 in our Connecting to Collections online community meeting room space. And we've been hosting webinars here for a couple of years. And this is our first online class, so we're really excited that you're here with us today. This is a new series of free online courses about the preservation of archival and historical collections. And these courses have been made possible by Laura Bush 21st Century Library and Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And you've met Hope already. She is our producer from Learning Times, and they're helping us with the website, the registration, and producing these webinars. I wanted to just reiterate our schedule for this first course called Collections Care Basics. You've joined us today for Agents of Deterioration and the Need for Collections Care. And we'll be getting to that in a minute after I get through some housekeeping items. And then our next class is tomorrow at 2 o'clock Eastern. And we'll go three classes next week, and then the following week, one last class. So I hope you'll be able to join us for those. They're all going to be 90 minutes. And we're just so excited there has been so much interest in these courses. We already have 260 of you logged in today. And because there are so many of you, again, like Hope mentioned, we're not publishing your hellos over in the Q&A, but we're watching that for questions you might have, and we will help you with those. And we will be giving you poll questions so we can learn more about you today. And in fact, I'd like to start that now. So you'll see on the screen two polls come up. And if you could answer these questions, just like to get a sense of the group. And if you've participated in any of our Connecting to Collections webinars in the past. And then I'm going to ask what kind of institution you're with. Let me just make this a little smaller. Let's see if we can get these both up at the same time. I need to move some things around. Give me a minute. You'll see some more applicable options. This just sucks. I hope you can see both those. I'm sure you'll let us know. And be assured that you will be, when you came into the meeting room, we got your name. So we will be checking attendance. And thank you for saying hello. That's great. But we will be checking attendance that way. And in a minute I will be bringing over our chat box if you're with a group. You can tell us who else is watching with you today. So it looks like we have a nice mix of institutions, a variety of type. We have particularly made this course relevant to people at libraries and historic societies. Hopefully if you've joined us from museum this will also be very useful for you as well. But we've been doing a lot of outreach on a lot of museum topics in Connecting to Collections online community. So we wanted to focus a little bit in on the care of artifacts that are found in libraries and historic collections. So I think we have a good attendance in these polls. So I'm going to close these to the side. But I want to tell you a few more items about these courses and ask for your assistance in helping us. Because we have IMLS funding we do need to show them that this has been effective and that we have reached people with this. So this is the reason why we have had a couple steps in our registration process. So we hope you have registered on this page on the ConnectingToCollections.org under the online courses. We do need this because we need to know who you are. It was about a three-page questionnaire and so if you had not registered on that, please do go back to the site after we conclude today and fill out that information. You'll notice that this course is already closed but hopefully you can register for something else or just talk to us and we'll work that out. In addition we have asked for your permission form to be completed and sent in to us and we hope you've done that as well. This seems a little strange to some of you. It might seem a little unusual to have to ask your supervisor for permission but we did have a reason behind this. We're not just board bureaucrats in Washington. We wanted to help you communicate with your supervisor to maybe get some relief from your regular activities so that you could watch these webinars. We wanted to make sure that you had ample time to plan for them and to watch them and to do the homework. And then in addition we have learned from our colleagues in the preservation field that they had required this similar continuing education course and found that it was a really excellent way for individuals to start conversations with their institutional leadership about collections of care and the needs for collections of care and the interest of staff, members and volunteers to learn more about this topic. So it's really a step to be helpful and we do ask that you submit it again, be in touch with us if you have a question. And then we certainly welcome you to join the online community. You might have seen the login on the home page and you didn't need to log in in order to join this webinar today but we do encourage you to join the community. We have over 200, well, 2,200 members and it's growing every minute. Across the country these are collections of care professionals, preservation experts and we have great discussions. As I said we often offer free webinars and we think it's growing into a very useful resource for the field. And so you're certainly not required to join the online community but we encourage that. And then you may have noticed in our publicity that we are offering a certificate for your participation in this today. You're not required to work towards a certificate but again we've just learned from our colleagues that having documentation of attending a continuing education opportunity is useful for people. So we're offering this opportunity but that means we do have a little bit of housekeeping we have to do. So if you attend all six webinars and complete all six homework assignments you will earn our collections care basic course certificate. And if you have to miss a webinar let us know. We will get to the link for the recording. I'll note that we are recording these but we're not posting those recordings on the website until the course concludes. You have registered, you've gone through these steps to register and so we want to honor that by not just making it publicly available right away. But eventually it will be all on the website. You'll see on the website the homework assignments. We'll talk about that in a minute. And if you complete those then we'll check that off. And then make sure when you enter the meeting room and when you do the homework assignments let us know your first and last name, this seems really obvious but let us know your first and last name as you registered because it's going to help us double check, check you in as having attended then the homework. So that is just another thing to think about. And I will be bringing back at the end of the session our chat box again that will allow you, if you're watching with a group so only one of you have entered the meeting room, that's fine but we will just bring over a chat box. So hang on at the end so that you can record the other people in your party that have watched with you. And we just want to make sure if you do miss a webinar if you're a little late with your homework just try to get it all in by January 31st because our next course begins in February. And I've referenced a couple times already our homepage for this class. So we have everything in one place. The schedule, links to the homework assignments, some suggested readings and additional resources that our instructors have brought together. If other resources come up during our conversation today that will be the place we'll put that. We'll put the PowerPoint from today's presentation there just as a document so you can have all those as notes and anything else that's helpful. So as we go along if there are other things that you think would be helpful for us to post we're certainly flexible and we can do that. And just a few little notes on homework. They are really, homework maybe is too harsh a word. They are very short. They are 10 minutes maybe, might be a little quiz, might be a short answer question. Just something to let us know that you are out there, you're listening, that we are communicating the information in a useful manner. And we're not going to, we'll be just, it's almost a pass-fail situation. So we won't be giving you individual feedback on your homework but we will talk about how everyone as a group did in the following webinars. And if you have additional questions you can email that to info at heritagepreservation.org or if you have questions about preservation topics you can start a discussion in the online community. And then one last thing. The Academy of Certified Archivists has approved this course to be eligible for five archival certification credits. So if you are a certified archivist this will apply. And you can check their website for more information. So I hope that helps answer some of the logistical questions. If I haven't answered your questions or if I've managed to confuse you further, feel free to type those in. Again, we're not going to publish those to the group but I will look at them and then we can answer them at the end of Danya's presentation. So without further ado, I wanted to present our instructor for today. It's Danya Khan and she has been in the Conservation and Preservation field for 18 years working in book conservation and preservation training. She's a preservation consultant and adjunct faculty for the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. And she teaches preservation management and collections management. And she recently was at the Northeast Document Conservation Center where she handled workshops and webinars on preservation and digitization. So with that, I will bring over Danya's presentation and again welcome everyone. Thank you, Kristen. And I just want to add my welcome to all of you. It's terribly exciting for me to have so many of you on here. It just goes to show that preservation is still important in many institutions. And so as somebody who teaches preservation at the library school level, it's good to know that there are still many institutions out there that still care about this issue. So what we're going to do today is really take an overview of what we're going to be talking about throughout the course today and then really use this opportunity as laying the groundwork for what all of the other webinars are really going to be talking about. It may be very basic and repetitive for some of you, but I wanted to make sure that we were all going to be basically on the same level so that we could understand what's going on, especially in the later webinars. So I want to just start off with a few definitions because basically we're a broad range of people on these webinars, and we all work in cultural heritage to some level. But libraries, archives, and museums, and also adding in municipalities and historical societies, we often speak a slightly different language. So if any of you have ever traveled over to Britain, yes, we all speak English, but we also have many different words for different types of basic things. So what we want to just lay the groundworks for, first of all, is what do we mean by some of these terms? And I'm going to start with collections care because it's really kind of the area that branches off differently, especially between museums and libraries and archives. And really collections care is the range of activities, as you can see, that preserve cultural heritage collections. And basically, strangely enough, it's what this entire course is going to be talking about. So collections management, environmental management, storage and handling, monitoring of many different things, it's really what we're going to cover. Now, that said, if you're from a library and archival end of things, it's exactly what you call preservation. So we're thinking much more globally in everything that we do. So the next time you're talking with a colleague and they start talking about either preservation or collections care, you're pretty much saying the same thing. It's like saying elevator or lift. The same thing, different words. But we can understand each other. Conservation, on the other hand, is really a very active remedial sort of activity. And conservation is really a separate specialty within preservation or collections care. And we'll be talking about when and where we do some of this stuff throughout the entire course, not just today, but throughout the entire course. We also want to think about people, because depending on the type of institution that we're at, we're going to have different people who perform collections care preservation and conservation activities. Some of us, there are many of you at academic institutions, and we will probably have a large staff so that we can have people specializing in preservation as well as conservation. Some of you from the larger museums may also have separate people doing collections care, preventive conservation, and conservation activities. And so we might have a wide range of people. On the other hand, many of us may be from smaller institutions, and we really are running on maybe, if we're lucky, a paid staff member, but then everybody else is volunteers. And so where can we have people doing this sort of work? And so what we're going to be looking at is having almost any of our staff members and most of our volunteers can really be trained to perform a range of these collections care or preservation activities. And for that, we're going to want to look at matching skills and interests in our people with the activities that they're going to be doing. We're going to spend a lot more time talking about this aspect in the last webinar of this series on staff and volunteer management. So if this is a topic that you're dying to know more about, don't worry, we will be getting to it. We'll have an entire webinar just on this. Conservation, on the other hand, is really going to be something we're going to mention, but we're also going to be saying in the same breath that we really prefer conservation to be done by the professionals only, please. It's actually a very skilled type of job that requires a lot of broad knowledge. So you can't just be a paper conservator because you've learned how to mentor. You need to make sure that you know about the type of paper you're using, what sort of fibers is it made out of? If you're working on artwork, what kind of print is it? What are the pigments? There's going to be a lot of different things that you need to know as a conservator that you're not necessarily going to be able to be trained to learn about in a very short period of time. It's a long commitment and it's a lot of specialized knowledge. So please don't think you can do it yourself if you've taken one workshop, but also know that even within the conservation community, conservators have their area of specialty, and so please, if you've got damaged collections materials, if you've got a damaged oil painting on canvas, please don't take it to a paper conservator to treat because you know the paper conservator. That's not their area of specialty. Again, even within the conservation field, we have areas of specialty and it takes a lot of training and knowledge to even know your one small area. So there are very few people who can do broad-based conservation. So diving into something that is very close to my heart in large part because even though I'm a trained conservator, I also went through library school, librarians love policies. And we love policies because they really help to provide guidance and framework for the institution as a whole. It's something that's written down, something that can be shared with people. It's not part of some knowledge base that is stuck in one person's head and when that person's retired, you've lost untold amounts of institutional knowledge. And so we want to have policies so that everybody really understands what's going on and what we're doing. And probably one of the most important policies that you can have as an institution is going to be a mission statement. A mission statement is something that is essentially how I like to put it short, sweet, and to the point. It basically tells people who you are and what your goals are. And even more importantly, who you are striving to provide these services to. It's really a way to identify yourself so that you don't have to have an identity crisis. Who are we? Who are we serving? What are we doing? It basically is your, you know, identification card in many ways. And so what we want to do is to think about what our mission statement is and what it says because that's going to be the foundation for pretty much all of our other policies that we build beyond this point. And so what I want to do is just bring in my first poll question. And that is... We make the... I make the box bigger. So if we make the box bigger, is basically how many of you know and understand the implications of your mission statement? Because it's one thing to know, yes, we have a mission statement. It's an entirely different thing to know what that mission statement says and what that means about what you do. And don't feel bad if you don't actually know what your mission statement says. I've worked at institutions and until we did strategic planning, there were institutions that I had no idea what our mission statement was because you couldn't find the thing and it only got pulled out when we were doing strategic planning. So for those of you who don't know your mission statement or are not sure, maybe as a extra credit, go and find out what is our mission statement? Who are we serving? What are we doing? What is our focal point? Because that's really going to help give you an idea of where you're going and we all need to have an idea of where we're going. But it looks like most of us actually really do know and understand the implications of our mission statement. That's fantastic. So I'm going to go on then and I'm not sure if I can close this or not. Oh, thank you. To the next slide, which actually is a sample mission statement. So you can see that it seems like there's a lot of words here, but there's some really important ones. So we're documenting, studying and interpreting Holocaust history. Right there in those few words, we're really laying the groundwork of not only what we do, but also what we're going to collect. Because if our focus is documenting, studying and interpreting Holocaust history, we're not going to go out and solicit donations for materials that relate to Wild Bill Hickok and the Wild West. It's not relevant to us. And so right there, it starts to lay the groundwork for our collections policies. And it's also going to serve as a memorial for the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust. So there again, it's also giving us a groundwork on what sort of programming we're going to be doing, what sort of exhibits we're going to do. And then we're advancing disseminate and disseminating knowledge about that specific topic. So we're really giving ourselves a framework on where we're going to work beyond this, you know, just really simple, what is it, two sentence statement. So when we have a good, well-worded mission statement, I was going to say collection policy because that's the word in front of me, mission statement, it then, again, like I said, lays that groundwork for our collection policies. So the first one we want to think about is collections as a verb. Okay, what are we going to collect? Okay, what are the materials we're going to collect? What sort of topics are we going to collect? You know, you can even get down to, you know, are you going to collect only, you know, printed materials? Are you only going to collect manuscript materials? Or are you going to branch out and collect objects? Okay, many of us in the library world, at least I know when I worked at the academic libraries that I did, whenever we would get object-oriented materials into the archives or into the special collections, it was particularly bothersome because we were not set up to catalog objects. It was not our area of specialty. We didn't necessarily have the proper storage environments for those things. So, you know, sometimes it really helps when you're doing your collections policy, your collection, you know, what you're going to collect is to try to be specific in that policy on what you want to take in because this way, when you are dealing with donors and they're trying to give you this great trunkful of materials that really relate to the history of the town and they think your public library's local history collection and you just have this trunkful of stuff and you open the trunk and it's full of, you know, mice and moths, you can say, well, our collections policy really is just for manuscript and printed materials. Do you have any of that? And you can politically turn down collections, especially if you have a collections policy. We also want to think about our collections and policies in terms of collection as a noun. What are we going to do to manage those collections? And so our collection management policy is going to include guidelines for storage, care and handling, security, conservation and preservation and deaccessioning. And I know deaccessioning can sometimes be a dirty word, but we need to think about it. And so again, this collection management policy is really going to be have its foundation in our mission statement, because if we don't necessarily talk about preservation in our mission statement, why are we collecting some of this historic material and why are we trying to keep it for the long term? And so one of the things that we think ourselves is what sort of institution are we? How long are we expecting to keep these collections? Because that's going to drive what you do in terms of collections management. Okay, so there are preservation activities that you're going to do if you have a collection that turns over quite a bit. So if you're wondering what sort of collection that might be, think about a library that's associated with a medical school. Those materials aren't necessarily kept for the long term, because they're reference materials, they're teaching materials, and none of us really wants our doctor to have been taught with medical texts from the 1930s. That would just scare the living daylights out of me. I want them to have the most up-to-date information. So yes, there are preservation activities that are going to go on, and that sort of institution, but they're not going to be the same types as we would be doing in special collections, or in a historical society, or in an archives. So again, who are you? What is your purpose? What is your mission? And how does that direct your collections policies? Now, it isn't policies that we need to be thinking about. We have a lot of other policies that we do need to consider depending on the type of institution that we are. Everybody here should have a disaster preparedness policy. If you don't have one, please consider signing up for the second and third courses that will be coming up. February and March courses. February is going to be all about risk management, which is really the first step in doing a disaster preparedness plan, because if you don't know what hazards you could be encountering, how do you know how to prepare for them? And then let's see, February and March will be disaster preparedness. So how do you actually go about writing that plan? We'll be talking about this one again in a bit. We do need to have some sort of deaccessioning policy. Because I can almost guarantee you, if I put up a poll question asking how many of us have more space, more storage space than we know what to do with, I might get great to your hand saying we have more storage space than we know what to do with. We need more stuff. Most of us have more stuff than we know what to do with and are desperately trying to figure out just how we can safely store all of this. So the first question you might ask is, do we need all of this stuff? And if you don't need it, if it's not appropriate to your collections policy, if it's not appropriate to your mission, then it is. What are you doing with it? Why are you keeping it? Why are you spending the money to store it and to preserve it? So you want to be thinking about those sorts of issues when you're writing a deaccessioning policy. Is it an easy one to write? No, it's incredibly difficult because it tends to bring out a lot of passions in people. Another policy that you're going to want to consider and talk about in the sixth class, or the sixth webinar in this class, is a volunteer policy. Are you going to have volunteers? Can you have volunteers? If you're going to have volunteers, what are you going to have them do? Who's going to supervise them? So you're going to want a policy for volunteers. You're going to want some sort of user or reader or access policy. Who can use your materials? How do they use them? What requirements do you need from them to be able to see the collections? And even if you don't allow people in to use your collections, who in your institution has access to collections? So who has access to collection storage? To a vault and things of that nature. So you want to think about issues like that. That kind of goes hand in hand with a security policy. So what are you going to do about security? Do you require people to provide a picture ID? Do you have lockers for people to put things into so that you can keep an eye on bags and things like that to make sure that your collection is being protected? Do you have an exhibition policy? Do you do exhibitions? What is your time frame for exhibitions? Are you going to allow outside exhibitions? Who does them? How long are they going to stay up? What's a schedule? How far out do you have them planned? Or do you do them at the very last minute and everybody is scrambling to put something together? You want to think about that. Do you have a donor policy? If nothing else, do you have donor agreement forms? Very important. And I can't tell you the number of institutions that I have worked with that don't still to this day don't have donor agreement forms. And if you do plan on doing any sort of digitization, please have a donor form because you need to consider that copyright issue. But that's going off topic. And then finally, do you have and usually more so for the museum world, do you have an events policy? What sorts of events are you going to allow in your building? Who can host events? If they're going to host events, do you allow food and drink? Do you not allow food and drink? Do you allow food and drink as long as it's not red wine? What sorts of policies do you have around that sort of area? So think about it and the list could go on and on and I could do an entire webinar on policies but I'm going to stop there because there are so many of them and we'll come up with a few more of them as we go throughout the course. So I just want to take a brief pause right there to see if anybody had any questions on our brief and rapid tour through the different types of policies. There are legal issues definitely involved in a deaccessioning policy. Part of it is really going to depend on what sort of institution that you're at. Libraries don't tend to have as much of a problem with deaccessioning. It happens all the time. In museums it really what you need to do is check your donor forms and this is where a donor policy and having the donor forms really comes into play. What was the gift? Are you required by the gift to keep this material in perpetuity? Or does the gift state that you can get rid of parts of that gift that do not fit with your collecting policy? Now some institutions will simply give things away to other museums or historical societies that do collect in that area. What you need to think about also is if you're planning on selling any of those collection items or those gift items any of the funds that you receive in the sale of those materials has to go back into the collections. It can't be used for general overhead funds. I'm sure depending on what state you're in there's going to be other legal issues but those are the main overarching ones that are relevant throughout the country. Websites of good examples of policies. Most of the time when I'm looking for a policy they're really as far as I know a one-stop shop. I believe Ohio for their connecting to collections planning grant actually put together a website and they have policy examples so if Kristen can find that and put that up that would be great but also what I do is I just do a Google search for the type of collection or the type of policy that I'm looking for because there are a lot of institutions that will publish maybe not the whole of their policy but you know a good portion of it to give you an idea because you really don't need to reinvent the wheel for that. Are we obliged to let the public or the donor know when an item is deaccessioned? If you are deaccessioning something from a specific donor gift it is generally polite to let the donor know in terms of obligation I don't think you are required by law to let the public know but if you deaccession a whole bunch of items and you don't tell the public and then the public finds out it could be a public relations nightmare and so it's generally a good idea to know what you're going to be deaccessioning know why you're deaccessioning it be able to explain to anybody and everybody why you're deaccessioning it and be able to let them know that because if you can explain to them why you're doing it it generally tends to be much better than just saying we're getting rid of it so so where do we get suggested issues to include in each policy again here I would really recommend just doing a little bit of surfing and finding out what other institutions are doing especially looking to see if you can find either online or through communications with colleagues other types of institutions similar to yours that have policies that you're looking for and see what they say because if you're a small you know maybe one or two person shop and you're looking for a collections policy you're not going to go looking at a major museum to find an example of a collections policy because you're not the same type of institution you're not the same size of institution let's see where was I if you deaccession item should you give it back to the donor first it's always a good idea to offer to give it back to the donor as a first step most of the time they gave it to you because well they really don't want it and so they will most often say you can do with it as you wish but again it's a very important thing to do especially if it's a family member of the donor you know so the donor themselves have died it but it's a family item it's best to always check with the family first but again if you're going to do that make sure that you have the reasons why you're doing this so that you can help them understand it's not that you don't respect their family's history or what they've done for you it's that you know it doesn't fit with your collecting policy or you know something of that nature I'm going to just slide in here if you've got anything on long-term loan from somebody really look into that because long-term loans are a very very bad idea um keep losing my spot here on my list it is very difficult to tell people that their items don't fit into your collections this is where having that collecting policy that fits with your mission this place really helps so that you don't actually accession these items in the first place and yes it's very difficult to tell somebody you don't want to accession it but it's a lot easier to tell them that you don't want in the first place then try to tell them you're giving it back and so this is why having that collection policy is so important alright somebody did share the Ohio memory samples that's great really is a really super resource to give you that start in what the things that really need to be set exactly if you do have that policy show it to them it's really hard to argue when it's there in print um oh especially board members someday I hope we have a really good course on board members they are an entire course in and of themselves because they can be the most difficult to convince that an item shouldn't be accession because they have a personal affinity towards it but just because they have a personal affinity doesn't mean it fits with the collection um so let me see if the donor received a text write off um correct if the donor did receive a text write off you probably can't legally give it back to them that's where you would inform them that you're going to be selling it because they can't actually take it back and this is where hopefully you actually have good donor records to show that um let's see should an institution what would be done with items after deaccessioning and that would be that would definitely be something maybe not so much in your collection policy but in a donor policy um so what you can do is within your donor policy say if you're taking in a collection any items within that collection that are not going to actually be accessioned x y or z because it's going to depend on what sort of institution that you're at whether you destroy, shred auction etc um so it's definitely something that you could in very general terms include in your donor policy so that the donors understand not everything that they give to you is necessarily going to be accessioned um education collections are another use for things that you're not going to actually accession into the collection because then you actually get to let people handle things see things, feel things it's a great way to deal with those um hey Donia I hate to interrupt you but um we've gotten a lot of great suggestions from participants on how they've handled this issue and I think that's really helpful um but I will and I will I'm not seeing any newer questions either so I was wondering if we should move on to the next section but I didn't want to just reiterate um that AASLH did a great webinar just on this topic so I will be hunting that link down and um putting that on the web page too yep oh super thank you um because deaccessioning is a huge topic um and it's I thought AASLH had done one so that's good we can get you know and if they're not doing it in the near future maybe if enough of you suggested or requested they'll do it again so we're going to move on now to the agents of deterioration um and this is really where we get into basically the foundations of why we're going to be doing collections care because all of our collections are deteriorating I mean there's no two ways about it whether they're organic whether they're inorganic all of our collections are deteriorating all the time we can't stop it um but we can slow it down but in order to slow it down we need to understand how they're deteriorating um for those of you on Friday afternoon if you want a little time wasting fun that's not angry birds maybe angry birds isn't the new and you know time waster um definitely check out the National Museum's um liver pools game on the agents of deterioration it's kind of like playing clue with um all of the different ways our collections can deteriorate so take a look at that when you want a little bit of Friday afternoon time wasting but basically I in your readings I gave you uh the Canadian Conservation Institute's 10 agents of deterioration I tend to break them down really into four main areas um chemical physical biological and incidental and so we're going to go through those four areas and then um kind of talk about where also the 10 really fit in with this so within our collections chemical deterioration is really the one that's happening all the time that we don't really notice because it's happening on that molecular level and so they're really degrading chemically um by two different mechanisms hydrolysis and oxidation and so basically in oxidation your collections the molecules that make up your collections are gaining an oxygen and where our collections are picking up this oxygen is either through ozone um it could be through chlorine or other chlorine based elements peroxides um and nitric acid those are kind of the most common ones that we're going to find um acting as oxidizing agents for us hydrolysis on the other hand is gaining a hydrogen and for most of us water is going to be the source of that hydrogen and so we're looking at two chemical um processes here that really happen in large part because of the relative humidity in our air is where the water is coming from but that relative humidity doesn't just carry water it's also carrying a lot of pollutants that we have in the air the sulfur dioxide the nitroxides that are the um results of our internal combustion engines and the burning of fossil fuels ozone is coming to us from our computers our photocopiers our printers and all of those other electrical um items the chlorine and the chlorine based elements are coming from the volatile organic compounds being given off by cleaning products carpeting furniture upholstery as well as the peroxides and so all of these elements are coming together to really speed up this chemical degradation and so when we're looking at those 10 agents of deterioration the inappropriate temperatures um are part of this because they actually speed up or slow down depending on which way you're looking at them the rate of these chemical reactions the relative humidity because it's actually a contributor and if you think about it the higher your relative humidity um the more water you have to contribute the more pollutants you're contributing the faster your materials are going to deteriorate light is another catalyst because again like temperature it's adding um energy and so speeding up these chemical reactions and then those pollutants in the air okay so for our chemical deterioration we're looking at four of those agents right here and you know so one of the ways we can look at it is um the way our tape degrades is a chemical deterioration so any of us who've seen those lovely brown stains from tape it's chemical deterioration um our acetate negatives our acetate based film when it starts to go through vinegar syndrome that's chemical deterioration um when we have rubber materials the natural rubber just breaks down there's not a lot that we can do about it chemical deterioration iron gall ink for those of us with iron gall ink documents that you know iron gall ink burn that we see a lot um that's a chemical reaction and then we can't ever forget for those of us in libraries red rot it's the chemical deterioration of our um leather and it's happening from the inside out so I'm going to have Kristen now bring over um a little video so that we've been going now for almost an hour and I want to give you all just a little bit of a mental break and um essentially share a cocktail with all of you and I couldn't resist who could resist as a librarian a cocktail called the red rot cocktail hi I'm Lauren Clark from Dream Bop and I'm about the red rot cocktail it's a weird name for a cocktail I know and there's a little story behind it I created this cocktail with one of Boston's best bartenders Misty Calcophone and we did it in honor of the Boston Athenaeum which is one of America's oldest private libraries in fact I'm standing in it now and as you can see they have lots of old works of art lots of books of various ages including really old books from the Revolutionary War era including some books from George Washington's library which is pretty amazing but you can't check those out and because there are a lot of old books at the Athenaeum they need to be restored once in a while some of those books have those old red leather covers and what happens to those covers is that they get something called red rot which is actually a pinkish mildew that sort of makes them disintegrate so what book restores do is they take a substance called red rot cocktail to restore these red leather covers and make them all new and shiny again so Misty and I decided to create a cocktail called the red rot cocktail now it tastes a lot better than what the red rot cocktail is that book restores use and that is because we use really nice ingredients and those include London Dry Gin Saint Germain elderflower liqueur cherry hearing liqueur which is a brandy based classic Dutch very rich flavored cherry liqueur and good old Peixodes bidders from New Orleans plus a little splash of lemon juice so let's get started so to make the red rot cocktail first you take an ounce and a half of London Dry Gin this is Plymouth Gin it's in the London Dry family that's an ounce and a half all guests have been muted half an ounce of lemon juice fresh squeezed half an ounce of cherry hearing brandy based liqueur this is where the nice pink color comes from half an ounce of Saint Germain elderflower liqueur it's being used in a lot of the classic cocktails and finally for a little more pink and a little more flavor two dashes of Peixodes bidders and give it a really nice shake make sure you pre-chill your glass and you have a red rot cocktail inspired by the Boston Art Club cheers but you know relaxation there in the middle of the webinar and what I do want to comment on is that were you to do this at your own institution please think about where you're mixing these cocktails because of course we don't want to do it around the collections materials that would defeat the purpose so if Kristen if you or somebody if you could move the video pod out of the way so chemical means of our collections deteriorating are going on all the time there's nothing we can do about it the rest of the means of the rest of these agents of deterioration we can do something about so now we go into biological means of deterioration and what we're really working with here are some of the more obvious types of deterioration that many of us have encountered mold insects and other pests and depending on where you are in the world in the country this can be a really big problem this can be maybe a less significant problem but all of us are going to have issues with these biological problems at some point or another um they are always exacerbated by inappropriate temperatures in general higher temperatures and higher levels of relative humidity are going to be catalysts for both mold and insects but some insects are going to like it maybe cool and dark but almost always they're going to like it damp which explains why if any of you have ever noticed and wondered your basements always tend to have more problems with pests than other areas and that's because basements tend to be damp and then either cool or warm depending on time of year or where you are located um and so we're going to be looking at issues of having insect pests that some of them will be harmful to our collections some of them won't be directly harmful but will be indirectly harmful um they may look mysterious we may look at books on our shelves and go gosh I wonder what's causing that strange problem um and if you start to see something like that that's telling you well you've probably got insects or mold water incidents can be a trigger especially for mold any of you who have gone through some sort of disaster a flood a leaking pipe um even you know a malfunction in your um heating system that has caused one of the valves on your radiators to blow and the interior of your building feels like a Turkish sauna then you know you've had probably had problems um poor storage locations are also going to be a big um issue in terms of our biological problems because basement storage attic storage barn storage container storage um are all going to lead to different types of problems and so we really want to think about these because unlike some of the uh chemical deterioration once we have the biological deterioration there's really no going back okay once the silver fish have eaten the starched linen architectural drying there's no getting that information back it is gone okay when the mold sets in and the domestic beetle larva start to eat your manuscript there's no going back that information is gone um and then mold okay once mold really starts to set in it can do a lot of damage to artifacts other than paper leather is susceptible metal is susceptible mold will grow on just about everything given the right um food source as well as the right environment and so we really want to be thinking about some of these things and we're going to delve into these sorts of issues um a lot more in webinars four and five um when we talk about pest management in webinar four and mold in webinar five um but we'll also touch on some of these issues in um webinar two when we're talking about environmental management and we'll also talk about them a bit in webinar three when we're talking about storage and handling because all of these issues come into play when we're trying to essentially combat mold and pests because they are going to come at us in so many different ways and in so many different locations um so we'll be talking about mold and how it grows and what it needs to grow um and how we can combat it in that webinar and then we'll be talking about what sorts of pests we can encounter um both the um eight, six, four and two legged varieties um actually two winged varieties and so we'll talk about a lot of those issues in detail um when we get to the pest management and the mold webinars physical um means of deterioration really really are under our control almost completely because basically this is where how we are storing our materials and how we are handling our materials can lead to problems with these physical types of damage whether they are wrinkling, creasing, abrasions um breakage um you know or sort of impacts if you drop something you jar it, shocks, vibrations pressure we can get damage from pressure if you think about um glass plate negatives if you stacked all of your glass plate negatives vertically you would probably find that your glass plate negatives on the bottom of the heap are going to be cracked and that's just because of the pressure of all of the other ones on top of it and so these are really um going to be issues that are totally under our control where are we storing our materials of furniture, are we storing them on or in, are we giving them any sort of protective enclosures like boxes or folders um are we giving them padding for things that need padding and then how are we transporting and handling these materials when we want to bring them out how are we putting them on exhibit um are we making sure that they are anchored and not going to tip over if somebody bumps into an exhibit case you know these are all of the issues that we want to be thinking about when we're thinking about how we can combat the physical agents of deterioration and so this is going to be something that we will be spending um definitely spending time on in the third webinar which Kristen has been putting up when they are up in that Q&A section so you know things to definitely think about because we think if our collections are deteriorating chemically we can give them a better environment and that will slow it down but there's nothing we can do to stop it sometimes there's very little we can do depending on where we are to really combat the bests and molds but we do our best when it comes to these physical agents it's all on us and this is where maybe we need to change our habits maybe we don't let volunteers who haven't been trained handle the collections maybe we're very selective of which volunteers can handle collections um be you know we'll be thinking about all of these issues think about as we you know get prepared for the rest of the course where you are storing your collections and how you are storing your collections because these are going to be issues that will come into play um in the upcoming webinars in this series so we want you to be thinking about them because if you're storing long term in leaky basements now some basements are fine um some basements if you store them on shelving off the floor you'll be fine um but you know what are the environmental conditions where you're storing them and not just that but how are you storing them you know are you storing collection items on a floor beneath a window that periodically gets open because it gets hot or are you storing things in such a random and willy-nilly fashion that all it's going to take is somebody to actually accidentally bump into a shelving unit and you will have an avalanche of boxes and collections materials okay we want to think about these sorts of things and really take the time to be honest with yourself about what sort of steward your institution is being for these collections so that um we can be more honest with ourselves as we're going through this course and really be able to be open minded and learn maybe some of the simple steps we can take first to be able to be better stewards of our collection so um I can almost guarantee you the picture on the left we all have maybe not our entire storage area but some part of our storage area looks like this it could be the unaccessioned area but we all have something that looks like this so don't feel like you're a bad person because you have a closet that looks like that we all do okay so just be aware of that um finally we have those incidental um agents of deterioration this is going to be where we have disasters that we didn't um think about you know that we weren't aware of that just happened okay we can't what can you do when you have a hurricane barreling down on you and you're not prepared for it okay especially if you're somewhere like New York City that well doesn't usually get them and definitely not at astronomical high tides so water emergencies are really going to be the primary issue that we're going to have to deal with fire we're going to have to deal with but generally when we're dealing with the collections after a fire it's going to be the collections that are wet that we're going to deal with because well the charred piles of ash aren't going to do us much good but we do want to be thinking about how we can prevent the fire from happening in the first place um see classes 2 and 3 for that um vandalism or you know maybe we can take accident in here as well you know are people purposefully or not damaging our collections okay um and for some of this you need to be thinking about where are you what is your community like where your institution is who are your um usual constituents okay maybe um a fine art museum that has a you know admission fee isn't going to be as much of a problem as um an inner city public library where all of the teenagers come to hang out after school okay you need to you know be doing some of that assessment when you're trying to figure this out theft again is going to be another one what sort of collection are you what is your security like okay and again we're going to come back to some of those policies you know who you know what is your mission the people you're serving who are the people that are coming in and you know depending on the who and the where what are you doing to ensure the security of your collections and sometimes it's what are you doing to ensure the security of your staff and your visitors it's all going to depend on where you are um and so be thinking about some of these agents of deterioration as well because they can really come out of left field at you and be some of the larger problems in terms of volume of loss of your collections and so we really just need to be aware of it and then when you get into vandalism and theft some of the more costly um you know think about oh I can't remember which museum it was now nope it's not coming to me but they had one of the paintings they had on exhibit was a Picasso and a woman tripped and fell into the painting put a big tear in the painting and they had to restore that Picasso okay and then you can think about the the church in Spain that had its mineral restored by one of the elderly parishioners um I use that example a lot with my students is that restoration or is that vandalism or does it depend on which side of the aisle you're standing you know so some of these things really can be minimized just by knowing the people and having the policies so that everybody knows their role and their limitations okay a lot of this comes into play to this whole question of vandalism um or not depending on what side of the aisle you're on with your volunteers um volunteers tend to become very attached to the institution and to the collections and they may not think they're doing anything wrong when they go and polish that arts and crafts brassware that had the patina put on for a reason okay so we'll be thinking and talking about some of those issues again into the future of these webinars we can't save everything so we want to think a little bit about selection how do we choose what we're going to preserve what we're going to care for what we're going to spend the money to buy a box for and be selecting materials that fit with our collections policy but also those high use collections maybe if you do a lot of exhibit loans you're going to be looking at those materials if you're at a teaching or research institution those materials that directly support what's going on there you'll always be looking at those iconic materials from your collections what does everybody come to see and then all of those materials that in some way shape or form are valuable to your collections couple of minutes to think about what do we mean by value you know there's value comes to us in different ways monetary is the obvious one but for some of us we could have artifacts that on an open market wouldn't bring a quarter but for our institution they're incredibly valuable because they represent who we are at a specific point in time one of my favorite examples to use for artifactual value are scrapbooks if you're an institution and you know you are take Simmons college for example you are a women's college and back in the 19 1920's a lot of your students created scrapbooks of their four years at Simmons college and eventually donated those scrapbooks to the college that's an incredibly valuable artifact for you because it's really showing you the history that's not recorded in your course catalogs and all of the official materials we could have materials that have evidential value that could be used in court of law those of you who are here from municipal agencies a lot of this is going to be in your collections but we could find it in our archives and manuscripts collections as well informational value it's just important for its information think about those newspapers those newspaper clippings okay we know the news print itself is not necessarily always that important it's the information and then contextual value okay one of the things that of course I've got here um for you know Disney is monetary we know that we've got the informational value here of a newspaper clipping but then I've got these two bottles in their um saratoga springs um mineral water bottles so you're an entity in upstate new york and you have a couple of the saratoga springs bottles because people in your community would travel to the spas at saratoga to take the waters you have a couple of bottles to represent that but it's just a couple of bottles in you know your entire collection they really don't have a lot to you now if you were the national bottle museum which is in bolstin spa new york just 10 miles south of saratoga these bottles would have an entirely different value because of their context with all the other bottles in that collection so think about things like that too as you're going through and thinking about collections care and preservation we also want to think about the at risk objects um paintings that may have flaking paint um our nitrate negatives that we may have in plastic sleeves that are starting to go a little bit punky um our acetate negatives and then don't forget some of that more modern media that we're going to have that we might not have playback machines for how do we know what's on it okay how do we know what's important about it um so we also want to think at some point then for our damaged materials is it worth keeping so if you look at the nitrate negative in the sleeve here is it worth keeping anymore there is almost no information left okay so if you are going to think about doing reformatting or preservation on any of these materials think about your return on investment is it a good idea um a few words on intellectual control basically if you don't know what you have how can you take care of it so if it's not cataloged if it's not accessioned if it's just a box of stuff back in a room that says you know donation by and that's all you know why are you spending the money on it you want to make sure you know what you have and where it is what format it's in so you know if you need to do something with it in the future what condition is it in and what value does it have to you because if you don't know what you have you can't prioritize it for care let alone justifying the cost of maintaining it and we've all probably had things in our collections that we wonder why in heaven's name we have them and so I am now going to open it up for questions on this half of the lecture and disregard the fact that you know the cartoon says it was only a figure of speech I really do want to take in your questions and so what thanks Donny yeah I put a couple of questions over to the side from Raleigh North Carolina from Gita Dave about some storage she had in the basement if you want to address those and I will start with those and then see what I've got in the Q&A section so for your collections being stored in the basement partly it depends hard of it you need to assess what the actual temperature and relative humidity are down there and then if they are if the temperature or more than anything the relative humidity seems high is there something that you can do to bring it down are you storing collections in if they are paper documents you know or books are you storing them in boxes on shelving by storing your paper documents or books in boxes you are buffering them from a lot of the relative humidity to start with so if it is temporary you might be okay there you want to consider making sure that they are on shelves so they are up from the floor but also away from any exterior basement walls because you want to if nothing else have a lot of good air flow and that is going to help combat the mold and Tara will be talking about that a lot more in her lecture on mold but what we really want to focus on is how long are they going to be down there what are the actual recorded conditions and what can you do to make those conditions better for the short period of time they are going to be down there a basement does not necessarily guarantee mold but you want to be sure that you can do everything that you can to prevent it from happening in the first place and that is keeping the relative humidity down in a large part and keeping good air circulation so see where do we Ronald had a question about intellectual control he said do you start with inventory do you start with some other step a really great step to start with is doing it inventory so really just sit down and figure out what you have and I guess the question is is when you are inventorying are you trying to inventory archival collections book collections museum collections and things of that nature I'll let you answer that question and then I'll get back to you Amy asks about the risks of the relative humidity being too low and that is definitely a risk as well because if your relative humidity starts to get down really below somewhere between 20 and 30% you actually start to lose water content within your collections and as you lose the water content in the collections they start to get really brittle and so think about how our skin feels in the winter when it's really dry out it starts to get all dry and alligatory when you bend your fingers and they feel like they're going to crack the same thing is happening to your collections when it gets really dry they lose that flexibility and so they become really brittle and then if you're dealing with other types of collections especially some of your more composite collections the different components in those materials are going to react differently and you can actually get some of that physical physical issues happening just from different parts of materials moving at different rates okay so I talked about nitrate negatives and plastic sleeves should the negatives be in vinyl sleeves or buffered we never want to store materials in vinyl because vinyl sleeves are actually made from polyvinyl chloride and so there is one of our oxidizing agents what we want to do for our nitrate negatives is store them in buffered envelopes that have passed the photo activity test and we'll be talking about that more in session 3 on session 3 yes storage and handling issues so sorry I'm trying to skim really quickly through my Q&A to get back to where I was well there's a question from Mary in Oakland are there any templates or tools for creating inventories I know there's a number on the mark I mean there are and it's going to depend on what sort of collection you're trying to inventory you know but when it comes right down to it if you don't have a lot of money and the size of your collection isn't huge even just a simple excel spreadsheet is going to do wonders for you just to give you an idea of what you've got you know and where it's stored you know so it doesn't have to be anything fancy like the you know the latest version of past perfect not that past perfect isn't a good product but if you have minimal funds and you know you need to do an inventory and you need help then a simple spreadsheet is a good way to go so um did you see the question from Kimberly it bumps me back to the bottom I'm sorry everybody because I'm trying to okay um questions well we had some good conversation with the group about relative humidity which is great and again we're going to be getting into that in more detail tomorrow yeah and then um Kimberly Keaton had a question is it true that newsprint will turn color regardless of where it's stored what's the best type of archival material to store newspapers and magazines in a special library newsprint will shift color that's just the way it degrades you can store it in the best archival folders in the best archival boxes in the best environment possible and it will still turn brown and brittle that's just the nature of newsprint um ideally and we'll get into this in the storage and handling a little bit um on the types of materials but to be perfectly honest for newsprint what I tell people and recommend to people is photocopy them or scan them and print them onto good acid free lignin free buffered paper and keep the information that way unless the actual full newspaper is something really important for you to keep um it's better to just save a a reproduction if it is the newspaper itself um acid free lignin free buffered folders and newspaper boxes and we'll talk about this more in session three and I'm seeing a number of questions about inventory um how do you fund inventory projects how do you train people in inventory projects that is a really huge topic um and in fact if you will bear with us we are currently planning in the Connecting to Collections online community um a series in February with the American Association for State and Local History's Small Museums uh group on just these very um basic questions about doing inventories doing collections management so um it is a huge topic more than I think we can get into today because we're just about out of time but um but please you know join the community and if you're in an archives the Society of American Archivists also does a lot of arrangement and description workshop so if you're working more with archival materials that would be the a good place to start right well um we are out of time for today but I want to assure you that if you ask the question we have it in our list we are going to be talking as we said about a lot of other topics like this and um we'll make sure that we integrate your question into our conversations um in the coming days I wanted to let you know about the homework assignment um that that Donia's assigning us it's to just describe an item that is showing deterioration and how just just a short paragraph and I've put a link up here it's also on the course web page um on how to to reach this um survey monkey which well you know I'll just give you a space to type in an answer there's no real wrong answer but we just like a sense of what kind of materials you're working with if you don't happen to be affiliated with an institution say if you're a student um or you're a retiree you can use an item that's in your personal family heirloom collection or something else similar um but again this is the website where everything um related to this course we've gotten a lot of great questions about links or other resources that would be helpful for you and then the next day or two we'll be hunting those down and putting up those links um before we close out I'll let Donia say goodbye but um we do need to know if you are watching with more than one colleague or if you logged in today and you only like gave a first name and last initial or something just if you could again type in your full name so this is helping us with taking attendance um so again we'll be putting Donia's PowerPoint up in a print form to download off of the um the website and if you have any last minute questions we didn't get to feel free as I said put them in there and we will make sure that we bring it up um in the next uh next couple webinars and I hope that this was informative and uh really appreciate your help we had over 300 people participating today anything else from you Donia? No I just want to say um thank you very much and if you do have any other questions get them in quick to the Q&A section and Tara and I will go over the um questions that you've submitted and make sure in the upcoming webinars that we um touch on many of them because I have a feeling that some of you know the environmental questions will be covered tomorrow but we just want to be sure we're answering the questions that you have. Yeah we'll make sure to answer all of your questions and I did see um there was a question about will the participant list be shared um we can talk about it uh you know we didn't make mention of that to people in terms of privacy but the online community is the great way to start interacting with your colleagues so hopefully you can join us again connecting to collections.org feel free to join and continue conversations there. Thank you so much everyone we hope to see you tomorrow at 2 o'clock Eastern Time login at the same way you logged in today. Thanks so much.