 Hi everyone. Today, we're going to have a really interesting webinar on marking and labeling collections. And I want you to know that all of the websites that are going to be in the slides are in the handouts. So you don't have to scramble to write down the websites and resources. And when I post the recording, I'll also post the slides. So I'm going to do my thing. The next webinar is on deaccessioning. That'll be on November 19th. And then after that, for the holiday season, we're going to have one on caring for collections during seasonal events, and that's December 3rd. And I'll tell you about the 2016 webinars when we get closer to them. If you have a problem and you need answers for caring for your collections, you can always go to the online community forum. The one thing is you have to be registered to ask a question or to answer a question, but you can read the questions and answers without being registered. And registration doesn't cost anything. It's easy. This is our website. And we're on Facebook. We're also on Twitter. And you can always contact me. This is my email address. And we're going to have an evaluation. We'll put this website up later again, too. So today we have Nora Lockshin. We're going to do marking and labeling collections. So take it away. Hi there. I hope I'm live. You are? Fantastic. Well, hello everybody. I'm so excited to be here today. I see there's a lot of people registered and the number is climbing, and we have people from apparently as far away as Peru and Australia. So thank you so much for attending. I do have quite a lot of slides, probably too many. So I'm going to do my best to speak a little bit and not go off-script so we can get through all the topics I have and thoughts today. And I'm already going off. So here we go. But just to let you know, I'm not going to be keeping my eye on the chat window. Susan will be pulling questions over to a little parking lot so we can address them in the Q&A session. So without further ado, I'm going to get started. So as some of you have seen in the bio if you got to read it, I have been around museums for quite a long time, actually over 20 years, but my experience is formed mostly in the realm of libraries, archives, and frameworks in exhibitions. Since I've been at the Smithsonian for a good half of that career, I've consulted on many varied collections from anthropological to artwork, specimens, space flight artifacts, you name it. Being an archives conservator at the Smithsonian means I get a lot of interesting questions, as I alluded to. Specifically, here's one that is going to carry us through some of the presentation. Early on in my career, I was asked if I could help with a canoe, an outrigger canoe, to which I said, really, I'm a paper conservator. But they went on to explain that it had these labels on it that transliterated native words for the oars and the parts of the boat, and those were the singular and perhaps unique record of that language. And so I went on to work on it. And I'm going to figure out my controls here. I'm so used to using my keyboard. Here we go. So here's the canoe. I admit that it threw me for a moment, but then I soon realized it wasn't very different from what I usually do. For instance, it's quite like working on endpapers that are attached to wooden boards and ancient bound manuscripts. It's paper attached to wood, and you want to keep it there, generally. If you'll forgive the pun, this canoe is going to come up again later as an object lesson because it offers me a lot of talking points. But first of all, I am going to let you in on a little secret. This presentation might actually disappoint some of you. And why would that be? Well, with apologies to our friend Dr. McCoy here, and I hope this translates across international boundaries. I know that Dr. Treck has met us in a lot of places. I'm a conservator, not a registrar. Generally speaking, with rare exceptions, we're not the ones usually marking or labeling objects. As I've said before in another forum, the only mark a conservator wants to leave generally is no mark at all. Move ahead. So I'm not a collections manager. I'm not a registrar. Let's see, moving two screens here. Nor a cataloger in books and library situations. A lot of times, marking is done in the technical services department, but also in cataloging and acquisitions. So we're going to go to our first poll and ask who's actually here with us today. I see your names, but I don't really know what you do. So if Susan can push the first poll, we'll hopefully be able to look at this later, and I'll learn a little bit more about you. But meanwhile, so here we go. I'm watching it. So you've got quite a few options. Scroll down, pick one. If more than one applies to you, go ahead and answer that. Moving forward. So let me tell you why I actually am here today. I was honored about a year ago with a nomination to offer an original contribution to a sequel to this set of books, Storage of Natural History Collections. Actually, Susan, I'm going to try and move my poll over because it's blocking my slides. Well, I'm just going to go for my paper slides then. Thank you so much. All right. So I was asked to write a chapter for this book, Storage of Natural History Collections, which was published in two volumes and is actually the second volume is out of print, but it is available online at stashc.com. Based on my own work with historic labels and archival documents for the upcoming revision, I was asked to write a new chapter that specifically deals with concerns of marking and labeling. So here's the thing. If I don't actually do marking of collections most of the time, who am I to lead this discussion? Well, much like most of my chapter, which had a word limit, there is not enough time here today to tell you everything there is to be done. But what I can do is take you through what my literature search interviews with many colleagues of diverse backgrounds and my own experience in research while writing this chapter has taught me. So for those of you who haven't seen this, this little gif is a scene from the movie National Treasure with Nicholas Cage explaining to you very sagely, do you know what the preservation room is for? Apparently, it's not necessarily for marking up objects. What I do know is that I can't give you the best tool and the best ink and the best way to fix a mistake. There are far too many considerations and options out there and your resources might not permit them all. On a brighter note, I am here to guide you towards best practices where you can find steps to critical decision making by reviewing the multitude of really good literature that's already out there and to point you towards resources both in print, online and workshops that there are out there that you can take for further education. So let's start off at the very beginning. We'll start off with the meaning and definitions for clarity. As the title of this seminar indicates, we're here to talk about marks and labels. To be very clear, they generally serve the same purpose. And in the chapter I've written for publication, I use those two words, mark and label, somewhat interchangeably. And I will show you that actually in the chapter here, I'm weirdly quoting myself, which is odd, but I'm going to point out that the definition of label as I use it is confined to a semi or permanent mark applied or attached to an object. And so I use it somewhat interchangeably except where noted, links to the catalog accession record in history and contemporary museum practice. And when I call out mark as something different, if you're describing an object, say a metalware or pottery, there may already be a mark, a hallmark. That is a very specific word that tells you a little bit about the object. And that would be distinguished from any label that you would apply or written other information. Next slide. So why do we do this? Why do we mark priceless and historic artifacts? Well, humans like to determine order. We also like to establish control and ensure against loss. We like to be able to find and care for our things. Beyond that, as museum people, we adhere to guidelines and standards among ourselves so that we are worthy of the public or private trust that has been placed in us. And some of those guidelines and standards are referred to in the handouts. You may recognize some of them, but I'll just spell them out. AAM is American Alliance of Museums. They recently changed their name from association. We've got ICROM, which is Institute for Goodness Preservation and Conservation of Cultural Property. It doesn't exactly align because of the international language differences. There's another group called the AZA, American Zoological Association, and ALI stands for American Library Association. But there are many more out there, of course. We also bark and label for further interpretation and arrangement and powerful use of metadata surrounding our physical objects. Through numbering and description, we can relate objects to each other beyond the physical boundaries in virtual catalogs. So I've called out their bullet for wayfinding. Also, labels today sometimes have technology embedded in them. You can actually do inventories with smart labels. I don't talk about it much in this lecture, but it is addressed in my chapter for an upcoming book. But those of you that are familiar with using a book catalog or your own public library catalog that tells you that there's a book in the system, but it's not at your library. You can find your way to another edition under the same call numbers and et cetera, but it might be the fifth copy. So those are familiar for the public, but in-house we also do lots of things that go on further. And I'll show you a little example of that later on. So the accession number. The accession number is sort of a holy thing, like something to be respected and not interfered with, until it is. On the right, you have an image of a catalog description for that outrigger canoe, and it's pretty long in the notes. It actually has quite... It also shows me that actually that boat has had quite a few different numbers associated with it. I don't expect you to be able to swim and read that, so I'm going to blow that up for you a little bit. And from the notes, in fact, this object, which is 0285, was also referred to as USNM, E160, et cetera, but it was also 307215, and even 67111. So which number is correct? Which one stands for it? Which do we believe? So what I've done is I've blown up the little left side of that slide, and you can see that I'm actually there working on the label, and I'm going to pull my arrow pointer down for a second, and I don't expect you to see this. I can barely see this. But right here, let's see. Oh, my little arrow isn't moving that quickly. Oh, hi. I'm sorry. I'm just seeing a note that my mic is kind of low. I'm trying to move it a little bit closer. Hopefully that will make an adjustment. At any rate, for those who can hear me, I am working on a label, and the accession number is mostly going into the little missing chunk of paperwork. And it says 20 possibly 0, possibly 8, possibly 5, but it definitely starts with the 02. You can also see that in this slide, they eventually decided on that upper number, 2085. But if you look at the number 67111, I'll ask you to keep your eyes on it for a second. That number actually still persists in one of these virtual catalogs. The number persists in literature and early citations. So if you look into the accession record in the catalog, it links to this online version of a 1923 citation that references 67111. So we're going to switch gears now. I know that some of you listeners are probably familiar with the notion of agents of deterioration of museum collections. I'll spare you all of them just to focus on one. From a holistic risk assessment perspective, as defined by Canadian Conservation Institutes Rob Waller and Paisley Cato, one of the 10 agents of deterioration of museums collections is disassociation, or dissociation, excuse me. I want you to focus here on the third sentence. Let me go back. That third sentence, disassociation results in the loss of objects or object-related data, or the ability to retrieve or associate objects and data. We can lose object data via physical damage to the label, loss due to adhesive failure, or catastrophic loss such as disaster or theft. Now we'll discuss some basis and rationale for having standards and guidelines and best practices, and some dos and don'ts, ideally, to follow them. Again, from CCI, you'll note this really excellent image of lovely, clear, numbering, contrasting, color, beautifully written, I think on this bone fragment, I think it is. While paying attention to neat handwriting, clarity, and contrast, there is a failure here to note the orientation of the object and its number. Without serifs, note this is a non-serif font, it's really hard to tell which way is up. An alternate solution here could have been to use an underline to indicate that that is a 9 and not a 6 on the other way around. Symmetry can be confusing, and that could lead to loss if somebody decided to file this in the drawer that had the 18,000 series as opposed to the 10,000 series. Even if the object is there, if you've not been able to understand the meaning of the numbering, this is dissociation. So I'm going to go further and give you some definite dos. Do check your references and resources. Some of those are in your handout and we'll go through a couple of them in later slides. Get training. You're here today. This is already a training. You've already learned one proper thing about how to orient numbers so that people can read them. Ask questions if you have people who've been there a really long time. Ask why something has done that way or if they know of how this material has been done before. Ask if you know what the material is if you're not sure what it is. Ask if you can get more training. Make space and time for yourself to do this. A rushed job can result in easy mistakes that are hard to reverse and take a lot of time to recover from after. And test and practice your techniques. What our friends from, again, the film National Treasure are demonstrating exactly is what not to do. Please don't use untested materials on important collections objects. For anyone who hasn't seen the film I'm just going to tell you I did not see the film until this past week and I said I have to watch this because I've been hearing about I've been hearing about this infamous lemon juice scene for years and so for you I watched National Treasure and it was a hoot honestly so enjoy it. But please don't go ahead and squirt lemons to reveal faded lettering on a document or object that you have in front of you. And don't do it for the first time on a collection object. There's plenty of opportunity to pick up something in a thrift store or perhaps you have deaccessioned collections or props that can be practiced on. But if you're interested in trying to figure out on how to write on ceramics pick up an inexpensive dish at a thrift shop or try something from home first and see what your little paints are going to be. Oh I think we've got a little break coming up and by which I mean it's another poll. So in fact how did you learn how to mark collection objects? I've got a couple of options there for you while I take a drink of water. Oh hurrah I see some of these answers coming in. Indeed I'm not sure if this was split into two polls but for those of you if there's a yes or no it would be great if you wanted to answer as well if you're not responsible for labeling and irregular duties or if you supervise other people wow this is going really fast I see lots of excellent wow yep yep yep ok I'm moving on while you answer that I'm going to just take an opportunity to say that a colleague of ours likes to point out that what we're trying to provide here is a shame zone you are here to learn and teach me also with valuable questions from your perspective so I might be showing some images of some fantastic perfect looking labels but I'll show some kind of funky ones too if you recognize them please don't shout them out in the chat rooms some of those collections would prefer to remain nameless and I thank them for sharing their time with me to take some pictures of some labels that probably should be remediated in some way so moving on so many options how do you choose what to do this quizzical little pug expresses perfectly how some of us feel about marking and labeling with some training, beginning training or none at all and possibly a bewildering array of materials of value in your collection how do you choose the right system or method this I found is a gorgeous way to sum it up this essential proverb like statement about collection stewardship from the American Alliance of Museums pretty much sums it up whether you're talking about what kind of building to build or how to light and exhibit or how to mark an object you've just got to know what stuff you have in front of you and know what stuff you need from a legal and standards perspective pretty much that you'll find that those with whom you wish to exchange items will agree you will also find brief similar guidance or read upon guidelines that must be adhered to for accreditation and loans in such organization as ICOM the International Council of Museums in ICROM so those are brief guidelines like items should be marked in a manner that it's safe but how do we do that explicitly well first I'm going to break it down for you with some principles I've sort of gathered for decision making so this was turned into a handout so if you want to pull the handout a flow chart I'll quickly follow along on the slides first of all identify your object what is the substrate the substrate is just a fancy word that conservators like to use for the material what is the type of surface that you are meaning to apply a number to and of course if you have something like a metal handled cane you have a couple of substrates you have metal and you have wood I'm being simplistic in this slide by playing first playing the game 20 questions for substrate is it animal is it vegetable is it mineral mineral you could also ask yourself a few other questions so that just this is just sort of flow chart thinking ask yourself what are its characteristics what are its vulnerabilities is it soft or hard is it porous is it absorbent is it smooth and slick is it chemically reactive if you don't know anything about it can you find out more from the artist's record of work or the cultural norm of the culture that it comes from for instance it's a culture that makes baskets and what were the common materials that were used and possibly coatings that were used in that century or that time also and this is a different color because it's a very different sort of concept is what it's outside the object external to the object what are the storage considerations is this going to go immediately on exhibit so you might want to put a really discrete label or is it going to be handled by researchers and you need to really be sure not to mark any important mark over any important features might it be going into cold storage or might it be going into a fluid medium if it's a biological or a plant specimen alternately is it going to be stored in an exterior environment for something like a farm collection all of those factors will affect the durability expectations for a system that you choose next principle characterize it so once you've figured out the surface characterize that surface so we've picked one and you have a choice is it friable or is it durable friable another fancy word or is it fragile does it flake is it powdery so between those two you can see the friable and that might be something that you want to avoid moving on to other factors are their colorants present dyes or pigments are they soluble or insoluble in anything that you might want to apply such as a barrier coat for applying a number and then a top coat would it bleed or change significantly with some care and minimal training you can learn to test for solubility through workshops that's really there are some guidance online there may be a video or two for small testing but it is something best worked out with someone who has done it before so as not to stay in an object or market in some irreversible way and then another line there again a little bit outside of this scope is is it animate or is it inanimate I know that not a lot of you necessarily have living collections but think about this seminar as a way to instruct your whole career and it's possible that you might move on to a site that has animal collections next principle once you've characterized considerations please consider that labeling is a mini treatment that you are doing you want to consider the size of the area that you're going to affect as well as the size of the information and how much you can conceivably fit in a way that communicates well to others placement not just for aesthetics if you have a 400 pound sculpture it's going to be really difficult to see the number if you have to turn over the sculpture so you might want to do it on a side that's more or less accessible you want to consider your users and your viewers you want to consider any potential damage that you could do and again I've said unknowns and you do want to consider your time there are some ways of sort of speeding up your process by batching types of materials but you can't always control it but try and identify time where you can sit aside make the decisions properly and not feel rushed about it I know some of you are laughing right now so let's go along this flow chart and think about choices how do you choose so you've picked a surface you've decided perhaps that it's friable or porous the red in the red section so you may naturally want to avoid that particular area of the object if you want to avoid writing on it directly or pasting a label on it because it might flake off you can think about another option such as a loop in a tag or a tag in a ribbon or in fact putting a little card next to it and putting it in a container an enclosure not marking the object at all alternately I mentioned that sort of cane example you might select another part of the object that has a more durable surface if that is an opportunity if we go to the lower branch of something durable or non porous or an absorbent maybe you can use a barrier coat which is a little bit of very selected purpose selected lacquer that then when it's dry you might write on with a pencil or another marking device like brush or ink and then consider putting a top coat on it so we're going to go into looking actually at an object and thinking about this I actually happen to pick an object that suits the earlier quality it's a bone fragment we're near Halloween some of my slides might get a little creepy I didn't do that on purpose a lot of this information was gathered while working around natural history collection so bear with me I hope nothing will get too upsetting for anyone so that's a bone and you can see on its left hand side I'll try using this pointer again it's really just not behaving for me so I'm sorry about that on the left side you can see that there is a little number written it's a little dark there's been a little barrier layer filling in a little bit so that the person didn't have to write into any little valleys of bone it's definitely more solid on the left side of the bone as opposed to the right side which has cellular structure some breakdowns where really the information would be at risk so imagine somebody bump bumping or sliding with a cotton glove across that right side you could easily rub off the number if this object was being handled by gloved hands I'm going to move on to another object so let's talk a little bit for a second about size and scale here in the Smithsonian we have very tiny things this is not the tiniest but it is a tiny if you look at the tiny little metric scale all the way on the left we have a little tiny hand woven basket that is possibly three millimeters across it's adorable we have stuff even smaller than that but we also have very big things so when we consider our collections we are honestly categorizing things in terms of small, medium and large these days and large for us is a space shuttle very happily both of those space shuttles pictured there knows to knows on a historic day at our National Museum of Air and Space those are labeled they already have labels on them it says enterprise and it says discovery so we know which is which that is handy but indeed to get away from joking about it it's really interesting to consider discovery which is with us now is that one object or is it one object and it's hundreds of components and I know some of you who are active in cataloging might have to accession each part within something like discovery and there are probably hundreds of thousands of parts in there that don't necessarily come out easily some that do probably on based on NASA's practices probably every one of those parts already has a unique and individual serial number because that's how they do things over there so the question is do you need to label every single component part when it already has an identification on it that you can record and catalog from it because it might be unique just a question it's a question that's also relatable to our National Postal Museum when I discuss with them it's very interesting to note when you're counting collections is a sheet of stamps for example a postage stamps is that one object or is it 40 objects because their currency they each have a value and it really depends on who you talk to and how we are counting our collections that's a very important thing to note but moving back to something that's a little bit more realistic for collections managers we're going to show some beetles now so here is a beetle and this is one of our very large beetles it's actually the largest example of a beetle I believe we have in the show and tell collection of the entomology department excuse me and right next to it is a very very small beetle and what you'll see to over from the very very big beetle is a pin a finger pointing to a pin and then a little tiny dot and that is actually the collected item the smallest, tiniest beetle which is actually much smaller than its label so how are you going to label that the question is you don't you label the pin that holds the tiny little beetle moving onward let's talk about let's keep talking about types of objects and since we're in the world of natural history let's take a detour into a special type of label and its relationship to the type of object and here I'm talking about type specimens so if any of you manage a collection with a natural history or a science education bent or have a cabinet of curiosities come across these these are lots of different labels for different types of insects for the most part but one special thing about them is that you see a red coloration for those of you who do not have a color blindness issue holotypes that is the unique specimen from which all other specimens are named and identified are always designated with the red coloration whether that be a little line around the writing or a red colored tag and under the butterfly over there you see that there's a sort of faded pinkish type label so that is a very important thing and not necessarily to be changed or altered because that tells you that that particular specimen is a very important one also within entomology collections at the very least order on the label matters in this particular instance for pinned insects the separation of information on the labels matters with the most important information being placed closest to the specimen and additional information afterwards and I've actually been working with our entomology scientists to come up with solutions for older labels that have been moved around a lot so their little holes are weakening and stretching and how to keep them in order so some of these pins I've seen can have up to 5 10 labels on them and yes our entomologists look at them under the microscope to read them and make them. Moving on to works on paper obviously I have the most comfort here because of my background but I don't want to dwell on it because of that I'm bringing it up because the rules are sometimes very different depending on the context for instance if we go forward to look at library collections we are all used to library books and in circulating collections we're used to checking barcodes and spine labels so there's spine labels at the bottom of each one of these lovely books about collections and all the way over there on the right you see on the grayish book there's a barcode at the bottom of that book and the barcode is very useful for checking books in and out obviously and tracking their location and the spine label is not just a label telling you what book it is but where it goes so many advancements have been made in barcoding and inventory control that now spread out to all sorts of collections and there's a lot of great information out there too much to put in this presentation but I encourage you to look for my chapter afterwards or contact me afterwards for an idea of where barcodes can help with inventory security and management control of your collections so that's where we're used to seeing them on new books contemporary books rare books and special collections there's a great history of marking whether printed or manuscript books in special collections we are used to seeing marks and labels like owners annotations book plates and library stamps let's take a look for a moment at this rather enthusiastically marked book it has lots of marks on it as you can see in the notes field the catalog record it's sort of about midway there it says local note and it describes all the book plates and the inscriptions so the question is is this hang on I lost my mouse is this marking or is this mutilation it's a real question today when you go into a print collection and you see these lovely lovely prints from the 17th, 16th century with a big red property stamp right in the middle of it it's aesthetically annoying and it sort of really makes you wonder about the value of the print and marking something up when someone was trying to get a visual story across for that we take a look at the guidelines provided to us by the American college and research libraries rare books and manuscripts section there are guidelines specifically regarding security and theft in special collections there's appendix 1 and appendix 2 and interestingly the librarian is guided against ever removing such marks when considering just the aesthetics or for deaccessioning and I'm going to read aloud from appendix 2 the draft model of legislation theft and mutilation of library materials which is way too small for you to read and so the section says the willful alteration or destruction of library ownership records electronic or card catalog records retained apart or applied directly to a book or other library property shall be considered prima facie evidence of intent to commit larceny of a book or other library property so it really says if you're going to deaccession a book you're going to pretty much want to stamp it deaccessioned you're not going to want to remove a book plate or use a cancellation mark to say no not this collection that's too easy for a thief to want to do that said some collections with ample security might choose to use a different book bookmark to bear the label information like a barcode or a sticky unfortunately we in Smithsonian shifted habits a little too late for this particular volume which they themselves tweeted about this is an early example of an early book cloth binding in the Americas and there's some sticky stuff all over it today we might have that in special collections with a bookmark holding that those labels on them but that's if the collection was under reading room level security and not circulating continuing on the theme of security and Hollywood Hollywood loves to make art crime and attractive pursuit since you see paintings here this is a good opportunity for me to talk about whether you label collections that are received as loan or the backs of paintings and sealed frames usually for loans this is done with temporary marking and relies on extant markings on the object I do know of one museum who received an irate call from an owner asking why the temporary loan label had been removed from their personally owned work when it went back to them of course we all know that inclusion in a museum show can increase the value of an object and that one must be wary of the ethical considerations of accepting a loan for that very reason so indeed it's up to you to decide what your local guidelines are for that sort of thing you don't want to imply value but generally you're publishing catalogs that say indeed this object was included in an exhibition so you sort of have to go back and forth with your own collection management policy about that going back to the topic of security specifically labels and markings are evidence and it's not as art theft is not nearly as pretty as Hollywood makes it seem I'm going to add a note that in my own line of work I do get a lot of public inquiries and I remember at least one caller hello I'm a caller from so and so I have a book and it's got a stamp in it it's got some writing in it that I would like to remove how would I go about doing that and I try and treat all my callers equally but there was something about that call that made me a little suspicious you know of course I cited our guidelines saying we don't generally remove marks that's I'm not necessarily going to tell you how to do that I have actually consulted for some agencies regarding allegedly perloined work allegedly stolen work and to look for evidence of tampering of removal of marks of property so that is something that we are trying to always walk a fine line with do we want to mark our collections permanently or in such a manner that it would be very hard for someone with bad intentions to change, alter, remove so I'm going to address a couple of special topics so you see the list of them there, living collections, some historic labels plastics, health and safety again I can't get to every type of object today but I'm going to point you to where you can find out more about those judging by my literature review I might be the first person to be writing about living collections into guidance on labeling for museum collections those guidelines and things are out there but they're not necessarily included in the usual museum management guide books on labeling that I have seen so far so if I'm wrong please correct me later on by email and I'll stop saying that so again you might not have any now but if you move on to a collection that's a historic site or works with live animals as part of your education this may become relevant so bear with me while I go through it and it's also adorable so we can talk about that too this is Winnie Winnie is a penguin ambassador for the Marilyn Zoo in Baltimore and she's making a public appearance here behind, she's behind the curtain just before the show goes on and she is introduced to the public and that people have an opportunity to interact with a penguin ambassador and you can see on her wing that's facing you she is actually wearing a little armband it's her custom armband I don't believe she wears this all the time but it is useful for people to be able to recognize which penguin they are working with as well as know her name if you want to call her I'm not sure if she responds to her name but I can ask my friend Rick who took this picture and find out let's talk a little bit about ethical guidelines for the guidelines for ethical marking of animals there are guidelines specified in the world association of zoos and aquariums there are guidelines specified in the association of zoos and aquariums so you have international and then you have more national groups that suggest guidelines for the non-harmful you know marking of animals there are absolute reasons why you must actually do mark the animals sometimes in breeding programs if an animal is going back and forth you have to guarantee that that is the animal that you are speaking of and that is one way that they track it and then besides guidelines there are also actual regulations I'm only citing the American regulations here international persons will want to check to their own guidance but there is the animal welfare act and animal welfare regulations to be found in code 9 it's also called the blue book which was a little confusing it doesn't look blue to me but even in the url string that you follow it actually says the blue book in there somewhere it must have been blue once so if people are talking about the blue book this is what they are talking about rather than trying to name the numbers of the codes here is a quick question for you how do you think one appropriately would label a living collection you know you can answer this whether or not you have animals in your collection and it's not just animals very carefully that's very cute yeah I see a few people are picking oh these are some good answers label an enclosure microchips being tattoos I'm not saying anybody object which is great and some good ear tags we have plants somebody called out in fact yes plants are also living collections meanwhile I'm going to move on and show you my alternate title for my chapter or presentation is how do you tag an elephant because we have them here and in fact to sort of fill you in on the poll most of the answers it's kind of a trick question most of those answers are true it really depends on the animal the size of the collection whether the animals can be recognized from individual characteristics or you have perhaps an impossibility of labeling when you have a whole collection of tiny frogs and as someone expressed to me sometimes a frog will die and you might not find it for a few weeks depending on the size of their enclosure so numbering can you imagine deaccessioning a dead frog it's not fun but it does come up also in artwork collections you can ask me about that later so in this case our herd is fairly small I think we've only ever numbered up to 7 and they are individually recognizable by the animal keepers however Kandula who is the baby in this slide also helped test in the field collars for elephants that are under field research in the wild so that collar is very big that's our curator Tony Bartel there demonstrating this big leather collar with a sort of bump on it that's the radio transponder with a big battery to see how Kandula responded how did the other elephants respond when he was wearing this weird new thing did he get grasses caught under it or did he potentially irritate his skin did he get it caught on something that caused it to rip off or fail or possibly get stuck so that's really helpful to know that there are lots of transponding devices I write about it much more in my chapter and since not that many people are having to deal with it I'm going to move on but I will say that the transponder may be an acceptable risk for some animals so some of you may remember or have been aware when this incident took DC by storm a couple of years ago we had an escapee we had a wandering red panda who everyone had to start looking for and in fact he was found due to an avid twitterer who spotted him and called the police and called the zoo and he was found but with an animal that might have a pattern of escaping or knows how to get out of their enclosure putting a transponder on them might be a very good idea but in fact Rusty was sort of banished after he was caught to another enclosure but indeed for pre-eating purposes so he could meet a lady panda and be very happy there that's Rusty's response tweet from a fan so that was a spoof account but panda security is a thing so the person who kudos 10 points to the person who called out botanical collections which are also living you see here on the left an unfortunate effect of tree wounding and overgrowth, reactive overgrowth by the bark there in the shore was a conservation effort many years ago marking the pacific crest trail however the tree has since grown over the tag there are better ways to apply metal tags to trees that avoid introducing pathogens such as viruses or cause scarring so some of those I refer to I'll swear you can safely nail onto a tree but you have to choose your materials property and ensure a certain distance so that the tree won't eat it over time more or less on the right you have an example of a plant stake which is great placed near the roots but not on the root specifically this communicates information as well to the visitor besides if you look down it says this is in our butterfly garden and there's a little tag there that says host and nectar so it explains the plant's purpose and in outdoor exhibitions that's another reason for potentially including technology in your labels because visitors now have mobile phones and there are cell phone apps where people can learn much more information than is actually included on the tag so yes there I do write a little bit more in my chapter about barcoding and near field ID and all kinds of good stuff that's coming to you through the people who do that sort of thing and also in botanical collections we don't necessarily just use labels as exhibition tags but to also maintain collection hygiene and protection you see here on the left some lovely orchids from our Smithsonian gardens and on the right you see a couple of hang tags and clips on the pots that indicate the status of this collection as virus free so you can imagine that moving a plant stake from one plant to another just to say that it's part of the orchid collection should and is a managed thing to avoid introducing virus pathways from one plant to the other so there are hygiene standards as well for using collections in living collections we're going to move on to another special topic which is historical labels so if anyone can tell me I think we're going to have another little pop quiz what are some values of historic labels we're going to pull up the slide on this while Susan pushes a poll or Mike so this one is also visual don't just look at the poll oh I'm getting a no poll alright well we can I will take a look over in the chat window and I will blow through this question and answer session so this object I'm not going to tell you what it is exactly yet but here's a detail of an object that was acquired and it was acquired with this dyed cotton tie and an original label on it the object was numbered elsewhere on the metal on a durable surface on the non rusty part of the base and so my question to you guys is what would be the proper solution to care for the historic label and attachment and I'm just going to suggest a few things which include okay so a you've numbered it you don't need to keep an old label that looks like it's actually ripped in half so throw it out because you transcribed it you could image it and put an image of that in your collections database be you could image it remove it and put it in the collections accession file or see leave it there in situ if the red ribbon is a little if it's a little funky and maybe it's not strong or thread bear maybe you can replace it or mend it as well or put it in a little polyethylene bag to stay with the object so I've seen something are they military parts save the little you guys you're kind of getting there this is great well I'm going to just say remove and save oh wait until it falls off on its own I love it it's just going to pop off there one day so it's a little hard for me to keep track of those numbers but I'm going to go ahead and you know give you the answer oh the label is an artifact too and you are right the label and not only the label in this case with curatorial input this is my colleague Josh Gorman who is describing this object to us it's in fact a patent model an object submitted for the registration of a type of machinery and that label and tag is actually official government red tape from a government office so in fact the that red tape was what was used to bind up and signify that these two items go together this is parts A and B are both part of patent applications so you know be aware that this entire thing is the object that we're trying to patent at this time later on we see that the collection did actually find it quite important if you look at the medium in this collection record it says the medium is tin and ribbon and paint so if you chose to throw out the funky old dyed tape you would actually have been throwing out part of the accession to objects so just to be sure keep an eye on things try and find out what all their meanings are old marks might have meaning a bit about preservation strategies to preserve historic labels often included in capsulation enclosures or protective wrapping this is back to the canoe example where this label has been worn away this is one of the ores or rams that goes across and stabilizes the outrigger on the right you can see the letters are quite worn away and in the right you see the lashing of the cords that wore the label away and in this case we did a little preventative wrapping with polyethylene just to keep that wear and tear from continuing to happen on the object so when indeed is it appropriate to remove an old label so you know they can be visually appropriate they can be incorrect in this case we have a cranium a medical collection and I'm a little curious about this is this a label or is this a historic mend there's a number on it but it also goes across a big crack and so maybe it's sort of a bandaid if you will so this is that providing really good information or as evidence of historic use so I think the jury is out on this one until I would discuss with the curator more what they feel is about that it would be possible to lift this restore the mend with more sympathetic means put it back but it would be a lot of work here's another example of when labels were removed from objects so this is a scrapbook held in the collection of birds over here excuse me many of these labels there's a note actually on the inside of the board saying why they were removed and I'll call your attention to halfway down the page on the right there's this little little line that is a pin actually these labels were pinned into a book to save them but they were actually removed from the actual book from the actual bird so why is that well this is to give you some context this is actually a pretty important specimen with its labels intact and encapsulated to protect them from overhandling and to be there with the bird this is actually one one item collected by Charles Darwin that is in our collection and you can see that like the insect pins there are a number of labels but we've chosen in this case to keep them with the object in collection why would they be removed on the slide on the right sometimes early prepared specimens or poorly prepared specimens will actually continue to leech fats and materials to the detriment of the label and the reading and understanding of the label so it's possible that those labels were removed in a campaign to put more regular data and newer labels aside from the collection to keep them from being further damaged but indeed for that particular book we actually decided to save the historic pins which seems like an odd choice sometimes we just throw pins in the garbage but in this case they were insect pins and a little bit about those with its association with Darwin and Gould could tell us a little bit if you wanted to actually analyze them where are those pins from who put them on there with all the other books and materials and so on the right we have a more modern way of keeping those groups of labels together the little ones that are flipped over to the left there are actually held together with their own polyester webbing in a little encapsulated pocket so instead of pinning those individual labels together that were with one specimen they're now in a little pouch. Here's a special topic on metals and minerals. Metals and minerals can be reactive anything reacts to the environment but there are some that will interact more, grow crystals perhaps or efflorescences, salts might migrate out that can actually push up and over any marking so these are shell fragments and indeed if those individual shells on the right superimposed over the little skull if that actually has its own number it's probably illegible now because of the salts that are over it so one would want to consider another way of marking perhaps metals or something that has an irregular surface. I'm going to move on a little bit to special topic about materials and toxicity I'm wondering if anybody recognizes this item or can read if they have a good understanding reading understanding of French if you know what that is shout it out and why would you maybe want to think carefully before using perhaps an eraser or a pencil or anything that would release little fibers from this. Oh somebody got it shout out to Stockholm and Shawnee indeed that is a sort of trivet with an asbestos pad on there so sorry I'm seeking some other answers in there but absolutely that is an asbestos trivet so one would want to be really careful about choosing where to label I mean handling in general but anything that would sort of interfere with the fibers that might cause them to be released into the air. Furthermore for those of you with drugstore pharmaceutical or store collections medical collections you might have older collections with labels on them that you may understand or you may not understand they're certainly not necessarily in agreement with guidelines today for indicating toxicity there's at least one of those in there that says poison which is good but some of them have abbreviations it's hard to understand what those materials are and a common name for something formerly might not agree with today. Here's another collection shared by my dear colleague over at the Maryland State Medical Society they have lots and lots of doctors kits and old medicine kits and one thing I can note is on the slide on the left and we've talked about this is that there's a label falling off of this object and without a label we don't know what's in that bottle so it's impossible for somebody handling it ideally they're not handling it often it is behind a glass case but if that label does fall off and become dissociated we don't know what that material is and people can you know not be protected from it you can remediate that with a small cotton tie or polyethylene sleeve to put it back on there not necessarily a Scotch tape Moving on and I am watching the time I see it's 3.02 I'm going to be getting to some really good stuff really soon so this last special topic is about marking plastics marking plastics is a difficult choice on the left over there you see a CD a gold standard recording CD that was used in our own house for many years to record individual to record sessions of some of our first broadcasts from the Smithsonian Jazz Works Orchestra and you can see somebody applied an adhesive label to it thinking they were labeling it it all looks really really good until that label decided to give up the ghost peel off the data layer of the CD with it there are guidelines for marking CDs not all of them are this vulnerable some of them have another polycarbonate sandwich layer above them but most markers and scratches can interfere with the colored sensitive recording data layer that the CDs or computers read from so it's really best to only mark the inner hub and use a list or a or a spreadsheet to catalog content well somebody's skipping ahead and the chat window it's coming for plastics I'm just showing you a couple of things that can happen to plastics on the left there you have a comb that is suffering from crazing and cracking it actually has on the lower side an accession number which doesn't seem to have interfered with the plastic the cracks don't seem to be originating from there but with another with a different kind of plastic solvents in markers and using solvents in barrier coats and top coats could cause differential pattern or response to humidity that could cause some damage some deformation over time the one on the right we have no idea what that is or at least I don't and those marks were put there by by someone who's developing this prototype of of a leg a replacement leg and so we just don't know how that surface is going to interact with those marks over time I'm going to show you right here this is totally something that's in my drawer this is a fob a key fob and you can see that or you can't see rather that there are really fuzzy letters on it telling me what room though those keys belong to that was handed down to me I don't know how old this fob is probably about 10 at least 10 years old but the heat and humidity from hands holding it over time and just the nature of the plastic has caused the writing to actually absorb into the plastic matrix it is not sitting on the surface this is permanently altered and also really hard to read so that would be an instance where if you can't figure out what the plastic is you might want to avoid writing on it so there's some great research on plastics developed by pop art preservation of plastic artifacts and museum collections there is an affiliated publication a great big book that talks about opportunities and solutions for plastics but the research is still going on and here we go this is really what you've been waiting for so all the resources on how to do stuff I have a number of guidelines out there and also some tutorials and supplies and I distinguish guidelines which are mostly written texts from tutorials which might actually have video supplements and pictures and I've got some vendors I'm not going to name vendors but I've got some screenshots of some places that you can buy some stuff from and let's go forward so full disclosure this is I believe it's a for profit model conservation center I wouldn't usually necessarily shout out a referral but based on the instructor Helen Alton you see her name on a lot a lot of literature that's out there already that is standard for marking museum collections she's done lots of workshops for the American Association of Museums and the registrar's committee so yeah in a lot more time than I have here you can see over about four or five weeks there is a course available it's not one time only I think she'll probably do this a few times a year or a couple at least for the low low price of 499 you can actually take a course and ask a lot more specific questions and do some practices possible possibly but she also has a lot of stuff online there at collectioncare.org that's available for free and that's shouted out in your handout there are lots of guidelines online this wonderful fairly new resource called Reorg is a whole approach for small collections and medium-sized collections to take on their biggest challenges and do it in some really great with some great guidance on how to maximize space and how to take care of your objects one wonderful feature about it is it's available in several languages French Spanish and English so for training international volunteers it's really useful find the language of your choice and there are some very practical guides specifically for specimens and fossils the paleontology portal at American Museum of Natural History is really useful they have a nice page on lots of great pages but specifically they've got great guidelines for marking very old collection items some of their links on the side the downloads are a little out of date but with some searching you can find them on other sites that's their second page and then the amazing somebody called it out already in the chat window I saw the MRM5 so I came upon this somebody told me about about halfway into my literature search and I said where has this thing been all my life having come up in libraries and archives I didn't actually see this book until very recently and it's a marvelous book there is an entire section on marking and labeling again longer than my own chapter contribution maybe 25 pages with some charts some textual indications on how to apply and how to consider materials by the type of material you're trying to label so it's really really great I suggest you buy it or borrow it use interlibrary loan do whatever is within the bounds of copyright to have a copy of this at your desk it's very very useful next up there's also the national park service museum handbook that's published in two volumes and now available online and they also have an appendix on labeling that's very useful labeling and marking objects you can buy kits and guides kits with guidelines that match a lot of the tutorials that are out there you don't necessarily depending on your collection you might not need everything in there these are two different screenshots from two different sources for it and one thing I'm going to note is that one place has it for about $77 and one place has it for about $130 so I would look really closely at what's included in there but you can also you can also do it yourself you can hunt and gather materials I came across or someone pointed me towards Ellen Carly she's an independent conservator private practice in Alaska but she did a grant-based project for the Alaska State Council on the Arts and published about a workshop that she led out there in those regions and you can see it's a little smaller but you can probably put it together she said I think for about $50 as opposed to $75 and that is a collections label kit for small museums that is shouted out in the handout across the pond we have share museums as UK they have a series of lovely little videos about museum labeling and marking and you can watch that it's short but it really goes through most of what you need to know some health and safety notes when you're working with barrier coats you see B72 all over this page there's also B67 if you're using a system of a barrier coat and top coat you want them to be in different solvents so they don't solubilize each other to erase or blur what your marking medium is so that's sensible but you can also make your own B72 or B67 preparations in various solvents but what I'm going to point out is that some of it is available in acetone some of it is available in toluene and you want to think about what you're using and having a proper respiratory protection if you're using the heavier solvents on labels, tags resist all paper is one type of material that's used for soaking in fluid collections there are labeling tape it's called tape but it's not self adhesive tape it's just ribbon that you write and sew on to textiles I'm going to address foil backed labels I had a question prior to the presentation as to whether it is appropriate to use a foil backed label on an object like a resin coated photograph that is actually not appropriate the foil backed label was invented for a whole different purpose it's not for marking individual objects themselves that is for boxes and book spines in circulating library collections so the foil helps it bond and shape to a round spine on a book label in a library collection and it also helps the adhesive from creeping through and changing the contrast of the paper that bears the information however, nothing is stopping the adhesive from soaking into the object so don't apply them to objects if you remember that picture of the book with the little book cloth book with the label stuck right on there that's a special collection book that today we would not apply a label directly to it's important to manage the permanence of the papers and the labels that you're printing on as well as the quality of your printing laser printer or printer we're not generally using inkjet printers with rare exceptions so there's some guidance on managing the quality of your prints try not to substitute generic toner in your laser printer to save money because the bonding quality is different and the binding medium is different and they might not operate at the correct temperature for things I had a call from lots of people around natural history one year because all their labels were wiping off as they applied them and that's because there was a mismatch of the toner and the cart tradition that was used in the printers that they were using for labels moving on very quickly bags and tags are another solution to keep obviously broken items together or very small things with a card perhaps where you can't write on a very tiny collection although someone here has managed to do that on that little tiny baby tooth sometimes it's just easier to keep something in a pouch if the pouch is not going to interact with the surface of the object you're trying to preserve it's not appropriate for all materials but it is an option and I'm not saying get them off the shelf from your supermarket these are very specifically made of neutral polyethylene uncoated plastic so that's what you're looking for a little bit about permanent marking this question comes up a lot what is actinic ink where can I get it how do I use it this goes back to the notion of permanent stamping of library and print collection materials it is available from vendors actinic is refers to a type of material that's an element series in the periodic table it basically means it's not reactive and it's not going anywhere and it's not going to change color let me move forward you can get it from vendors you can also read about it from vendors but you can also read the library of congress statement on it ownership marking of paper based materials available from the library of congress they also make the product available should you choose to use it but they also say it is not for all materials it will not come up it's really meant for very specific purpose which is to end library and and lastly marking photographs comes up all the time again please don't stick anything adhesive to a photograph there are pencils that do work that are softer or waxier that do mark the back of more plastic photographs new contemporary photography is one of those examples I have a little bar across the right there over the lacquer it's a little offset from where it should be but there are graphite pencils and if you must use a marker try and pick one of the more stable markers and do not mark in the image area at all usually there's a little bit of a frame line and if you have to mark you might want to do it on the backside very far away from the image area and that is it we have 15 minutes for Q&A I am going to go switch my screen a little bit so I can see the parking lot and try and get to questions in the order which was received hang on okay here is the parking lot let's go wow there's a lot of questions okay I think I hear Susan on mic is there anything you want to say to me I just wanted to say some of these are conversations that went on and if you want me to read them I would be happy to do that if that will help that would be great so Susan is going to call out some of the things and if I can contribute to that conversation I will I think that will be a little bit more efficient okay there was a question about when you tracked an object that was marked with the wrong number and you now need to correct that number but you have no idea what they marked what they used to mark it with in the first place what would you do one of the responses was cover it one was make a new label but you may have an idea yeah no those are actually the cover it is a really nice solution there are newer methods besides marking the individual object or trying to do erasures or possibly lift with other solvents you could drive that marking a little further into the surface if you don't know what you're doing so if you don't have a conservator available you could try one of the methods which is a new label on the Japanese paper or a stable permanent paper perhaps and then put that in place with a barrier coat over it the barrier coat that you put down to adhere they kind of work as adherents and adhesives also that possibly could cause some bleeding I would go ahead and test with a little tiny tiny pointed brush with the solvent that the barrier is in maybe tap a little piece of paper to it see if any color comes up or if it becomes tacky but printing a new label and putting it over it would be a good solution that's all I can say for that for right now but you can follow up with me and maybe we can talk about it a little bit more and there's a question about do you need to have anything other than the catalog number because you've got the catalog record indeed but we do also think this is a great risk management question you have the catalog record but in the event of an emergency and I've responded to a few you don't necessarily have your laptop up and running your system maybe down how do you know what is a collection object and what is it if you're setting up a field response and recovery area it would be great if someone can view what we call human readable a bit of information a human readable number to know no we got objects 1, 2, 3, 4 out of the secured building it is now located in the emergency recovery zone and a registrar would be able to look at that object and say 1, 2, 3, 4 is here and note it in on a notepad until you can get your collection system up and running to deal with an emergency recovery scenario so we always want to try for at least a bare minimum of one human readable identification on an object and 2 if you can manage it if you do have a really big heavy jug handle base with two prongs you don't necessarily want to pick it up and turn it over but you could use a hang tag possibly on one of the arms as well as a number on its base in an emergency scenario anything could happen that tag could burn up or be ripped off but then you would still have a number on the object itself okay so there's a question if you had a pair of skin hide boots and a large piece of the leather lashing broke off would you label that piece with the same number so it doesn't get separated yeah that's a good question I would think I would try and manage the separation more than write a number I mean leather is an absorbent material I don't know how big but if it's like anything like one of my bootlaces it's not very big to write a number on it you could probably try and manage it but I would think about using an enclosure such as a four flap wrapper of paper or a see-through polyethylene bag to keep with the object and write the number on that outer enclosure and keep it together there were a couple of questions about if you had outdoor objects that were you know like artworks or wagons or how do you label those yeah so that's actually that's a terrific question a lot of that I actually our own gardens has that and that's why when I showed the plant steak that's an engraved sign it's an engraved sign on a very specific type of plastic aluminum or stainless steel if you can afford that but sign making companies do engrave signs for that reason because you have something that is legible based on on light and contrast and shade instead of color and dyes that that may fade so that's an option engraving or stamping I'm also going to bring up the fact that though if you use metal a lot of collections signs have been disappearing in our own area here and I generally advocate for not necessarily using bronze to replace outdoor statutory labels because people do steal them for melting them down and that becomes regular expense and loss for museum so if you can find signage that's maybe made of coated printed aluminum and work with an outdoor sign manufacturer they should be able to tell you ones that are more durable than others so that is a solution um there were some questions about guidelines for coating for coated paper for marking on coated paper that won't accept pencil and are too dark oh too dark well the coated paper thing I think I addressed that in the marking photographs slide is that you do have to go to a softer pencil we're often used to using 2B if you go to an art supply store you can get the full range up to 6B 6B is very soft and ideally when you're marking something like a photograph you actually want to be doing that on a hard surface so you don't impress down and sort of engrave into the photograph anyway but there are waxier pencils, waxier mediums that do stick and there are even grease pencils that you can use that stick on a little bit more but then you might want to consider using interleaving between the coated paper so it doesn't rub off on the next object okay there was a question about white India ink that settles in the bottom in the bottle are there other white ink? there are other formulations you can thin titanium dioxide white paint in solution that's one of the things about time and having enough time to be able to do it it's true that if you don't do labeling for months and months that your materials might dry out you do have to think about the solvents that are in that and how often you're going to replace them that's one reason why sometimes heavier solvents are used that don't evaporate as quickly as well so that it doesn't thicken up in your solution but I would go to the MRM 5 and some of the tutorials to look for other materials that are available like titanium dioxide white paints that you can dilute and use in a pen or on a brush can be great but it can be inappropriate from some other materials like sensitive plastics so do be identify what your surface is and figure out the solution for the MRM 5 that has some really nice discussion of when to use some materials and when not to and I see I'm getting a time warning so you've got probably 5 minutes okay same thing for the military question I'm going to, I believe that the MRM 5 has something on artillery and military specifications so that's something of interest I'm not sure if that's armament but for very high security objects things that you would not want going along that might be a time that you actually engrave and interfere on a metal object if it's something that needs to be traced for legal reasons of legal protection such as a high security gem or a military object that could be functional is not made dysfunctional that might be one odd time when you're actually engraving directly into an object it's very rare to do that but there may be a consideration and there's a question about bad handwriting bad handwriting yeah and bronzes is that the same question yeah they're in the same question Zachary Harper trying to avoid bad handwriting it's applying small printed accession labels a barrier coat on small bronze sculptures it absolutely is there are some great tutorials out there for creating labels with a computer and a printer with a proper toner and it also really allows you to get down to a scale that is discrete and yet legible more legible than bad handwriting definitely options that's certainly what is done for vials biological specimens and inserting tiny printed labels into wet collection vials with the specimen there are quite a few guidelines out there on that hopefully they're referred to in my citations but if not grab my contact info and I will get it to you besides this handout I have a really really full bibliography that I've been managing on Zotero which is a citation manager that can be made public I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to make that public or not because I have a lot of personal notes in there about some commentary but I do have a lot of information so follow up with an email on that one yeah and note that you can download the handout now but I think we're going to stop we've come to the end I will post the recording as soon as I get it and I will put an announcement on our facebook and twitter page but you can also go to the archives and check so thank you Nora, thank you Mike and I think we're done bye bye and remember next time deaccessioning with the John Simmons thanks so much everybody been great bye bye oh thank you I forgot please don't leave without taking the evaluation this is a hot link to it ok bye bye we look at those evaluations so they're really important