 And like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, we have the listserv, which you can join by using this if you're not already on it. And the listserv is just so that I can send you announcements. And you can contact me anytime at this email address. Coming up, we're doing a series on legal issues in collaboration with ARCS, the Association of Registrar and Collection Specialists. So take a look for those. I should have this third one on May 17 put up fairly shortly so you can sign up for any of those now. And if you saw this morning's budget projections, National Endowment for the Humanities and IMLS are scheduled to be cut out entirely. So if you benefit from this program or other programs, please contact your legislators and let them know what you think. Okay, so I'm going to turn this over to Katie Neuler from the Wisconsin Historical Society and we'll start. So thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your patience. The good news is we got the hard part out of the way, so now we're ready to begin. I'm Katie Mullen. I'm the Preservation Coordinator for the Wisconsin Historical Society and I would like you to welcome you to our webinar, Oversized, Overwhelmed, Caring for Architectural Records and Maths in Your Collection. Our presenters today will be myself and my colleagues, David Erickson, who is our Architectural Records Specialist here at the Wisconsin Historical Society and Robin Carlson, who is our Paper Conservator here at the Society. I am just trying to advance slides in one moment for our presenters. And our goals for you today through this webinar are to help you understand the materials that you're dealing with, their characteristics, and the degradation processes that they undergo. We'd like you to know a little bit more about good, better, best storage and handling practices and we'll also show you some examples of things that we think aren't so great or don't fall into that good category. We're going to talk to you through planning for processing your collections and we'd like you to have some resources at hand for your further learning after the webinar is done. We'll also try to leave about 15 minutes at the end for questions, so please feel free to type your questions into that chat box and we will respond at the end. So right now I'm going to turn the presentation over to my colleague, Robin, who will talk to you about the types of materials that you encounter in these records. Hi, I'm Robin. The first slide you're looking at right now, I just really wanted to talk about the common materials in these processes. We're focusing on maps and primarily architectural records today. There certainly are other oversized materials in the collection such as photographs and broadsides, but these are pretty common to small institutions and since there's so many of them usually we don't know how to deal with them, that's why we get overwhelmed. So let's talk about maps. We're primarily talking about wall maps that were occurring really popular about 1830 to 1880. That was the height of their popularity. There's certainly other large maps in our collections. It's not just wall maps, but I think this is something especially in small organizations that I see a lot of, what's their problem of. So I want you to really think about before you start thinking about how to take care of them what they're made out of. There's a lot of different processes. Some of the early processes to maps were hand drawn. There were woodcut printing. They were engraved and etched and there was lithography. Later processes include color lithography, photomechanical processes, and digital printing. Maps in themselves, I'm sorry, our largest production of maps was done in Philadelphia naturally because that was our printing source at the start of our U.S. And so when maps were produced they really became into production when lithography took off in 1807. And they were especially popular among the general population for several reasons because they could serve as one, a wall decoration. I know that's minimal, but they were very large and decorative. And they also were used as tracking devices for the general population. This was again before lots of newspapers and certainly media that was out there. So this way people could track their relatives in the wars or traveling west or whatnot. So that's why they were very popular. So at this map what you normally see is a map that is either paper that's lined with linen or muslin. Sometimes they're not lined and usually they have some sort of battens on them. Later maps like school maps will have metal rods and whatnot. I want to talk about architectural records. Again, there's a whole variety of processes out there. It really helps, very hard to interpret which ones are which sometimes, but it helps if you at least have some idea of what you're dealing with. Some of the early processes are blueprints, pellet prints which was a reverse blueprint, then dykes which are a brown cone and diazotites. Later processes included hectographs, gel lithographs, photostatic prints, silver halide prints, electrostatic prints, xerography and CAD. Just general things you know, usually blueprints and then dykes are considered very brittle because the processing makes them very acidic and the paper they were used on wasn't very strong. So you really want to be careful when you're storing these things. You want to store them separately because of the processes. Because they're acidic the process can off gas against each other and so generally we recommend separating processes, whether... and that could be as simple as laying a sheet of paper between layers of them or putting certain ones in a folder within a folder. One thing else I want to talk about is the enclosures themselves. One time it was believed that photomechanicals should not be stored offered enclosures because the buffering could affect their lighting. Current theory is that that really would only occur if moisture was added to it. So it's okay to use non-buffered materials, we believe at this point. So I'll send us some common base materials that you can find between both of them. You're going to find maps and architecture drawings on cloth, on paper, on polyester film, and usually not architecture drawings, but at least maps you'll find some on animal skin, parchment and vellum. Probably not the wall size though. Another thing you'll find is media. They can be made up of a bunch of different things. Early maps of course were hand drawn. Either with graphite later they used manuscript inks that were handmade and then later they went on some oil based printing ink and then eventually to photomechanical processes that we see today. So the next slides are just going to be showing examples of all these types of things. Animal skin is not as important to you, but I want you to know that whatever you do, excuse me, just have to take some water, that you do to your documents will have effect on them. So when you're dealing with animal skin, you want to be very careful. They're very hydroscopic. Humidity and water can have great fluctuation on them. So it's something you would generally send to a conservator because it's not easily treated. Okay, the next thing is architectural linen. This was generally a cloth that was impregnated with starch to make a hard surface so it could be easily drawn on. These are easily damaged by water. If you have water on them, it dissolves with starch and then it will cause a rippling and you'll never have a flat artifact again. They can be humidified, but it must be done carefully. Again, on these types of drawings you should know how it's drawn or printed with because sometimes you find them with iron gall ink and you don't want to humidify them. And I'll talk about that later. The next slide is paper. Generally, maps you'll find in two types of papers. One of the maps are going to be handmade paper. The later maps are going to be machine-made paper. Again, handmade paper usually has ragged content or ragged fibers so they tend to be stronger and more durable. But by the time we're hitting the 1800s, especially the later 1800s, the first early 1800s will be machine-made but they'll still be ragged pulp. Later 1800s are going to be machine-made papers but they're going to be wood pulp which is short-fibered, acidic, and not long-lasting. Other characteristics you can do to judge what your paper is is look for with handmade papers you're going to see watermarks, chain and laid lines. You're not going to see that on machine-made paper. Here's another space. It's used often more so in architectural drawings than maps, it's a polyester film. The base is always stable but you should know that the media printed on it is not always stable and so it can be soluble or it can be easily abraded so not only do you have to be concerned about the base but the media on the surface. Not all plastic film is polyester. Some is acetate and deteriorates or polybonychloric and so you want to know what the plastics are that you're dealing with. Again, there's some all tests out there and we'll talk later about how to identify some plastics. Most of the time you're going to see these types of polyester film in architectural records, especially CAD. It's not advisable to store these with paper or cloth because they could off-gas. They tend to, not these, but a lot of them would have additions put on by architects and those would usually be put on with wax or rubber cement and they easily come off which make a huge problem down the line. You might be talking... You should not crease them but just know that if you're going to roll them they will really hold a tight curl to them when you unroll them so it's best to store them flat if you want. Some of the, I talked about the bases now, the cloth, the paper we probably have to show them. Now we're talking a little about ink and mediums that's used on. Mainly for maps, you're going to find primarily oil-based printing ink on the 18th, maps from the 1800s. Earlier maps tended to have the manuscript ink in. What you should know about the manuscript ink is the very complex medium. We now know that most of the early ink had iron ball in it, all of it, a lot of it and that alone presents a lot of conservation problems that will talk along down the line. But you should know that high humidity can increase the deterioration of iron ball inks and the oil-based inks are usually generally pretty stable. They can fade, they could be abraded off. They're usually not soluble but occasionally you'll find additives in them that will surprise you such as things that can be dished off with alcohol. What are the general causes of deterioration for our map and architectural drawing? Again, I just have a quick list with slides to follow to highlight those points. Generally, deterioration is caused by environmental or the intrinsic nature of an artifact. Poor handling, poor storage and disaster also occurs. Let's talk with some of the basic environmental deterioration that goes on. You think of pests not so much as environmental but actually poor environment is a great habitat for pests and so that's why we encourage people not to store things and plant basements or other areas where pests tend to hide. If you can do one thing for your architectural records, think about the bigger or your maps, think about the bigger picture about controlling the environment. If you're unsure if you have pest damage, you can do certain things. You can put traps out to monitor if there are pests around. You can examine your documents and you can quarantine the incoming ones if you're seeing anything happening. And then finally you should consider going to museumpests.net to learn more about pest problems. There's another problem that occurs in collections, mold. People are always very scared of mold. How do I get rid of it? How do I take care of it? You really don't get rid of mold. It's all over. There's truly not anything that truly kills it. The best you can do is inactivate it. So there's active mold and inactive mold. Active mold tends to be more damp and fluffy. Powdery, that's the word I want to use. And inactive mold tends to be more dry and powdery. So when you find mold, there's certain things you can do. You can discard the housing if that's gotten moldy and put it in new housing. You can reformat documents if they've gotten moldy. You can vacuum the mold off with a HEPA vacuum or brush it off outside. But the best thing you can do is, again, maintain a proper temperature and humidity. That's the only thing that's going to restrict mold growth. We talked about inks before, and here's acidic ink, iron gall ink. This is eating literally through the paper or corroding the paper. Again, I find big maps just with signatures on it. So when I treat that, not only do I have to consider the map, but I have to consider the signature. The best you should know is that handling, you need to handle with support. You should consider reformatting it, and if you can afford it, you should do conservation treatment on acidic ink. Another great thing that occurs to documents that you don't plan on, when they made these wall maps, they often varnished or shellacked them to provide a protective coating, which it did, but it also, over time, became quite dark. And if you were going to treat the map, it would be removed to lighten up the map. Another problem that often occurs in documents is poor processing, especially in architectural records that have photo mechanical processing. You should probably separate them in case it could off-gask other things. It would make a reproduction of it. If it's not too bad, I would just leave it as is. Other things that cause deterioration is sometimes the design of the item itself, such as book maps, the folding of them. Certainly, they deteriorate along the fold lines. You have to make a decision if they should be conserved to be put back into a book, or if you need to take them out of the book. Other things that can deteriorate is humans. They love to repair and take care of things. As a conservative, we certainly know that, but not all their methods are good. On the left is a document that's been heavily taped with pressure-sensitive tape. We all know at this point that that becomes brutal on stains, and it usually takes quite a long time to take off, and you have to use chemicals and work in a fume hood, so it becomes quite expensive. Some people believe archival mending tape is a solution, but it's not the best practice. It's more of a hack. Why do we consider it not the best practice? It's not a sure that it's going to come off easily after it's been there a long time. It can remove some of the fiber, so if you are going to use it, make sure you use it on the back of your document. But it is a good solution for mending versus regular tape. And then there's our greatest disasters to your collections, and usually it's going to be water damage, because even if it's a fire, they're going to put it out with water, and you can see all the great slides of what happens through your documents. They come to water. There can be staining. There can be bleeding. There can be ferro typing, which is surface damage. They're all great things to fear, believe me. And now I'm turning the rest to Katie. So, I'm going to advance my slides. All right, so I'm going to take you through a little bit about storage and handling. In terms of storage, you have a great opportunity here. Good quality storage, good quality storage enclosures can really help you protect your collections. So, enclosures can offer your protection for mechanical damage. By this, I mean that they can buffer your collections against changes in humidity. Those changes in humidity can cause the items to spit your paper items, your cloth items to swell and contract. So, a good quality, especially in this instance, a good quality paper or board enclosure can help protect against that. They offer protection from chemical damage. Robin told you that some documents are inherently acidic. If you provide a good quality enclosure, that can provide a place for that deterioration product of acid to migrate to. Good quality enclosures can also protect your documents from pollutants in the environment. And finally, they offer protection from biological damage. They help keep pests away. They help keep dirt and dust away, those types of things that attract pests. On the other hand, if you use or provide poor quality storage enclosures, and we'll talk a little bit about what makes up a good quality enclosure and what makes a poor quality enclosure, you can actually help accelerate the deterioration in your maps and your architectural records. So, you encounter a lot of terminology when you're trying to figure out what a good quality enclosure is. Just like every other industry, marketers for archival products want to give you great vivid descriptions of why their thing is the best. Some of those terms, I think, can be a little bit misleading or really more even just a little bit meaningless. A good example is the term archival. There's really no standard behind that word. It's like saying healthy on your low-salt potato chips. It's kind of applied without any regulation, without any standard. So archival, okay, but it's not the first thing you're looking for when you're buying storage enclosures. Acid-free is better. Acid-free still only means that something is acid-free or another way of saying that, pH neutral, at the time that it comes off the production line. It can still have things in it that will cause it to become acidic over time. So the best thing to look for when you're looking at paper storage enclosures is to look for the word lignin-free. That ensures that those chemical components, which will cause acid to form in the paper, in the paper storage enclosure over time, are removed. So that's the best. You may see this term buffered. That means that an alkaline buffer has been added to your paper product, your paper storage product. That's common in our world. As Robin mentioned, in many previous years, people recommended against buffered enclosures, especially for architectural records, because they thought that those late-sensitive processes or van dyke prints would be affected by the buffering. I think you're okay there. It's my opinion, and from what I read from recent research, that it's not often going to cause damage. If you can get unbuffered paper materials to store these things in, it's certainly a good thing. But I'm not overly concerned about the use of buffered materials when it comes to art. You will see conflicting statements about that in the literature, so you can make up your own mind, but that's my understanding and my opinion of it. pH is something that you'll see, and it's just a term that's used to describe whether the material you're using is neutral or slightly alkaline, and for your state of affairs. For plastics, I've listed for you the types of things that are requirements for good quality archival plastic, but I will tell you that the hack, the shortcut to finding out this information, is often simply to look for something... your Gaylord catalog or your University Product catalog will say that a plastic enclosure has passed what's called the PAT test or the Photographic Activity Test, and that's a good shortcut to knowing that it's a good quality archival plastic. So people debate plastic versus paper and can have very strong opinions on the matter, which is good. I think there's good evidence that each has some benefits and each has some drawbacks. So if you're using plastic enclosures, say Mylar, which is a common method of encapsulating your maps through your architectural records, yes, you can actually trap acidic byproducts inside the enclosure. However, you also get some benefits. You get some protection in handling that encapsulation really stabilizes the item, keeps it from people's sort of sometimes grubby hands. And when you're talking about oversized documents, which are often rolled for storage, the plastic is something that really helps you roll and unroll them safely over time. So those are benefits and their drawbacks. Paper, on the other hand, will provide a place for acid to migrate to. So it's good. That circulation of air, that breathableness, that's a good thing to help in the longevity of your architectural records. You have to handle the documents more to take them out of the paper enclosures to look at them. And it's a little bit harder to deal with when you're rolling things. Just a caveat, if the records that you're dealing with, and this might be unusual with architectural records, but perhaps more common with maps, if you have some great flaking or fragile media, the plastic and the static that comes along with plastic may help to curate that valuable media. So to go through a little bit about poor, good, better, best storage practices, you have some slides that show you various things on that scale. So I've called this poor storage because I don't like that the vertical nature of the storage is placing all of the weight on one small edge of these documents. I prefer a horizontal storage, which gives more support across the entire oversized material. I don't like that the enclosures, which in this case is just the regular cardboard box, is acidic. If you have an enclosure that's directly touching your material, I think it's a better idea to have a good quality and lignin-free board or a good quality plastic. I think also in this storage scheme it's going to be pretty hard to find what you want. There are no apparent ways to label this material. Just a few things to keep in mind as you think about your care and your storage and your handling. These are the types of things you want to think through. They're returned to storage in a minute. The temperature, of course, is the lower, the better. Humidity. Nano is possible in our American climate, which ranges, can range from very dry in the winter to very humid over the summer. The best humidity is going to be between 30 and 55 percent. But small institutions, and we here at the Historical Society routinely exceed those things for our institutions, and it's okay. You can help buffer against those changes through the use of your good quality storage enclosures. You're going to want to plan against pest infestations, plan for good handling, and think about lighting and storage, which we're going to return to. A few more, what we call poor storage practices. Changing storage. What I don't like about this is that it puts stress on very specific points often in your document and doesn't provide that good support overall. If you have it and you're using it, it's not the end of the world, but if you're buying new storage, this is not necessarily the way it would go for dealing with your oversized materials. Certainly, you want to have enough room. You can see in this picture that some of the documents are warped because there's so much weight and because they're unevenly distributed. You can see that the ones on top are very crowded. It's going to be very difficult for people to move anything off of this shelf. There's going to be a lot of extra handling if you're trying to get something on the bottom, and I think it's going to be hard to find what you're looking for. One other thing that I will point out is that the shelves that you see in this picture, they're prepped wood or plywood of some sort. That's not a good idea for long-term storage. First, because they can off-gas that wood can off-gas acid. Second, because if you ever did have some sort of leak, I have seen it happen where a heavy shelf, a plywood shelf piled with a lot of heavy documents will collapse when it gets wet. So metal is your best choice overall. Coated with enamel or baked with enamel, that's usually the archival standard. You need to think about if you're planning to get shelving for your material. It used to be a very common practice in libraries to cut apart oversized documents and paste them in the style of a book. This is called sectioning. You may see this in your historic material. It's not common now, and it's certainly not something that we recommend for storing your material. Finally, lamination. I think sometimes the term lamination and encapsulation can be conflated. Encapsulation is housing the document in a good quality plastic enclosure. Lamination would involve actually bonding the document with the plastic, and that can cause problems over time as you see in this slide. You'll see the plastic start to turn translucent as the material is leaching out of the laminate. You'll start to see the laminate shrinking in your document warping. So this is something that we avoid. Your best storage practices. Best storage practices for oversized materials are going to involve storing things horizontally so that there's good support across the document. Some type of housing, and we'll talk through that, whether it's a wrapper or a plastic wrapper through encapsulation. Flat boxes. If you have room to store it in flat, if it's possible. If it's not, we'll talk about different types of rolled storage, including tube storage. Just a tip. The bigger the diameter of your tube, the greater longevity that storage practice gives. So flat boxes for your architectural records and your maps, you're probably not going to find sturdy boxes that are big enough. But this would be good for something like large posters, typically. Map cases or flat files would really be the gold standard. They're expensive. They take up a lot of room. If you have these and you have ones that are big enough to store your oversized materials completely flat within them, that's fantastic. That's a great thing to go for. If you can't do it, there are various ways of rolling your materials to store them. So there are good and bad things about various types of rolling, and we're going to take you through those just to start you off. The picture that you see on the left, the box, the individual box is nice for that material and it offers some protection. There's a paper wrapper which offers some additional protection. The object is rolled rather tightly, and that's going to be a little difficult. How do you flatten it when you go to view it? On the other hand, the picture on the right, you see a very large diameter archable tube. You see the items encased in mylar and rolled around it, so it's going to be very easy to open that item up to view it, but that was a specially constructed enclosure, so it costs a lot. It's time-intensive to make, and you can see it's a pretty big thing to store, so it's not great for huge volumes of this type of material. I'm going to turn you back over to Robin, and she's going to talk about some of the other types of rolled storage that she has encountered housing these materials through the years. I just put up a few slides of different examples of housing I've seen on the Internet that's similar to this rolled storage, and there's good and bad to everything. It's really what you can afford and what you can provide for yourself. Normally, if you don't have ASTED-free tubes, one solution is to either cover the tube with mylar and or put your document in a mylar folder and roll it around the tube. The mylar is going to protect it against the acidity of the tube. They've also put a cloth at the end, and that acts as a light cover. There's other ways to act as light covers, also in the next slides. Here's another example. This has a backing paper with a sheet of mylar clear on the top, and that way the backing paper acts as the light barrier on the back of it and also acts as a roll-up. There is no tube, so it could be crushed easily. There's also questions of how to attach mylar to paper without a double-sided tape that could also affect your document. This is another option. This is our lab. This is one that I've created. This is a large diameter tube. I have a giant mylar folder. I have a large sheet of acid-free paper, buffered paper in back. This is a map that I relined. The baton's removed. The muslin lining was removed. It has new Japanese paper on the back and the varnish has been removed, too. So that will be rolled up and tied. That's how we recently took care of all our oversized maps that couldn't be flattened and folded. Going back to today's architectural records, there's something else. Again, we like to keep them flat and in drawers, but often they're very long, and if not long, we just have a ton of them, and we can't begin to flatten and store them all. So this is one solution. They're not on tubes. They're in small bunches, but there's just a piece of mylar wrapped around it as a protectant, and then we have tags that are attached to the mylar. Why do we prefer this over paper? Well, again, the paper gets acidic. The mylar allows us to see more clearly what's inside there, and also it acts as a dust cover, which is really important when you have this much hanging around your collection. Again, a bunch of other examples from different institutions around the U.S. Here's one storage system where they used, look like Coroplast, which they created a pyramid scheme so they could put rolled documents in without housing them. That is the housing itself. Here's another example where they have an outside tube for storage, and then they have the document rolled on a small tube and put inside. You can see the label on the inside of the tube. The problem when you don't have an outside tube is it's really hard to label your documents because the hanging tags aren't very big. You don't have an end cap that you used to be able to label. So this one sells that, but generally we don't like to stick things in tubes. We like to roll them around tubes because from practice we find they get crushed in back tubes. This is an alternative. Since it's rolled around a tube, it could be stored in a tube. It's a very nice thing. Other things you can do for maps and or architectural drawings is encapsulation. That's using a polyester film that is an erud and doesn't off-gas. It acts as a protective support system for your document. One way is to use a double-sided tape, and the other way is to use an ultrasonic encapsulator. There are a few other methods. I just want to state that ultrasonic encapsulation is an expensive piece of machinery to get, and so that often people do the double-sided tape, but a sound weld is much more effective than a tape weld. And in the long run, if you can have a machine such as this, it's a really safe time. Also, just encapsulating, it would take 15 minutes to do a tape weld versus five minutes to do an ultrasonic weld. Often these aren't so much for maps and architectural records, but if you can't put it in a drawer, if you can't put it around a roll due to either the medium, often we consider sync maps or special custom housing boxes, the one on the left is for a bunch of panoramas from our Bennett Historic site up in Wisconsin Dells. I want to talk about handling, too. I think this is one of the greatest problems I see around the library archives in Wisconsin is we take good care of the collections, but staff are not often trained, and even if they are trained, they don't have the time or the resources to necessarily properly carry out best practices. Here someone is grabbing something by both corners, which is considered a good practice because it's basically supporting the map without anything just hanging where it could be dropped and ripped. Another way of handling oversized items, especially in map drawers, is to get a flat support board so you can help pull out the item. It's always handier to have several people handling the items, and oversized carts are especially good to see some pictures ahead. There's some handling methods. The one on the left, they probably have a piece of politics under the document. On the left, they have a support board handling the oversized folders and carts I was talking about. Generally, when people are coming out of our map collections, we have maybe the map cases, but we don't have the aisle space that seems not to be taken into account of. You can't bring it out flat on a support system. Maybe a cart, a flat bed like that, but usually we have these either gently roll it, like such on the right-hand side, that's a specialized cart, or they're slightly rolled gently until you bring them out and put them flat on the table. Hi, it's Dave. Yeah, it's Dave. So we're switching gears now and talking about reproducing for users and providing access to original documents, so the reproduction process. It could be for a user, it could be for an exhibit, it fails online. What? Start with a photographic digitization process. What you see in this slide here is a couple of hot lights, a copy stand and a camera with tethered laptop. That's great for a 11x14 or 8x10, but we're talking about very large documents here. So what I'm going to talk about is a process that I've used as I've digitized approximately 4,000 architectural drawings in my basement. Do you want to flip the slide? This is my studio slash lab and I've been researching for a book that I'm writing about an architect. I had to find a way to do this without buying large format scanners and finding a way to do it that would satisfy the detail that you want from a reproduction standpoint. So what I've done is I've taken a copy stand and elevated it. I've got a 7 foot from floor to ceiling to the top of the copy stand space. The higher the better. I'm using a 60mm flat field micro lens and flat field is important so you don't get distortion, you don't get that key stoning or perspective distortion. So that E4 inch height can accommodate most of the very large architectural drawings or maps. I've got a polarizing filter on that camera and that's important because the two source softboxes for fluorescent tubes are the softboxes are shrouded in polarized film. The direction of that film has got to be the same from one softbox to the next and that's got to be 90 degrees offset by the polarizing filter on the camera. It sounds difficult but it's actually quite easy. So that setup is tethered to software that you can control the camera, make adjustments, see the results. Click again. You can use Lightroom, you can use this happens to be control my Nikon. It's a very easy software to use. So you can... I have the histogram there to make sure that your settings are in good shape. I recommend highly finding manual settings on your camera so that you're not searching for whether it's white balance, whether you're searching for the right exposure. You get that manual setting and leave it alone and there's options beyond photographic reproduction. We've got scanners. This is a fairly small format scanner but that's all you have. You're going to have to find some way to, you know, to rotate a drawing on a platen that might only be 11 by 14 inches and create quadrants that you're going to later stitch together in post-processing software. There's a luxury in having a map or oversized flatbed digital scanner. They're not cheap. They take up a lot of space and running those through the roller does create an opportunity for some stress on especially a fragile document. Plotter is the same thing. You're making an old piece of paper and running it through there, you run a lot of risks but it does provide another option. Then once you've got this image digitized, this document digitized in a high-resolution format, now you're going to print it for the patron, for the user, for an exhibition, whatever it might be, a digital printer in a large carriage width is important. It might cost a couple thousand dollars. You might be able to find an outside source that will print those. Alright. Switching back to something that is often the bulk of our reproduction, just a little bit about play, exhibition and display, and then we'll move on to processing and open it up for questions. Reproductions are a great way to put your oversized materials on display if you have reproductions done, if you can do them. Just consider when you're loading things out or when you're putting things up, what your policies are, how long are you going to display them. There are ANSI standards for exhibiting librarian archives materials, which are a good guide to light levels, to duration exhibits, and to the types of materials that you use in New York City. Again, just a brief note. Here, handling storage, these are the best front-line things you can do, but you're going to want to have a disaster plan for your materials and do some exercises and some thinking through how you're going to deal with things if there's a disaster. So back to Dave, actually, for processing collections. So with incoming collections, there's sort of a mental or intellectual process that you go through in a physical process. Have I got space? How much space are you going to need? I think you can probably flip it ahead. One of the things you'd want to do is understand what's coming in. If you can actually see and document, you can plan better, and that would involve not only from a good handling and space standpoint, but what are these materials and do a little bit of research to prove the provenance of them or whatever. So if you can make a trip, find out what's coming in and plan accordingly because you're going to need a lot more space than you might think you need. I'm going to talk about flattening in a lot more detail. Flattening is a big space talk, whether it's the large table that you're actually flattening on. You do another table to roll out the next batch that goes on here. So we talked about kind of a physical process. A lot of it is a matter of deciding about physical separation, what's the importance of having physical together, tight together. I think it's important to have formats and physical processes grouped together, but at the same time you've got size considerations, you've got content considerations. At some point you're going to have to create some sort of an intellectual documentation process. It's going to tie that together. And very early in this process, this is a Nutrior perspective, one of the drawing sets. If you take a look at this drawing, there is no description of the drawing. There's no architect's signature. There's no stamp. It's not uncommon to get small collections that are purported to be X that turn out to be Y. And that confusion can sometimes be from the donor who might be third or fourth generation from a home or from family extension of a homeowner or an architect. In some cases the architects aren't totally accurate. In some cases they get older, they forget where they put something and a lot of these collections will come in all mixed up. So it's important to have some resources available. Some of that is sort of community-based research. If you're unclear, you can go find and it'll keep you informed maybe once or twice. Find building permits, applications and assessments, records that'll show who the architect of record is to validate some of these things that you're going to be documenting later in this. Get back to this idea of separating projects, separating formats, but yet having some sort of rational approach to physical concentration of like materials. I think for whether it's people that have to do the research, whether it's people that are handling these collections to have some sort of physical and intellectual commonality is ideal, but in some cases you're going to have to separate a format or a project, a different format for that same project and tie them together through detailing and intellectual record keeping. In this case, this is one of the records for a collection that we have where we're using city, client and date. You could see that you've got drawer numbers, these are all drawings, but you might have manuscripts to go with that that are going to be in another physical location. And when it's all said and done, base is going to be a big concern because you can do a lot of damage and you can be disorganized by bumping, by man handling and spacing. That segues nicely into what I have to talk about. I wanted to give some tips about conservation. Our conservation lab is a small lab, but one thing you do see is large tables and we have a lot of large tables for working on and storing things on. I do have to fight with the preservation office constantly to keep the storage space free, but there are certain hacks. People could get small horses and get some laminated boards that they could put on the top. That way you can take them up and down easily if you have to, but you need tables. The other thing I want to mention is if you are going to be working on large tables, think about the ergonomics of it, the height that you're going to be using. It makes a big difference in the process. I'm dividing conservation into basic and more specialized. The basic is things that I generally feel people can do and the specializes when you might look for a conservator don't become incensed if you feel you could do more complex conservation. I'm telling you you can't. Mainly I'm just giving recommendations. Working in an institution, everyone loves to fix something and they don't always do it the right way. The basic conservation you generally see when a document comes in is surface cleaning, humidification and flattening, surface stabilization, and spray deacidification. The next slides will give examples of that. Here we're just using there's many different types of eraser substances out there. There's scum acts, opaline pads. I'm not trying to mention brands. This is just a dry eraser chrome that's been ground up and we're using it to surface clean the document. When you surface clean documents you should consider both sides front and back. Also what you're cleaning you really have to think about hard. This happens to be a lithograph. But if things are heavily inked, careful about dry cleaning over them but you can see the surface becoming cleaner. It's going to make it easier to handle for someone handling it. Also if it's going to be further treated you need to get that surface dirt off before you can further treatment. Another good way is just to have a good HEPA vacuum in your area to vacuum documents off as they come through before they get folded and put away. It's good to possibly have a light nylon stocking or something but if you don't want to use a hose you don't want to pick up any of the document and any of the fragments you're just picking up the dirt. Other things that you'll have to deal with with oversized mats is taking off the attachments which are not always easy. These are battens that are usually put in with small nails. You may or may not want to keep the batten. Some people want to keep it as an artifact. Other people prefer to just discard it in good storage. You will want to look also possibly for peltel traces of history. A lot of them will have square petted nails in them sometimes. Gray deacidification that's something a lot of people feel they have to do. It's further maps that they can't wash and deacidify them or what not. There are several brands of gray deacidification out there. I think you really have to even though they're sold to the general public you should read up on it and really know what you're spraying before you. It adds a buffering to your paper. That's what it does. So I'm just going to jump in and say you do not want to use this on architectural photo reproductions. This is the case where the buffering will affect that. Okay. This is under specialized conservation. It's not that I don't think people can do some of these things. It depends so much even on your ability. It depends on your space. That's why I put hemidifying and flattening under specialized conservation. It takes a lot of space to do these things. You don't want to proceed unless you really can do it accurately. Otherwise you're going to cause damage to your documents. Things we do mend. Here's the humidification case. We can go back. These are a couple examples of humidification. Another is just a sink that has been hacked. You can put plastic over it and let things humidify in the sink. There's many other methods. Dave will have one of Dave's up shortly, which is a small hack fruit. Architectural record. Dave's hack? You just get a large... I learned about this from a National Park Service posting on this. Just a large Tupperware container, something large enough so that you don't have any kind of issues about forcing the documents in. They're rolled up. I usually roll up a dozen sheets on top of these trays with two inches of water below. They recommend warm or hot water. Room temperature water works fine. Close the lid. I'm going to hit the button. You could use a trash can. Many people have used trash can and put them in there. The nice thing about here is lying horizontally, I think, is gentle. I think you've got much better control over what's going on. Those trays work very nicely. They're ready for the lid to go on. In 24 hours or 48 hours, you can feel softening of the fabric of the paper and it's ready to be flattened. How often do you check them? Check them probably every 12 hours just to make sure. The key here is, talk about checking, is check that container after every batch. Clean it because you could have an old document introduced mold and now you've got some sort of mold introduction to a clean document. I clean this thing off both the trays and the inside container. That to me, after humidifying you're going to have to flatten your document. We use blotters to flatten our documents that absorbs the moisture and the humidity and allows them to stay flat. Usually you'll have to keep them under way probably one to three days to really absorb humidity. You can use these look like plexi pieces with weights on top, but you can use boards. Again, you should have the board sealed. We're just trying to give you ideas to do it cheaply, but you need something to really weigh it down to get it flat. Just to say that the paper will really change character and that roll, the memory of the paper rolled up for 25 years, you get it moistened and it's going to be much more receptive flattening than just putting it under weight, dry and brittle. You're just not going to get what you're looking for. Right. You often come in, sometimes your maps come in and they're not in terrible shape, but they do have some loose fragments. Now, you can stabilize a lot of things without having full conservation route and just by pasting down some of the fragments and making sure that they're pasted down in weight until they're dry. Really, I want to say preserve a map for much longer than before you have to do treatment. But again, know what paste you're using, know the solubility of your materials. You don't want to make any mistakes. You can also mend your maps. This is some tissue that was made that's been hand torn. When you mend your maps, you want to use Japanese paper, not a western paper. Japanese paper again has longer fibers that won't break like wood pulp does. You want to make sure your mending strips are probably done with water because you want a really frayed edge. You don't want a hard, sharp edge that can break against. Then when you mend, you want to use reusing rice starch. You can use wheat starch or rice starch. Usually some water-soluble paste that can be easily changed if you want to. Then we weigh them between we use a little piece of holotex as a release tissue we use a small piece of plexi and then we use a weight on top or we use a water tube over the holotex. You can let it dry for 15 minutes or longer and then it's ready to go. Here's a map. This is beyond mending but it could be mended. What do you do when you have this is what I'm saying. When you really need to seek specialized conservation like this. It's a very hard treat. This would require washing and it's been relined on the back. You need the resources and the knowledge to do that. Preservation links, Katie. I'm turning that to you. To wrap up, both in the handout and on these slides which will be posted after the webinar there are links and learnings. These are two published books which I think are particularly useful if you're dealing with architectural records. The first one from the Society of American Archivists gives a brief overviews which include modern processes much more in the computer era for computer produced drawings and things that plastic based drawings that Robin was talking about and it gives you an overview of processing. Processing, organization, arrange. The second one is a very detailed description of the history of early architectural drawings in the 1840s and it goes into great depth about conservation. We're going to turn to some of the questions that people have asked and there are a lot of questions. I will start by saying for those of you who are familiar with archives we saw a number of questions about how many folders do we recommend? How many things can go in a folder? Do we do these types of treatments on everything that comes into our collection? At the Wisconsin Historical Society we operate in what's called an MPLP environment for those of you who know archival processing. More products, less process and we deal often with very large volumes of records that are coming to us. We do not clean everything that comes into our collection. Not everything that comes into our collection gets conservation treatment. It's only the neediest items and in an ideal world yes, one item per folder is great. We don't do that. We don't have the resources or the space to do it. We go about 10, 10 items per folder and then it depends on the depth of your other questions. I'm going to go back and we'll try to work through some of these. Katie, let me ask you too since there's so many questions to answer Frank Lopez from Palm Springs about the sticky residue tape removal, adhesive removal from drawings that's something where if you actually want to get that off you might be looking at talking to a conservator. If you can't do that that might be a case where you're encapsulating that document in mylar or foldering it in mylar to keep the adhesive residue from gunking off any documents that are next to it but adhesive removal is a pretty intensive treatment process. Often you can try something simple which is getting a cray eraser and lightly seeing if you can get adhesive but you can get yourself into some trouble there too by taking off parts of the paper or parts of the image with that caveat to decide how to approach it. Katie? Someone asked a question about storing maps or lithographs in glassine. I don't recommend glassine as long-term material for storage is inherently acidic, essentially. Paper that is lignin-free acid-free those are the things to look for. Glassine, unfortunately, even if it's called archival really doesn't often meet those standards. Instead of glassine you could look for a type of tissue paper which would be lignin-free acid-free from an archival supplier. I wanted to jump in. Katie's still answering questions and that's fine. This is Robin. I was thinking a little about for smaller institutions we get a lot of questions about permanent display of maps and their institutions and one we don't recommend permanent display of anything but generally the hardest thing they want to keep them as artifact and it's very hard to hang a wall map adequate support system that doesn't get damaged by patrons looking at it. You have to consider that. That's why we suggest reproduction. Somebody was asking about keeping architectural drawings together in this whole intellectual versus physical. I just want to make one point I think from experience it works well that architectural drawings by project by address by client keeping those together is important. You could create an intellectual string from this folder to that folder and so on but these big huge drawings are difficult to handle. Here we've got myself or some other people who are pulling these files out of a map drawer the fewer times you can handle those better and if you're pulling a bunch of architectural drawings out to search for one I think you're going to be doing a lot more damage to those fragile documents than you would by having them grouped together physically so you know you just have to go to one place to find project X or Y instead of going through six or seven of them to pull all those documents together so I'm saying keep the projects together so when there's a need to research a project you pull out one folder instead of 14. All right so we are going to continue tackling questions and we will, there are a lot of questions so for those which we aren't able to answer in the about 15 minutes since we have left we're happy to follow up and provide the people who asked them with written answers and connecting collections is going to help us do that so don't worry your question will eventually be answered so if buffered paper there's a question is buffered paper recommended as interleaving for iron gall or acidic ink? Robin and I are looking at one another and throwing up our hands I actually don't know that there's a standard recommendation for that I think it would be fine I don't necessarily think it's going to do a lot to help ink any more than a good quality folder would but I don't think there's a recommendation against is mylar encapsulation good or bad for maps? Again I think sort of armed with information that there are benefits to encapsulation with plastic and there are benefits to foldering things or using paper as an enclosure and drawbacks each of those techniques you have to make a decision about what is best for your collection the point was made by the person asking the question leave a gap an opening in the side of the encapsulation if you're going to use that yes that is a good point it's a good thing to do that's a little bit of air circulation and Susan is telling me that the written answers to the questions will also be posted with the recording on the connecting so there's a question Kathy says we have a large collection of rolled archival documents and we're accessioning them they're dusty, there's water damage and they have been stored in a very I actually can't stored in a bad environment Kathy is going to store them rolled and what's the best way well again it sort of depends on the context of this piece and the resources you have at hand and you'll think about how they will be accessed how often they'll be accessed do you want to use a rolled storage that includes mylar to make it easier to open them and close them what is your labeling method so there's no there's no one best way but there are different sort of techniques to get to work best I wanted to add to the handling and storage training of the staff is important and also signage is really helpful I find with the oversized maps people are very intimidated to take them out and handle them and so by having little directions to a giant folder that gets rolled around a tube they're much more confident about it Dan asks can we repeat information about buffered materials so what we said about buffered materials this is pertinent to architectural photo reproductive processes like blueprints and van dyke prints people consider them there's some evidence that they're sensitive to buffered materials that they might change they might change color basically the photographic image will change when it's in contact with a lot of alkaline material some of the research and recommendations are loosening up on that and saying it's not as bad as we thought it would be or it's not as likely to make a change but it would be so there used to be very strict recommendations not to use buffered folders or buffered paper to house your blueprints or your other architectural photo reproductions great if you can get unbuffered paper but I also happen to think that you will not do too much damage if you're using buffered paper maybe no damage at all and again it kind of depends on the resources available what choice you'll make there it can be actually kind of hard to get lead and free unbuffered folders Julia asks do you have any reading suggestions or guides for making large flat file folders when you need to use two sheets make a folder big enough I usually end up making those Julie and I'm just using a gum linen tape for the hinge and so I just have a giant table and I fold my gum linen in half and I just put them on the edge of the two folders that are bunched together and then bone it until it's hard and then put weights on it until it's dry so I don't know I don't think it's really complicated you have to decide if you want to use a I prefer to use the water soluble tape some people will use some sort of pressure sensitive tape but I worry about the adhesive then Kathy asks what's the best way to store large documents what's the best way to find them labeling pouring them in some sort of order within your horizontal storage system actually not entirely sure the best answer to that question or what you're looking for but it is hard you're going to have you know I think whether actually they're stored vertically or horizontally you're going to have a hard time when you have a lot of documents what do you do with a large section of architectural records that have grommets and are staples I take staples out and the grommets if you can why do you do this the staples have a tendency to stain and it's just another point as they're moved and it's just better to get them out of there how do you label the drawings to keep in order of any sort to um no unless there are some reasons that they need to be kept together often times the reason they're stapled together is just through some ease and often times the ones that are stapled are copies original the pencil normally aren't so it could very well be the second version of something I really haven't had an instance where I wouldn't separate those and put them in two different folders I keep them as so there's a question can we provide links to the rolling methods with detailed instructions I think we can give the source documents for information if there are written instructions that are already existing you're in luck otherwise it's a great question to ask when connecting to collections care for them about how you might bring out something like that we'll provide one information that to ask is there a worry about an acidic environment if you store an inner tube inside an outer tube yeah I think that's true so if you're using first of all if you're using an acidic inner tube to wrap your documents around you're going to want to provide some interleaving something whether it's plastic or cloth or paper rolled around the acidic tube in between the document you're rolling on it you could do something similar enroll another piece of paper or another piece of mylar around your document but acid free is really the same as in a sense if you had a good quality archival folder then an acid free, lignin free folder inside of a box that might be acidic I think it's the thing that's most that's directly in the document that's most important so if you have limited resources put your resources in the document if you can get good quality inner and outer tubes also you can explain that route when you are dealing with projects consider them en masse at the big picture at times I will have 500 blueprints to demidify and flatten not just one I won't say you treat them differently but you do much do more of a processing type of line almost like a factory where you do one thing first to it to the next step and whatnot to keep the process going Catherine says we've had problems before when using double sided tape in encapsulating documents as sometimes our document comes into contact with the edge of the tape that's true that is a concern it's better to stay away from the method of using tape for this reason you can sometimes try to get around it by using something like a piece of thread and stick that onto the edge of the tape as a barrier between the tape and your document which somebody mentioned in the content it's sort of a resource issue if you have Mylar that you can just use as folders rather than four sided encapsulation and you don't need to use tape to get some sort of welder that welds with heat ultrasonic welder that Robin mentioned you can get around but if you really want to use encapsulation as a method you feel that is what's going to work in your collection use the double sided tape to do it with the caveat that yes it can cause a problem for your document to be third to the tape so just in that sense Robin leaves a lot of space also Liz I can answer your question about what software I was using and I used control my Nikon because I'm using a Nikon camera for this but you can also use Lightroom very easily to control the camera and to receive the tethered flow of information back and forth just look up tethered photography and you get other recommendations based on camera brand and whether using a tablet, a PC or a laptop questions about how to store files inside drawers and I wanted to say from my own practice I don't like to put small and large folders in the same drawer I like a uniform size of one folder in a drawer now that's not to say that you can't put smaller folders within a big drawer by having sections sectioned off also do okay and we're going to turn it back over to Mike to wrap up thank you very much here's just my volume sorry thank you everyone for joining us thank you everyone at the Wisconsin Historical Society for this webinar it was great there was a lot of information a lot of great images I'd like to thank participants who joined us for tolerating with us the technical issues we have at the beginning with the audio so we do apologize for that thank you everyone the recording will be made available in the coming day or two and with the recording will be posted copy of the transcript and the questions that have been answered and we'll provide a written response to questions that were requested and not answered during the session so thank you everyone for joining us and again Wisconsin Historical Society we really appreciate it thank you all see you next time