 Hi, welcome everyone. We're going to have a great webinar. I'm so thrilled about doing something with reorg. So I want to tell you that we have some upcoming webinars this fall. You can, right now you can register if you want to for the September one on taxidermy. There'll be one on insurance, one on labeling and marking objects, and later on there'll be one on deaccessioning and one just for the holidays. So look forward to those. You can always find us on the community website. You can like us on Facebook. You can follow us on Twitter. And if you have questions, you can go to the Connecting to Collections Care discussion forum and get answers. In order to use that though, you have to be registered on the site. Otherwise, everything in the program is free. And you can contact me anytime. And we'll have an evaluation at the end. We'll post this link later, but don't worry. And so now we'll start with Simon. Simon Lamford is the Preservation Development Advisor at the Canadian Conservation Institute. He's the coordinator of Reorg Canada program. And he's one of the original developers of the Reorg methodology. So Simon, take it away. Great. Thank you, Susan and Mike. Let me just say two other things. If you have questions, please put them in the chat box. And last time there was sound dropout. And that was because of summer storms in the Intermountain West. I lost sound. So if you lost sound where you were, go to the recording. Everything is there. It happened today. I noticed a couple of other people said they're having storms. So that could be the problem. Thanks. Simon, go ahead. OK, excellent. Thank you, Susan. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for the step-by-step reorganization for small museums. So excellent. I just want to begin by reminding everyone. I hope you can read this. It's written very small. Just who we are, CCI, what we do, and the kind of services we offer. So CCI advances and promotes the conservation of Canada's heritage collections. And we focus mostly on conservation science, treatment, and preventive conservation. And our clients are Canadian museums. We have about 3,000 clients across Canada. And we offer expert services, different types of training and professional development opportunities. We develop conservation resources, tools, publications. And we invite you to subscribe to our e-news to stay on top of the latest information and to like us on Facebook to learn about our current projects and to visit our website. So since today, I'm wearing two hats. I'm also wearing a hat of e-Chrome. I just want to remind everyone who is e-Chrome and what they do. So e-Chrome is the International Center for the Study of Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property. And they are physically based in Rome. E-Chrome is an intergovernmental organization. So that means that you as a professional cannot be a member of e-Chrome, but it is your country that is a member of e-Chrome. And it was created by UNESCO in 1956. It currently has 134 member states. And just for US listeners today, US joined in 1971. And for our Canadian listeners in 1978, if you're from another country, you can find out if your country is a member of e-Chrome by going to the e-Chrome's website. So what are we focusing on today? Storage reorganization. So I'm going to talk about what we're not talking about. So first of all, storage planning. That's when you have a collection and you have an empty space. And you're trying to put this collection into an empty space. So you're designing a new storage space. What we're focusing on here is storage reorganization. So that's when you have a situation that's already existing that sometimes is complete chaos. And what you want to do is to make improvements and create order within the same space. So you don't have access to, you're not planning a capital project, you're not building a new building, you're not designing a new space. You're creating order within the same space. So for storage planning, there are a lot of resources out there. So if you want to create a new storage space, you'll find information on different types of requirements, checklists, things not to forget. So there's a lot of information out there. But comparatively, on storage reorganization, there are very few resources out there available, especially for small museums, with limited resources or access to outside expertise. And we all know that storage is a huge problem because most of the collections in museums are in storage. So here, just as an indication, more or less, you can expect to find 90% of the collection in storage. So if there's problems, if there's issues with this collection storage, I think the slides are going too fast. If there's issues with the collection in storage, then it's affecting most of the collection. So it's a major concern. I'm just going to go through a few key statistics about storage across the world. Here in Canada, there was a survey done in 2008, 2009 of 43 art galleries. And the findings were that 93% of the storage in these facilities would be full within 10 years. And 37 said that their storage was inadequate. Similarly, another finding comes from the US. In 2011, the Smithsonian Institution's Office of the Inspector General had a report about the national collections at the National Museum of American History and found that 10% of the collection was missing. So when there's problems in storage, it's not affecting one or two objects. Obviously, we all know this, working in museums. It's affecting a large amount of objects. So the risks are quite significant. Another example comes to us from Russia. And this is that the Hermitage Museum, an inventory was done, and over 50,000 pieces were missing at the time. So again, a large amount of objects affected. There was an important study done by UCL in the UK. And one of the findings was that problems with overcrowding in storage, one of the biggest obstacles to opening storage to the public. And the US, again, most of us are familiar with the Heritage Health Index. And one of the very shocking findings in there in the storage section was that only 11% of institutions who took part in the survey had adequate storage facilities. Now, since we have this amazing tool, this poll that we have here, I just want to ask you who are assisting today, who are attending the webinar, do you consider your storage to be adequate? So that's interesting. We'll definitely see 90% around there. OK, so we'll let that go and come back to it a bit later. And please answer as soon as you can. OK, so you could benefit from reorg, is what we're saying. So you're not alone. We saw a few examples of large museums in a few countries. But ECROM was really interested in investigating this storage issue a bit further. And so in 2011, ECROM partnered with UNESCO and some of the ICOM national committees to carry out a survey to investigate what the problems were with storage across the world. And so we managed to reach 1,490 museums spread across 136 countries. And here you can see how the spread of countries that responded to the survey. And so here are some of the really key findings. Worldwide, about 50% of museums who responded to the survey said that their storage units were overcrowded. 40% said that they lacked management support to make improvements to storage. And 30% said it was unclear who exactly was responsible for storage in their institution. And 25% of museums said that there was absolutely no location system in their storage. So they had no way of tracking where objects were physically in the facility. So this gives you a picture of Worldwide. And there was, if we look at the US statistics, so the US segment of the survey, we can see that there was a huge response in the United States. So 383 museums responded. So that's totally outweighs all of the others. And we were interested to see, well, is that skewing the results? If we look at the US on its own and we compare it to the Worldwide segment isolated from the US, is it any different? So there was only plus or minus 2% or 3% different. So really the situation that we're seeing in the US and in Canada also was the same as any other, was the same as the rest of the world. So there was no difference, even though there's more museums coming from the US. So as you can see, more or less, very similar results. One very shocking statistic also was that there wasn't enough space in 66% of museums. One thing that it didn't include here was one out of four museums said that it was impossible for them to get from one end of their storage area to the other. So that's one out of four. And that's quite shocking. So we all know storage is a huge problem. If you want to access the summary of this survey, I just put the link here, and it's accessible from ECROM's website. And you have just a summary of the Worldwide segment, so including all countries. So what do you do when you're faced with a situation like this? So what do you do when your storage is severely disorganized? That's a question that UNESCO and ECROM wanted to explore together through this partnership called Preventive Conservation of Endangered Museum Collections in Developing Countries, which ran from 2007 to 2011. So this was a partnership. And the goal was to look at two different aspects. So documentation, lack of documentation systems or lack of functional documentation systems was identified as a major issue. And so there needed to be some guidance out there for smaller museums on how to create a documentation system from scratch, focusing mainly on just low technology, how to do it with just a paper-based system. And the other component, obviously, was storage. And this project I should mention was made possible thanks to an extra budgetary contribution from the United States to UNESCO. So in terms of documentation, the practical guide, the documentation component, the idea was to create a practical guide to help smaller museums step by step in creating a new documentation system. And this part of the project was led by the School of African Heritage, or EIPA, in Benin. And the storage component was the idea was to create a step-by-step methodology. And it would involve 15 professionals who were past ECROM course participants coming from 15 different countries. So what was created was the Storage Task Force. And I know that one of the members of the Storage Task Force is listening today, Rosanna from Peru, who's right in the middle with the green scarf. So the idea was to create a Storage Task Force to really identify how to go about reorganizing storage. And this is where all of the different professionals were physically across the world. And what's the problem? Well, the problem is that for the past 30 or 40 years, collections have been growing exponentially. And improvements to storage areas have not necessarily followed. So collections are growing, growing, growing. And storage is not following. So what do you do when you have a situation like we saw that has been abandoned for many years, a complete mess? So how do you begin to untangle this issue? And so the idea that the Storage Task Force came up with was to divide the problem into different parts to make it easier to tackle. So one part of the problem was how to do with management and policies and museum mandate and is what you're collecting, does it match what your museum is supposed to be collecting? Should you be deaccessioning anything? Or all sorts of issues that have to do with management. And then there was a component that had to do with building in space. So the building itself, how well it protects the collection from the different agents of deterioration. Then everything has to do with the collection, its specific needs in terms of conservation, vulnerability, all things like that. So the fourth component was furniture and small equipment. So the actual storage units and storage furniture and also the equipment that you need to work in a storage area. So what happened was the Storage Task Force met on a few occasions, once in Rome and once in Caracas in Venezuela, to just brainstorm about what are the steps that you would have to do in order to start from your starting situation to end up with a reorganized storage. So what are the different steps? And they came up with a methodology where you start with one step and then you need to do that step in order to do the following steps. So there was kind of an organized logical system that was created to guide non-experts in undertaking such a project. And you can see in the lower right hand side kind of visual representation of the methodology as it was at the time. Now, everything since then has been published on this website, reorg.info. And here you'll find everything that has to do with the storage reorganization methodology. You'll find the practical guide, the documentation practical guide that was developed to create a new documentation system from scratch. There's a glossary, there's different case studies, and there's a section where you can actually create an account and track your progress online. So if we go into the storage reorganization section of the website, you'll find that along the top you can navigate through the different phases of the methodology. So there's phase one, phase two, phase three, and phase four. And along the right side of the screen, you can actually navigate inside those phases. So and here I'm showing a screen where if you want to access the full methodology, all you need to do is create an account. It's free. All you need is a username, but your name in, your email, password, and your set. So here I'm showing you an example of one of the steps of phase one, which is called gain the support of decision makers. Now you'll see that every single step has a kind of worksheet like this that's attached to it that explains why this task is important, what's the objective, what are the final products that you're expected to produce after you're finished, and some suggestions on how to proceed, and also some advice or remarks to help you. Also embedded within the different tasks, you'll find some images. So there's lots of images that illustrate some of the issues that are discussed in those tasks. And you'll also find forms, exercises, online references, and some examples as well for you to look at. So the platform was launched in 2011. And since then, the number of users has been growing. And at the moment, we have 1,125 registered users. So that's users that actually created an account and went a little bit deeper in the methodology. For the small museum, the best way to approach Reorg, because it could be quite daunting to start looking at the website, all the different tasks, all the different phases, it could be a little bit intimidating. So the best way, in my opinion, to approach the methodology is through the self-evaluation tool for museum storage. And it's accessible. I put the URL on the screen. It's very simple. If you know your collection well, it'll take you about 10 minutes to do its 43 questions. And it looks at the four different components. So it looks at management, building in space, furniture, and small equipment. So basically, the way it looks is like this. And there's a series of statements or benchmarks. And you're asked to score every single benchmark based on your situation. So here, I don't know if you can see on your screen. The first one is someone is officially responsible for each storage area. And you score six if yes. And his or her duties are written down in the job description. And two if yes, but there is no job description. And zero if your answer is no. So what you do is you answer every single question. You add up your score. And for each component, and then you end up with a score for your storage for each of the four components, as you can see on the top of the screen from left to right. And you can determine whether your storage is at risk, whether you need a reorganization project, whether only small improvements are needed, or whether the situation seems to be fine. So just as an interesting exercise I did, I've been teaching a workshop, a two-day workshop on storage reorganization here in Canada. And I've been asking since the workshop has been offered, I've been asking every participant to fill out the self-evaluation. And just to reassure you a little bit, most of what's happening is, as you can see, there's a lot of yellow. So that means that only small improvements are needed. Our workshops are targeted at smaller museums. So some of them do require a storage reorganization project, as you can see from the orange, but most of them are in the yellow, which means that they only need small improvements. And only a very, very small amount actually needed, or cases where the collection was extremely at risk. So this is kind of a simple tool that's very visual, and it's easy to bring that to your manager to justify the need to investigate the situation further, and perhaps launch into a more in-depth project. Now the storage reorganization methodology is, as I mentioned, organized in four phases. So the first phase, getting started, that's where you assemble all the materials you need to begin working. So you're looking at collecting all your floor plans. You're documenting the storage area as it is now through photo and video. You are building your team, all things like that. So everything you need to get started. And then phase two, the condition report, and that's where you're documenting the current condition of your storage, looking at the four different components. So you're looking at all the policies, you're looking at the space itself, you're doing your storage space calculations, you're looking at the condition of your storage furniture, and you're looking at all the small equipment that you need, or that you have and that you need to purchase or acquire. So you're really painting a picture of what your storage looks like now and what are the key issues that are affecting conservation and access in that storage area. So the idea is to present something that's convincing, that could help you get support in order to launch into a full project. So you present this to your management and they have a better idea of what's going on. After that, there's the action plan phase. That's where you take all of the information you collected and you start to define step by step what you need to do to address those issues that you identified. So to find solutions for all the issues. And then the fourth phase is the implementation. So that's the fun part where you actually roll up your sleeves and you start reorganizing your storage area. So I just want to do something that I know you're not supposed to do, which is read a bullet list. But so at the very basis of RE-ORC, there are 10 fundamental criteria that have been used to define good storage. So the first one is one trained member of staff is in charge. So these are kind of essential things that if you don't have these there will be, either there are problems or there will be problems or it could lead to issues down the line. So the first one is trained member of staff is in charge. The second one is the key policies and procedures exist and are applied. And if you go deeper into the methodology then you find out what we mean by key policies and procedures. The building and storage area offer adequate protection for the collection. That's fairly self-explanatory. The storage area has dedicated support spaces. So that means all the different spaces that are connected with the storage area that allow you to work efficiently in that storage area such as an office, a work room, a storage area for non-collection items. The storage area contains only objects that are accessioned. So that's the fifth. Can I hear anyone cringing? No object is placed directly on the floor is the sixth one. Oops. Every object has been assigned a specific location and storage. Every object can be located within three minutes. That'll have people gasping, I'm sure. We estimate that if every object has its location, if the documentation system is up to date, if your location system is functional, it should be possible in a small museum to locate an object from using the documentation system in three minutes. You know that the mask that you're looking for of such-and-such accession number, you know that it's on shelf A in storage unit number two. So number nine is every object can be retrieved without moving more than two other objects. So this is an interesting benchmark, and you can see already there's a kind of pattern emerging here where we try to define what it means in precise terms. So you could just say every object is accessible, but that means different things to different people. So here we're saying, here's a benchmark. We're gonna say that good access to collections mean that you shouldn't have to move more than two other objects or items, boxes, palettes, whatever they are, in order to access another. Similar for number eight, where we're saying that they can be physically located within three minutes. It's not quickly, it's not rapidly, it's three minutes. So you can actually measure it and in time, you can use this to see how well your storage is doing, if it's starting to get disorganized, it's starting to take you 20 minutes to find things and then maybe you need to intervene. So if it's not three minutes, if it's five minutes makes more sense for you than it's five minutes. Number 10 is every object is in stable condition, ready to be used for the museum's activities. So this is a key criteria. And now what I'd like to do is show you a practical application of Riorg on a real museum. This is the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts located in New Delhi, and this was a project that was undertaken by Ekram in 2011 that I took part in. I like to show it because it's a good example of how much you can do with very little and the kind of improvements that you can make with even if you don't have a very large budget and the kind of creativity that goes behind some of the solutions that can be found to the problems that you have. So this is where New Delhi is in India. And this is a picture of before what the storage area looked like. So this is a space that's outside the storage area that had collections as well. It's kind of a hallway space leading into the storage area on the far back wall. And so there's some collections that are there as well. This is inside the storage area in one of the corners. And these are some really beautiful shadow puppets that were in the storage area on the ground when we arrived. And here are a collection of, here's a collection of masks that was also in the space. So who were the participants in this workshop? They were working in the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts. We had members that were part of the conservation department. We had people from the archives department, people from different departments of this institution. We're all kind of working together, most of them for the first time together, those who were from different departments, in order to learn this methodology step by step and then possibly apply it to their own department. Because I should mention that the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts is extremely busy kind of effervescent center where there's lots and lots of exhibitions and festivals and activities and it's very, very active. So they use their collections a lot. And we were working in the, what they call the ethnographic collection storage. So they did the self-evaluation. So this is how they scored on the self-evaluation. So as you can see a lot of the management collections and furniture and small equipment scored in the red and building in space scored in the orange. So that's summary of phase one. Phase two, the condition report, that's when the participants kind of divided into four different groups, looking at each of the four different components. Some of them look at the collection, some of them looked at the storage furniture so on and so forth. And this is the floor plan of the situation before Reorg. So I just wanna emphasize the importance of documenting the situation before, during and after the storage reorganization. It's very important to keep track of what happened of how it was before, how it is after in order to see really the improvement that was made. Also for management, it's important to record this. And the importance of floor plans is because when you take pictures of a disorganized storage area, you don't fully grasp the extent of the situation. Only with floor plans can you really see how impossible it is to get from one end to the other. So for example, here, if you enter the storage area from the bottom left, you basically cannot get to the other side because all the floor is occupied either with non-collection materials or collections that are directly on the ground. So only with a floor plan can you really fully grasp the extent of the problem. And here's the summary for the condition report. So the management section was found that the responsibility for storage was unclear. Different people had the key to the storage areas. Things were kind of appearing there, unexpected from one day to the other without clear kind of knowledge where it came from. The procedures were unclear as well for access to the storage area. There was a lack of training for the handling of collections. Building in space, one of the key things was that the functional spaces were undefined. What we mean by functional spaces is spaces where certain functions happen. So there was an area where, since they have a lot of exhibitions, they needed to prepare their exhibitions. So they need to prepare their objects for the exhibition. That was happening wherever space was available. So in this corner, in that corner, on top of that box. And so that was kind of overlapping with the collection storage. There was a loading and unloading function. So kind of crates were coming in and out of the space without a clear understanding of where the crates should go. So it was really kind of overlapping functions that's happening here. And that's a very, very common problem in a lot of storage areas and museums. So the collection, as you can see from the images, all the objects were on the ground. So that was, it's the most visible issue when you walk in there, obviously. There were many non-collection items and you can see certain examples on the picture. Crates, empty boxes, packing materials in the far back. I don't know if you can see there's some display panels from an old exhibition. So that was piled up there. There was no location system for the collection. So if you wanted to find an object, you literally had to pick every single one up or go from memory in order to find what you were looking for. In terms of furniture and small equipment, there was obviously no storage furniture. So that was a key issue. And I just wanna mention here that the idea is not that we're pointing fingers at this institution. This is a common situation in many museums the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts is generous enough to share these images with us and to really share their experience in order for other museums to learn from it. But this is something that's very common and happens in any museum anywhere. So phase three, it was the action plan. So that's where the participants got together and found different, identified what were the tasks that were required to address some of the issues that they found. So on the right side, you can see kind of a graphic representation of their project chart where they have the tasks listed on the left side with a kind of a Gantt chart on the right where they could check off where which tasks have been done. And so it was easier when managing a group of several people it was easier to track the progress of the project. So in terms of management, that was going to be tackled later because a lot of it had to do with drafting new policies and procedures. And that was something that could be tackled by the team later. We wanted to use the opportunity that we were all together in order to make some improvements to the physical aspects of the reorganization. And I'd like to say that that's something that's becoming clearer and clearer as ECROM does more and more storage reorganizations is that there is initially, there is an important aspect of the project has to deal with the physical aspect of reorganization. So you have to be able to handle and resolve the access issues to your collection before you can even start doing some of the other things. And so it becomes essential to kind of focus on that first and then to tackle the other things afterwards. Building in space, the idea was to define specific functional spaces for the different functions. The collection, the idea was to create a location system to bring all the collection that was outside of storage back into storage and to remove all of the non-collection items out. And furniture and small equipment, the idea was to recycle and reuse storage furniture. So in terms of the implementation, I'm just gonna go through images of the different types of collections that were in the space and some of the solutions that were found. So here's a collection of baskets before and after, the shadow puppets, how they were stored before and some of the solutions that the participants worked on trying to find to store some of these things with the materials that were available. So these are kind of rolling exhibition panels that were unused and were repurposed to hang some of these shadow puppets to get them off the ground and then to kind of protect them with individual sleeves, protect them from the dust. Here are some metal objects that were housed in a reused metal storage unit that was found in one of the hallways. Here's a collection of rolled textiles and how they were stored before and some manuscripts. And here's a prototype of a kind of storage rack that was designed and built during the workshop by a welder. And after the workshop, other similar ones were built. Here's a collection of hand puppets and how they were stored before and here is how they were stored after. So they each had their own stand and there was a shelving unit that was found. The masks represented by far the biggest challenge and we were fortunate enough to find some unused shelving that we were able to repurpose and adapt. And some of the large wooden crates that were in the storage area were repurposed and refitted in order to create a hanging system for some of the masks. So here you can see the shelving units repurposed for the medium-sized masks. The smaller masks were hung from the chains. There's a large number of masks so we really had to find a solution for those especially. Some larger objects that were just isolated from the rest of the collection in this one of these crates that was the best solution that we could find given the time that we had in the means. And this is the end of the fourth day. So everyone's very happy, the project is completed. So this was done in four days. This is the before and after. So you can see all the different collections are now inside storage units. If you look at the top left corner of the slide, you can see in pink, I'm highlighting where that space is in the image relative to the floor plan. So this is the collection storage area that's kind of at the center of the space. This is the loading and unloading area that you see was created behind the screens on which the shadow puppets were hung. And so since the space was large enough, it was possible to create all of these functional spaces within the storage area. Sometimes it's better to create them outside the storage area that here is the only space we had. An exhibition preparation area was created also along the wall. And this is a research area that's actually located outside of the storage area. And this is just kind of what it looked like before. And this is what it looks like after. So definitely more inviting for researchers. So this is how the work was organized. Phase one, two phase four. This was done by a team of, a motivated team, a team of 10 motivated people. Four days of work and the cost was $400 for this project. Of course the cost will vary depending on the specific project that you have. But this is just an example of what was done with very little money actually. Most of that budget went towards the creation of the storage racks for the textiles and manuscripts. So if you look at the criteria for good storage, you can see that all of them at the end were met except the key policies and procedures because that was something that was gonna be dealt with later. And looking back at the self-evaluation, you can see that there were improvements in the billing in space, there were improvements in the collection component and improvements in the furniture and small equipment. So it's still not perfect. There's still improvements that can be made but the improvements that were made in four days were significant and they did contribute to improving conditions. Storage, this is again a before and after of that project. Now, I just wanna take a different turn now. So the tool was created, it existed in 2011 but ECROM and its member states felt that more needed to be done internationally in order to build capacity in storage reorganization because it's a problem that affected all countries. And so there was a resolution that was passed in 2011 at the General Assembly and the General Assembly called for a long-term program for capacity building for storage reorganization based on the Reorg materials. And all countries were invited to join hands with ECROM to develop this program. Now ECROM, this program was called Reorg International and ECROM contacted 133 countries, they received 61 replies and 38 were interested in joining hands with them to develop a national or a regional sub-regional program on storage reorganization. In 2014-15, CCI, hey, that's where we come in, and the Central Institute for Conservation in Belgrade launched two different projects. One was obviously for us in Canada, it was a regional, it was a national program and in Southeast, in Serbia, Serbia partnered with different organizations in different countries to launch a regional program for Southeast Europe. And coming up this year, there are different projects going on across the world. So in Canada, we are tackling a second province. So the first one we did was Ontario and now we're tackling the Atlantic provinces of Canada, so Eastern Canada. Belgium and Luxembourg are doing a project as well and that's led by Irpa. China is also organizing a international course in the fall. There's currently a project being undertaken in Rajasthan and just a few weeks ago, there was a project in New Caledonia as well. So there's different initiatives going on, so there's definitely a ways of the New York training programs that are happening all over the world. And if you're interested in kind of following some of these courses and seeing some foreign after pictures from the different courses across the world, I invite you to like Reorg International on Facebook and to follow Reorg International on Twitter. For the first year, for us at CCI, our approach was gonna be a bit different than the two-day, sorry, than the two-week workshop model. We're going to do some distance-based learning, some distance learning using distance mentoring and a combination of distance mentoring and face-to-face hands-on training. So we needed to develop some new trading resources that would allow us to deliver some of these courses and to allow our participants to do some self-learning. So to work on their own projects in their own museums. And so what we're doing is we're working on a workbook right now that is a simplified version of the Reorg methodology. And I'm very pleased to say that it will be available to a wider audience later in 2016, so stay tuned. And it's very much a step-by-step, do-it-yourself approach. Some of the comments we got from the initial Reorg materials was very daunting and labor-intensive. This one aims to simplify the material considerably just to focus on what the key things are that you need to do. And here in Canada, we used a training platform in order to keep good communication between the different groups located in the different museums across the province of Ontario. So we used an online training platform for that. And our learning objectives here for Canada, so our goal is to implement this course in all the regions across Canada over the next five years. And the learning objectives are, if you're one of the groups, is to implement a storage reorganization project from start to finish. So you'll be able to do that if you're one of the selected organizations. You'll also be able to advise other museums on how to plan a storage reorganization project. And we're building that into the course by encouraging the participants to partner with a smaller museum and their own network to share their knowledge and to help them in a project of their own as part of the course. Also, we can reorganize storage for reorganization's sake, but it's really important to remember why we're doing this and why it's important to have a reorganized storage area. So where communication is a huge component of this program and we're encouraging our participants to organize public outreach activities to really show to their community what are the benefits of having organized storage areas. So some of them are doing guided tours of their storage areas once they're reorganized. Some of them are kind of highlighting the object of the week or the object of the month that was discovered through the reorganization project. A lot of them are using their Facebook page to engage their community in their project. So it's really great. And a lot of them are actively, proactively contacting the media and getting them into their storage and having them follow the storage project that they're working on from start to finish. So that's really great to see as well. Another thing is we really want to be able to disseminate the results to the professional community. So our participants are encouraged to write an article in a professional publication or to organize a conference session to showcase their project. And a lot of the institutions in Ontario are actually organizing a panel at the next Ontario Museum Association annual conference in the fall. And so they took it upon themselves to organize this. And so that's great to see. Here are the participants in Ontario for this past year. So this is where they're located. So we tried to get a nice geographical spread. And this is kind of just a quick snapshot of what some of their storage areas look like. Maybe you recognize yourself in these images. So these are the kinds of projects they're working on. And this is the timeline for the course. So it started in October, 2014. And it runs through to October, 2015. We started with a half-day information session where they were introduced to the methodology. And then they worked on their own for four months on their condition report. And that's when we started to work on the condition report. Then we had a four-day face-to-face workshop in order to all work together on one storage area and reorganize it in four days. Because you can list all of the issues, all the problems you have, and all the things you want to do to solve them. But there's kind of a mental barrier. How do I actually start doing it? So it's to kind of get rid of that barrier and show that if we all work together, we can achieve some great results. So a lot of the participants commented that, wow, it's not as hard as I thought. This is great that we're actually doing it. I now feel prepared to do it in my own museum. So that's kind of the goal of this four-day workshop. And then they worked on their action plan and currently they're implementing their projects. So the four-day workshop at the, we worked at the Brandt Museum and Archives and that is in Southern Ontario, close to Toronto. And we worked on an archival storage area together. I'm not gonna show you the video, but I encourage you to go to the recording of this conference afterwards and to click on the link here and you can see a three-minute video of what was achieved in two days, two days work, by the team of participants at the Brandt Museum. And after this intense experience of teamwork, there was a one-day conference where we opened this up to a wider audience. We had 61 delegates, mostly from Ontario, and six guest speakers who were invited to talk about different storage projects that they were working on in Ontario. And we also had the participants present their own projects and what their challenges were. And so it was nice to see a nice exchange of best practice and of expertise from both sides. And so if you want to see the recordings from this conference, everything was recorded and you can go to the link below to view the individual talks. And we were very fortunate to have a speaker from the Reorg Southeast Europe group that was there as well from the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina who was there as well. So she talks about her project in her country as well. So the anticipated results by October 2015 is that we will have visible improvements in storage in seven museums, so six museums who are participating plus the training case study museum. There will be plans developed for six smaller museums, so the partner institutions. There will be a provincial storage advisory network. So these institutions who are participating have agreed to be a kind of reference museum for other museums in their community. As they embark on projects like this, they can actually pick up the phone and call them and ask them for advice. I'm stuck here, what would you suggest? So they're actually committing to doing that. So that's really great to see. Six public outreach activities will be organized but I can just say, I can just see that there are more than that that are being organized and six professional dissemination activities. So the idea is really to build institutional and professional capacity in storage reorganization across the country. If you want to know more about this project, actually if you want to know more about Reorg International, I encourage you to contact Echrom. If you want to know more about Reorg Canada, I encourage you to contact CCI. And if you want to know more about Reorg itself and want to access the methodology, you can access it here online for free. And I just want to do a little bit of cross promotion where there will be a webinar at the end of the month, Tuesday, August 25th, organized by the Ontario Museum Association called Your Storage Reorg Project, planning for it and funding it. And where you'll hear about two of the participating museums and their experience. And for all of the Canadian listeners online, there'll be someone from the Museum Assistance Program to discuss what are the components of your project that could be funded through a Museum Assistance Program grant. So that's it. And thank you for your time and for joining us today. So we have a few questions. We're pretty close to being done, but I think we can go a few minutes over. My first question for you, Simon, is can others who are not in Canada participate in your distance learning programs? At the moment, our courses are for Canadian clients only. And so to be one of the participating museums, you have to be based in Canada in one of the regions that's being targeted that year. So this year, if you're in the Atlantic region, the deadline for applications is August 17th. So in a couple of weeks, the training materials, the workbook will be available online later in 2016. So the idea is that after these courses are over, what will be left behind is the training, is the workbook. So any small museum that wants to do something like this can embark on it and there'll be the workbook and also additional materials and resources that'll be available online. What about the webinar at the end of this month? The webinar is open to all. There is a cost. I've been told that the cost for non-members of the Ontario Museum Association has not been yet defined. And I know that for members, it's $15. So the registrations are open next week. So if you go on the Ontario Museum Association website, you can find out more there. Okay. And Brad Hoff just asked, is there a similar program in the US? And I don't think so. It's unfortunate. Yeah, there hasn't been. Yeah. I think the best thing to do if you're interested in proposing a program like that for the US, the best thing to do would be to contact ECROM and ask because they contacted the United States initially in 2012 or 13 when they contacted all the countries, the member states. So they did contact the United States. So I'm not sure what response they received, but if you're interested in kind of hosting one of these workshops, I would encourage you to contact ECROM directly. Okay. And then let's see, could this questionnaire about preparing the short questionnaire? Could a larger collections use it by breaking it of department by department? So absolutely. Yeah, that's a great question. So what we encourage people to do is to fill one of questionnaire per storage area. So if you have 10 storage areas, you could have a different situation in each storage area. What's also interesting to do with that self-evaluation is to have it filled out by different people, just to see if the perception of the problem or the issues are different from person to person. From management, comparing it to staff or sometimes it's also useful to do it as a team, to fill it out as a team so that you build consensus while you're filling it out. So there's different ways to use the tool. But yeah. There's some questions that are specifically related to the case study in India. One is, how did they improve their documentation study? And then another says $400 for the project. Does that include inflation? What would it translate to in the US or Canada? Curious, because a dollar definitely goes a lot farther in India. Talk into your microphone. Oh, sorry, yeah. So those calculations weren't necessarily made. It was the amounts and basically I can just answer by saying that the cost, most of the costs, most of the $400 went into building a storage unit for the textiles. So if you can imagine that you get a welder and you take a few pieces of metal and you have to build one of these units, kind of what would it cost? And so that's kind of the cost, yeah. But I don't know any exact amount, including inflation. But yeah. There were a lot of questions, a lot of comments about people not having their collections accessioned. And one of the questions is, how would you adjust this method using this method when only 90% of the collection is accessioned or documented in any way? Sounding collection is a major problem for us. Right, so one of the things that's a very good question and one of the questions that was always being asked at the beginning when the team was trying to develop this tool is, when is the good time to do the inventory? And can you embark on every organization if your inventory isn't done and isn't complete and all your objects aren't accessioned? The best time to do the inventory is after the physical reorganization of the space because that's when all your locations are gonna be more finalized and you can record your locations in your documentation system. So it's very difficult to do the inventory if you don't have access to your collection, if you can't physically go into the space or if you can't physically access the objects. So that's kind of that part of that. In terms of the accessioning, as I mentioned, Riorg looks at all aspects, but there's definitely a first phase that's about the physical improvements that you can do to improve access in the space and then all the other things get flagged and identified as improvements that can be done over time. So there's no expectation, for example, with our participant museums in the different provinces, there's no expectation that they'll completely finish all of their accessioning and their inventory within the year. The point is that they'll create the conditions, the best possible conditions to do those things afterwards and some of these things will be ongoing improvements and some of these things will get resolved within the actual project. Mike is telling me we're gonna be disconnected. So thanks, thank you to everyone for coming. I'll make sure that all the answers are done. I'll get Simon to give them to me and also I will post all the websites and the, what else? And your slides. So thank you very much. Bye-bye. And I'll see you soon.