straightforward thing to do. So, you know, if an institution ever gave me complete control over their archival supply budget, this is what I would buy. I buy, I get record storage boxes, document boxes, 16 by 20 flat boxes that are three inches deep, 20 by 24 inch boxes that are three inches deep, you know, and then some flat file cabinets that are 32 by 42 and then some larger ones that are 40 by 60. And again, you know, this is, these are six different storage options that really cover almost everything that a typical archive will see. And I do want to say, please, when you're buying boxes, I encourage everyone to get the three inch deep flat boxes rather than the one inch or the one and a half inch deep box. Let me just share that thought with you just because they do store things. And, you know, a lot of institutions, especially in the flat boxes and the larger flat boxes, they do oftentimes store different collections, different record groups in a single flat box. And so you may find that you have a number of collections that, yeah, they only need one folder of oversized material, but you can group them all together in a shared flat box. You know, that's perfectly fine as long as you have intellectual control and it's noted in your finding aids and your locations. I'll also say that I encourage staff and people to really buy legal size boxes. Again, that legal size boxes may not work for your organization or your current shelving setup and that's totally fine. But, you know, I think we recognize that most paper based collections always have at least a couple of legal size papers tucked in there and they get folded up. And, you know, in the long term ideally if we can have everything flat and open in the box when it goes in, that's great. But that's again, that's my two cents. An area that many organizations, small organizations in particular overlook is having written policies on a number of issues like security loans and exhibitions, handling event planning, space rentals, collection development, things like that. Policies are, you know, they're written procedures that let us pass on our knowledge from one generation of staff members to the next, but they can also serve as justification for staff members who could be put in a difficult situation. You know, if you have a written handling procedure or a policy in place and you come across a difficult patron in the reading room, you know, the volunteer that you have staffing the reading room can, you know, point to a written document that might make it easier for them to deal with a patron. That's my feeling. So I'm going to go through a couple sort of basics of policies, but I want to make sure that we get to everything. So this will be quick because, you know, each of these policies probably, some of them have their own webinars I know on collection, connecting to collections care and they're deserving of them. So I don't want to seem like I'm short changing them, but I also know that there is more depth here than I can really provide. Security, you know, it's the foundation of our collections. If our materials aren't available to our users when they come into the reading room, then we've failed in a major part of our duties and our jobs. You know, the two main areas we're planning for are our storage spaces and our reading room. And, you know, in the storage space, you know, you want to have questions like, who has access to our collection storage areas? When do they have access? You know, do we have locks? Are they really secure? Are there windows that people could get through? Things like that. And then on the other end of the spectrum is, you know, is our reading room staffed when patrons come in? There's always someone there watching and making sure that somebody doesn't walk out with a document, whether on purpose or by accident. You know, do we have a place where researchers can safely store their bags in jackets when they're in the reading room? Because we don't want the researchers bringing those materials in because that's sometimes how things accidentally disappear or someone puts their bags down on top of a folder filled with material and something gets damaged. But we also, you know, we don't want them just to leave their bags out in the lobby where someone can come in off the street and rifle through them if no one's there to watch. So we do, you know, it's a relationship we have with our patrons and we want to make sure that it goes both ways. Loans and exhibits, you know, they're really, loans are a great opportunity to raise the profile of our organizations and to reach new communities and audiences. But they can also be confusing and stressful for staff and possibly damaging for collections. So, you know, it's, again, we talked, I talked about this when I talked about lighting, but you want to think about rotating your exhibits regularly. A lot of times that means, you know, every three months or so, 12 weeks is a pretty typical run for a normal exhibit. If you have some light sensitive material, it might mean four weeks or six weeks. And again, if you have that light sensitive material, you might want to try and have lower lighting levels. You know, we think of having light sensitive materials as being, have them be displayed about 50 lux or lower, whereas typical exhibition lighting level aims for about 100 lux. For these, you know, for outgoing loans, you do want to have some sort of signed loan agreement with the borrowing institution. You want to have a paperwork trail just so you loan something and then you know that you got it back and you know when you got it back. You know, if you can, you want to ask for proof of wall-to-wall insurance so that you know that your materials are covered. And the borrowing institution should be the one, you know, if it's possible to pay for that wall-to-wall insurance. And the American Alliance for Museums has a standard facilities report that museums fill out that, you know, describes their environmental conditions, security operations and other relevant issues. You know, if you're a mid-size archive, you'd want to think about getting, you know, something like that for when you loan materials. And then again, you know, if you're worried about something being fragile, it's never hers to take photographs before and after. And again, you know, with these policies, they're, they can be bent, they can be broken. You know, we all know that there are curators out there or heads of collections that really want a loan to happen, you know, even if the borrowing institution can't insure it. And, you know, our job is to be responsible and let the people who make the final decisions in our organizations know what the best practice is and what we would like to see. But on some level, you know, the person who is responsible for the collections is the one that makes those final decisions. And, you know, you want to be listened to when it's important. But sometimes people make decisions that we don't agree with and we have to accept that. Handling, you know, this is where our collections get used and this is where they get worn and where they get damaged. I'd really love to have something super sexy to say here and exciting, something new. But handling guidelines are our basic and straightforward. You want researchers to have clean hands. You want them to only take one folder of material out at a time so things don't get mixed up. No pens in the reading room. If they're using oversized materials, a staff member needs to help them to move them if they need to flip it over or shift things around to see something lower in the folder. You know, no one should be placing anything on top of collection items that are on, you know, in reading room desks and tables. Under no circumstances should there be eating, drinking or smoking near collections. And, you know, now the white glove question. My advice is only use gloves to handle sensitive formats like photographs, films and negatives and other materials like that. In the day-to-day reading of archival collections, it's the awkwardness of white gloves is more dangerous to say brittle material than, you know, the oils on our hands. When moving collections, always be carding. I think that one speaks for itself. You don't want to be the person that accidentally drops a box on their way to and from the stacks. If you rent out your space, that's great. It's a good way to raise money, but you want to make sure that your collections and storage areas are secure. You want to make sure you have policies in place that tell, you know, the renters, the people who are renting the space and any caters that they have, how to keep food out of their collection areas. You also want to make sure that you plan to have the garbage removed and the trash taken out of the building immediately following the event. Collection development is, again, something that's beyond the scope of this talk for the most part. But if you have a collection development policy, I, you know, I want to emphasize that that's a policy that should serve as a guide to your preservation priorities. And you want to make sure that you're not, you know, spending money on collections that are secondary or tertiary to an organization's priorities and needs. It's wasted effort and wasted money in a field that, you know, we don't have enough of either. And then related to collection development, collection storage is, it's not for clutter. It's not for storage of office supplies. It's not for people to, you know, leave the holiday decorations that get pulled out once a year. Collection storage areas should be for collections only. Collection and clutter and debris, you know, they take up valuable space and they provide insects with safe places to harbor when we're trying to keep them out of our spaces. Here's my essential list of no-nos. Food brings pests and the chance of messy accidents to our collections. Hanging folders destroy boxes. If you have vertical files, fine. Hanging folders work well there. But don't put hanging folders into record storage boxes. You're just wasting money by putting them in record storage boxes. Tape is evil. Never, under any circumstances, put tape onto collection items. Same goes for post-it notes on items. You know, photocopy the post-it note, put it in next to the object and put it in a folder. You know, in the best of circumstances, that post-it note is going to fall off in the next couple years. In the worst of circumstances, if it's on brittle paper, you know, it could tear out a whole section or chunk of that paper. So avoid post-it notes on items. You want to put them on the outside of boxes or outside of folders. That's okay. That's part of processing, but not on directly on items. I encourage you not to add staples or paperclips to the collection. And if you do, but if you do, make sure that they're stainless steel. You know, if you need, find that you need staples or paperclips, you can always use folded up acid-free paper. You know, perma-life, something of that nature to, you know, create a mini-folder within the archival folder that can keep those documents together. Never stack boxes more than four high. I think I'll touch on that later, but that's basically the maximum weight limit that the bottom box can hold is going four high. And really, this is just, again, no thinking that problems will solve themselves. Like, we are here to be active caretakers in our collections. And we all know that there are problems that we've inherited in our archives. And it's our job to fix them. We don't have to fix them today. We don't have to fix them tomorrow. But they are our responsibilities. And we want to make sure that we leave the collections better for those who follow us. Since the vast majority of our collections lives are spent waiting for the next users and not actively out in the world doing something, it's very important that we take the time during archival processing to get the housings right. I touched on some of the basics earlier, but now I want to spend a little more time covering some of the everyday situations that we all find in our collections. I'll say again, you know, these are general guidelines, general recommendations. You may have specific instances that differ in your own organization, and that's perfectly fine. We want to start out, you know, when possible, using acid-free folders and acid-free boxes, good quality boxes. They don't have to be, you know, the gray Hollinger box. A lot of organizations that I work with have a deep, abiding love for the Page Miracle box. You know, it's brown corrugated board. It is not buffered acid-free in the way that the higher end, quote-unquote, archival boxes are, but they do a good job, and they're strong, and they're sturdy, and that's very important. You know, the documents touch the acid-free folders, so maybe in many ways that's a place to spend the money on acid-free materials. But, you know, I do want to say that if you're processing a collection that came from a donor that's already neatly arranged in Manila office folders, and you're wondering if you should, you know, spend your extremely, you know, limited budget on new acid-free folders to replace everything, or boxes that will actually fit on your shelves and, you know, be able to let you move the collection around, spend the money on the boxes. The Manila folders, they are not approved for long-term use in archival collections, but they're not the worst thing in the world, and, you know, most paper today is produced in a much better way than it was 30 years ago, so they do folder start out as being acid-free, although they will deteriorate over time. But frankly, they won't deteriorate so much worse than most of the paper documents that are in those folders to begin with. And so, you know, there'll be a substantial period of time before you might see minor damage coming from the folders. Every folder goes in a box. You want to make sure that the folders fit the box. If you have legal-sized document boxes, make sure you use legal-sized folders. You don't want those folders shifting around. The same goes for flat boxes. If you have a 16-by-20 inch box, you want to make sure that you put a 16-by-20 inch folder in. Otherwise, the folder and the material that's in the folder will shift around every time someone picks up the box. It'll slide from one side to the next and just cause all these little dings, and that's what we're hoping to avoid. You don't want to overfill boxes. You don't want to be a hero and, you know, save that $5 or whatever the box costs, you know, from using a second box. But, you know, if you're squeezing things into a box, you're just going to break the box over time. So, you know, use more boxes to be safer. And then if your box isn't full, use a spacer board. Slumping is, you know, a major issue in a lot of collections where boxes weren't filled up. And then over time, the folders weekend, the pages weekend, and they just sort of curl up on one another into a mess in the bottom of the box. And you want to avoid that, and the time to do that is at the initial processing. Let's see. I see there's a question. 25 to 50 leaves per folder. You know, you just want to, pieces of paper. That's sort of a ballpark estimate. Again, you know, just like the boxes aren't meant to be overfilled, the folders aren't meant to be overfilled. And frankly, you don't want to serve up a folder of documents to a researcher in a reading room that has 300 pages in it. It's unwieldy to begin with, and then the patrons have to, you know, rifle through 300 pages. And if they're looking for one single page that someone made a reference to at some point, you want to, you know, you want to make it easy for them to find things. Again, you know, just the basics of keeping things neat to avoid dog ears. So that was that question I saw come up on the side, and I know I'm holding a lot of these in holding pattern. We'll get there soon. So make sure we get to this key stuff. You know, every box goes on a shelf. Boxes should have permanent labeled locations that, you know, anybody in your organization can find. You don't want to store boxes on the floor. That's how things get wet and get damaged. And boxes should fit completely and securely on the shelves. Again, I mentioned this. Don't stack the boxes more than four high. They will get crushed. You don't want to stack different size boxes on top of one another. The strongest point of each box are the edges. That's where they can bear the weight of boxes on top of them. So if you're putting a 16 by 20 inch box, smack in the middle of a 20 by 24 inch box, that 20 by 24 inch box lid is going to give way and crush over time. And then you could possibly damage the materials in the box, and you've certainly then damaged the box and you need to replace it. So you want to keep your boxes stacked together in the same size. Similarly, you know, I know in our minds we see these pictures, the neat pyramids of different size boxes on our shelves that we're feeling great about using space efficiently, but not only do they crush the box, but you know the first time that someone pulls that large bottom box from the bottom and serves it to a patron in the reading room, when it goes back on the shelf, it's not going back on the bottom because that's just a pain. And so it goes back on top and then it's teetering and tottering on top of a much smaller box and has the potential to get knocked over or fall on the floor. Oversized flat items. You know, if you can, you want to put these materials into map case drawers or flat file drawers. These items should all get folders. The folders should be either, you know, sized to fit the entire drawer or half drawer size. You want to avoid having, you know, six different size folders in a drawer that causes that, you know, that lump of material in the middle that causes things to slide out of the folders on the side, causes you to lose little folders that are in there, have materials slide out. And also, again, then you avoid the issue of having six different size folders that you have to keep stocked up in your supply cabinets. I mean, also though, you don't want to fill up the drawers too much. If you can, I want to encourage you to leave about half an inch at the top of each drawer so that nothing gets caught when you're opening closing drawers. Oversized rolled items. You know, an alternative to flat storage is rolling oversized items. And, you know, they can be rolled up around an acid free core or tube. And then on the outside of the paper of the item, you know, you can wrap that with paper or polyester, mylar. And then you can tie it all closed with ties and ribbons. And you do one of those, you want to make sure you label it on the outside where someone can easily see it and know what it is so they can be retrieved. And then the rolled tubes can be stored upright or flat. Photographs and sheet films, you know, they can be stored with the rest of the collections in document boxes. But you do want to try and, if possible, store them in paper sleeves or polyester sleeves so that the image surface doesn't rub against other materials within the larger folders. If you can, obviously, you want to keep these materials cool and dry. They are more sensitive than most paper-based materials. And also use gloves when handling them. Some of the big issues that collections face with photograph and sheet film are nitrate sheet film, which is a flammable hazard. And that's almost always found on film produced and used between about 1910 and 1950. Acetate sheet film was the replacement for nitrate sheet film and was begun being used in 1925. Its use continued, you know, it was primarily in the, you know, through about the 50s or 60s. But it did in some instances continue into the 70s or 80s. In this film, this is what you see to the right here. That's called channeling and that's part of the deterioration process of what's called vinegar syndrome. And that's when the acetate, that is the film base, deteriorates into vinegar, acetic acid. And you'll know it, it has a very distinctive smell. It smells like vinegar, like salad dressing. Glass plate negatives are very fragile and often very valued items in our collection. And you can get special individual four-flap wrappers to wrap each individual one. You want to make sure that you store the glass plate negatives on their edges. So not flat on their long, on their wide faces, but actually on their edges. And if you can pack them close together, that's good. Glass gets strength from being close together and you do want to pad them. And if you have the option of storing them on thick shelving as opposed to compact shelving, that's good. Even minor vibrations can cause losses in glass plate negatives. And then slides can just go in polyester sleeve pages or boxes. Film reels. Again, basics, if you can, put them in archival plastic cans and on plastic cores. You want to make sure you have a leader around the outside to protect the film and then label the can and the leader. Film cans should be stored flat. Ideally, you want to keep them as cool and dry as possible. Again, nitrate film on film reels is 1895 to 1950. If you are an organization or institution that discovers you have more than 25 pounds of nitrate film in your collection, it is a federally regulated hazard. So the link that we had on the prior slide to the, I believe it was a National Park Service document does tell you more about that. Acetate film was also used from 1922 until you see the switch over in the 1960s for many things. But here in Florida, actually, we had state mandated contracts that dictated that our microfilm be produced on acetate until about 1989. So we deal with acetate in our collection basically up until about 1990. With AV tapes and magnetic media, you want to store these fully rewound and stand them on their edges. They can go in boxes with other materials, but you want to make sure that there's not too much room for them to shake, rattle, and roll. Books and scrapbooks, you know, no collection that I've ever seen is, doesn't have books in them somewhere. If they're going in archival boxes with other collections or by themselves, you want to store them spined down and in a folder. Scrapbooks are a joy that we get to deal with and that researchers love. And the safest way to prevent their contents from falling out is to store them flat in a box. Framed art and photographs, you know, if possible, I would encourage you during process to remove the frames and remove any glass glazing that is present. Under no circumstances do you want to store the glass in the same box as other collection items. Broken glass is a giant pain and a giant hazard for both collections and staff. If you do, you know, if it's a historic frame, if the frame has a direct attachment to the item and you can't remove it, then you should plan on storing it separately and storing it upright, if possible, and that may mean, you know, hanging it on a wall somewhere. Textiles get stored flat in an acid-free box, you know, loosely folded, and you want to support the folds with acid-free tissue. Reality objects and 3D artifacts, you know, are maybe the biggest headache for storage and now you know they're also a growing area of collection, collecting from many archives. Unfortunately, there's no one solution for these types of collections. It really depends on what the items are and how they're going to be used by your researchers. I will say that anything that is remotely heavy should be at a minimum stored in boxes separate from your paper-based items. You don't want those office paper weights, you know, rattling around and tearing holes in the, you know, the typing paper that came with, you know, with this office collection. As you see on the screen, Stash C and Reorg are two organizations that provide ideas and advice for storage solutions for, primarily for 3D artifacts. Their, you know, their audience is libraries, museums and archives, so there's a lot of interesting things there. You know, if you have a collection of feathers, something like that, if you have a collection of bird eggs, you know, they have solutions that you may want to look into. Because we don't need to reinvent the wheel every single one of us. Finally, I do want to touch ever so briefly on digital preservation. It's something that, you know, that I don't think any of our collections can avoid anymore, but it's also its own very, very complicated issue. And its most basic rule, and this is something that goes for, you know, for personal digital archiving and for small organizations, you want to follow what's called the 321 rule. You want to have three copies of the files. You want to store those files on at least two different media types, and you want to put one of those storage units, one of those copies, in a different physical location. That means outside of your building. You don't want to just have three hard drives, you know, in two different parts of your office, which then catches fire and you lose everything. You know, the purpose of this is to have a backup. And then the other thing is you do really need to have a consistent and descriptive, be consistent and descriptive in naming files and folders. You know, if there's an archival collection that these digital files are associated with, you know, whether they're images, they're Word documents, whatever they are, you want to make sure you include that accession number or that record number in the file naming format so that future generations know what this document is and can associate it with the proper collection. The cloud, it can be a part of your preservation plan, you know, if we're talking about Amazon Glacier, you know, if we're talking about Dropbox, things like that. You can consider that to be one of your different media types, but you do just have to be aware that the cloud, different cloud storage options offer you different benefits and different takeaways. And you want to know what's best for your organization before committing yourself to a cloud storage. I do want to make sure that everyone should always make sure that they do keep hard drives of some sort with their digital collections on them. You know, you don't want your only place where your digital files are located in your collections to be the cloud because things can happen, things do go away. That comes, you know, to the end of my formal presentation. And I see that I'm a little bit past my time allotment as well, so I'm looking forward to moving on to taking questions. I do want to just briefly thank the University of Florida for supporting me in this field, as well as a couple other folks. Paula DiStefano, Laura McCann, Sarah Stouterman and Priscilla Anderson, who've all at various times and in various ways helped me think about these issues and how we deal with our archival collections. So I see we have about 20 minutes for questions. I'm going to pull up. I'm going to go through the parking lot that we have on the side. Is that the best way to work, Susan? Do you want me to read them for you? I can go through the parking lot, and then if you want to keep on adding at the bottom, I'll get there. I want to remind people that the evaluation link is up in the upper left-hand corner, and I didn't forget it, and please fill them out. They're very important. Thank you. So, Fletcher, go ahead. Great. So I see that the first question I had, well, someone's commenting on the hit-by-the-bus thing and the bus factor, and yep, it even has its own Wikipedia entry. So if you're future planning and future-proofing your organization, you want to make sure that you take into account the bus factor. Can you freeze photographs? Yes. Film and photographs can be frozen in cold storage. There are procedures that you want to take to make sure that your images aren't getting frozen together, but it is possible. And especially for film, cold storage is the ideal. You do want to avoid freezing videotape, audio tape in any sort of magnetic media, and most plastics as well. Those are things that you do want to avoid putting into cold storage generally. And there are a couple of really nice resources on freezing film and photographs that are in the resources of the website, so check those out. There's especially a good one from the Park Service, and I think I also added that to the resources today. Wonderful. Thank you, Susan. We have a question here from Michelle Roseberg about controlling humidity. They've had an extremely hot and humid summer, and humidity control was a problem. Their humidity would rise every afternoon, and despite adding a dehumidifier, they found it hard to control daily swings about 10% to 18%. Any advice on this would be useful. Generally, I would say if you can get the daily swings to between about 5% and 10%, obviously that's better than 10% to 18%. Small dehumidifiers oftentimes can't handle the load in storage spaces. If it's a large stack area, it just might not be able to get the job done. One way to think about relative humidity is also relative humidity. It is the humidity relative to the amount of water that the air can hold at a given temperature. So you may find actually in many places in the summer that you're better able to control your relative humidity if you're able to increase the temperature in your storage spaces. So there's typically, we think of there being about a, for every one degree Fahrenheit that you raise the temperature, you reduce the relative humidity by about 2% points. So if you're keeping a very cold storage area in the summer, you may very well find that you're not able to control the relative humidity. But if you can convince your organization to be a little more flexible in their set points, and maybe instead of 65 Fahrenheit, they move it in the summer months to 72, 73, 74 degrees Fahrenheit, you may very well find that that relative humidity may lessen. Otherwise, dehumidification is often a major HVAC expense, and you can go and upgrade your HVAC system, but I don't think that's necessarily the advice that you want to hear. Let's see Evelyn Fiddler, and I apologize if I'm mispronouncing anyone's name here. I'm just trying to get through everything quickly as possible. Is there a special kind of film you can add to the windows to bring down the UV light factor? There is. There are commercially available films that you can buy, that you can either, you know, if you're very strapped for cash, you can apply yourself, or you can pay somebody to do that. It's essentially putting a plastic sheet that has various materials to absorb or reflect UV in it. They do, the films do typically have a lifespan, so you do, you know, if you put on a UV film, you may, your organization may find that you have to replace them, you know, every 7 to 10 years, something like that. So that may be a cost factor that you have to deal with in the long term. You know, whereas if you get some lovely velvet curtains, something heavy that doesn't let the light through, you know, you don't have to deal with that issue. But it is, there is an aesthetic factor I recognize with organizations. What dimension do I mean by record storage box? Record storage box is, again, there will always be terminology differences, but that's sort of your basic banker's box size. It's typically 10 by 15 by 12, something along that size, so like a page miracle box, a large Hollinger box, something like that. Storing and filing cabinets. You know, filing cabinets are an acceptable means for storing archival collections. I think they're difficult because, you know, they're hard to move, they're hard to reorganize, but, you know, that is oftentimes what people have. You know, if you have filing cabinets, you likely find yourself with hanging folders, and then within those hanging folders, you want to put archival quality folders. You know, the filing cabinet is probably stainless steel, so you're probably okay there on the materials. You know, if a researcher has nail polish on, ask them to put gloves on, you know, I wouldn't worry about it so much. I think, you know, if we're talking about someone who's looking through, you know, paper-based materials, I wouldn't be too worried about the nail polish rubbing off on the materials. Obviously, you don't want them putting their nail polish on in the reading room, but again, gloves make handling things awkward, and, you know, if you're talking about minimizing your risks to collections, you know, you're probably more likely to get a small tear from someone wearing gloves than having some sort of nail polish rub off. There are, you know, microspachelors are great ways to turn pages, but, you know, we may have different feelings about using bare hands. Again, you know, it does depend on what your papers look like, and if you're just taking, you know, corporate paper that's been printed out in the last five years, you know, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Rubber bands are also a no-no. The rubber in rubber bands deteriorates over time, and it becomes this. It loses its stretch and gets sticky and will end up staining whatever paper it breaks and sticks to. There's a question about plastic-coated paperclips, and if they can be used. I think, I don't want to speak for all folks involved in conservation, the preservation field. Plastic clips are, they're not bad for the collection in the same way that rusting paperclips are, but they do tend to break. They're not very strong. They're not very efficient. They don't really seem to get the job done. I know there are folks that have very strong feelings against plastic clips. I don't quite fall, you know, I'm not to, tape is evil. Plastic clips, I'm not so sure evil, but I certainly avoid using them. I've never found them to be particularly helpful. When I'm talking about rolled storage, I'm generally talking about large items that may be already rolled up or may not be rolled. I think, you know, if you're dealing with smaller pieces of paper that are rolled up when you come across them in processing, I would try and gently flatten them and then just put them in a folder in a regular document case or record storage box. But, you know, you may find, you get a collection of 100 blueprints and that are already, you know, that came rolled up. And it's okay, you know, rolled storage is a very acceptable way to manage oversized collections. But you do want to make sure that the, that rolled items are rolled around a core, you know, there's something in the middle of that role to support the item. Just because over time, you know, if you've ever seen, you know, it can be challenging to unroll documents that have been rolled up for 50 years or 100 years, but it's possible. But, you know, if you've ever come across a document that's been rolled up for 150 years, you know, sometimes the inner layers of those roles sort of collapse in on themselves and cause damage. So you want to support those materials appropriately. How long, here's a question from Christina Johnston, how long do you keep transparent season slides? We're trying to digitize as much as possible and I know these materials deteriorate and lose coloring over time. Again, you know, this, how long do transparent season slides keep? It's a question that really depends upon your collection environment. Color slides and color transparencies, you know, most often will have a polyester base. So in that sense, they will stick around as objects, but they do, you know, when exposed to light and high humidity levels, the color dies that were used, you know, usually particularly in the 60s and 70s and 80s, and those dies are prone to fading and deteriorating and discoloring. So, you know, you do want to get to those materials in a reasonable amount of time if you have, you know, issues with humidity levels in your collections. I'm not sure that I would necessarily always make them a major priority, but again, this does depend on your collections. So if you're an organization, say, a university archive that is dealing with a large collection of, you know, in art historian slides that they always used in their classrooms, and there's a lot of research value there, and it tells you a lot about the growth of the institution, you know, that makes total sense to get them digitized. Let's see. Jennifer Sanchez is asking, should this videotape be stored on the long edge or the short edge? Generally, on the long edge, the short edge is acceptable as well. You really just want to avoid storing videotapes flat. The tape pack has a tendency to move and get out of whack over a long period of time if they're stored flat. Courtney Bastion is asking, what is the best way to store approximately 100 rare books? Should each book have its own clamshell archival box? Ideally, yes. You know, if you have the money and the shelf space to, you know, if you have the money to buy clamshell, nice clamshell boxes for your rare books, that's wonderful. You know, I will say adding a clamshell box to a book does increase the amount of storage space required for a book, but depending on your collection, it could very well be worth it. You know, if you have 100 rare books, you should probably think about having a storage area in your collection that has perhaps some library shelving. You know, I wouldn't necessarily want to put 100 rare books into page boxes or something like that just because, you know, every time you're pulling those out, they're very, very heavy. And you wouldn't want, you know, you wouldn't want a page to unexpectedly pull, you know, pull off a very heavy box and drop them. Let's see. Tanya Coleman, Donna Bedion, is saying that, yeah, she sees folks talking about keeping curled items rolled, but the majority of the collection I am working with has been kept very badly and is slumped in the boxes. Trying to use very heavy books to try to flatten them somewhat. Are there any other ideas? I would say it depends on, you know, it depends on the size. I would say if you have materials that are going to go into a flat box, you know, 16 by 20 inch box or 20 by 24 inch box, you know, you may very well find, but, you know, then they're not going to be used very frequently. You may be able to get away with just the gentle restraint of having those items in folders, in boxes, yeah, with other collection material on top of them. Over time, those paper fibers that have, you know, spent a long time curled up, they will flex generally and uncurl. And, you know, I know in special collections, you know, we think of collections that are used heavily as something that's, you know, that's used in the reading room once every five years. So, you know, if these are documents that are going to be used once every five years or even less frequently, that's a fairly long time to get them to relax in the boxes without having to have too much intervention. But otherwise, you know, you're using heavy books to try and flatten them. You know, other options, you know, if you have a, if you have a stash of folders, of acid-free folders somewhere, you know, you can use those as a weight as long as everyone knows, as long as you put signs on top to let everyone know that there are collection items in there and you don't want people moving things without your knowledge. Let's see. Mary Porter asks, she says they have an offer in their institution from a designer who wants to give them two large map files. They are painted and not powder coated and about 20 years old in perfect condition. Do you think off-gassing has already occurred so they will be safe? You know, in my experience with, you know, if they're about 20 years old and they're, you know, and they have a coat of paint on them that's, you know, 20 years old or maybe it's only five years old, but you know, maybe it's latex house paint or something like that, you're probably okay. You know, I think if they're, if they're steel, you're probably good to take them. It's certainly, you know, it's some of these things depend on your offers. It's, you know, do you, you know, do you need large map cases and, you know, are you going to be able to get them from somewhere else? You know, in some of that, this is sort of some of the compromises that we make and, and again, you know, you're not, if it's better for your institution to have decent physical storage for your collections and there's the chance that there might be some, some minor off-gassing from, you know, from the file cabinets, you know, depending on what you're going to put in there, you're probably going to be okay. You know, if you're putting some, some large, large printed maps or large printed posters, something like that, you're probably doing okay. Hailey is asking how we can remove old sticky rubber bands safely. I would suggest gently using a micro spatula to try and lift off the, the sticky rubber bands, but you may find rubber bands are, there's a point in the middle of their deterioration where they're very difficult to take off, where they're, they're sticky and they're, but they still have enough flexibility that they're really hard to separate from the surface of the paper. When they get older, they get crispy and brittle and then they, most of the rubber band will just flake off with a, with a gentle push of a, of a micro spatula or a fingernail. But there will often be, be some staining left over and that's frankly something you're, you're probably going to have to live with unless you want to, you know, get in touch with a, with a paper conservator to, to deal with it, the issue more directly. Sure. Yep. We had, we out of time here, Susan. Almost. So try and answer the last question and thank you everybody. Please remember the evaluations we'll see you next month and Fletcher, try and finish. All right. I'll, I'll, we'll get here. What sort of books are, what sort, what do, what should I do with books or bulletins that have covers falling off or binding that is gone or, or near gone? I'm finding a few covered in tape. Again, this depends on, on how the books are used. You know, if these are things that are used regularly in the reading room, you should look into finding a local book conservator who can rebind them for you or recase them. If they're not used very frequently, you may just think of putting them in folders and putting them in boxes or just getting, you know, simple corrugated board clamshell boxes or four flap wrappers made for them that can keep everything together, but won't necessarily make it easier for readers to use. Again, it's, you know, this depends on sort of what the end goal of for these, these materials use are. So hopefully that answers everything and thank you everyone for joining us today. And thank you all. We'll see you in November to talk about food and that's it. So thank you very much.