 Good afternoon, everyone. Please welcome our next speaker, Joyce Garner, who's coming all the way to Kansas City to just promote this morning. She's going to talk about practical preservation today. Thank you for inviting me on 50 and 50 of the Technical Services Round Table notification talk about practical preservation techniques. I'm an archivist in the National Archives of Kansas City. We are one of 13 regional facilities of the National Archives of Records Administration. And we hold records from, we hold permanent records from US history courts and field offices of the federal agencies in the states of Missouri and Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Minnesota. So you have researchers who need those kinds of records. You said that we also, we have lots of Bureau of Indian Affairs records, including the Winnebago agency, which I just let team on arranging and describing those records. I feel we can shift to the graph these days for having that map. But today I'm going to talk about preservation techniques. I am the person in charge of preservation in the National Archives of Kansas City. And being a federal employee, that means I take readings and submit reports and collect statistics and such. But it also means that I'm the person when we run into something that's falling apart, I'm supposed to know what to do with it. And so sometimes they make it up. But there really are some very basic sorts of things that we fall back on. And so a lot of those really are very applicable to libraries in general. I come into the archives profession with an undergrad history of NLS. From an employee state, I have been a school librarian. I've been a congregational librarian and a school retailer. I wrote a column for school library year over years. I just dropped that a couple of months ago. And so I really come into this with a lot of library background. And went back to school into some of the classes about other half-masters that we used to look at in the hospital. Which I've enjoyed very much. It brought me back to a circle to my undergrad. But for me, it's information management. Everything about it, really just in information management. Although I love historical stories that we discover all the time. So we're going to look at some things that will just be very practical. I hope that you can take back and use not only in your libraries, but also in your own personal belongings. We all have family heirlooms that we want to preserve. We also have people who ask us for advice on those sorts of things. So I hope that this hits on several levels. Just an overview of basic preservation for paper-based items today. Please don't ask me about digital or electronic media. I keep saying, but we start getting the email to archive. I'm going to retire at that time because it's not my era so much. But we're going to look at just what constitutes an effective preservation environment. The effects of proper housing and storage. We'll specifically take a little look at pass control and mold prevention, things to crop up in libraries all the time. I'll show you some very inexpensive paper repair techniques, clean communication, and then we'll touch on the depth of preparedness and emergency response. You could do almost a complete graduate program in any one of these areas. So this is going to be overview and here we go. Well, the main thing, what anything we're trying to preserve is that we are fighting with mother nature. Everything that we are trying to preserve, if it's paper-based in particular, is organic. And there are, you know, just at the molecular level, it is decomposing right before our eyes. We cannot completely stop that process. We can do some things that will significantly slow it down. And we can do some things that will preserve information on the paper and medium. But follow the paper's books. That's all organic and it is decomposing. So a lot of it just comes down to provide the right environment for storage. And the four main tenants of a good preservation environment are that it should be cool, dry, and dark, and that the item should be as flat as possible. So when I give workshops or when we teach classes in this, I always say that you don't leave with anything else, remember, cool, dry, dark, and flat, and you will really be ahead of the game. Cool just refers to the temperature of the environment. Dry refers to the relative humidity. And there are particular ranges. Paper-based things like to be on the cool and dry side. And it needs to be a constant, steady temperature and humidity, not an average. If you have, you know, peaks and valleys, that really stresses the paper as it encounters those. So cool and dry, pretty consistent. In the dark, that talks about the effective UV rays. We are getting UV rays in there right now, behind closed curtains, off of the lights, overhead. And so we want to store things so that they are not getting that UV get. We know what it does to our skin. It does bad things to paper too. And if you think about a newspaper that plays in your driveway all day, how loud it is at the end of the day, well, that's highly acidic paper, it's printed on. So it's not meant to last. But you are seeing UV damage over the day as well. So over time, it really accumulates. And then to keep things flat as much as possible. We're not really going into the chemistry behind paper. Paper is made of fibers. And when we fold paper against the grain, we actually are damaging the fibers along that fold. That's so if you want to tear paper, you do it with your finger nail, and then you put it apart, and it's the other little fuzzy thing. That's the paper fibers. Anytime that we fold paper, we're stressing those fibers. Anytime that we roll paper up tightly, we're stressing those fibers. So we want to keep things as flat as possible. Now, if you have a map that is like one I worked on, you know, 18 feet wide and 25 feet long, you know, no map cabinet is going to hold that. But there are ways to keep it flatter than just, you know, fold it up and stuff it into a box or something. So we'll look at those a little bit. The cool dry garden plan, or basic tenant of this preservation environment. We have these little critters called TEM monitors in our stacks around our building. It stands for Preservation Environment Monitor. And these cost a couple hundred dollars a piece. We have them in our stacks, and anywhere that we have original records on building. So in our galleries as well, in our research room. And they take readings of the temperature and humidity every so many minutes. And once a quarter, I put a flash drive in there and pull all that information off. Now put in this software on my computer and make a report, send it off to Washington DC. So this is the highlight of what we're doing or not doing or need to do. But it's very useful information because it really does tell us how we're doing on the temperature and humidity. It's hard data. You may well have an HVAC system that would be able to provide you reports on this kind of environmental control in your building. And I tell people, if you really have no budget at all, at the very least hang a thermometer on the wall and pay attention to it. Now take a daily reading at the same time every day so that you actually know what's going on. If you are in your stacks and it feels uncomfortable to you, it's uncomfortable for your records or your paper face. So we really do need to pay attention. Proper storage is really important. We store our records in boxes that are the right size and shape. As you can see in this picture, this is a record storage box. But it is made so that it's the right size for these folders, like legal folders. It has handles, it begins, so it's easy to handle. It has a box that goes over the top of the box. So the folders are standing up straight, they're not slumping, they're not crowded. These are properly stored records. If you're thinking, I don't know what you had in your collections, but this goes to file cabinets as well. If you pull a file drawer open and things go, you know, kind of rumble across the top, it's too full, you need to do something about that. If on the other hand they're really slumping, that's not supporting them well either. So, you know, you need to use proper kind of housing. And I brought in one of the boxes that we use in our stacks for record. This is made out of the asset-free material. The records that we have are old and they're generally on a specific paper, which is slowly deteriorating over time. So we try to put as much asset-free material in physical contact with it. So the folders inside the box are made of asset-free material. The box is made of asset-free material. It slows down the acidic deterioration. When I close the lid on the box, the records inside are in the dark. The box can be sitting out in the room. It takes the UV kit from the record to the side or in the dark. And this is easy to handle, it's a good size. So this is the kind of thing that we use. The memory enforcements really help the box in strength. Thank you for the question. So then what would be too cold for records? The question is, what would be too cold for records? I am in just a moment point to give you the optimal range for things. I hate to quote it off the top of my head because I'll be blown. For things that are oversized, we use math doors. We have lots of big oversize things. We have lots of art and chord engineer records. These people make maths about everything. Maths, charts, diagrams. So we have lots of those things and we like sort of flat. So again, these are in big folders that are made of asset-free material and they're stored in math cabinets when the doors shut and the windows are in the dark. But we have things that are just too big to go in math cabinets. We actually roll them around the outside of an asset-free tube. You can buy these tubes in different diameters. Generally three inches or six inches is what we use. Different lengths. I usually order them in four-foot and six-foot lengths. But we roll them loosely around the outside of the tube. You know, if you roll something up and stick it inside a tube, what's the first thing it does? Spring's open, right? And then you can't get it out. You grab, you fish out a corner and the whole thing spirals out and damages. When we wrap things around the outside of a tube, it doesn't create that tension on the paper. And then we wrap it in mellonex, which is just a polyester film that is not off gas over time. It's completely stable. To keep it clean, we tie it with cotton twill tape. Nothing here that's going to last over time. And then we store them fully-supported on shelves. So it's not truly flat, but it's a lot flatter than it was. Oh, we got it. Because we do get them all curled up as tight as they can be. And it really is the best that we can do. Just looking at some enemies to preservation, I've mentioned acid and lignin are chemicals that are naturally present in paper. And lignin is the chemical in wood that makes a tree trunk stand up erect. It's great in a tree trunk. But in paper, it deteriorates over time. So basically, a sitting paper is deteriorating from the inside out over time. And as I said, we can't completely stop that, but we can slow it down by putting as much acid-free material in physical contact with the paper as possible. So we even sometimes just interleave sheets of acid-free coffee paper, because it's more acid-free material in physical contact. Dirt and rust are very corrosive and can obscure information on the record. Breast comes from paper clips. We find straight pens, stagels, blades, any kind of metal fastener will oxidize over time. It does not have to get wet. And it eats through the paper. So you'll get a hole in the paper. You may also just have information that's obscured. Pest, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about in detail why I talk about. Water is, you know, the humidity in the air. It's water, which is not so good for paper. But also a flood and any kind of emergency that you have is going to involve water of some kind. We'll look it down a little bit more in detail. So just a pretty good pass. The best thing to do is not to let them get started in the first place. So you want to present a good preservation environment. Stable, cool, dry temperature is really not that inviting to clear it. So, and for the past, we're talking about both rosin and insects here. So you want to keep things really clean. Be really careful where you store your food. You should never have food around your records or your books or anything like that because people's sticky fingers get on there and get spilled, it's inadvertent, but it does happen. Weather stripping will help keep them outside where they belong. One of the things that we do if we're getting on landscaping, we don't have anything that's planted directly up against the building. All of our landscaping is set out a couple of feet with a concrete barrier and a sidewalk around there. So it really helps that we don't get the bugs so much that way. Don't use poison bait because if you do without poison bait, whatever critter that eats it, going to not die right when they're where you put the bait, it's going to crawl up in some different corner and die and smell bad and become a food source for other critters. So we use sticky-hug traps. We actually have them in different places around the stacks, around the building. We have a contract with pest control company that they come and check out the traps for us every month. And we keep on log anything that we cite in the building that something else I get emailed because I'm the preservation person at the Lodge. That's so fun, but we keep on log and then the other thing that I can log is see what we've been dealing with. And it's a lot that we keep in the output of some of them. We've had a lot of them know it. We're just really freaking some of our student employees out. I've never one of those wormy things with all the legs, you know, just kind of have to keep dealing with them and then we finally got rid of them. For us, our dumpster is around the backside of the building and our stacks are in the front. So just that physical separation is important. Anything that you have shipped in is likely to bring passengers with it as well. So you really want to be careful about crates, pallets, shipping packing materials because you can easily get insects that come in with them. So we unpack those kinds of things on our dock not in the processing room, not in our stack. There's some things that affect paper on Japanese, just in general, how much acid is in the paper, acid-free paper certainly does not deteriorate like a sitting paper. Not all paper is equally acidic. All these paper clippings are some of the worst. Well, telegrams are really bad. How it's been stored? Has it been flat? Has it been rolled or folded? Just how it's been handled? You know, I had someone call me this week. She had found a stash of Civil War era letters from her family and because they had been stored in the dark and a wood box, which I'm afraid because it's acidic, but in the dark and in a very cool dry place, they're very flexible, they're in good shape. She just wanted to have them preserved going forward. Exposure to UV rays, pests, all these things that we've talked about really affect how long paper products will last. Also, there are things like what kind of ink was used. You know, there is some kind of ink that actually has iron in it and will oxidize over time. Just if that's its inherent quality. Mountain pen ink tends to fade. It really just depends on what kind of ink was used. Temperature, humidity, air pollution can be very corrosive. So these are all factors that determine our effect, how long the paper item will last. A lot of times we have old books and scrapbooks. I get lots of questions about dealing with old scrapbooks especially. If you have old books, you want to make sure that the covers are supported, so that the book doesn't slump. So, use bookends. It's really a nice, very handy thing that is very effective. If it's really large, it should lay flat on the shelf. A copy table book is meant to lay on a copy table or a shelf is not meant to stand up. It's fine, we'll not support it over time. You know, the way that you remove a book from a shelf makes a lot of difference. It's easy to want to just put your finger on the top and pull down on the top and that will rip that binding. So, if you have things that are special that you really want to preserve, if you keep your books pulled out to the front of the shelf so there's a little room behind them, push the two, the one on each side in, that gives you a room to get a grip on the spine and just pull it straight out from the middle. It's a very simple thing that people don't think about that and it really will help preserve the spine. Scrapbooks really should be stored in a box and people who want to know what to do with their family scrapbooks, that's kind of a problem. You may have scrapbooks that have been donated to you or something like that. Scrapbooks tend to be put together on really acidic paper and they're just kind of crumbling. A lot of the times the binding is really lousy and they weren't really manufactured to last in the first place, but yeah, there's a full of cool stuff you know, we wouldn't keep up. So, I really encourage people to go through and take extensive digital photographs of everything in the scrapbook if there are items that open up like an invitation or a program, open it up, take a picture of the inside, thoroughly document that digitally. Then put the whole thing away and then acid-free box. You can have it with some just acid-free tissue paper if you need to. Boxes will live, put it in a place like a bedroom closet and that will really be good for it in the long run. And then, share the digital copies. Don't share the original. You have researchers who want to look at it. They need to look at the digital copies. They don't look at the original. It shouldn't be handled anymore, but it should be retired. Louspapers should be put in acid-free sleeve folders or in plastic sleeves. You always want to avoid anything that says PVC off-gasses has it basically over time. But sleeves made of polyester, polyethylene, there's three polys, and they'll say archival quality on the package. Those don't off-gass, they're very safe when they'll do nothing to harm it. Then you can't handle that letter or whatever it is in the sleeve. You're not touching it. You can read it through there. You can photocopy it. You can photograph it. You can display it that way if you want to, but you're not handling it anymore and you're not getting any oils from your fingers off. You want to avoid folding things more than once. We do usually fold things once. We think they're difficult. But we don't fold them up five or six times to suck them in there. And we can fold and consider very large. Preservation photocopies really are a great idea on acid-free paper. This is especially good for newspaper clippings because that newspaper clippings is going to continue to deteriorate over time. So if you make a preservation photocopy of it, you preserve it at the edge right now. And then you can, again, retie it in original. But they did a sleeve, an acid-free sleeve, but put it away in the dark in an acid-free box and make your photocopies on acid-free paper. You could also make digital copies and save life. But photocopies, you don't have to have any hardware or software to access them. You know, a piece of paper in your hand is a great thing. So here we go, the ideal storage environment for documents and books. A cool, stable temperature in a 68 to 72 degree range. Stable humidity of 40 to 50%. You want to keep it in the dark. So remember that it's not only sunlight, but it's fluorescent lights that can be coming off of them in a properly stored. Photographs are a little bit different. There's a lot of chemistry going on in photographs. And there are so many different kinds of photographs. I actually had an intern with me six weeks this summer specializing in photography preservation. She was in a graduate program, just for that. And I really envied her because it was so cool, you know, the stuff that she was wearing. The voice she could rattle off the particular, the not different kinds of photographs. So each photograph, depending on when it was taken, who took it, how it was developed, how it's been stored, it's going to have individual chemistry in its physical makeup and will determine to some extent how long it will last. But these other things are still important. You want to keep them out of direct sunlight. So it's a little bit exposure to UV rays. How you handle photographs is really important. They should be to sleep or you should be wearing gloves. We don't wear gloves to handle paper documents because we think the gloves actually make you a little bit clumsy, you lose the dexterity. So we say wash your hands, continue to wash your hands because a lot of times our records are old and baggy and our hands get dirty from handling the record. So wash your hands again if you think you're having a problem. But with photographs, you should always wear gloves or they should be sleep, one or the other. Having this stored is important on photographs. They take a little bit more care. The temperature is a little bit cooler for photographs and the humidity is a little bit drier. The emulsion on photographs will be tacky in high humidity and easily damaged at that point. And you'll also get a little mold growth going. So you want to have it a little bit cooler, a little bit drier. Air pollution, again, will be very corrosive to photographs and bugs and rodents like to eat photographs just like anything else that's paper-based. So they're a little bit specialized but a lot of the same factors still apply. So the article storage environment with photos, 65 to 70 degrees, a little bit cooler, 35 to 50 humidity, a little bit drier and again, should be stable and keep them in the dark. Polyethylene, polypropylene, polyester, cultured industry polys, I couldn't remember all of them. You don't want PVC that anything made of polyethylene, polypropylene or polyester will be a good sleeve. There are also paper sleeves made of acid-free material that can be very good for photographs. When we think about preserving photographs against the heat and humidity that can be very damaging to them and makes the emulsion sticky, you should always store photographs flat. We actually find photographs that have been folded to fit the box and anyway, you say that things in the courts sometimes, but that it really ruins wherever they've been folded, the emulsion is cracked and it is ruined at that point. So photographs in particular need to be stored flat and they need to be sleeved or handled. Now some things you should avoid using on your documents and photographs and this in particular, think about your own personal items as well. Anything that you are creating that you think you want to save or someone in your family might think it's an heirloom someday because you could be proactive on this upfront when you create things too. But these are, this is kind of the list of all the supplies that archivists hate because they cause problems with the balloon and transplant tape. We've got a lot in front of that here of a document that somebody is going to tape having on it. And the problem with this is it's a quick fix. It's very pragmatic. And if it's not something that you're going to keep for a long time, it's fine. I put it as something I'm going to keep. Well, I need to know that over time the adhesive will try out and fail and the cellophane will come off. And then what I have is a document that is still torn, still coming apart, and now it's got tape residue on it. And to get it off, you really have to go to a conservator. Then we're getting into solvents and archivists don't deal with solvents. That's conservators realm. So we just say don't do that. The same thing is true with white glue over time. It dries out, it fails, rubber cement, yuck, stuff that it leaves behind. Now you can rub it up on your finger. One of the things that we've run into a lot here are those self-stick magnetic photo albums. They really are terrible because there's nothing acid-free about them for the most part. And the clear sheet that lays over the photographs eventually will just kind of become one with the photographs. I mean, it all just sort of runs together into one thing mess. So I tell people that if they're trying to deal with one of these, if you can get the sheet off the top, so that the photograph is exposed, you can take a piece of dental floss and just look it back and forth under the photograph to get it to lift off. Because otherwise, you're trying to get it off because otherwise, you're trying to bend that photograph to peel it off and you may damage it. That dental floss really works pretty well that way. If you can't get them off that way, then really the best thing to do is to take digital photos of the photos, so that you at least have the original and the state that it is at this point and move forward and value them, never use one of those again. PVC, page, and photo protectors are out there. You know, they're very common, they're cheap. Things that are archival quality or acid pretent to be more expensive. So we find these and they generate acids, they bring down and it actually speeds up the deterioration. Any kind of melt-ass hair will rust over time. So one of the things, if you are dealing with things yourself and you're tempted to repair something, think can I undo this without damaging or changing this document at all? And if the answer is no, then don't do it, okay? We can put something in the sleeve, I dig it out of the sleeve, nothing has changed. I put tape on it, I've changed it. So it should not, it should always be reversible. Now if you have torn records, one thing that you can do is encapsulate or sleeve them. So this is what you do if you can't use tape, okay? So we've got a picture here of an exhibit from a court case actually and it was just kind of on old cardboard sort of paper and had completely fallen apart and we didn't know what it was. So one of our archivists took it out to a presentation lab and laid all the pieces out just like a puzzle where there was no picture on the cover and figured out what it was and it was a picture of a boiler. And you know, we find all kinds of things in court cases. It was an exhibit and so it was kind of a cool picture. So now we have this big thing, what do we do with this? So we actually made a very large sleeve that was welded all the way around so that it's encapsulated in that now. And it's just a custom thing that we were able to make. It will always have to be sort of flat. We had a researcher who wanted to look at this. We would probably take a digital phone serve that to them and say, I'm sorry, you can't look at the original because it just is too fragile to actually transport. But do the same thing if you have a letter that has fallen apart of the fold. There's a nice letter size sleeve, reassemble it in there. There's enough static electricity built up inside the sleeve to hold those pieces in place. Then you can handle it. It really works very well. You've not used any tape on it. Now one thing you can do for things that are maybe not a permanent value but very pragmatic things that you do need to repair, you can use heat set tissue. And this is something that actually I put, this PowerPoint is on the conference website, one of the others, and I put pretty explicit directions here on how to do this, thinking that I was not going to be able to actually demonstrate. But heat set tissue is just a material that has a neutral pH tissue. So that's a pretty, mine was in a curling adhesive. It's a lot like if you sew kind of like iron knot interfacing, it's that kind of concept. Only it's more of a tissue. And so what you need is this little packing iron, some a sheet of heat set tissue and then a sheet of silicone release paper. And basically all you do is you pre-heat the packing iron, you cut a strip of the heat set tissue to fit whatever your tear or your little hole is. You wanna have a little bit of overlap around the outside. If you have a scarf tear, you know when something tears and it's kind of like the paper actually split and it's like we got some over here and over here, you wanna make sure that it's like the right way. To line it all up, you kind of tack it down with the heat set tissue, down with the shiny side down because that's the heat set side, tack it into place just to position it. And then you use the silicone release paper, which nothing will stick to, put that down iron over it basically. And then if you want to do the whole process again on the back side for extra strength, you can. If there's any that extended over the side, you just trim it down. This is an easy technique. It takes a little bit of practice. So if you're interested in it and it's really barely inexpensive, you can buy all of these materials from, Gamelord or any library supply company. Takes a little bit of practice, but it's kind of fun. And I brought a little example. This is just the tacking iron. You can see it's the temperature control tissue and silicone release paper. And if you wanna come up and look at these afterwards, you're welcome to. I also have a map here that I did a lot of heat set tissue repair on. So, this was when they came out of my glove box. And you know, all the corners had hole corners. And so when I learned to do this, I wanted something that would be useful. My daughter lives in St. Paul and we need this map. So if you wanna look at this afterwards, you can see that every place it's folded, I've reinforced it on both sides of the heat set tissue. It can be re-folded at this point. It really is a very strong repair. Didn't take very long at all. The other thing I said, things need to be reversible. You can take heat set tissue off if you need to just by reheating and taking it off. Eventification is another thing that's really a great simple paper repair. I know I said that humidity is bad for paper, but in a controlled environment, humidity is really very good for paper. If you think about old brittle paper, one of the reasons that it's in a state of tennis because it's become too dry over time. So we can very gently reintroduce humidity to it through the humidification process. These are pictures of humidification chambers in our preservation lab. These are about four by six feet. They are, we're set up there to really deal with these oversized records that we get. But you can see in one of the pictures, I've got some records in there. Something that's been folded up. We get old court records that are actually tri-folded records. And they've been stored, tri-folded for a hundred and whatever years. They're not kind of easily unfolded at this point. And they're very difficult to even scan a photocopy. We can't safely use them until we get them to lay down, relax. So this is the process that we go through. It's putting them through this humidification chamber. Usually it's an overnight process. And then we layer them between sheets of heavy blotter paper with plexiglass plates. This is just a small humidification chamber that I made that we use for smaller things. It's on the very same principle, exactly like the big one. And this is one that you could easily make at home. This is just a rubber band cut. So nothing that will rust. In the bottom, we have a sheet of thick blotter paper that's been cut to death. So what I would do is pour warm water on here. The blotter paper soaks up all the water. So in this case, I don't have any standing blotter at all. But it's really wet. And warm to warm water. This is, we call it a crate. You find it at hardware store and it goes up to us and like it's just plastic. Lay it on top. And then for this one, I added a sheet of, this stuff is called Polytex or Remay. It's a spun polyester. It's a lot like it's very new home. That lay it over the top so that occasionally a very delicate record could be kind of kind of embossed with that crate pad. The records go in here on top and then the lid goes on. And it's an airtight, it's a pretty airtight environment. Very warm and humid in there. The records just, it's very passive though. No hands, no mechanics going on here. I've done this same setup at home with the type of work it takes when it's like paper towels. So I mean, you really can improve. Leave them in there for, it depends on what you're putting in, how old it is, how thick it is. But if there are old letters, anything with top and pen, you need to really watch it because the equal run as it starts to be redefined. So that may only take 20 or 30 minutes. Other things may need to be left in overnight. But then the next day, you take them out, layer them between sheets of water paper with a blade on top, let them dry overnight. They come out looking just like they've been ironed almost. And they're really very subtle and much easier to handle at that point when they just relapse. Any damage that was there from a fold is still there. It doesn't make the fold go away. They're just laying flat. Like we give a lot of folks, you know, need any sort of advisory, you know, in better conditions than the ones we have on the show. It probably indicates some mildew or something. I mean, anytime you smell something, I'd be really cautious about letting those back in with the other thing. Now, we'll see what we can say about that. Okay, so the question, I'm sorry, I'm asking the question. So the question is about smelly things. I think what you're going to need to do is just keep them segregated. As much as you can. Some of you can sleeve them. You can encapsulate them. You can put them in separate boxes. But if there is that smell, there is something chemical going on that may not be a good thing to have around the rest of your collection. Segregating them is a good thing. Kind of pointing them. I'll take one more question. You don't have to keep that. A cigarette smell from just a circulating book. I don't really have a good answer to that. I don't really have a good answer to that. The best answer might be to replace the book. I've got some examples of some different humidification chambers. I just went out and found these online. Just to give you an idea of how creative you can be in coming. This top on the trash can within the trash can, this is very common. It's really great if you have bold posters or tubes or something like that. That basically you have a big trash can, you have a small trash can that sits inside of it. The records go in the small trash can to pour water around the outside. So there's no water touching the records. You put the lid on and get the humidifier in. The two underneath, I've seen these frequently as well. And I've seen a lot of conservation labs where they will set these up in their big oversized stainless steel sinks, actually. Run some water in the bottom. Put a tray or a box of some kind on top of that. And then put a piece of plexiglass over the top. So again, you're creating some kind of enclosed, passive human environment here. You never want water touching your documents, but they have to be separated in some way. But these are just some examples. So you can really think about what you have to work with if you'll find stuff in your kitchen. And then when you stack humidified documents to dry, you can just do all the weights on top or you can do a layer of weights in the middle and another layer of weights on top. Just so long as it's all the same size and thickness and whatever works for the space that you have. If you're doing this at home, like I said, I use just white paper towels. Be careful about anything that's printed on paper towels could run, but just white ones are fine. Mold is a fungus that's composed of long filaments and it eats whatever it's living on. So that's why when you have mold and cheese, you get a nice big margin, I hope, around when you've had off the little blue corner because there are, it's sending boots down into whatever it's living on. So there are inactive molds for all around us in the air all the time. We can't really filter them out. As long as they're inactive, they don't really bother us. It's when we get a spike in humidity that they become active and then our allergies flare up and we get active mold for all of our records. So temperature over 75 degrees, relative humidity over 60%. You have a small window of time which to do something about this situation. 48 to 72 hours and you can expect active mold growth. So what you need to do is if you have things that are damp, get them into a freezer. Actually putting things in a freezer will stop mold growth in its tracks and it buys you time. When you're handling things and have become moldy, you want to be careful of your own health. So wear a face mask, wash your hands frequently and really be careful. As once you get active mold growth going, it will continue to crop up and I will wear the Ruze My Library that moved again to its new facility before the HVAC system was truly regulated and within a month, head of water you're being found is skylights on the collection and they have a continual mold remediation facility set up in the backside of the building now that it's outside and there is constantly looking for things. She uses everything from pans and kibby weather to freezers to unit that, you know, that you need to really be careful of it. I have some really lovely pictures of mold damage here. Once mold becomes inactive, which happens when we get it into a cool and dry environment, those mold scores can be crushed or vacuumed away that they will leave behind permanent stains and so the information can be obscured at that point. These are some records that we had, we opened up a box of court records that apparently had been wet at some point and nobody knew it and it was just a carpet of mold across the top of that box and these are permanent records. The government says we have to keep them. So we had to deal with it and we had people with masks and vacuums going for a while until this was dealt with, that they were binders of court records and you can see where the paper actually has been eaten away by the mold and it just went right across the top of all those pages. So it, you know, hit the top of the edge and just went right down. So we really had some fairly significant loss and it even was on the outside of the binders, we opened the binders up, the paper pulled the card, it was a disaster. So don't let this get started, go back to that temperature and humidity, the thing. If your HVAC system fails, remember you've got a small window of time to act and if you have things that are wet, get them in a freezer. So moving on to our last area of disaster response, when disaster strikes and it will, preparation is the key. So thinking ahead, because I can guarantee you, at some point in your career, you will feel that some kind of a disaster. I've been through a fire and a massive water break at this point. So I sort of, and then I had a school library that had a really big, you know, it was, these things just happened. The disaster recovery, remember that if things actually burn up, if they're actually charred, that damage is still reversible. What we can usually deal with is smoke damage, you know, smoke, pollution like behind can be cleaned off and water will be involved. It's just about anything that you deal with. Having been through a fire, I can tell you, it's a very small fire. I've been through a fire. The fire is very enthusiastic, with how much water they pour down your bed. So we had way more smoke and water damage than we had anything that actually burned. And, you know, in the group, I had a children's library directly below that fire and it was flooded. So it wasn't even in the area that was burning, that just, it was the water that was poured on it. If you have things that get wet in a flood or a leak or whatever, really quick action is important. You can't air dry things, the paper will buckle. It will not be nice when it's gotten nice and smooth. But if you can put them in a freezer, it actually will freeze dry. And we had a water leak in our stacks about a year and a half ago from a bullet that had pierced a scene in our brand new stacks. So people shoot bullets at all buildings around. And it was very comforting to all of us to know that we had torrential downpour, water finds that hole, finds its way down, we had 56 boxes. And everybody got called in to work, it wasn't there, we did a massive refoldering, refoxing and we sent them off to a basically a freezer facility that we have access to as the federal government. Then we brought them out, we left them there for several weeks. They, the boxes, you know, they were tight, fully packed boxes. The paper is really just freeze dry right there. We took them out, cut the boxes in time, laid them out for a lot of paper, let them fall out so that any moisture that remains, we lost absolutely no information. I mean, it was really tremendous. It was months of recovery work on that. So really, getting things into a freezer, you won't get mold growth and it will really start to freeze dry. So it's really a good idea. If you really need something to be fixed, afterwards you need to consult a conservator. It's expensive, but it's an investment. It's something that you really do need to keep. Don't try to deal with it yourself. And Zaster will occur at some point, pipes burst, fires break out, you know, it just happens. So you need an emergency response plan that the staff is trained on and they include your volunteers, your custodians, all of your staff. Our Water League was discovered by a student who happened to take the long way back around at Stacks instead of coming out the more direct way. It could have been a lot worse. She caught up when it opened going up for probably an hour or two. If it had been on a Saturday night, it had gone on all weekend, I'd still be working on it. So preventive measures, fire safety inspections, make sure your exits are accessible. The vital records need to have backups off site so that everything's not in the same place. Your emergency supply should be stored near your Stacks. We now have enough plastic sheeting pre-cut to cover our entire Stacks. It's stored outside the Stacks. So it's not down in the basement, no, where is that? You know, it's right there. It's really well made with shelving. Be careful of what you're storing near the Stacks. Chemicals, anything that would flame up, fire drills, and be sure that you know who your recovery contractors will be before you leave them. Just like the way the tow trucks show up before the police, when you have a rack, when you have a fire, I can tell you that a recovery contractor will be there along with the fire department. They may not be the best people. So remember, everything is water, rough sleek, so you will have water involved in just any kind of emergency. Anything that you have will require a custom solution. So there are basics that you also need to stop. Consider what you have going on right here. Consider human safety. You don't want, you know, wait into water all over the floor and if electricity's not off, you can get electricity. So you need to think of safety, not heroic. And people don't always do that in the heat of the moment. Throughout the list of this PowerPoint, I know we're out of time. I've just given some real specifics that I would encourage you to go and look at the PowerPoint online. So just ways to immediately respond and stabilize the area. Set up recovery zones by medium so that it will be much more efficient in the way that you deal with things. The way that you pack things out is really important. Everything used to be documented so that you can find every box or every book of whatever it is at any time of note where it's located. And if you have photographs that are wet, they need to be kept wet and then you need to get a conservatory. These are lists of emergencies of why. A number of these things we already have on site, on hand before we leave them. So, because they're really first response things. There's other things you will think about first, you know, renting when the time comes. I have enough masks and goggles for a whole set. I have not bought steel-toed boots for everyone. Just some specifics on recovering things. Paper, as I've said, you wanna freeze it as much as possible. Be really careful, you can get insects and pests going in here too. Photographs are really delicate when they get wet. Do you wanna be very careful with them? If they are wet, keep them wet and keep them cold so you don't get mold growth going on. And these are just some additional websites that are good sources of information on preservation in general and some sources for article supplies. And that's it. I'm sure the government will think that I don't know why. I know that you already thought one of my evaluations was awesome, you are happy with me. And if you have any additional questions, I'm glad to hang around for a little bit and talk to you personally. So thank you very much for having me here.