 with Heritage Preservation. This recording will be a little different than others. Our webinar on protecting collections during special events originally aired live on December 12, 2012. Unfortunately, the sound of that recording failed, but we're so fortunate because our original speaker, Barbara Heller, has kindly agreed to re-record. We also have a list of questions from our audience on the 12th, as well as results from poll questions that we ask. We also have to almost recreate that entire webinar right now. Before we jump into our topic, and as usual, let me start by giving a quick introduction to the community and these webinars. The Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Time. Our online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, and resources quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for this CDC initiative, including the bookshelf and the raising the bar workshops and webinars. Links to these resources are filed under the topics menu on the site and this recording is also there. On the online community, we feature a particularly helpful preservation resource and host a webinar related to it. All of these resources, again, can be found on our topics menu at Connecting to Collections.org. So today, Barbara Heller has agreed to once again record our webinar on special events. Barbara is the Director and Conservator of Special Projects at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Barbara, thank you so much. Would you mind just giving us a little information about yourself? I'm Barbara Heller from the Detroit Institute of Arts. I was formerly the Chief Conservator and I've worked here for the past, yes, about now, 36 years. So a good portion of my career has been at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Thank you. So things will be a little different today instead of seeing a chat box over on the left of people's comments since this is not exactly live. We have, right now, we've saved all the questions from the 12th webinar so they're all there and we'll get to them at the end of the presentation. On the 12th, we also asked a couple poll questions from our audience and we have saved those results as well. So we'll just quickly go through those and those were to get a better sense of the folks who were there with us and our audience. We first asked about our institutions and their facilities if they use them for rental or special events and, of course, the overwhelming response was yes occasionally and yes often. We also asked, does your institution currently have event policy that takes into account collections care? A large number said no, but we also have a great number of people who said yes or they are currently working on it. We then asked our audience where rentals were commonly held. Not surprising, the most common answer to this was throughout the facility in both exhibit and collection spaces. Two more that we asked. We asked what types of events and we're really all over the map and the most interesting I think was the most popular response was educational programs put on by the institution. And the final question that we asked was about maximum occupancy. We had a lot of folks that day who had some larger spaces. Our most popular answer was 200 or more. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this and, again, we'll get to those questions on the left at the end of the presentation. All right, Barbara, I'm going to go ahead and pull this off and you should see your PowerPoint and I'll hand things over to you. So these are the topics that I'm going to go over briefly. So a lot of us have a varying amount of institutions as you saw from the poll and the Detroit Institute of Arts happens to be one of the premier art museums in the United States. It's quite a large institution and just if you look at this, you can see how many spaces we have. It's quite a large facility. It's 658,000 square feet. So we do have events in a variety of spaces. One of the things that I'm just going to sort of introduce you to some of our spaces and I don't think that everybody also understands it's not just what is an event. An event can be a variety. It doesn't have to be just a food event or a gala. Here's our Fort Great Hall. It's quite a huge space. Up with that is also we have tours and correction tours and you can see in the bottom right we also have tensing demonstrations. So all of our spaces are sort of multi-use and we're probably not alone. This is Rivera Court. It's over 4,000 square feet, three stories high of painted murals by Diego Rivera. But that space is one of our most popular spaces and it has multi-use. We have artist demonstration as you can see. We have music, storytelling and performances as you see in the upper right where there's a Native American dance presentation going on. This is our Prentice Court. Again, it's three stories high. It's actually a new space connecting the new and one of our things and then a new South Wing edition. And that happens to be a multi-purpose space. It is a group entrance for schools and tours. We use it for dining. And also on Friday night it happens to be the place where the Chess Club comes. You can see both of those uses here at the Chess Club below here. We do have some spaces that are dedicated for meetings and receptions. And this is our Crystal Gallery. It's a cafe used during film screenings. We have business meetings there. It has its own serverry, which is great because then that's the only thing it is really used for. We have our original Kresge Court that during the day, the original photo, it is used for a cafe. It has its own serverry and is also near the kitchen. But it is also, it's a music bar or brunch with Bach on Sundays. And it is also used for events in the evening. During our master plan renovation between 2000 and 2007, we renovated and added a food dock with direct access to the kitchen, added a basement kitchen, and a brand new cafe. The cafe was designed as a really large space divided into three. So one area, which would be the DIA cafe, could be 150 to 200 people for strolling or sitting. And then there was two smaller spaces, dining room A and B. Dining room A holds about 25 to 30 people and B 40 to 75. If we combine the three spaces, we can have 300 people. And we do use that for events. And as you can see, we're now moving chairs out, setting up and putting on tablecloths for an evening event. But, and the walls move into a closet. So it was a purpose-built multi-use space. However, we have about 12 different spaces. I showed you some of them where we do a varying capacity from small to very spacious areas to holding up to about 500 people. What we do is, and this is on our website, we talk about all of our different spaces. We do have policies for setting up events. And basically what we want is we have an iron shaft. And so people, of course, want to do events in other spaces. So as part of being a chief conservator, we set up food service guidelines and building usage for our catering staff. Because anything and everything we do in a building can affect the safety of the artwork. And therefore, we develop these guidelines with our food service, with our caterer and with the people that supervise them. And it's been a great partnership. Here are our spaces during events. And you can see our great hall. We've got seating for 450 people. Our Ribera court set up for a cocktail party. The Prentice court set up for dancing. And our Kresge court that set up just recently for the opening event for our Fabergé exhibition. So we established these policies to ensure the safety of the collection during private events. The museum is available for corporate nonprofit and social events. We do not allow events of a religious nature. So no wedding ceremonies, even though you can have a wedding reception for up to 150 people. Some of our guidelines are basically, we don't allow the sale of any commercial product except for book signings. We don't allow political rallies, fundraisers, or similar events for endorsing a candidate for public office or other inappropriate use. And the museum reserves the right to review event requests on a case-by-case basis. If you are a nonprofit, you can get a discount, but we need your letter. We want to make sure that you are a 501c3. And then also, if you're exempt from sales tax, we have to know that also. And if, however, if tickets are sold, and this is according to Michigan law, the event is taxable, regardless whether you're a nonprofit or tax-exempt status in the first place. So when we do set up, we talk about... we give our guidelines for the client, but we have to approve of any decorations or display. We have to approve the invitation. But during set up, we also have supervision by DIA staff, as you see here, we're setting up for a party, and this happens the weekend before the webinar, I think it was December 10th. And we are coordinating. We have a great partnership with our events and food service, our vice president of museum operations, our building operations, and our collections management staff. This is the total partnership. The DIA uses a catering company, Sodexo, and they are great partners with us. So we supervise their set up. But during set up, basically, we have... we do certain things, and they have certain responsibilities, and they're literally defined by us. So when we set up that for event, we use different... here you can see we've taken planters, and we've closed off a doorway leading into a gallery. This is our ancient Middle East gallery, and we set up planters because along the back wall is where we have artwork installed, even though they have distancing barriers. We are now coordinating this off so people don't go behind the planters. And between Rivera Court and Great Hall, we have a Wisteria Gate by Thomas Hastings that's been very important. It's also manufactured by Edwin Caldwell. And you can see that we have put a... some sanctions just to protect it. So as we're carrying maybe chairs or whatever they're doing, that is not disturbed. So basically trying to protect our collection during events. So DIA is basically responsible for that. We have certain spaces that are multi-purpose. Again, what you're looking at here on the left is the student lunchroom. And on the right is an empty gallery. But the student lunchroom will move out all of the chairs and they set that up as a servery. But you can see in the empty gallery, which is right near River Court when there's no exhibition there, they're allowed to use that. And we use Masonite, the smooth side down. Edges are taped. And that's one of the ways we protect the floor. In other spaces, we have these final folding walls. They're made by Screen Flex and they're portable room dividers. And we set these up. They easy roll into positions and they're easily stored. And you can see them. They're on wheels. And they're actually self-leveling on uneven flooring, which some of us have some historic buildings, which is their acoustical panel construction. So they're also sound reduction. And I'm going to show you here. We have a gallery where we're going from a setup area. This is still in progress. You see the Masonite on the floor. They've already set up the stanchions, but we haven't pulled them yet. And then here's upper right. We have our hallway that's all prepared. It has the wall in place. The floors are protected. And we have...