 Hello, my name is Mary Coughlin and I'm Chair of the American Institute for Conservation's Collection Care Network, abbreviated CCN. CCN was created in recognition of the critical importance of preventive conservation as the most effective means of promoting the long-term preservation of cultural property. This means managing risks to prevent damage to collections, keeping temperature, relative humidity, and light levels at safe ranges, keeping pests out of collections, putting good policies in place to make sure collections are inventoried, secured, and handled properly, and much, much more. In this way, museum collections, historic sites, and archival holdings can be made accessible not just today, but for many years in the future. The following video is one of three interviews that CCN conducted with the 2020 AIC Award recipients whose work specifically focuses on collection care. If you're interested in learning more about CCN, please visit culturalheritage.org and search for Collection Care Network. We strive to support the growing number of conservators and collection care professionals with strong preventive responsibilities and interests, so we always have many projects for you to be involved in. Thanks for watching. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm Kelly Krish, and I'm the editor for the Collection Care Network, which is the part of AIC responsible for collections care. And joining me today is Susan Barger, who is the recipient of this year's David Magoon University Products Conservation Advocacy Award, which honors conservation professionals who have advanced the field of conservation and furthered the cause of conservation through substantial efforts in outreach and advocacy, which I think we can all agree Susan has certainly done. Susan is a consultant for small museums and archives. As a research scientist, Susan has delved into the chemistry of photographs and has written three books on the subject in addition to many other publications. She's taught undergraduate and graduate level courses in conservation science, the science of art materials, and the care of museum collections. She co-founded a nonprofit field services organization, Museum Development Associates, whose mission is to provide professional development training for small cultural institutions, and she has also served as coordinator for Connecting to Collections Care. So her voice will sound familiar to many of us who have enjoyed the webinars and workshops over the years. So thank you, Susan, and really appreciate this opportunity to talk to you about some of your experiences in the field and any advice you can share for the rest of us to be effective advocates. So I think first maybe the best place to start is can you tell us why it is so important to be an advocate for collections care within the ASC community as well as to the broader audiences? Well, I suppose the answer to that is if we are working with collections, our job is taking care of those collections and so we have to advocate for the monies to do that because those are always left out. You know, somehow if you have a museum or you have libraries are a little bit better or archives, the funding for those activities of care are often just not even considered or they're considered in a way that it means buying more boxes or more envelopes but not necessarily doing the kinds of things that would be overall care like taking care of the building or making sure that you have storage that isn't full of bugs. So making sure the budget and the policies of the institution are kind of more comprehensive for collections care. Yeah, but in small institutions often they don't have even those kinds of policies. So I mean in small institutions, collections care as I learned means everything. It means having a board that functions. It means making sure that people have training opportunities and that they're not penalized if they take advantage of them, that they have resources, that they have some kind of support. So it's a lot of things. You know, just a lot of times conservators were the harvangers of no. You shouldn't touch things, you shouldn't do this but actually, you know, people want to take care of their collections and they're very eager to learn better ways to do it and that's really part of our job. So it sounds like a lot of balancing and a lot of creative thinking to have projects be effective and please multiple stakeholders. Yeah, and my idea with these small institutions was that I wanted them to be a little bit better every year that I wasn't going to go in and say, well, we need to do this and this and I also helped them to figure out how they could collaborate with other people so they could do projects that they needed to do but you know, I had a feeling for the people I was dealing with and sometimes, you know, that meant I needed to just keep my mouth shut and figure out a way to solve a problem. So maybe this is a good time in your acceptance speech, you gave some great advice on choosing the most interesting and adventuresome option and to consider everything experiment and it sounds like some rewarding experiences for you have been bringing these collaborative projects together and having people doing work that they feel really satisfied with and so I was just wondering if you could share either specifics or qualities of what has made your career in collections care most rewarding for you. Well, I think one of the things that a lot of people don't know that I worked on was Adobe and when I first got back to New Mexico from being in the east and I was a horrible Easterner, but I came home and I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do here and I went around and I asked people what they would like me to work on I said, you know, I'm a material scientist and they all said, oh please work on Adobe and I thought, oh, give me a break. I just couldn't think of anything worse. Well, there was a big international meeting on Adobe and I went and I figured out that there was a problem that interested me that wasn't being worked on and that's the durability of Adobe plasters and so I thought, well, that would be interesting to work on. So I got some money from NEA and I got hooked up with the with Cornerstones and they were working on churches. I petitioned the Archdiocese of New Mexico to analyze Adobe plasters that came off of buildings that the old plasters were being thrown in the Arroyo, but I still had yes permission and I would go out and plaster buildings and and I would analyze these plasters and I also did oral history interviews with the and padores because plastering was until very recently was done by women and so and I also read up on what people said about plasters and for instance I had these plasters that were full of organic stuff and the anthropologists or yeah anthropologists had interviewed and had orders of the turn of the 20th century and they said you put you put manure in these and they would say yes but you know when I was looking at didn't seem to be right when I was doing these oral history interviews the place that had the the strongest plaster was full of organic stuff and I knew it couldn't possibly be a manure and so I asked this old lady and she said oh we would never use that I mean that would be awful it would be gross but they were they were getting basically compost from the bottom of Arroyo ditches and that's what they were putting in their plasters and the thing that made these plasters really strong was that they would form humic acids that would drink up carbon dioxide from the air and form natural limes and it made them very last a long time and the report that I wrote for any day any a getting passed around so I'd go places and they'd say oh we have this this report and but they they never realized it was done by a woman you know which is kind of funny and say well that's me so actually the the work that I did on Adobe kept coming back and I was able to go to Prater the Center for Research on architecture and earthen architecture in France and because of that one of the other people in my group was from Mexico so I did work in Mexico I so I got to do a lot of things I also learn there about examining architecture and figuring out things that could happen in buildings that made it mean much more effective when I was dealing with architectural conservators on for caps and also when I was going out working with small museums trying to figure out problems infrastructure problems that they were having that were mostly bad maintenance so that had you know a big effect but it's not something I would have really chosen had I not had a little push I guess your story actually illustrated this quite well but I don't know if you had any other thoughts on how conservation can better serve small institutions and other underserved communities you talked about the importance of professional development opportunities for them is that something that you feel does the field need to make more accessible or have more opportunities or do you have other thoughts on that well you know for a long time on both when I was doing stuff for this state and then when after reform museum development we were doing lots of training and the New Mexico has the largest state in the nation and so if you have if you have a workshop one place even if it's if it seems it might be centrally located on people might have to travel six or eight hours to get to a workshop and then that means they might also have to spend one or two and so even though we usually charged we would find money to basically support the workshops we we had people coming to us and saying I can't afford to go to workshops because we can't afford to travel can't you do them without travel so or they would also say you know my board won't let me come to workshops because I might be waiting for two days and they don't have anything to show I don't have anything to show when I get back that I got this training so that was one of the reasons why we started Small Museum Pro which is now part of ASLH and to get that started I applied for money at IMLS which we did we did not get because they said we didn't have the capacity which was probably true I also lobbied the architect of the legislature I became a registered lobbyist and I'd have to make my report about the five dollars I spent to lobby every year I didn't realize you had registered as a lobbyist even that's advocacy far well in order to talk to people in the legislature I had to register and so I was able to get money from the legislature that enabled us to start Small Museum Pro through Eastern New Mexico University which happened to have one of the oldest distance education programs in the country and so that program basically it helped us solve the distance problem and it also because we could use the certification through Eastern New Mexico people could get a certificate and if they did all the classes there were five classes they would get something that said they were a Small Museum Pro and when museum development went out of business we basically gave that to ASLH and it's still running I'm really pleased about it that's wonderful I so I think that also gets to how how can how should be how should we be working to evolve professional development opportunities into the future to better serve a wide variety of needs and to reach everyone well I I think that programs like I'm connecting to collections care which is one of the reasons why I wanted to run it can provide a lot of assistance and I see that a lot of other institutions are now providing distance learning basically I think that asking people what it is that they need and really understanding what it is that they're telling you that they need because a lot of times you'll say well do you need X and they'll say oh yeah because they're afraid to say you know I really need Y and you need to try to figure out what what they're saying their needs are and what their needs really are and then how you can fulfill them and you know when AIC took over connecting to collections care and cap those are really the first two programs that AIC had that were reaching out of the profession reaching to non-conservation types and you know at first people were thinking that connecting to collections care would be an opportunity for an employment opportunity for emerging professionals and and I'd say you know I'm really happy if that happens but that's not our audience all right since these people outside of the profession and I think that drum a lot um I think that might be a good place to end thank you so much for your time and for sharing that I feel like I I learned a lot from from hearing about your experiences and everything that was that was really interesting so I really appreciate you speaking with us and taking the time