 Thank you so much, Hope. And thank you everyone for wishing me a happy birthday. I don't think I've ever had this many people around the world wishing me a happy birthday. So very cool. So I'm actually going to start today off. I'm going to immediately ask you a question. Since we're talking about recovery today, I am curious. If your institution has disaster response supplies, and I will come back to that in just a second, so go ahead and answer it. So as you guys know, today is our final required webinar for completion of this course. Thank you again for joining us and also spending the time with us over the last two weeks. Julie once again has a fantastic presentation plan for us today. And because it cannot be said enough, we are incredibly grateful to the Institute of Museum and Library Services for supporting Caring for Yesterday's Treasures today via a Laura Bush 21st Century Library and Grape Program. And we're also grateful for Learning Times who's been on board to assist in producing these webinars and providing website support. So I've given you a couple seconds now to fill out that question, and it looks like we're mixed here. 41% and 40% say yes, no, and a few say you don't know. All right. Now I'm going to ask you, in addition to wishing me a happy birthday and saying hello, if you answered yes to this question, so about 61 folks, wow, a perfectly even split, or it was, I'm going to ask you to also say in this chat box what type of supplies your institution has. It looks like we have about 175 people logged on so far. So thank you again for joining us. Now, while I have your attention this one last time, I'm going to go over course logistics one final time. So if you are interested in earning a certificate by no means you do not have to. Everything is due by March 21st. That's a Thursday. It's one week from today. We'll check to see if you're registered. We'll check to see if your permission form has been turned in and that you've completed all four homework assignments. If you did have to miss a live webinar, that's not a problem. We understand things come up. We just ask that you watch the recording. And our homework assignments really are our way of knowing that you're staying up to date with the material. And again, everything's due in one week. So you might be asking yourself what's next. So before the day is complete we will send all of our registered participants an email with a link to every webinar recording and a homework assignment. So you'll have all these links in one place. On March 22nd, so a day after all the materials are due, we'll close those homework polls and replace the links on the website, the course homepage, with links to the webinar recordings. So those will be available to the public. We'll then start pulling people who've completed all the course requirements and begin the process of sending out certificates of completion to the address that you provided us when you registered. We will send you an email letting you know that certificates are on the way. So you'll know to keep an eye out on your mailbox. Then shortly after this we'll also send out to our quote-unquote graduates their online credential from Credly which you can choose to use or not use and we'll send more information about how to use that in the coming weeks. We also encourage you to join the online community which is free and it's a great place to continue some of these discussions that we're having. And we also encourage you to potentially sign up for another course. Our next course is Caring for Digital Materials, Preventing a Digital Dark Age. It begins in April and registration closes Tuesday, March I think 26. So make sure to sign up as soon as possible if you're interested. Now going forward, we also hope in the coming months you'll have time to flesh out those components of your disaster response plan and have a chance to work on the appendices you've included and complete the prep. So we know once you've completed that you may wonder what to do next. That will be a great achievement but what then? And we hope to answer that question on June 4 with another 90-minute webinar with Julie who has kindly agreed to provide a follow-up instructions on exercising your disaster plan now that it's complete. So a fantastic opportunity. It's not required to complete this course but we do hope that you'll join us. And then we'll post information on this follow-up webinar to the course homepage. As always, if you have questions, let us know. Send us an email or give us a call. Now Julie, I'm going to go ahead and move over your PowerPoint and I'll turn things over to you. And actually, I'm going to move this say hello chat box over and we're going to move over to that moderated chat. Keep the comments coming and I'll just approve them as they come in. You'll see your comment twice but don't worry. Everyone else only sees it once. And feel free to type in questions and we'll get to them during breaks. All right, Julie. Great. Thanks, Jenny. Appreciate it. Welcome back, everybody. It's just fabulous to have so many of you participating again in our final session. I also appreciate how many of you did the homework. I really enjoy looking through that. You're taking it very seriously and that's a real tribute to your commitment to disaster preparedness. I was impressed that many of you were pretty easily able to come up with at least three top priorities. That was one of the questions asked. The range was rather spectacular in its variety because you're from so many different types of cultural heritage institutions. There were the standard books and documents and photographs, also furniture, baskets, taxidermy, locomotives, historic building complexes and even some living collections. So it was just really quite amazing to me. You also mentioned that you were starting, some of you, to determine exactly what size of salvage you could actually do in-house, how many materials. And that was, you know, some of you were breaking down by 100 or 150 items to 500, over 500 items. That's a great way of approaching it. I think you'll have a better concept after today's session on how to approach that quantity question. And then on engaging, ideas for engaging responders. One of you is thinking of having a responder appreciation week or event. That's a great idea. Also, others sharing your cool stuff or giving behind-the-scenes tours to responders. That's a fabulous way to engage them. Some talked about food that, ever present, taking donuts to the station. Inviting them into cultural events. One was even mentioned a chili cook-off. So this was exciting. And I would really appreciate hearing in the future about successes or your actual use of the prep. I think Heritage Preservation would be interested in that as well, these real actual implementation cases where you have used the plan. So please, if you can forward some of those on to us in the weeks or months or years to come, we will be interested to hear. So today, I hope you've been able to download the documents for today's webinar. We are going to be covering Appendices 10 through 15 as possible supplements to your plan. It'll be most helpful if you have the documents to refer to in paper already printed, but they will be on the screen as well. So a few things. I want to go over recovery objectives. This is kind of important because when something happens, our tendency is to want to rush around and do stuff. It's important that we slow down here and remember what our objectives are for recovery. The safety of all those working to reduce any additional damage to the collections and thus minimize cost. Record the damage. It's especially important for insurance and record keeping purposes, stabilizing the environment so we minimize additional damage to materials. Clearly, we want to save as much of the collection as possible, which may mean that we may need to attend to undamaged collections first so they don't become part of your disaster. Keep that in mind as well. And then we want to return to normal activities as soon as possible. So in order to achieve these objectives, it's important to promptly and methodically assess the situation and then proceed with what you decide is the best course of action. All along the way, you need to remain flexible as your emergency response unfolds and to be prepared to adjust your original decisions. Kind of that mantra of go slow, be flexible. And the first objective, health and safety. That's critical. We talked about it just briefly in the first session and it can't be emphasized too much. This is the basic premise, health and safety first. This guides all emergency response actions. All of our planning for emergencies presupposes that the personal safety has been taken care of. You need accounting for all personnel, caring for the injured, and then protecting workers during a response and recovery. So this is extremely important and I want to just show you a little bit as far as some of the equipment. The slide shows really basic personal protective equipment referred to as PPE, hard hats, boots, face masks, respirators, potentially gloves, goggles, all of this. Important also to protect workers from cold, from wet, from physical stress and emotional stress. All of these are components during a response and recovery. Never enter a building alone. You need to remind workers about this, the buddy system, at least with one other person, and always let people know where you are going, where you are going to be in a compromised building. For emotional well-being, human dynamics, and the way people respond in an emergency, is also critically important to keep in mind during your planning and your training. First off, you may have to deal with some people who freeze. They are unable to cope, they may behave irrationally, or they just can't think through what to do. They're kind of in shock, basically. For some, the reaction may be flight. They're in shock, they may panic, and they simply lead the situation for someone else to deal with. What you want are the people who remain calm, the controlled and the clear thinking. Even these folks who are going to be your best workers still are going to approach tasks differently. They're going to interact differently, and they're all going to have issues going on in their lives that affect their response, either because the disaster is such that it has affected their homes and families, or just personal things going on, medical issues, other things. So you have to keep in mind that all of these affect the folks as they work, and communication is key in regards to this. Once again, as well as the ability to remain flexible in a difficult situation, be sure to respect the different approaches to the situation, and be ready for all kinds of reactions from people. It's important to talk about potential psychological and physical aspects of a disaster event during staff training and exercise. And also to think of ways that you can avoid burnout. It's important to keep in mind that in a disaster situation, people can work about four to six hours, and then they start to become exhausted, mentally and physically. Your adrenaline is pumping, the pace can be frantic at the beginning, and then quite frankly, any excitement and novelty of the event begins to wear off over time. After about three days, or possibly sooner, of recovery activities, the work becomes just plain drudgery, especially if the damage is extensive and the conditions are extreme. What you may think you can handle at the beginning with your own staff or volunteers may over time become apparent that you need outside help. So don't be afraid to change your mind. That's staying flexible as events unfold. You didn't make a bad decision at the beginning to do it yourself. You made the decision related to the information you had at the time. Now it may be changing. So look for ways to avoid burnout through good communication and teamwork. These are, again, critical. Breathe people before efforts begin so they don't go through as much of an emotional shock when they enter a scene. Pace yourself. Don't keep working and working because there is so much to do. There will be so much to do. You will at some point become a liability if you push yourself too far. Emphasize teamwork. Share both the workload and the emotional load to help diffuse kind of pent-up emotions that can begin to happen. Schedule breaks away from the incident scene. People get very attached to incidents and pulling themselves away is not always easy but it's very important, kind of that feeling no one else can do as good a job as I can, I need to be here. So getting that break away from the scene. Encouraging workers to eat properly and maintain fluid intake. Avoid too many drinks with caffeine and sugars. You need lots of water. Amazing how much water you will drink in an emergency situation. Rotate teams for breaks or new duties. Move people from, say, a high-stress job to a low-stress job whenever possible or from a more physical to a less physical job. Then, oops, sorry, one more there. And then conduct regular discussions and updates. Allow workers to express what they're feeling. Psychologists encourage open, honest expression of emotions. It's a self-protection mechanism that we have to avoid emotional overload. Some people may feel terribly guilty that they could have done something to prevent or lessen the severity of the disaster. You need to help people. And then arrange for a debrief after an event. This is where workers can describe what they encountered, give them an opportunity to express their feelings in more depth, and then look for ways to improve your disaster plan procedures and to provide additional staff training. Jenny, do we have any questions? Well, Sonya brought up, she knows that she's prone to panic. So she's curious, what if you are that person and you already know that you're prone to panic? Do you have any suggestions for assigning yourself for responsibilities or how you play a role? That's really interesting, Sonya. If you're the key person responsible for a response, you need to have a team around you that can support you and others you can turn to. Often we don't know. I'm impressed that you at least can evaluate how you would respond. I have worked with a situation at a library. I had two different library directors. The first one told clearly to the disaster team that he did not want to be the first phone call when something happened. He did not operate well in an emergency. If there was a major earthquake, he would be really shaken. And that was okay. We all knew that. I had another library director who said, I want to be the first call when something happens. And he was the type who would want to be in charge in directing things. There's nothing wrong with either of these. And there's nothing wrong with Sonya's acknowledgement that she is the one to panic. What you need to do is everybody else needs to understand that and you need to look for supportive people who are good. Also keep in mind it's those little tools we have that trigger us to know what to do and to get back out of that operating at 20% of our capacity and to move into more of an action role from a panic role. So that I guess some of those would be my comments on that. Any other things, Jenny? No, that's it for now. Okay, let's keep going then. There are several factors to consider when you're looking at recovery options. The approach you decide to take in the response phase will in part dictate your recovery options. So making the best selection for your materials will maximize your outcomes and help control your costs. So we have these three main circles, cost. Now most often people think only of the cost of services they might need like a recovery company service or a conservator's time. But do not underestimate the cost of staff time. Insurance is also a factor to consider in determining the potential cost of recovery methods. What will it cover? What is your kind of coverage to actually get something done through insurance? Then space. Do you have adequate space for certain recovery methods? And is that space secure with appropriate temperature and humidity control? Now air drawing, which is the main thing that we can, mere mortals can do in a disaster response, takes an enormous amount of space. The National Archives and Records Administration estimates that the contents of one standard cubic foot record center box requires about three six-foot tables of air drawing surface. So if you had 10 boxes you wanted to air dry all at once, you would need about 30 tables. That's a lot of space and tables. So thinking about that and as you approach your recovery methods. And then outcome. What are the desired outcomes for the damaged items? This may be linked to the value of the object. It doesn't have artifactual value or associational value. It's a part of a bigger collection. Does that informational value, evidential value, monetary value, any of these kinds of things? Does it need to function after recovery? You know, for a book, that might mean just it needs to open with the text readable. But for an art object, function might also be linked to appearance and exhibit. So also are the damaged items highly valuable or significant? Thinking about these in relation to your outcome. For magnetic media, perhaps fun simply means that the tape needs to be recovered and transferred to a new medium. You don't need to retain the original, but it's the content that you need to be able to transfer. So in thinking about this kind of recovery scheme of things and your methods, let's look at several disaster events and consider what they decided to do for their response and recovery. Maybe this is what you're faced with. After a wildfire or a fire in a neighboring building, get smoke, soot, ash, et cetera in your building, it can come in under door jams, through cracks, on broken windows. I hope you can see the extensive ash damage that's come in under the door and the little slip of paper has been moved over on the computer and you can see the dark square. I mean, this is, it's over everything in this building. It really doesn't take much to be deposited inside a building and all over the collection. This is not a cleanup for amateurs. This extensive damage is not something you want to subject your staff to cleaning up. It takes specialized equipment and handling. So in this case, this public library called in a disaster recovery company for cleanup. So that was their cost factor. That's what they decided to do. Their space was secure and could be controlled and the outcome they needed was that the equipment collections and the entire facility get back to normal as quickly as possible. So that was their approach in this case. This is a textile museum which suffered a roof leak whereby the water got into their storage area. They made the decision to air dry the affected collections and here we see the aftermath with textiles laid out on the tables in the museum auditorium using staff and local museum studies students. That was their cost factor. They had volunteer and staff labor. They were able to control both the security and the environment in their space. Notice they're also using fans to increase the air circulation and they also used dehumidifiers to reduce the water. So that's their space factor. And for outcome, they assessed the original damage and just decided that the appearance and function of the collection would not be detracted from by the air drying and that then they would use a conservation services if they needed to for any specific work and repair work. An aside was in the process response and recovery, they built some great relationships with the local museum studies program and that program is now a resource for help in their disaster plan. This library mishap was the result of vandalism when some kids put a burning piece of paper under a fire sprinkler triggering just one sprinkler head. The library was open at the time and the water ran for about 10 minutes. This actually happened on St. Patrick's Day. It just occurred to me. That's right around the corner. I always remember the date that it was March 17th. I think that's it, March 17th. Over 1,000 books were slightly wet from the driving force of the sprinkler. The sprinkler systems are under high pressure. The spray creates not only the water to put out the fire but also a mist and a cooling effect that is needed for quick extinguishment. It's not a gentle spray. Luckily, this water hit the fiction collection which has kind of a regular paper in most of the books and not the nonfiction science books that were only one stack range away and those science books have a high percentage of clay-coated paper and therefore the choice of recovery method would likely have been different than just air-drying because they would have been having to worry about that paper starting to stick together. What they did instead was they just set up a major air-drying operation of these slightly damp materials. They also used the opportunity to weed the section of the fiction collection. So they're caused with staff, time for air-drying. In addition, they did have insurance which paid for replacement of the books that were deemed a complete loss. For space, they did the drawing within their building, both security and environmental controls maintained. And since many of the books were only slightly wet on the top and the bottom, they felt that the outcome as far as appearance and function would not be a problem for them for this circulating public library collection. And then kind of a last image here. I think you'll recognize these images from Colorado State University. I showed you some from their flood, some of the images in the first session. From all three factors, cost, space and outcome standpoint, there was only one direction that they could go due to the extensive damage from this immersion of their entire below grade first floor. I'm going to use them as an example to lead into working with a commercial recovery service but first I just want a little reminder for you about freezing. Freezing is our single best weapon once there has been water damage to many types of materials. It buys us time, which is critical for a successful recovery. It allows time for rational decision making. It's especially beneficial when the quantity of the materials is large and the time window is short. Remember, 48 to 72 hours we can begin to start to have the opportunity for mold. It's a tool we can use for paper, many photographs and film, some textiles and other materials in order to stop mold growth. Freezing does not kill mold, but it inactivates it and it stops additional damage to items. It also stops water soluble inks from running and it keeps clay coated paper and books from drawing and blocking or fusing together. In general, my motto I think is relatively good. It's if in doubt, freeze. It will serve you well in most instances. There's some materials that freezing may not be appropriate for for instance some artifacts and some photographing processes. I will show you a little later in this session a tool to use to determine what can and cannot be frozen. Materials are normally boxed up and loaded into a large or a commercial freezer and frozen as quickly as possible. When ready, materials can be brought out. You can defrost some to air dry in a controlled environment or you can process them through a commercial process recommended especially as vacuum freeze drawing. Vacuum freeze dry process involves special equipment and the use of a commercial recovery company. So I'll talk a little more about that and let's look at a recovery company information. If you are faced with thousands of wet books or hundreds of boxes in a freezer or a facility and damaged materials you can't begin to cope with, then call a commercial recovery service. You have Appendix 10 working with a commercial recovery service. These questions on the slide are on your handout as well. Institutions should think about your specific recovery procedures prior to a disaster based on the material in your collection. Being an informed consumer about services that are available as well as the suitability of those services for your collections will yield the best outcomes with available resources after a water related event. Now vendors may use different terms for slightly different techniques. For example, vacuum thermal drying, dehumidification drying, freeze drying. These may be unfamiliar to some vendors or they may simply use another term for the process. Before calling a vendor, make sure you can explain what you need. This is particularly important with services that use a freeze drawing which could refer to several different processes. So when in doubt, please consult a consultant or a conservator for assistance. I do have some resources for you today that describe more about these processes and we'll look at them in a few minutes. Ask commercial companies for references and recommendations from other libraries or museums as soon as possible. Sadly, there have been instances over the years where major collections damage has caused libraries to sign contracts which escalated in costs and promises and it's been necessary to actually switch commercial companies in the middle of a salvage operation. This is very disruptive and much better to start it outright. If your materials are already in a freezer, then you can send a frozen sample batch to test different processes or to try air drying. You can even send out several boxes to different vendors and make a comparison. You know, you've bought yourself time by that freezing so then you want to take advantage of it. Keep in mind that what a company should and should not do for you is outlined on this slide. They need to listen to you and advise you, help you assess your damage and perform the actual recovery and rebuild services to get you back to normal. They absolutely should not take over. You need to be involved all along the way with decision making. It's important that you establish priorities for collection salvage. This is another reason to have your priorities down on paper. You don't want them establishing priorities for you. That will not work. On Appendix 10 handout, there's also a series of questions to ask a commercial recovery provider and a consultant can help you all along the way. So refer to that handout as needed and talk to your insurance company to determine ahead of time whether or not your insurance provides for the use of the commercial recovery service and what type and amount of coverage you have. When possible, let that insurance company know ahead of time what drawing process you want used and what company you want to use for collections recovery. Jenny, do we have some questions? Maybe I'll do that before I show some images for the Colorado recovery. Sure. Yeah, Julie, I'm not sure if you feel comfortable commenting on specific disaster recovery organizations. So we did have two questions, one from Jeanine about your opinion on ServPro as a disaster recovery company, whether or not they had a good reputation. And then another one from Melissa Houston about rapid refile which I think is now the Polygon Group. Yes, I should have given one more slide these questions because I will begin to answer. So just hold those one minute and we'll go into those. And is there anything else? Yeah, let's see. We also have a question about freezing parchment. Do you know whether or not this is advisable? You know, rather than get into techniques for individual items, I think let's I'm going to show you some some resources because we could take a lot of time talking about individual types of materials and I will show you and there's some for you to print out that will give you extensive information much better than me trying to kind of handle them one at a time. So hold on that as well. All right, I'll hold on to all those questions over here and we'll get to them when the time is right. I did Julie want to ask you to comment on we had a conversation going on earlier. Lonnie mentioned that in most of the disasters that they've responded to the person who knew the collections of facilities often had their own issues and was interested in potentially writing into the plan someone from the outside organization and a few people also said that they do that. Can you just comment on including outside folks on your disaster plan? I think that's just fine. I'm assuming by issues you mean they couldn't get in. They had other things that they had to take care of. I'm not sure quite about that, but absolutely. I mean, you can put anybody on your plan. I like to play the what if game and what if this happens? What if people are out of town? What if somebody's incapacitated? You know, things shouldn't hinge on just one or two people. And so think about that. Every time you see a disaster that's happened somewhere that's in the news, say what if that had happened to us? How would we have handled? What would have been our impact? Okay, and then we have a bunch of freezing questions, but I know you're getting to that. So we'll hold on to these guys. Please, I am going to get to freezing. Okay, let me show you some pictures from Colorado State that use the commercial recovery company. I mean, dirty, awful conditions. You do not want to subject your staff to this kind of labor and clean up. The people working on the right are hired labor through a company. I already see some health and safety issues going on there with masks, not having masks, you know, what people are wearing. It's all worrisome to me. But all I'm trying to do is get the impact to you of what a nasty situation this can be. You want to call in the professionals. And there are only a handful of national companies that have experience dealing with recovery of cultural materials. You want one of these big companies, especially when you are dealing with something like this disaster when there's so much damage. The big companies that provide the best drying processes are BELFOR, that's B-E-L-F-O-R, BELFOR property restoration. They're headquartered in Fort Worth. BELFOR has many regional offices around the U.S. as well as internationally. It's the company I've had the most experience working with. Another company is Polygon. I saw that in one of the questions. Polygon was formerly MUNTER's moisture control and they have recently absorbed rapid refile, which is a smaller document drying company. So they are another one of the big ones that can handle a broad cross-section. And then Blackmon Mooring Stematic Catastrophe, otherwise called by everybody as B-M-S-CAT. They are also located in Fort Worth, Texas. So those are some of the big ones. You asked the question about ServPro. Some of the smaller ones, usually what they will do is they can handle some of the on-site remediation in the facility and the drying of the facility and these kind of things, but they will subcontract out the drying of the collections to someone else. And personally, I favor going with a big company that can actually then take care of the whole picture. They're not using subcontractors to do lots of different things. And that's where you begin to lose control over your materials and your collections especially. So if you're working with someone like ServPro or another Stanley Steamer or some of the other lots of them, find out where the materials are going to go and how they're going to be subcontracted out. That always kind of worries me with cultural collections. So the first step in cleaning out an area, I wanted to show you this bucket brigade type approach. This is low-tech and it's something that you can use. It saves on traffic in and out of an affected area. It's ergonomically better and it takes absolutely no training for people. So just keep in mind if you have to clear things out of an area. This is what it looks like after books especially have been packed into boxes and moved to a commercial freezer storage. Now they bought time here by getting these into freezing and now the books are awaiting processing at the drying facility. I want you to remember this image when we discuss inventory control in a few minutes. This is a vacuum-freeze drying chamber at Fort Worth. The frozen materials are unpacked and loaded onto carts that are rolled into this drying chamber. Vacuum-freeze drying is the recommended process for paper-based materials. The water goes from a frozen state to a vapor state through sublimination. It's vaporized. The companies I've mentioned should be able to provide this vacuum-freeze drying process. So no water, no liquid water is created during the drying process. So the distortion of the material is kept to a minimum. Clay-coated paper can be successfully recovered this way and the pages will not block together. Just real quickly for you techies in the crowd, they draw a vacuum below 4.57 millimeters of mercury. That's the triple point of water. The liquid phase of water cannot exist at vacuum levels below this triple point. So this is considered a very high vacuum. Notice the reinforcement on this chamber is extreme because of that. Recovery companies can offer other services such as cleaning, dry documents, copying, rehousing, reformatting. They're shown here, for example, at a HEPA vacuum table. They're cleaning dry documents. They're wiping dirt off of documents with rubber sponges. Full-service recovery companies can take care of all sorts of the additional services in your building. They can do smoke and ash cleanup, carpet and wall board removal and reinstallation, mold remediation. The list goes on and I gave you the benefit of working with a larger company is that you don't get into this situation of having things subcontracted out and losing control. Jenny, any more questions right at this point? We do have, of course, the million-dollar question is, what if your small museum or organization can't afford to hire one of these large recovery firms? Well, I guess you're going to be doing it yourself. I mean, you either hire somebody or you do it yourself with volunteers, with I get to know your neighbors really well, look for other people. But in some cases, I will talk a little bit about the cost. So you don't have to have them do the whole thing. It could be you pack out, you know, a couple hundred books into boxes, stick them into a commercial freezer and then a small batch is sent and dried. Or only the things that are very, very wet are actually treated that way and the things that are just slightly damp are more easily air-dried. So it's a balance. I mean, you look for donations. You can use even the large companies for a varied variety of recovery services that you need. You don't have to use them for everything. All right. And then John Norris also mentions or asks, what are some of the health challenges doing these things yourself? But I think you'll also get to that. Well, that's that health and safety that we just talked about. I mean, you do have to worry about contamination. You have to worry about, you know, what's the water source? Is there contamination? Is there a mold problem? Absolutely. You know, we're just hitting the highlights in this session, but there are a lot of other concerns. So you have to weigh all these different factors and consult health and safety people and decide, you know, what do you actually want to subject your staff to? And then one final question for you, Julie, at this moment. We're curious if some of these companies serve Alaska, Hawaii, and overseas. Do you know if any of them do? Yes, I know specifically that Belfort has an office in Hawaii. I'm not sure if they have one in Anchorage. I'm not sure about that, but they have one in Seattle and they have one in Vancouver. And I'm imagining they would serve us out of there without any problem. The overseas Belfort is an international company. I'm not sure about BMSCAT to tell you the truth. Polygon is a foreign-owned company and they are international as well. So I'm going to give you some resources a little while where you can probably get some more information on that. And then Julie, sorry, we just had one more come through. Would you recommend getting contracts and relationships with these vendors before a disaster? Yes, I would and I will give you a little bit more information on that. You can set up an agreement with them. They have different levels of agreement. Some of them are free where they come and look at what your collections might need if something happens and you get kind of listed. It gives you a little bit of a priority over just somebody calling in in the immediate aftermath of an emergency for help. You move up a little bit in the priority scheme of things. These big companies also have huge resources that they can pull from around the country. So I always get the question, well, what if everybody in Los Angeles calls one company? Everybody has the same company on their list. Are they going to be able to handle it? Well, these companies have big catastrophic teams that they moved areas and especially preposition if they know something is coming in like a hurricane or something like that. So, yes, I encourage that and I'm going to give you a source to actually find some of these in the contact information. All right, great. Thank you, Julie. I also see someone mentioning about freezers and I talked about commercial freezers, but I just want to remind you freezers for canneries or at markets or if you have big food services on a campus. Anywhere that there are large freezers you may be able to use in a pinch even especially if you have a small amount of materials. Get them in on a Friday afternoon and then figure out on Monday when you get back to work what you're going to do next, that kind of thing. Okay, how about we let's go on to the just fascinating topic of inventory control which I just really must mention. If you hire a recovery company, they will do this. They will take charge of the pack out and they will use computerized methods for identifying and tracking boxes and this will all be taken care of for you. If, however, you're packing out for yourself, inventory control is a vital component for a successful recovery but it can be a little bit difficult to visualize. So I'm just going to briefly describe it and you have appendix 11 which gives you much more detailed descriptive information. The purpose of inventory control is to keep track of materials that are removed either for storage, for treatment, for restoration, for disposal, whatever. It tracks these materials. So it's vital for control and insurance purposes and it really is a key to an efficient recovery. Good inventory control makes the recovery process and the reshelving or the reinstallation process go much more smoothly. Remember that slide of all those boxes in the freezer storage? This is where inventory control comes in. You have that appendix 11 and I want to go through just a couple of processes but you can go back to that description sheet to give you more information and you have two templates. This one showing is the first sheet is for books and documents. It's shown on the slide. You can use this to track the call number range and then record the movement of the boxes on this sheet. You can number the boxes, maybe number the pallets that they are on but you record the movement on the sheet. You don't go trying to put information on the boxes because once they get into freezer storage or stacked you lose all of that information. Sometimes you can use barcodes. If they're barcodes on the outside of the books you can check out, you can set up a dummy patron with a barcode number and you can check out books to an individual box and keep track of it that way. Whatever you do, don't go opening wet books to find barcodes. This can be very damaging to the structure of the books and it will slow down your packing out process. Knowing what has been stored where is critical. If you pack out administrative offices for example and wet files are sent for freezing it may be critical to get back those files as soon as possible and they would have a priority for treatment. But without good documentation and inventory they may be buried in those pallets of boxes in our slide. It also can be critical to sort wet versus dry and sometimes damp materials. You may want to bring back boxes of just damp materials to air dry in small batches. So you need to know what box or pallet numbers they are on in a freezer. Dry materials can be boxed and stored so they don't become affected by the mold and moved out so you can keep track of what box numbers and what has gone off to dry storage. So having an idea of how you might approach inventory control and you need it can be helpful. Of course it's also going to depend on how many boxes or drawers or whatever it is that happens to you. Again you're keeping flexible. If you're dealing with objects there's a second sheet in appendix 11. You usually need to do objects by item by item. You capture accession number, the type of the object, type of damage, type of salvage. Once again you record the movement of the items and their containers on the sheet and you need to remember to track all any associated materials with complex objects. So depending on your collection types and institutional needs make multiple copies of these inventory control and object documentation lists and you can just file them into your disaster plan for ready access. Questions, Jenny, before we go on to response supplies and equipment? We're still getting some questions about freezing but I'm going to hold on to those for later so we can get through the presentation. Okay, I think we're good for now. Okay, great. So you have appendix 12. Disaster response supplies and equipment. I was happy to see that it looks like 40% of you have some supplies and 20% of you are not sure. That's something to go find out as soon as you can after this series. What I advocate is that every institution have these immediate response supplies. That's in this first category on this sheet. The categories are broken down on the left-hand side by immediate response supplies. Personal protective supplies are here and then it goes on to the other supplies and equipment and this is a page and a half long listing that you may need for a variety of response and salvage operations. I hope you also notice that there are categories running across the top of the sheet as column headers. This is an additional breakdown by the types of response and salvage activities. I'm sure you can think of more supplies. You may quibble with our categories. This is the best effort of the West Pass Trainers and it's based on our experience. Please feel free to change the little X's in the boxes or to add or delete supplies and equipment. This is only meant as guidance. Those of you who have experienced something or you have special kinds of collections, you may need to augment this. These column categories going across immediate response, rinsing, air drawing, and freezing for stabilization. The freezing for stabilization includes the supplies and equipment you need for a pack out to get them into boxes. This format was actually the idea of Lynn Davis, the head of the preservation department at the University of Hawaii Library. She suggested it because she oversaw the collections recovery after the massive flooding at their library. We looked at some pictures of their damage in the first session. We looked at many supply lists at the time, but she had a hard time figuring out just what she would need for rinsing and air drawing, which was the majority of the in-house work that she was overseeing. We followed Lynn's experience and set up the list in this format to add these column headers. I've seen some institutions take this list and then add a column to the far right to record which supplies and how many they have and where they are located. But they maintain the full list in case they need to have something to refer to for things to add in. Keep in mind you can flip this list, this document to landscape format, and you can gain quite a bit of room for your location-specific information on the far right. Perhaps some of the supplies you have access to are shared supplies in a city or on a campus or with other members of your disaster network. You'd want to list those as well. I know a question has come up. I think it came up one of the earlier sessions too about immediate response supply kits. I wanted to show you pictures of a couple that are available. The one on the left is the React Pack put out by ProText and the Collection Protection Emergency Kit on the right from Gaylord. The URLs are listed there. They're both in the range of about $225 to $250 a piece. If you only need a couple, this might be an easy way for an institution to stock supplies without much work. Believe it or not, all the things that are shown in each picture either fit into the folding box on the left that folds up, the mops unscrew, and all fit in there, and the tub on the right holds everything that's shown there. I will warn you that once you take them out of these containers, you will never ever be able to fit them back in. It is the tightest packing job ever. If you don't want to spend that much money or you want to put it together yourself, you can do it probably for half this amount of money, is these examples. The one on the left is from a library and there is a museum example on the left. They both use supplies from a store like Home Depot and they also ordered some supplies online. The one on the left cost about $100, $125 for the contents of the black can with the red lid. The list you have at the top of Appendix 12 for immediate response supply can is what is included in this container on the left. Those are the contents. The purpose is to be a reliable source of immediate response supplies. This library has multiple supply cans throughout their library branches and in their main library. The containers are inventoried at least annually to make sure supplies are readily available when they are needed. They are stocked with plastic rags, plastic rags, buckets, sponges, paper towels, flashlight, batteries, scissors, gloves, masks, da da da da da. Copies, also copies of the disaster plan and the salvage wheel. You might want to make a little note on Appendix 12 up there at that immediate response supply can to add a salvage wheel. You can put it into an envelope, taped up into the top of the lid, for example. The can you see here is at the library circulation desk. It also includes boxes with hard hats and extra barricade, a caution tape because these are the staff that sometimes are responsible for doing that. It's behind a public service desk but it's accessible and noticeable by staff which I think is important. I prefer to have supplies in staff areas and not behind locked doors so people remember that they are there and know how to access them quickly. On the right is the disaster cart put together by a museum. It's stored in their workshop area. It's on wheels and it can be moved immediately to the galleries, to a collection storage space, or to the museum library if it's needed. They have a variety of supplies on it. I don't have a specific list of what is included there. These are just two examples of small immediate response supply caches. To actually hunt and find more major sources of supplies, I have a couple listed here on this slide but I also want to remind you that they are on the course resources list as well. The RAP, the original Alliance for Preservation that we talked about earlier, Regional Conservation and Assistance Centers, that website will link you to their member websites where you may be able to find more localized lists of supplies, services, and experts for your region. For example, Balboa Art Conservation Center is a RAP member. They are focused on the West Coast and Arizona. They have five guides to emergency preparedness resources for their four state region. So consider going to the RAP website, look for the member nearest you, and investigate what the local website has to offer. The second entry, the Disaster Mitigation Planning Assistance Website. This is a national database. It does include many of the resources that are also on the RAP member websites but not everything. So use both web tools. This is a searchable database where you can specify one or more states that you want to search for local resources. You can choose whether or not you want to include national companies. My recommendation is that you do include national companies because a lot of the smaller offices are not all listed, just the national company. And then what you want to search for, are you looking for supplies or services or experts? Under those three categories, there are further subject breakdowns to refine your search. You can then download the results of your search to Excel and include it with your disaster plan and list some of the key ones under, remember that column on the RAP site A, the communications column, it was emergency recovery services. And I said I'd help you find some of these that are called for there. We didn't go into details then. These are the resources you can use to start filling in. And these recovery companies I mentioned, Belfort and Polygon and BMSCat, they will all be listed on this searchable database. You can also go online. You can pull them up quickly. They're individual websites. But I want to remind you, this is where you can look for conservators. You can look for other resources. Don't forget also just your local phone book for things like freezer storage and refrigerated trucks, but you can find both of these on this disaster mitigation planning assistance database. And I've seen in your homework that some of you have been really concerned about this. And now you have a tool to use. So after we enter the webinar today, take a look and link through to some of these websites while it's still on your mind. If you have any suggestions for additions or corrections to these databases, there is actually a mechanism for the disaster mitigation planning assistance where you can input additional resources and submit them, and then it's moderated, and then those will be released to the database just to make sure there isn't spamming and that kind of thing. You can also send, if it's easier, you can send suggestions to me or to Heritage Preservation and we'll see that they get added. The Cooperative Networks link I put up again to remind you that networks may have shared caches of disaster supplies that members can access. Checking in with any local network to see what might be available in your area. Also, professional organizations sometimes have disaster resources on their web pages. For example, I know CERMA, the Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists. They have a list of collection experts, conservators, and service providers, which is especially good in the Rocky Mountain area in the United States. Check these organizations as well. Feel free to, if some of you know of organizations, professional organizations that have disaster supply resource lists, feel free to add that into chat and that may help some of you. Finally, don't forget the trustee field guide to emergency response. There's a shopping list as well as a master supply list. This is also probably a good time to mention that the Heritage Preservation Web site has an excellent series of resources. I put the link on to the resource list for the webinar. They have a set of planning and preparing resources and listed and then response and recovery and these links are on your resource list. The resource list I put together is very selective and it links to a couple of other good ones where you can find some excellent additional information. So take a look at those. Jenny, questions? Yeah, sure. We have some questions. John in High Springs, Florida is curious. This is earlier when we were talking about recovery companies. Should the recovery company information be included on your prep? Yes, a name and a number, a 24-hour number. That would be under, it's in that column and a list to the contact is. If you can find, you know, if there's a local, you may have, there may be an emergency number, like an 800 number, but you also can find out if there's a local office and then you can get their contact information. If someone comes out to look at your collection ahead of time and help you get the name and number of that person, you cannot have too many numbers in this regard. And then we had a question that came from both Casey and John, who are curious where you should store your disaster supplies. Should you store it at a different facility since your facility might be affected and the supplies might be affected? Yes, think about this. That immediate emergency response kit, the idea is that that is used when something happens when you're in the building to actually use it. There could also be maintenance people, I'm sorry, custodial people who are in after hours and they discover a leak when they're in there and you're technically closed. You know, show them where these supplies are, especially like the plastic sheeting. They may be able to throw it away. So that group of supplies is stored in-house to be grabbed immediately and used by those that are on site. The bigger caches of supplies, think carefully where you put them. Don't put them down in a basement where you would have bad access when they get waterlogged. Look at some places have cargo containers outside of their building or they have storage rooms that can be accessed from outside of the building without going in. Look at all the different options because the point is well taken that you don't want to have you not be able to access them. And then one more question from Wendy. She's curious, should a first aid kit be included with the personal protective supplies? Yes. That's a good thing to add right on there. I'm assuming that most of you have first aid kits no matter what for any kind of emergency. This list is more towards a disaster response. First aid kits and people supplies, you should have. You should think what your potential risks are and what you should stock to take care of people in a medical emergency. That's it for now, Julie. Okay, great. I'm going to focus the rest of the time on some tools to help you with decision making during a disaster response in salvage. This is a slide we saw earlier and I just wanted to draw your attention back to it as a reminder of things to consider as you make decisions along the way on recovery. The cost, the space needs and the outcome desired. Now that's it. Most of our preparedness, training and supplies on water damage. Since water can affect a collection through leaks, water from fire sprinklers or fire hoses, or broken pipes, which may be the result of old age or a construction accident or an earthquake breaks a pipe. We're able to recover from most all water damage if we take prompt and effective action. So it's important to have staff trained to safely handle wet materials and how not to do additional damage during the response to recovery. The best way to learn about collections recovery and salvage of collections is to combine the written documents we're looking at today with hands-on training. Jenny, you want to pull over that poll? Sure. We have a poll for you and you have training in hands-on salvage. We'll let that run while I go on for a minute. I highly recommend that you look for such a workshop in your area or you organize one with local conservators or consultants. They're DDDs and YouTube videos you can watch, but nothing beats getting your hands wet. Learning to air dry wet books and documents, to carry a wet textile, to unframe a framed artwork, to rinse dirt off of books and documents to separate wet sheets such as maps, all of these things. And the overarching reminder is, however, be mindful of the valuable and high priority collections and to please consult with conservators when possible. So let's look. Have you had hands-on? Wow! So a third of you had, so that is that is something I hope you can change because this really, this isn't rocket science. Quite frankly, you can go out and get a tub, get a shelf, get a tub of water. I've seen people use a little backyard swimming pool, blow-up tubs for kids. Put some materials in there and see how they absorb water. See what happens. See how heavy they get. See what you can get out, what you can air dry, what you realize will be difficult and probably you would need to freeze. Just, you know, go ahead and do this. You're going to have enough tools probably from today. We'll also talk about training in June at the webinar that, on training and that would be another place where maybe by then you'll be ready to try this because the weight of a wet book and the fragility of wet paper really has to be experienced and learning what types of inks and dyes will run, how a book with clay coated paper feels, all of these things you need to experience them firsthand during a training. Also, if you ever have the opportunity volunteer at another institution's disaster cleanup. I kid you not, you will learn so much and have a new appreciation for the time, the work, and the space involved. So let's look at a few resources to help you inform some of your decision making. I'm going to need to go through this pretty quickly. You can gather any information all along the webinar series. It's going to help you. Now we have appendices 13 and 14 that will inform your salvage and recovery decisions. You probably noticed by now you only have the first page of both of these in your handout packet. The reason is these two appendices combined print to over 40 pages. I didn't want you to print them twice. I want you to go to the downloadable disaster plan template documents on the webinar course page. They're in a shaded box and after this webinar download these two documents in their entirety. Print and hole punch the one on the left, keep the whole thing, and then the one on the right, the salvage of water damage collections. I want you to eliminate the pages that don't relate to your particular collection scenes. If you don't have textiles delete the section on textiles. But at a glance the one on the left will be a quick reference to all types of materials. Now these two appendices are linked together. The very first entry on the salvage at a glance I just want to point out is books, cloth or paper covers. And then the very first one page is cloth or paper covers for a full page. Much more information than you have on the at a glance. But at a glance we'll get you going. I also have that I have a blow up of the at a glance because I want to show you a handy little quick reference for you. See those snowflake symbols going down the column on the left. These little guys. That symbol is used to denote materials that can safely be frozen to buy time until a drying process is determined. Now this at a glance handout has been pulled together from multiple sources including the originals done by Betty Walsh for the western association of art conservators added to by the national park service and additions by the West Pass group of trainers and all the citations are on the last page. Now as you look at these two appendices in more detail you will notice there's the drying column that will refer to different things air drying or it will say freeze and then vacuum freeze dry. So what I have for you next is a handout the last one I think is the handout on the different drying processes. Oops, wait a minute. Let me get that. I did something wrong there. There we go. Let's see if I can get rid of that. Okay. There we go. The different drying processes for water damaged books and paper this summarizes them and as they are referred to in the previous appendices this is appendix 15. And let me go to the full size version here for you. It's a little bit easier to see. These are the major processes running down the left-hand side and at the bottom it cites that at the NEDCC website in their preservation leaflets there is much more detailed information. Let me just show you one of these. I don't have a lot of time but air drying I want to point out it shows you the procedure, how it's done, it tells you the speed is going to be days or weeks the direct cost is negligible but the staff and labor is high to do it availability is good as long as you have the space, the labor and then the results you get swelling of materials especially books about 20 to 30 percent they will take a more shelving space after air dried drying there will be some cockling or rippling of the paper clay coated paper may block together if it's not separated while water soluble links may run and you have the potential for mold especially if the drying period is long. Let me just show you the sheet and look at the other processes I do want to point out vacuum freeze drying right here is the recommended process for paper materials especially and it takes a couple of weeks per load in that chamber notice the cost it's about $5 to $10 per volume they figure about $150 for a record storage box that's how they come up with the price there's a variation your staff times low and the availability is good it's definitely available and it has very good results if frozen quickly you'll see some of it there now it does mention leather and vellum may warp and photos may lose some of their gloss so you'd be thinking that would show up also on the salvage at a glance sheet vacuum thermal drying is virtually the same cost it's what some of the some companies may do it's I don't recommend it over vacuum freeze drying so try to get that if at all possible but some of the smaller companies or some of the ones that may subcontract I'm not sure who they subcontract to but some of them may subcontract to smaller companies that are not capable of doing vacuum freeze drying so this goes back to being an informed consumer okay just a couple more things here I want to stress that after any emergency event use it as a learning experience it's become a training a training opportunity every event whenever it involves more than a couple of people or it requires an outside response like a flood response or a fire department sit down as a group and evaluate the effectiveness of the response and look for improvements you can make for next time so the objectives of the debris it's gathering as complete and accurate information as you can objectively assessing the response and looking for areas of improvement and then recognizing stress and allowing people to share experience and personal reactions that's that human factor you know it's important to let people talk they may find that someone went above and beyond and deserve more recognition than they have received it's important to get all let them share their personal reactions and how do personalities or human factors affect their response you know who panicked who is the cool thinker that no one recognize the fact that they would be hey let them more involved next time also use the information from every event to keep an emergency event history as part of your disaster plan remember what has happened before and if the cause has not been mitigated it is more likely to happen again so this history will help you better evaluate your risks and vulnerabilities and it ties directly to your risk assessment it also helps with new staff on your training so they can see what's happened and you don't lose this event history if someone leaves the institution now I want to allow more chance for questions so I'm just going to tell you that read this slide when you have chance you have it in your handout it's the general rules and it's what makes for a successful recovery and finally I just want to mention a little more on the blocks and the things to watch out for the poor management this is back to who is best to be in charge I gave you that example before it wasn't poor management it was an acknowledgement ahead of time that who what director wanted to be involved and what didn't so think about that overall communication a poor communication can be a showstopper and it can affect you going forward we talked about that and crisis communication flexibility it's going to be changing isolation administrators should not work in isolation being overly ambitious you know by the third day you just may not be able to handle everything no priorities you're going to waste time making decisions and you're going to possibly salvage the less important materials if you don't have those priorities written down practicing I told you you know there are ways to practice and train we'll talk more in June and then look for ways to not miss the opportunity you know put out a press release monetary donations are being accepted to help rebuild the library or museum or historical society whatever the collection donations may be sent to collection restoration or something of a sort so the address and the phone number and so getting that kind of information out and poor pre-planning I mean that also is a critical problem so look for ways look for dates to do to do updates keep your plan up to date emergency preparedness month nationally a September another national date that's used a lot is May Day I think it was started by Society of American Archivists which encourages cultural institutions to do at least one thing to improve their disaster preparedness during the week in May and we'll probably be getting reminders soon from Heritage Preservation and others so maybe you can plan some follow-up during May Day and that and that week. So that's it that's our those are our objectives Jenny do we have some questions we do we have some fantastic questions and feel free to keep them coming and we'll try to get to them let me first Julie are you okay with me moving over more yep that's just I just wanted to remind you of the objectives and I hope you're leaving today feeling like you have a good start on writing or revising your plan use the handouts use the resource list to round out your efforts and and remember that overarching goal please a disaster plan completed for all collecting institutions with staff trained to carry it out go ahead Jenny all right let's see Ali and Wright had a question she says how do you handle keeping some of the larger supplies that you'll need like tables and generators how do you make sure they're accessible even though they are so large well it did if you were actually storing them on site you know generation generators are a challenge because you don't just buy a generator and then let it just sit there you have to you have to think about it you have to test them you have to keep them up sometimes you might be better off knowing where you can quickly get a generator or call a play so it may not be something you want to store it might be the same with plywood though I realize some of you are in areas where you use plywood probably way too frequently with hurricanes and other major events but this all depends on your situation you you have to evaluate what you can have or what you're going to try to get that supply list that didn't mean you're supposed to buy all those things and have all those things it's that when something happens you may need to know ways to get a hold of them okay let's see another question from Esther let's see she is wondering would you recommend having preservation and salvage portions of the plants separate from the actual emergency plants it seems she says there are multiple plans and documents the prep emergency instructions salvage procedures would you recommend keeping them separately or keeping them together well the prep should be widely distributed to anyone who might need to access the phone numbers and to know what's going to happen you may have your whole staff and all your volunteers I don't mean you huge institutions but many of you may have it that widely distributed and then we talked about the binder approach having the binder approach for the rest of the documents the floor plans if they don't fit on the prep this is this should be scalable this should be adapted to what you can do I mean some of the things I've given you you simply hole punch and put right into the binder maybe with a tab especially the handouts from today some of them were just blank things to have on hand that you would photocopy and you wouldn't want everybody to have that they don't need to have it except the key people who might need to access it even if they're outside the building some things some of those immediate response things were things you wanted right by a telephone you wanted people to know the first couple of numbers and steps to take so this is this is going to vary this is going to vary dramatically you know what works what works for you and to have it in multiple locations I just moved over the homework assignment this is the last one it's actually our evaluation but we do have a question specific to this course so please go ahead and fill that out and there is an opportunity to respond to the evaluation anonymously you'll see a link at the end of the evaluation to do it anonymously so that's an option of course there's the course home page and I'm going to ask our group our group leaders go ahead and start entering in the names of everyone in your group so we can take attendance we're getting close to 330 Julie can you hang on for a little bit yes I'm just going to stay on and keep answering as many questions as I can great so we completely understand if you need to leave at 330 but we're going to keep powering through to get to some of these questions so let me get right to it Sonya is curious we've talked a lot about water today and Julie I know you're very familiar with the damage fire caused can you speak a little more about fire recovery well I talked about the soot and ash problem that might be from within your building or coming in from outside the if you actually have a fire physically in your building that can cause that intense heat even if things aren't burned that intense thousand plus degree heat can result in just an instant embrittlement and extreme damage to organic materials especially so it's it's not anything to try to do yourself I mean you can clean some individual objects there are techniques for that with rubber sponges and wiping things down or some things to be rinse but you have to be very very careful there's some good articles out there on the web about smoke and soot cleanup because as soon as you touch an item you start transferring it anytime it moves from your hands to other items and it can actually kind of get embedded into things so you have to be very careful in handling smoke and ash damaged collection so I'm giving you some general information but it really does get into experts and conservators especially and I think Sonya clarified she was looking for it looks like an ash recovery let's see so another question from Casey she says there are a lot of examples of the prep which is really helpful Julie do you know where she can go to find examples of full disaster plans to work from well there are some on the conservation distlist which is now under the American Institute for Conservation the cons distlist has a disaster section and disaster plans I don't know how up to date those are those have been around a long time have been posted a long time the the biggest fear I have is when people go to look at somebody else's to use as a plan if they just start copying over things that are not that helpful I would hope I've given you through the appendices really the linkage of what you need to have in that binder that was my hope look maybe to some other libraries or museums whatever your similar kind of institution is and asked to look at theirs especially those that are maybe in your immediate area you could also ask this question on the connecting to collections online community page the forum and ask it and see what some of the you know you could even say would like to look at some examples of does anybody have any to share or are there some posted somewhere okay and I have another question from Jeff Julie this might be a very specific conservation question he wants to know where to go to understand the dynamics of drying out historic building that may have very important painted or gilded surfaces well I do know there is a publication I think it's FEMA publication and it is it is about water damage to historic buildings it may be more from a structural standpoint I can't put my finger on it immediately what I will maybe someone who knows they maybe they can add it into into the chat but I think it's salvage of water damage to historic site historic buildings or something of this sort and certainly a conservator I look for a conservator so familiar with historic buildings you can you could ask that question on the online community I just mentioned that probably would be a very good question to put on the community because a lot of conservators are on there and I think they'll be able to point you to it that's a great point Julie too if we're not able to get to something make sure to post it there and you'll definitely get a response I have a question from Eric and you know one of the challenges is of course making the case that preparing is important to administrators to donors he's curious if you know of any good resources to obtain archive or library disaster example pictures images that could be used in presentations to directors and managers and donors okay I'll put this out there if you email me I have a short just a shareable version it maybe has about 10 8 or 10 images that I will send you the PowerPoint don't all email me at once but I'm happy I'm happy to do that you can grab them sometimes from sites you can you know you can you can try to save them off of websites I don't know of a site specifically and I have to be careful that I only share slides that I feel I have control over that are mine or that I know it's okay to share all right Julie are you ready for some freezing questions okay bring them on all right again folks if you can't hang on we completely understand but we're going to power through Trace is curious I'm also curious what about what happens after you freeze are there any precautions or a process that happens well there are different ways to pack pack collections or books into boxes we didn't get into any of this detail it's really more of kind of the hands-on part of a training but you can pack them into boxes there are procedures to follow some the procedures I gave you the one where they have a full page or page and a half about each example look at those it talks about them once they are frozen they can stay for however long some of those things from Los Angeles public library fire that were frozen stayed in freezers for a couple of years before they were brought out so they're fine once they're in there they can stay for however long then when they're brought out if they're going to go through a vacuum freeze dry process that will be done by the company they'll pull them out of the freezers and they'll take care of all of that if you want to bring them out and air dry them which is about the only thing you can do you would start with the books let's take books flat on a table because they're a little frozen chunks of ice and you let some of the water get off of them and then gradually begin to to fan them open and work with that part of the air drying component I hope that answered that question and it also answered Dennis's question about how long should you freeze something for and you said it could be free for however long you need it to be right exactly exactly if you need a couple I know places that bring back maybe a couple of boxes a week and they air dry them and then they those are done and then they bring back a couple more because remember how much room that can take you pay at a commercial freezer storage you usually paid by the month by the pallet a pallet will hold about 24 boxes and and those are stacked up and so you can multiply that out by 10 to 15 books per box however many it is will give you an idea of how many boxes per pallet someone marked happy about pulling out a couple of boxes at a time but maybe you've got them in a local freezer or you can ship them to a local freezer and be able to pull them out. Well and here's a great question about if you're freezing them yourself. So Sonya asked she has a refrigerator and freezer in their facility when they needed it for a quick response should the freezer be cleaned in a special way between use between freezing materials. Well usually when you put them in a facility usually they're in a box or you can put them in a plastic bag so they're protecting they're protecting the other things keeping them away from the other things that are in there if they're in with fish I do know sometimes you get a fishy smell afterwards but it's more it's really more your choice you can also if something's just slightly damp you can slip it into like a ziplock bag and leave the bag open. But it still protects the covers but the air can get in because a self defrosting freezer will keep pulling the moisture out of something that is just damp it can take quite a while it's on your sheet it's called a freezer drying on that last appendix and so you put your meat in the freezer and if there's a pinhole or you leave it in too long it gets freezer burn all you're really doing is your freezer burning your book which is not going to hurt it or stack of papers or whatever it is so the separating as far as from other things again that not specifically I mean if you had sewage on your books or contamination that would be a different matter okay Lonnie has a question about leather bound books are they okay to freeze dry? I think it depends you need to look at that sheet download that appendix and look specifically at leather bound because there was the cloth and paper bound and there is also leather bound so look at it some of these things leather especially if it's dry too quickly can crack so you need control but you still I think in many cases can freeze them originally but boy don't I don't try to memorize this stuff I'm telling you I use these sheets just like you can use these sheets so go for that we've got two more Julie okay Sonya has a question I think you may have mentioned this when you're going through companies she's curious how do you find a company that does rapid freezing go to the website disaster mitigation planning assistance website input that you want services and that you want national and then when the services list comes up you pick freezer storage or freezer trucks sometimes you can just bring a freezer truck right on to your location and start packing the boxes into a freezer truck as well so do that and that will come up now the first entry should be I think it's the national association of refrigerated warehouses and and a rw I think that's it but you can search that online as well I think it's national association of refrigerated warehouses and those that's their association they belong to it you can figure out those are reputable companies and then you can search it by state location there are lots you'll be amazed how many there are around the country all right and one more question from Jeanine she's curious if you have recommendations on where to find insurance companies that will underwrite a very small museum and have properly trained assessors should a disaster arrive I think there was some there was discussion at the last session about insurance and I didn't give companies but I think I noticed in the chat that some people were I also referred to the book that is on the resources list which is on insurance and risk it's put out by American Library Association and it I'm relatively sure in one of its appendices has a list of some of the companies but that's I don't have others now whether or not their assessors are trained for cultural collections insurers will insure any size of collection so how small you are it doesn't matter to them I mean you can get insurance regardless of your size but those that are listed that actually have experience with cultural institutions would be your best bet especially if you're a museum historical society great I think that's it I hope I got to everyone's question if not feel free to send us an email Julie thank you so much this course was fantastic which I think you can see over in that chat box everyone agrees thank you all for joining us well I appreciate all of you I know a webinar structure can be challenging and I appreciate your patience and your attention and really a big thanks to our facilitator our webinar with is Jenny you're great in heritage preservation and learning times for all the facilitating and the promoting and the technical assistance overall I'm just going to go here I don't know the little show well not really there's the end of my email address I think it's on I think it there we go I think it's on something else as well but if you want to get in touch with me you have it I just want to acknowledge again all my colleagues in the disaster biz for cultural collections you know many parts of this presentation were developed from your input over the years and I thank you for sharing we all it's a our field is a team effort and sharing examples and images and resources and publications so that was great for our funding from instituted museum and library services you know we wouldn't be here today without the connecting to collections initiative so thank you so much thank you Julie and just a reminder we will have that follow-up course in June 4 if you're interested in learning how to exercise that plan you've now finished and our next course is caring for digital materials preventing a digital dark age it starts in April and registration closes March 26 so make sure