 Susan, whenever you're ready, go ahead. Hi, everyone. I want to welcome you to this last session, and we'll go through my slides really quickly. This is our final webinar. If you're aiming for a credibly badge, you need to listen to all the webinars, either live or the recordings, and complete all the assignments. And you need to get everything turned in by August 16th, and then I will issue the badges for everyone that finished the following week. So you can start badgering me if you think you deserved a badge and didn't get one towards the end of August. But I think we're fine. So if you have questions about connecting to collections care, join the Connecting to Collections Care community. So if you have questions about caring for your collection, you can find the instructions on our website. And we have conservators there who monitor it, and so you'll get answers quickly. And if you need disaster assistance, and you're in the U.S., you can use the National Heritage Responders 24-Hour Hotline. Coming up, in a couple of weeks, we have a webinar on fire. And then the beginning of September, we have a webinar on archival processing, and these are both free. And now I'm going to turn this over to Samantha. Remember, if you have any questions, if you type them in the general chat box, I'll collect them to answer later. Great, thank you. Hi, everybody. It's good to see you all here today, and congratulations. We've made it to the end. So this is our final webinar today. We're going to be talking about making that leap into writing a preservation plan after you've gotten your assessment. We talked last week about how useful these assessments can be for grant rating and fundraising purposes, but this one's a little bit more internally focused. How do you use this inside your institution? And after you receive your assessment, there's tons of recommendations that need to be dealt with, either implemented or ignored in some cases. And a preservation plan is an essential institutional document that helps collecting institutions thoughtfully and carefully chart a course for the preservation of their collections for three to five years. Assessments help to lay the groundwork to creating such a document, and that's why they're so important and why we're sort of talking about these things together. In this webinar, I'm hoping to sort of provide guidance on how to create a preservation plan and then show you how the sort of recommendations from assessments can be made into implementable goals, objectives, and strategies in these plans. So I will go ahead and jump in. I did want to mention real quick, I enjoyed reading everybody's self-assessments, and you should have had your comments come back to you. So just make sure that if you have any questions about that, let me know. I see Sharon is talking a little bit about some of the comments that she got on her assessment. Sharon was in a class with me earlier this year, and we played this game called Monopolicy, in which we really saw the importance of policy development. It was a game created by John Simmons, though. If you want to look that up to kind of drive home the importance of policy development, that's a good one to check out. Great. So let's go ahead and jump into the content. Before we get too far along here, I want to make sure we discuss the differences in approaches to preservation. And there's two basic approaches here. It's preventative and remedial. Preventative preservation plays much the same role with respect to artifacts as do public health and preventive medicine does for people. It's more of a long-term view. You want to eat right an exercise that keeps you healthy, just like making sure your collections are in appropriate storage environments keeps them healthy. For the most part, many preventative preservation methods can be easily folded into things that the institution does normally, acquisitions, rehousing, processing, shelving, cleaning, photocopying, deaccessioning, et cetera. As each of these texts are done, they affect the long-term survival of the collections, so performing them with archival housing materials, with safe handling practices, et cetera. You can really extend the lifespan of your objects. And preventive preservation really refers to a range of direct and indirect actions undertaken on collections aimed at preventing degradation and prolonging document lifespan, carrying out environmental checks, preparing and monitoring an emergency plan, transferring to alternate media, and the like. So if that's preventative preservation, like senior general practitioner for regular checkups, then remedial preservation is like going to visit an ER doctor after breaking a bone. So the ER doctor will reset your bone, will bandage you up, but they're not going to look at sort of the longer-term issues you might be having, like your cholesterol levels or something like that. There's more like an individual item level conservation treatment you might want to have done on some of your institution's most treasured objects. And it's definitely still part of preservation planning. You need to budget time and funds to have that conservation work done. However, as you can sort of see, I think between these two conversations here, preventative measures have the greatest impact on the long-term preservation of the collection as a whole. So to the extent practical, preservation planning should really focus first on the activities that will benefit the collection as a whole by preventing or minimizing damage or loss of the preventative thing and then look at the remedial treatment needs of the specific parts of the collections or individual item. For example, it doesn't make a whole lot of time, like a lot of sense to invest resources on conservation treatment only to return items to a poor storage environment where they're going to just get damaged again by temperature and humidity fluctuations or to allow careless handling to continue and items get dropped. You're just going to have to do it again. So these two things are, it's important to understand the difference between both when we're talking about preservation planning. So I just wanted to make sure that that is understood from the beginning here. So now let's talk about what preservation planning is. As cultural institutions, libraries, archives, museums, historic sites and the like are all responsible not only for collecting, interpreting, and exhibiting significant materials that document history and art and all of those things, but also for the long-term preservation, security and accessibility of those materials. So in other words, we are responsible for the stewardship of our materials and there's a lot that goes into that, right? Selections management and preservation must be considered in all institutional decisions from building maintenance to security to staffing and only when the infrastructure of collections, care and management is in place and is consistently and constantly supported can an institution safely design and install exhibitions, plan public programming and provide research access. All of these preventative measures must be taken in place to ensure that collection safety and well-being. And I mentioned this in a lot of comments to people in their self-assessments as it doesn't sound like you have a lot of communication happening interdepartmentally and that's really important in preservation planning as it has to be something that is understood on an institutional level not just your department. And so, you know, I know that's a lot easier to have been done, right? But it's something we definitely want to strive for and that's because the public really entrusts us with the task of properly carrying for collections materials. In fact, usually preservation is an integral part of our mission. So we really do have an ethical obligation to take care of things to the best of our abilities and that can be a really good kind of argument for why the rest of the institution needs to get on board with this. So I'd recommend that approach when you're trying to get others on board. And, you know, I'm a big planner in general and as most things in life, the best way to take care of things is to have a plan. So in the case of collections care, the best way to make that happen is through preservation planning which should be part of the institution's overall strategic plan as well as your sort of departmental plan. So probably since you guys are all here in this series and you've made it to the end, you all understand why preservation planning is so important. But again, I really want to give you guys some ammo to go back to your upload management, your administrators, boards, all those people and explain to them why this is so important to kind of get everybody on board. When an institution undertakes preservation planning with a clear understanding of the purpose, scope and nature of its collection, preservation plans can be developed that are responsive to institutional priorities, users' needs and the preservation of the collection. It can also be, and this is really important here, can also be a really big money favor. It's more cost effective for the institution. Putting in smaller sums of money over the long haul is usually preferable to paying a large chunk of money to fix a giant problem once it becomes a disaster. So, you know, that's something that can really help and it's the best use of your money. Remember that example I just gave you with the remedial versus preventative, it doesn't make sense to sort of spend all that money on that conservation just to have it go back again, right? So it's a really good use of funds as well. Also key to effective preservation planning is the establishment of intellectual control over existing holdings. Lee talked about this a little bit about, in his webinar last week, or the week before, excuse me, about sort of the ordering which things have to be done and the inventory comes first, right? Getting that intellectual control over everything. The staff knowledge of the nature, scope and quantity of the collection guides many of the decisions involved in preservation planning, including selecting and prioritizing materials for preservation, determining needs for resources such as staffing, funding and supplies, what sorts of assessments you're going to be doing, right? Staff familiarity with the content of the collection also provides information about their value for research, as well as their historical, artifactual, or aesthetic value. The staff understanding of the value and potential use of collection helps you determine both the priorities for preservation action and the appropriate preservation methods to use. And the results of this whole preservation planning process is not just to, you know, have fun talking about preservation, which, of course, I think that's very fun, but it's actually in the end to come up with a formal, written, long-range preservation plan. A written plan not only works to validate the role and importance of preservation, but it also helps to make preservation an equal partner in other institutional priorities. It's really vital for that advocating for collections care that Lee talked about so much. Really vital for securing the necessary resources and funding. And Susan has given you a little bit more information there about Sherilyn Ogden's preservation planning worksheet. Sherilyn Ogden is sort of like the guru goddess of preservation planning, so I definitely recommend looking into that. This book here that I have up on the screen is another really excellent resource, so you should definitely check that out, too, when you are trying to work on writing a preservation plan. She defines a preservation plan as a document that defines and charts the course of action to meet an institution's overall preservation needs for its collection, provides a framework or context for carrying out established goals and priorities in a logical, efficient, and effective manner. It is a working tool for achieving agreed upon priorities over a set period of time. So it's really, I love that definition of it. I couldn't have said that it better myself. Sherilyn says that the book is out of print, so I'm not sure maybe it'll come back or maybe there's a library that you may be able to borrow it from. Oh, and here, Susan knows there's a second edition coming out, so that's pretty exciting. Keep your eyes peeled for that. Maybe there's something, maybe a library that you might be able to borrow it from. If you are near Philadelphia, I believe we have a copy here at CCHA you might be able to borrow. So actually having that tangible written plan is super important in this as well. The needs of the collections are really multifaceted and complex and they need to be strategically addressed and sort of the best way to do that is to put it all out there, write it all down, put it all out there. And as we've discussed, the preventative preservation is cost-effective, will help the greatest impact long-term plan on the collections. Having that written document also really helps the staff. It helps sort of direct and guide them, ongoing collections, care and management of the collections, outlining the needs, ongoing projects, necessary staffing and funding. And when I say staff, I don't just mean paid staff. This can be a really helpful volunteer management tool as well trying to make sure all of the pieces are sort of working together. So I've taught a whole series of workshops on preservation planning through New York State earlier this year and a lot of the comments that people got backwards, this is just a really good way to organize staff, volunteers, everybody so that we're all sort of on topic. And rating this down because there are so many sort of moving parts is really important. Okay. So now we all know why this is important and why we want to do it. Let's talk about, you know, a little bit about the components of a plan. We already know kind of how we're going to start there. We're going to use the same team that we gathered for our preservation assessment. We're going to have a lot of sort of data. We've assessed a lot of needs. But now we want to talk about what's the best way to go through the variety of substance we discussed, actually break them down and create them or use them to create a preservation plan. So now of course there's many ways to do this. There is no like one size fits all, kind of like those, the assessments I talked about before. You should definitely, you know, other assessors are going to have things set out in certain ways. This is the way that I like to do a preservation plan. But of course you should do whatever kind of works best for you. Obviously preservation plans are going to vary greatly from institution to institution, but generally the preservation plans start like goals, objectives and strategies for the next three to five years for the collection. The plan should focus on staffing, funding, building environment security, emergency preparedness, selection development, access, intellectual control and more detailed topics that relate specifically to collections preservation. This sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it? It kind of sounds a little bit like what's covered in the preservation needs assessments, right? So that is on purpose. The plan should also outline actions necessary to provide adequate staff and funding, assign responsibility and set a schedule for implementation. So the sections you see over on the left-hand side of the screen are a bit more in general. They're self-explanatory. So, you know, I don't want to go over them in too much detail, but in short, you do want to make sure you're setting the institutional background, a description of the collections, a general overview of the preservation needs, a list of preservation accomplishments to date. I really like including that, because it helps you just sort of keep track of things. And I know staff turnover, and it's kind of hard to know what worked and what didn't. So if you can sort of get in the habit of writing things down in these sort of living documents, preservation plans, then you'll always sort of have that record. You do also want to show where this plan fits in to the rest of your organization. So that's important as well to show as you're talking about it's an equal partner of other areas of the institution, and you do want to make sure in this sort of that general area that you are talking about how this is fitting in in that sort of big picture. The items on the right-hand side of the screen, especially what I've started there, are a little bit more complicated, so we're going to do a deeper dive over there. We will talk a bit about the prioritization of tasks soon because that is really important, and we will have a short homework assignment on that. But for now, I want to focus on the big starred section there, preservation goals and objectives. This is really kind of the meat of the plan, and the section below that, the project priorities, project timelines, takes the information you set forth in that bigger preservation goals and objectives and maps it into a timeline. So let's go ahead and break down that a little bit more. If anybody has done any strategic planning or anything like that, this is probably going to look pretty familiar to you, but this is the idea of breaking things down into sort of bite-sized chunks, and I've said that a lot in people's comments, too. Think about how you can take this big concern and break it up into little bitty, bite-sized chunks so that they're more approachable. The goal is that big picture thing. It describes where you want to be in the future. At the end of the five-year plan, this is what we want it to look like, or you could even dream bigger. At the end of 10 years, in my biggest dream, this is where we want to be. It's broad, big picture. It's not always measurable. It sometimes is, but it can just be more of an ideal. Those are big and sometimes amorphous things. You want to break those down into objectives, into the little steps, explaining how you're going to reach each of these goals. These are often more measurable, and you can often sort of set a target goal with that. Each of those are then broken down smaller into the strategies, which are those actions or tools used to reach each objective, and those get very specific. So we sort of move up in specificity as we go through this, and I'm going to show you some examples to kind of explain what I mean about this. So, since we talked about the health thing already with our preventive versus remedial preservation, so we'll just use a non-cultural heritage example to sort of explain this concept a little bit more. You know, you want to lose weight. Be healthy. That's your big goal in five years from now. I want to have lost weight. You could have that be measurable or not. You could just want to be more healthy, right? And then how do you break that down? What are the steps there? Exercise, you'll eat healthy. You'll do a little bit more detailed, right? And then you break it down into the even more specific detail, right? You'll exercise. You're going to do 30 minutes of cardio a day. You're going to lift weights for 20 minutes a day. Seems crazy to me. This person must not be working full-time. But, you know, that's the idea behind it there. You know, it gets sort of more specific as we break down, and that's the same idea with your preservation plan as well. You're going to be breaking things down. Let's do a cultural heritage example here as well. I'm going to start with my big goal, to maintain environmental conditions that meet conservation standards for the long-term preservation of collections in all areas of collections and purials, right? That's sort of big. You know, in five years, it's sort of an ideal. Five years from now, that's what I'm hoping we'll be at. Then we'll further outline how you're going to meet the goals. It's a series of objectives. You know, I have two here, but you definitely could and should in a lot of cases have more than two. But just for the purposes of this example, I have two. So the objectives are sort of self-contained. We'll form sort of the foundation of the course of action outlined further in the preservation plan. So before I can maintain them, I have to know the environmental conditions, and then I have another one that sets a target. Remember how we talked about that on the previous slide? You could set a target for, I want to have the humidity between this range. So then each of those is broken down even further into more easily accomplished activities or strategies, which again, I've done here, lines up with the idea where you want to sort of break it down into little tiny bite-sized chunks. So to know the environmental conditions, I need to purchase and install data loggers. I need to also establish an environmental monitoring program so that I will know the environmental conditions. That keeping humidity between that might be that I run a dehumidifier when RH hits 60%, right? Which I will know because I've established an environmental monitoring program. So you can kind of see how it breaks down there. So after each, after listing each of these activities, you will definitely want to designate responsibility for each activity and establish a timeline for completion. Determining the schedule for completion, who will carry out the activity and who will be responsible for ensuring that it's completed on schedule are key to successful implementation of the preservation plan. So you can't just kind of say these, you know, it's really important to tie them to a specific person. That can be a volunteer. That can be, you know, a temporary employee, something like that. It doesn't have to be the, you know, head of collections or collections manager every time, but it is important that it is assigned to somebody. Along with that, you will also want to identify resources required to carry out each activity so that those resources can be factored into the institutional budget. And resources can include not just money, and I know that comes to mind first, but also staff and time, space, supplies, of course money is part of it, and also if you might need some outside expertise to come in with some of it. Again, you also want to schedule, create a schedule for completion for each activity to be sure that, you know, you're keeping, you're keeping up with everything. And that can be helpful to give sort of those deadlines, due dates to staff. Make sure that it's realistic. I always recommend sort of over-budgeting time. It's easier and better for staff morale if you've come in ahead of a project. And some of that will be related to prioritization. That timeline was going to go hand in hand, so we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail soon. But you want to make sure that you're definitely assigning responsibility and assigning a due date. So hopefully this is starting to make sense. I wanted to show one more example, and then have you guys help me out with one just so we can practice a little bit. Because I love emergencies, which you guys are probably learning. But so another one that might ring true for some of us, our big goal, safeguard the collection from emergencies. How can you break that down into objectives? One objective might be have an up-to-date emergency plan. What might be one of the first activities you would do with that? You might form a cross-departmental team to update the current plan, or write a new one, depending on your situation, right? Another objective, reading up to our big goal of safeguarding the collections, is to ensure an effective response. So to have an effective response, we might need to have supplies, right? So you're going to purchase and replenish your emergency kit. Having an effective response is also important that your staff knows what they're doing. So you want to conduct staff training annually. You can see how it's sort of broken down into these little bite-sized chunks. I know a lot of the kind of goals can seem really overwhelming, but if we can really think about it like this, it makes it a little bit easier to tackle. So I have a couple here, and we'll have to sort of write frantically in the comments there about how you might break this down into an objective or a strategy, or an objective and strategy. But let's kind of see if we can do one together. You guys can help me out a little bit. So what if our main goal is in five or 10 years, right? Our collections are housed to conservation and preservation standards. What would be an objective that we could do with that? Oh, I see lots of people typing, so that's great. But thinking about those bite-sized chunks, that's a big, lofty goal. So how can we break it down and make this more achievable? I still see some typing. So I'll let the typing happen for a minute, and I'll just talk this all the time. So remember, you're breaking it down into one big step is the objective, and then those go even smaller into little or individual items. So Elizabeth suggests to work collection by collection to get all items in neutral boxes. That's a great sort of way to think about it, breaking it down by collection. So you might have, we're going to start with, you know, the Elizabeth collection, right? We'll be the first one we tackle, and then we'll do the Emily collection next, or whatever that sort of thing. That's a good way to go about it. Emily suggests assessing how many preservation boxes are needed. Yep, that might be a little bit later down on, well, it could go either way, right? You could have that as an objective, and then putting them in the boxes, right? Might be your strategy there. Claire H. says Assessments of Current Housing. Yes, I think that's a really good one to do. You can't really know, like, you don't know what you're going to do until you know what you have, right? So that's a great one, assessing it. Claire T. says Identifying Priorities Identified in the Survey. Yes, so you're, if you have a good assessment, and we'll, you know, you can pull a lot of this out of the assessments that you have. So you will want to go through and look at what are some of the recommendations from there and pull those out, and you can slot them right in off into a lot of these goals, objectives, and strategies. So see what has been said in your assessments first. Jamie suggests Development and Environmental Monitoring and IPM Plan. Yeah, that could be sort of a bigger topic too. That might even go more into goals, more into, like, having that environmental conditions, right? But that could also be another sub-objective here with this bigger goal. That's what I mean by there's no one, one-size-fits-all, right? You could do this in many different ways. So it's going to be important to figure out what is going to work best for you. You could look at this sort of bigger overall goal and think of this purely as housing, and you could also think about it a little bit more as the environmental too. So definitely have to modify according to what's going to work for you. I know Sharon is typing, so keep typing over there, Sharon, but I'm going to move on to... Oh, she has developed the Plan Breakdowns Objectives with strategies. Yep, that's exactly the process. So I'm going to do one more example together, and then we'll talk a little bit more about some other topics here. So here's my other example. Collections are managed with an up-to-date collections management policy. Our big goal, 10 years from now, we want to make sure we have a collections management policy that is useful, up-to-date, appropriate. How can we break this down into some objectives and strategies? All right, so Emily is saying, define different parts of the collection and rates of those policies for each. Yeah, that might be good. You might also kind of break it down into sections of the collections management policy and just do them sort of one at a time. Claire H. sort of suggests that too. Identify components of the policy and do it. Example, digital versus print. Yes, that's great. So those are both excellent. I sort of missed doing these polls earlier, but let's go ahead and we'll do them now just so we can kind of get a sense of where everybody's at. I wanted to ask you guys if anybody had a preservation plan already for their institution, and also wanted to ask if you had a strategic plan. They're both pretty related, and they have sort of a similar sort of strategy of this goals, objectives, and strategies. So if you've done it, it might be familiar to you already. Lots of you have strategic plans. So that's great. That's a really good, that's a very good first start to this. And I see some of you even have preservation plans. So that's awesome. If you have some experience with writing either of these, please let us know in the comments. And we can learn from each other as well. Great. So I'm going to go ahead. We'll kind of shift gears a little bit. And I'm going to talk now a little bit about prioritization. You know, we sort of get this theory about how we're going to kind of go through things, kind of step-by-step, breaking down to bite-sized chunks. But how do you know when do you do what, right? You've gathered your team. You've got the data information. You have a preservation needs assessment. You know your goals, objectives, and strategies. But how do you figure out what is done first? And this is probably honestly the hardest part right here, figuring out how to prioritize. Planning requires, you know, a lot of sort of people skills, understanding the organizational dynamics as a whole at the institution, and nowhere is that more evident than in prioritization. So you really need to bring sort of all your interpersonal skills and big-picture thinking to the table. You need to listen to what the issues of other departments are and be able to focus on what best serves the needs of the institution as a whole, rather than sort of one particular area, one particular collection, one particular department, or your area of expertise, right? So in the long run, that will serve your, that whatever that particular area is that you're most worried about, that will serve your, that area as best also. So luckily, if you've had a preservation needs assessment done, hopefully some of this will have been done for you and it might come a little bit easier, especially because you guys have been working through all of this already and have had that sort of outside consultant help guide you through it a little bit. But there is definitely still some thing you need to go back and think for yourself and with your institution. So after gathering all of the information we've talked about, you're going to have a ton of goals for recommendations, et cetera, to consider. Some surveys or assessments, as I said before, might make prioritization suggestions for you, depending on the consultant or type of survey, but even still you will need to consider and evaluate the recommendations given. Some things to think about include, you know, what action is going to benefit the largest portion of the collection, what collection or collection items are an institutional priority, and what are the institution's most immediate and pressing needs. Which of the recommendations are feasible in the next five years, right, in the plan and which are a little bit more long-term and require more planning and investment, what resources you will need. In the example that I sent in the handout pages, I have a sample of the redacted preservation plan that I worked on, an institution here in Philadelphia, and in that area I write a lot about the methodology and how I did the prioritization there, so definitely check that out when you have time. I'm going to talk a little bit more about what some other ways to think about prioritization might be. Even if you have suggestions from a consultant as what might be your biggest, most pressing needs, that definitely is something to consider, but you also want to think about how it fits into your institution. Prioritizing is the process of deciding which actions will have the most significant impact, which are the most important and which are the most feasible. So it's important to keep in mind that the preservation plan does still have to fit into an institutional context. That's what we wanted to talk about, how it fits into that right in the beginning. So in addition to reviewing information in your surveys and interviews, you will also want to be reviewing other institutional documents. Most importantly, you should closely examine the mission statement, but other documents you might need to consult and review during this process include any other sort of long-range plans, master plans or strategic plans, collections policies, emergency preparedness plans, appraisals, grant proposals, any sort of other things like that. And remember, what works for one institution might not work for you, right? Just because something is a best practice, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is right for you or fits into your institutional context. But the sort of sweet spot, I think, to determining how important a task or recommendation is, is to see where it fits into this Venn diagram. So I really like to consider these sort of criteria when considering prioritizing preservation action. The first is impact. This is sort of the extent to the action will improve the preservation of an institution's collection. High impact actions will result in a dramatic improvement in the present condition of materials, substantial decrease in the rate of deterioration, substantial increase in the efficiency of current preservation activities or considerable savings of time, energy, and money. The high impact thing. The second is feasibility. Actions will sort of vary in the amount of time and resources required to implement them. Some are really easy to implement. Well, some are more difficult, if not impossible, right? So factors to include here might be staffing levels, expertise, financial implications, and the policy and procedural changes. The political feasibility of various actions must also be realistically evaluated here. If you know that, you know, something is going to not work because Joe in maintenance is just not going to do it, right? That is something to consider, right? If it's not feasible to implement an action, it may be given a lower priority even if it's a higher impact. The third thing to consider is urgent faith, right? Actions can be considered urgent. If waiting to implement them would cause further problems or it would mean bypassing an opportunity. So if there is a grant available right now, it will solve this problem. It might bump that task up on your priority list because of the opportunity. I also think of this as literally on fire right now. We have to put it out. It doesn't matter what the other things are. So that's another thing that you would want to consider. And all other factors kind of equal. The actions requiring immediate implementation would be given the highest priority. I see a comment from Claire over there about getting quotes. I think that these will be available to after the fact. You guys will have access to the recordings. So you might be able to quote me that way by pausing or, you know, sharing this with maybe whoever you're trying to convince that we want to do this. Susan, you can correct me if I'm wrong there, but I think the recordings will be available for people later. So no matter if you are sort of, you know, how you're thinking about prioritization, I think it's really helpful to kind of come up with some sort of tool, something to kind of help you think about this in sort of a systematic way so that you're not just, you know, deciding in that Venn diagram. This is where it goes. I like to really give the numerical values. It's sort of a tough exercise because sometimes it feels like you're splitting hair. What's the difference between a 9 and an 8? What's the difference between, you know, a 3 and a 4? But if you go through this process and you're able to sort of have that numerical number, even if it's kind of forced and seems a little bit arbitrary, it gives you something to react to and react against and you can always change numbers. So, you know, I do encourage you to think of some sort of systematic way to creating prioritization. There's some online tools we've talked about, especially that FAIC risk planning and evaluation tool that I shared with you all during the risk assessment webinar. That one's a great one to kind of help you do your sort of prioritization list. You know, again, the outside recommendations from our consultants are really helpful. But again, you might want to go and make your own tool to help you sort of standardize the approach. Even if you are doing something that sort of fits out priorities for you or working with a consultant, it's always good to review for yourself. In this way, all the constituents at your institution can be satisfied or they'll at least understand the logic behind you or your committee. I actually think you should do this in a committee. Decisions to prioritize different activities. You know, different areas might think that there are different priorities. So, it's really nice to be able to show them we considered all of those factors and this is why we are doing things in this order. So, once you've developed a sort of prioritization criteria or tool, there's a number of ways you can examine recommendations. You can either sort of rate or rank them. This one is just the informal rating system. As I said before, I'd always suggest working in a committee for this. Really any sort of prioritization project, that team that you assembled, this is sort of a whole team activity. You can kind of see how people are rating various things. So, you're not sort of working by yourself and making decisions in a vacuum, right? This is just a really simple DIY prioritization tool that I just made up sort of on the fly. You can just take the list of proposed tasks. That might be the recommendations. These are probably going to be more like those strategies, right? Those very end uses are really sort of specific actions. And you can kind of look at them, assign them a value, each of the tasks in the areas of consideration, impact feasibility or urgency, and find out the average value to determine overall score. With that, you can rank your strategies there. Low, medium, or high priorities, as I have up on the screen there, just a couple of examples that are completely made up. Susan, I just took the average number for my final number there of the rest, but you could do it however. This is pretty arbitrary, whatever kind of is working for you to give you sort of a number to work with. I took the average for this particular example, but you can definitely... I encourage you to make up a tool that works for you. So once your committee kind of comes up with the criteria for each of these, it'll help you to sort of drive the decisions. And again, there's no one size fits all approach, so feel free to make up your own tools. I did also want to show you those same examples that I just showed on the other side. This is the FAIC, the risk evaluation and the planning tools that they have on their website using that methodology. So the way they found that was they looked at sort of the risk. They identified each risk, and then they identified a mitigation solution, and they multiplied the risk, as we talked about in that last webinar, the risk is the potential for the risk to actually occur and the impact that it's going to have on collections that gives you sort of that overall score. Your mitigation strategy incorporates sort of the feasibility of doing the mitigation strategy and the impact it will have. And I really like this one, because you can put things next to each other to kind of see where your money is best spent. You know, the bottom one there, lots of light exposure. It's a sort of middling risk, but it's a pretty easy for just a light meter mitigation solution. You might do it to check it off your list, that HVAC leak is a pretty high risk, but the repair, as you can see, it's not super feasible, but the impact would be really high, so it sort of has a middling thing there and might be worth spending the time and money to do. The processing, the backlog, hiring collection staff, that one is a little bit trickier and might not be a highest priority thing to do given your current situation. So, you know, just some different ways to kind of think about things. And as I said before, no one size fits all. There's also, I've seen people use this sort of matrix approach before. They just sort of plot things into here. Again, this is all pretty subjective. You don't want to do it by yourself. You want to be doing it in a committee. You can kind of go through each recommendation, place them on the charts, sort of debate it out with your committee. A little less numerically focused, but might work better for some institutions out there. So just wanted to give you a couple of different ways to prioritize, but of course, encourage you to make up your own systems as well. And this will actually be your homework. When we come to it, I'll go over it a little bit more, but remember some of these tools and hopefully you have some ideas for some of what tools might work for you at your institutions, because you will be prioritizing a little bit with some of your own institutional needs for your homework assignment. But I did want to kind of go through a sample. And you do have the sample preservation plan, and also a template for writing a preservation plan in the downloads. So please make sure to check those out. But I did want to kind of show you what a completed section might look like. So this is from that sample that I told you about here in Philadelphia. Here we see their big goal, what they're hoping to be like in five years. In this case, the big goal is to be more prepared, know like a disaster. So they want to be more prepared. It's broken down into objectives, and we see one of those objectives here. In this case, it's to have a plan that each of those objectives are broken down into smaller strategies for each strategy. It's important that we are being very clear in what you're hoping to achieve. Also crucial to figuring out what resources are needed. There should always be someone assigned a strategy, and they should be given a timeline for completion, which you see there. This is so important, so you don't feel like things are just sort of never-ending, right? You want to make sure that you have that, and you can kind of see they did this with an impact feasibility for there. So just sort of an example of how that might break down. And then, of course, for each goal, you're going to have more than one objective, so I did want to show a couple other objectives here as well. And I'm not really reflective here, but you might have more than one strategy as well, too. There are more strategies. I put the two strategies up here, too, but there might be more objectives that relate to the larger goal of having this emergency plan up to date. So that's what it might sort of look like, and I do hope you go look at the downloads to kind of get a better sense of that, what it might look like, and sort of all laid out. It's sort of hard to show the paper documents in a PowerPoint situation, but looking at the paper document will help there. And I did want to talk about this ranking and rating and prioritization is so important, because eventually, you're going to have a lot of these individual strategies, and you can kind of line them all up here to see where you should be sort of spending your time and money with a high-priority project might be that you've identified. Remember, it's all in the downloads, so you can really look at this a little bit closer. But the thing here that I'm showing is we're lining up the task based on their priority, and then you can also sort of, you could also line it up based on the timeline for completion. Things really start flowing together this way. You can line things up again. This one is, we're showing it by priority, so we're showing sort of those high, the ones that got that high feasibility impact rating. Those ones are ones that we're going to probably want to tackle first. We might change our timeline a little bit based on that. And you also are going to be able to see who is assigned to it. Like, for example, it looks like that painting conservator is assigned to a lot of these projects. So we might want to consider, you know, are they actually able to do all of this? What are some things we can assign to other people? When we have it all laid out like this, it's a lot easier to kind of see it all together, puzzle your way through it, figure out how you might be able to shift around tasks so that things can still be completed. So it's a good tool to use, a good management tool for staff and volunteers as well. Great. I see Elizabeth's writing question. I'm going to talk just briefly about your homework assignments here just to go over it real quick. So again, I really appreciated reading a little bit about your institution based on your sort of self-assessment. I didn't go into them in a ton of detail, but I did read through them and I picked out the things that I thought might be some of your biggest priorities to kind of guide you a little bit. But for your homework, you can consider the things I said, but as you would do in an assessment, you're taking me, the outside consultant, as one bit of information, but you have to internally decide what your biggest priorities are going to be. So based on kind of your reflection, I want you to think about what the three biggest priorities might be for your institution and then tell us the order. Are they high, medium, or low priorities for your institution? And then give us a little bit the justification of each of those. You can upload that in sort of one word document in the platform back there. And again, that's going to be due next Friday for the Credly badge. So hopefully that all makes sense. Please let me know if you have any questions about it. I will actually be out of the country next week, so Susan will be at your main point of contact in a lot of those. And that brings us to the end. I did want to spend some time to see if you had any final questions and any wrap up, but it's been a pleasure working with you all and learning a little bit more about your institution. But hopefully you have been inspired to get an assessment and use it as a tool for fundraising and for writing your eventual preservation plan at your institution. And if you are coming to the ASLH annual conference, which will be held in Philadelphia just at the end of this month, Susan and I are actually presenting there about overcoming barriers to preservation. And I'm also doing another session with a local institution here in Philadelphia about the same topic, making the most of your assessment and a little bit more about how one institution and I have gone through this whole process together over the course of several years. So a little bit more follow-up if you are around. Oh, and Sharon is saying she's not there, but she signed up for the online conference, and I do have to say I am presenting my session on this topic on the online conference. You can catch me there as well. Right, yeah. So I also wanted to add that sometimes it's really helpful in an area that's not a public area to make a big list and use those huge post-it sheets that people use in meetings and put up the stuff you need to do and then you can cross it off. And crossing it off really helps people feel like they're accomplishing something. Yeah. Yeah, at Christmas time I got a note from one of the museums I used to work with that Susan, we've finished everything on your list. Are you ever going to come and see us again? Yes, there's always more to do. Well, that's why it's important you can get another preservation needs assessment done as we talk about in the way beginning. Probably every 10 years is good for that. And then you get to start this whole process again. So you will have that list. Elizabeth and Emily are having a question about, I have a file, I'm not sure about the details there, but I'm paying attention to your assignments. So don't worry if you got something on week one, I will take care of it. And thank you, Mike. This is very important, the course evaluation. We really do look at those. They're very important to us. They help us determine future things and let us know what's good, what's bad, where you're from, that kind of stuff. So please take a minute and fill this out. And I'll also post a link in the handout. And let's see, if you have any problems, you should contact me at this address because if you just hit reply in the education thing, it goes to two people before it gets to me. So if you need to ask a question, ask me directly. And I think that's it, unless any of you have any questions, just not. Thank you so much, Samantha. This was really good. Yeah, hopefully it's useful. I think the assessments are really sort of an underutilized tool out there. So I'm hoping we'll help people feel inspired to get in the assessment and actually use it. Yeah. And we will all see you in Philadelphia, I hope. Yeah. Whoever's there, you should definitely stop us both and say hello. We're always happy to meet the disembodied voices that we work with. Okay. So thank you, Mike. Thank you, Samantha. And thank you all. And pay attention to the Collecting to Collections where Collections Care website for future stuff. We have a course on housekeeping coming up in the fall. And one on lighting. There's the one on fire. There's archival processing. I can't think of the rest. You know, pay attention to that. And we'll see you in the future. Thank you.