 Welcome to the introduction to CAP webinar. My name is Liz Handler-Curt. I am the CAP program coordinator. In this webinar, I will talk about the CAP program to also give you a better understanding of whether this will be a good program to help your institution now or in the future. I will talk about the CAP process, the benefits of participating, as well as eligibility and funding. The CAP program is administered by the Foundation for Advancement and Conservation under a cooperative agreement with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It is designed to help small and mid-sized museums by providing funding and support for a general conservation assessment. CAP is often a first step for small institutions that wish to improve the condition of their collections and develop long-range preservation plans. The general conservation assessment is a review of all the institution's collections, buildings, and building systems, as well as policies and procedures relating to collections' care. This is not an item-by-item review of the collections, but a broader, big-pitcher review. The goal is to help the museum determine their greatest collection care needs. We all struggle with limited time and limited resources, so the goal of the CAP assessment is to help you determine where to invest limited resources to best improve the care of your collections. So how does the CAP process work? The most important thing is that this is a team process. The internal aspect of the team is your staff, your board members, and your volunteers. We encourage you to get as many people involved in the process as possible. It helps your assessors to get a more well-rounded understanding of your museum, and it helps create institution-wide buy-in for the recommendations in the report. The other members of your CAP team are the assessors. Most museums will have two assessors, one who has a collections background, usually a conservator, and one with a building background, which may be an architect, an engineer, or a historic preservationist. The two assessors work collaboratively to create prioritized recommendations for improved collections' care. The CAP process takes about a year and is comprised of multiple steps. Once accepted into the program, the institutions will select their two assessors. We provide a list of approved assessors that they will review and interview. The museum will also complete a site questionnaire. We will provide the museum with a questionnaire that asks specific questions about the organization, collections, buildings, building systems, and policies and procedures. The site questionnaire helps the assessors get to know your museum. As you near your site visit, the museum will also hold a pre-site visit phone call with the assessors. The goal of the call is to introduce members of the project team to one another and to allow assessors to ask questions to get to know the institution, their goals, and concerns. It will also be a time to organize the schedule for the site visit, and having this preparatory phone call will really help the assessors make the most of their time during the site visit itself. Next will be the two-day site visit. During the site visit, the assessors will tour the collections, the buildings, and the exhibition spaces, looking at things like lighting in your building, the storage materials you're using, and the environmental controls you have. Your staff and their roles related to collections care, your collections policy, and a number of other things that affect the preservation of your collection. They may also meet with other staff, board members, and volunteers. This will culminate in a written report that is usually submitted six to eight weeks after the site visit. The report contains prioritized recommendations for improved collections care at the site. Then, approximately 12 months after the initial site visit, the institution will have the opportunity to consult with the assessors once again to report on progress, request further advice, and address any challenges that may have arisen. And again, the final product is a comprehensive report written by your assessors with prioritized recommendations for improved collections care. Here you'll see some examples of the recommendations you might find in the final report. Every CAHB report will contain an executive summary that serves as a prioritized list of recommendations. Though you may be aware of some of these issues already, the assessors can help you decide on where to invest limited resources and staff time. This is not a complete list of recommendations, nor are they all from one single report, but it can give you a general sense of the range of issues that assessors look at. Having a prioritized list of recommendations is important, so you don't feel overwhelmed with a bunch of recommendations and you're not even sure where to start. This example has the recommendations organized by critical, high, medium, and low priority, but other reports might use intermediate, short, and long-term, or one-year, three-year, five-years. There are many variations in how the assessors will organize their findings, which are all based both on their preference and the needs of your institution. Some of these recommendations, like updating a written collections management policy, require only an investment of staff and board time. Others, like adding an air filtration system, might require more fundraising and more time to implement. It's typical to have a range of different types of recommendations in the report. There are many benefits to CAP. As busy professionals, it can be challenging to take a step back from the long list of day-to-day needs and projects of your museum to help create some long-range planning. And CAP can be a wonderful way to start that process. In addition, if you're interested in seeking grant funding or private support for conservation or preservation activities, a CAP report can provide a professional argument for the need for such work. Bringing in an outside consultant to identify a need can really help in adding that needed weight to a grant application. Having an outside perspective can also be valuable in drawing the attention of your board or other leadership and community partners to collections' care concerns and to help engage them and create a sense of momentum for addressing those concerns. We've talked a lot about what CAP does and its benefits, but I also wanted to review quickly what CAP is not. We unfortunately do not provide grant funding for collections' care or for the implementation of your CAP recommendations. We do try to share some information about relevant grant programs as they come up, but FAIC does not administer any of those programs. CAP also does not provide individual conservation treatments or object-level surveys. It is meant to be a broader look at the collections, the building systems, and the policies and procedures. This program emphasizes preventative conservation and what your institution can do to create the best environment for the items in your collection. The CAP program is built for all types of museums, from art museums to historical societies and nature centers. With that said, libraries and archives are not eligible for the CAP program. The reason for this is due to the program funding. The CAP program is administered under a cooperative agreement with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Office of Museum Services. So therefore, the program can only serve those institutions defined as a museum. We understand that many museums have archival materials, and that's okay. As long as your institution has objects and identifies primarily as a museum and not an archival library, you're eligible. Next, I want to go through the other eligibility criteria that museums need to follow. First, you must be a non-profit organization or a unit of state, local, or tribal government. If your institution exists within a multi-purpose public or private non-profit organization, such as a municipality or university, you are also eligible for CAP. Second, your institution must be located in the U.S. This includes the District of Columbia and all U.S. territories. Third, your institution must be organized on a permanent basis for educational or aesthetic purposes. This means that art centers or galleries whose primary purpose is the promotion and sale of art, for example, would not be eligible. Fourth, the institution must also own tangible objects and make them available to the public through exhibition and or research on a regular basis. You may have seen other IMLS programs or grants that require the institution to be open to the public for a minimum number of days per year to be eligible. CAP does not have this requirement. We do ask that you show a commitment to regular public access. Fifth, your institution must employ at least one full-time person or the equivalent of a full-time person. That person does not have to be paid. You may have a very dedicated group of volunteers that put in the equivalent of full-time, but there needs to be a workforce that can oversee the assessment and, most importantly, work on implementing the report's recommendations after the assessment. And finally, it must be possible for assessors to review all of your collections and facilities in a two-day site visit. If you've never had a conservation assessment before, you might not know how to determine whether your site can be assessed in two days. What we would suggest is to think about your site or sites. Think about all the collection storage areas you have, the exhibition spaces, and all of the buildings. Now, this isn't an object-by-object assessment, but your assessors will need to spend time visiting all those sites, observing the environments, and talking to staff. They should also be able to take time to process their notes and think through preliminary recommendations. They need to be able to do all of that in two eight-hour days. If you are unsure about any of this, please contact us and we can talk the particulars of your museum and whether that would be possible in a two-day site visit. Now that we know who is eligible, let's run quickly through who is not eligible for the CAT program. Agencies of the federal government, and that is because the funding for the program comes through IMLS and that is a federal agency. Institutions that serve primarily as libraries or archives are not eligible. Historic structures without collections. If you are just a historic building and there are no collection items beyond the building, then you are not eligible for the program. Also, if you don't own your collections, you are not eligible. If the objects in your collections are on loan and if you are responsible, for example, for caring for the collection, but they are still in private hands, unfortunately you would not be eligible. It is fine if some of your collection items are on loan, but the majority needs to be owned by the museum. Institutions with collections that take more than two days to assess are also not eligible. Again, if you have any questions regarding any of these eligibility requirements, please don't hesitate to contact us. Institutions that participate in the CAT program will receive an allocation toward their assessor's fees. Allocation amounts range from $3600 to $4000 per assessor based on the annual operating budget of the institution. For example, if your annual budget is $150,000, you would receive an allocation of $4000 for a collections assessor and $4000 for a building assessor. CAP is not a grant because funding never flows to participating institutions. Instead, the allocation is paid by FAIC directly to the assessors. The institution will be responsible for paying the remainder of the assessment cost. All of the CAP assessors are independent contractors and may perform similar conservation assessments outside of the CAT program, so they already have their own set fee structures. Here is a sample fee scenario, and remember that this represents one contract with one of your two assessors. Let's say the collections assessor that you choose charges a professional fee of $4000, and her travel expenses are $900 to cover mileage, food, and hotel. That assessor's total fee would be $4900. If your CAP allocation was $4000, your museum would be responsible for the remaining $900. I know people always want to know how much they should budget for their participation in the program. It is difficult to provide a range because it really does vary, but in the past couple years, the average museum contributed around $1,300 to the total process. Now, actual museum costs have ranged from next to nothing to a couple thousand, but if you're thinking of applying to the program and you're working on a budget, we do encourage you to be prepared to budget some cash costs for the process. Museums are required to show a one-to-one cost share on their CAP allocation, so if you've received a $4000 allocation for each assessor or a total of $8000, you need to show at least $8000 worth of investment in the project from your institution. That doesn't mean that you have to provide $8000 in cash. In addition to the costs that your museum may pay for assessor fees and travel, cost share can also be achieved through staff volunteer and board time spent on the project, in-kind expenses, and overhead expenses. We have a couple of examples on the website, and I encourage you to take a look at those to show some of the ways in which you might show your match. Museums accepted into the program will also have an orientation webinar where we talk more about the cost share in greater detail. We will have forms and trackers for museums to complete that will help them keep track of this. Applications are currently closed for the CAP 2023 program cycle. If you would like to be added to our notification list for updates on future program cycles, please send us an email at CAP at culturalheritage.org. Also, I wanted to briefly discuss the emergency CAP program. We know that disasters can happen at any time, whether that is hurricanes, floods, burst pipes, or other emergencies that can devastate collections. FAAC often has funding to support emergency CAP assessments to assist museums whose collections have been affected by a recent disaster. The emergency CAP program functions similarly to the regular CAP assessments, but is more flexible in that it does not adhere to the annual schedule of the regular CAP program. The goal is to help museums affected by a recent disaster receive post-disaster collections care recommendations from conservation and building professionals. Just as with the regular CAP program, the emergency CAP provides partial funding towards a general conservation assessment. The emergency CAP will focus on both care for affected collections and protecting against future damage with prioritized recommendations to improve collections care. Please check out our website for more information about the guidelines for the emergency CAP program. And finally, contact us with any questions. Every museum is unique, and we'd be happy to talk about your individual questions and concerns anytime.