 Go ahead, please. Hi, everyone. Nice to have you here. We're just a few people shy of everyone being here, but I'll just go over the education platform again. So the contents are where you'll find the events, either the live event or the recording once it's posted. There are the handouts and the discussion. If you have any questions, you should contact us by the discussion. If you have a technical problem, you should contact me directly. And so my email is c-2-c-c at culturalheritage.org. If you need to reset your course password, you can contact info at culturalheritage.org. And remember that if you want to receive a credibly badge for this course, you need to listen to all the webinars and complete the assignments. You don't have to listen to the webinars live, but you need to listen to the recordings, and it's recorded if you've listened to them or not. If you have questions about caring for collections, you should join the Connecting to Collections Care Community, and you can find the instructions for doing that on our website. You don't have to join AIC in order to be in our discussion group, so follow the instructions so you don't get confounded. And if you need disaster assistance and you're in the U.S. and you've had fires or floods or whatever, there's a 24-hour hotline, and you can contact the National Heritage Responders, and that's the number there. So without further ado, I'm going to turn this over to Samantha. Oh, and yeah, that's fine. So Samantha, you're on. Remember if you have any questions, I will collect them and I'll put them where we can answer them at the end. So there you go. Great. Thank you, Susan. And hello, everybody. Welcome to week two of our Making the Most of Your Assessment Program. Last week we learned all about the sort of general preservation needs assessment, but as I mentioned in that webinar, there are so many other assessments that you might get, and all of them are super useful for particular instances, and you might want to consider some of these when you are thinking about your institution's preservation and conservation needs. So today we're going to be learning sort of in depth about three different types of assessments. I will be talking about a risk assessment, which ties right into what Susan was just saying. It's a disaster hotline. It's typically used for emergency planning, so it's a good one there. I will be joined by two of my colleagues. First we'll hear from Heather Hendry, who will be talking about a conservation survey, which sort of examines items on more of the individual level to talk about their conservation needs. And you will also be hearing from Dianne Freige, who will talk a little bit more about a digital preservation assessment, which is helpful for understanding kind of the digital needs of your collection. So before we go too far into the details here, I did want to talk briefly about some of the many, many other types of assessments you might consider or investigate on your own. We did sort of hit on some of these. And please also let me know in the general chat section there if you've had another type of assessment that you want to make sure your fellow students hear about. But some highlights, some common ones. Environmental surveys are really useful. They sort of examine the environmental conditions that collections are stored in or exhibited. Usually with this one you would obtain some data for planning purposes. You want to be measuring and recording temperature and humidity around the clock and throughout the year using something like a data logger. And then once that data is collected, you can then consult with an expert like someone from the Image Permanence Institute, for example. To sort of help interpret that data and identify options for remedial actions. And it's a good time. Definitely we talked a lot last time about using an inside assessor versus an outside assessor. This would be a good time if you do want to work with an outside consultant, somebody like someone from the Image Permanence Institute. But you might have somebody also on staff who is an HVAC expert who you might be able to tap for this project as well. Just making sure you get the right people involved like we talked about last time. Another type of survey that's really helpful is historic structures or building assessment. That is usually included in those collections assessment for preservation, the CAP program. You do get a general preservation needs assessment. And one of these building assessments is really great. Those will help look more sort of the envelope of your building. And it's really good if you have a historic building that has a lot of issues. We have a lot of those here in Philadelphia, so we know all about that. And this one is really good to engage someone like a historic preservation architect or engineer. It's sort of more of a kind of a structural assessment. It would give you some ideas about how to improve the envelope of your building and help it from falling apart in general. The other ones that we sort of talked about briefly, the archival assessment last week. To reiterate, it would be something that would be more focused on how items are sort of arranged and processed, probably more applicable to libraries and archives, probably the museum. And then for all these assessments, the recommendations that are made are based on sort of the data that's collected and then its interpretation can be used to inform tasks to make a preservation plan as well as to generally help prioritize needs. And so we're going to be focused on collections and preservation needs. I'm not mentioning there are a ton of different types of assessments that would look at all kinds of ways that you are an institution operates. I listed three up there on the screen that are through the Math Assessment Program, which is funded by AAM and IMLS. As you can see, those are sort of more operational or education focused, but definitely other things you might want to consider when you are strategic planning and overall looking at things. So I just wanted to mention that it's not only a collections assessment that's out there, there are more types of assessments out there. But again, the ones we're going to be really focusing on today are the ones that I've starred on the screen, the risk assessment, the conservation survey, and the digital preservation assessment. I'm going to get us started with the risk assessment and then as I said, I'll be joined by some colleagues in a little bit. But I did want to bring our first poll question over and let me know if you have had a risk assessment done on your collection before. So this is usually one that is the first thing you do before you do an emergency plan, but not always. All right, it looks like most of us have not had one done. That's pretty common. So no worries, they are great. Okay, we can go ahead and pull that back over to the side. It looks like the majority of us have not had a risk assessment done, which, great, we'll learn all about it. So what is a risk assessment, you might be asking? So this is really the systematic process in which you examine issues from, you know, say, the arsenic in your taxidermy animal to a leaky roof, and then sort of determine a game plan for if something bad should happen. Today we're going to be talking about how to use a risk assessment specifically in cultural heritage organizations, but really this sort of assessment methodology is applicable for a wide range of organizations, not just cultural heritage ones, business two, you know, is this risk worth doing in terms of business management? I might be losing my internet connection, but hopefully things are still seeing. I'm not sure, Mike, if you can hear me. Not sure if everybody else can hear me out there, but I have lost my internet connection, so I'm trying to get it regained. All right, looks like, all right, everybody can hear me. I just lost my screen. That's all. It looks like it's coming back. So I will continue on talking a little bit about risk assessment. Sorry about that blip. Hopefully it will be okay. But yeah, so as I was saying, you can use this to sort of look at other things as well, sort of what's going on in terms of, you know, should we do this program? Of course I'm going to talk more about kind of collection specific risk today, but just wanted to mention that it's applicable for a lot of different things here. The ideal outcome of a risk assessment is to come up with a method to mitigate or make less severe the risks that you identify. And a lot of that is really sort of common sense in a lot of ways. There's this picture here you can probably see if you want to type in the comment box what some risks you might see in this picture are. You might see something like we're having people, there's collections on the floor, there's, you know, things might get bumped into or kicked as they're walking by. Emily I see is writing something. Yeah, so the air ducts are, that's a good one. They might be kind of kicking something into the area. Anybody else see any other risks that they might want to mention? The aisles are very cluttered. Yeah, that's a good one too. So yeah, you guys are hitting on them, right? So there's things that are unprotected. You see them back there. Pipes over the ceiling. Exactly. Items stored on the floor. That's one for flooding that might be an issue. But there is also, you know, there might be bugs that might crawl on stuff if it's on the floor. So lots of issues there. Good job. You guys identified the risks kind of the easy part, right? Then the next thing we want to do with that is sort of analyze the risks and then figure out how we can, you know, mitigate that, make them so they aren't risks anymore. So what might some of that be? You guys probably know some of the answers here. The stuff that's sitting on the floor, we might want to, you know, put it in a box, put it on a shelf. We might want to put things in boxes in general to help with that. The cluttering of the, keeps up from the air ducts getting out of the way there. Yeah. All sorts of things there. I'm hoping Mike can hear me and he can put me back in presenter mode because I'm not in presenter mode so I cannot advance the slides right now. But I will continue to talk about our next slides. Oh, there we go. I am back in presenter mode now. Great. Perfect. So great. You guys identified some of the issues. You identified some of the mitigation methods. But what do you do when you can't mitigate them? You prepare. So you might not have funds to repair that leaky roof, right? But you can be prepared by keeping weak supplies handy. You know, you might not be able to predict when that faulty electrical wiring might certifier, but you can make sure that you have a fire suppression system that is working, that you have a response plan, right, in place. That's really the most important thing here. You want to make sure that you have a plan as to how to address these situations that they arise. You might not have control over an incident or an emergency, but you do have control over the response. So the creation of an emergency response from a preparedness plan and knowing what to be prepared for is really the point of a risk assessment. And risk assessment is important for many reasons. I know, you know, I don't have to tell you guys all about why it's important to have an emergency plan, but without really thinking about what your risks are, what you are facing, it's impossible to plan for them. I often talk, you know, using the word disaster and emergency sort of interchangeably. But I do think it is kind of helpful to think of them separately. A disaster is kind of an emergency that gets out of control. Of course, there are, you know, the big things like the hurricanes, the earthquakes, but they're definitely disasters and you didn't have any chance to control them from the first place. But a lot of times at our museums and our, you know, libraries and archives, we often let something like a leaky HVAC system become a major disaster. So that's what we want to work on. We want to make sure we have, you know, that conservator on hand to come in and help with recovery, make sure we can get that generator if the power gets knocked out. Writing all of this down ahead of time is important and knowing what to write about first is why you want to start with an emergency plan or a risk assessment, excuse me. So in a risk assessment, you have to look to identify risks, but also just as importantly, is identifying and assessing the mitigation strategies as well. I think the name risk assessment causes some confusion, because people really focus on that risk part, but those mitigation strategies should both be, or should also be written out and discussed. With both of them, you want to look at the risk and the mitigation strategy, discuss them, rank them, rate them to have sort of a complete assessment. And as I said, again, the outcome of a risk assessment is to figure out what a reasonable mitigation method might be. For some, that might mean affordable, even free in some cases, and for some, that might mean low staff involvement. Here we have an example of a storage unit in British Columbia. These objects had been sort of sitting loose in a shelf, and this is in an earthquake-prone area. So employees recognized that these objects needed to be stored more securely, so they weren't sort of rolling around on the shelves during a seismic event, and really the same logic could apply even if they weren't in an earthquake area since these doors open and close. We don't want them to be rolling around. So they created an intern project to make custom-built cavities to keep objects secured. It was a good learning experience for the intern. And aside from a little bit of staff oversight, it allowed the regular staff members to continue on with their daily tasks. So this was a reasonable mitigation method for them. That part's kind of easy, right? Identifying the risk might not be difficult, and thinking of the mitigation strategy, like some I've listed on the slide there, not necessarily hard. The hard part comes when you're thinking about that reasonable aspect. The prioritization and use of resources can really be the hardest part of both conducting a risk assessment and also implementing it. So, for example, we talked about with the objects on the floor. We don't know enough information in that last picture. We don't know enough information about if what we suggested, you know, boxing and putting them up on the shelf was really reasonable. We don't know if there was enough room on the shelf for those objects. We don't know what other space is available. We didn't really have enough information then. We're just using it as an example. But when you are doing a risk assessment yourself, you'd want to figure out how to deal with those sort of extra factors, which is why when you do a risk assessment, you're going to cover sort of a broad range of topics. You'll want to look at sort of all aspects of an organization to really understand, you know, what the staff workload is, how much funding is available, how much space is available, how many, you know, volunteers helping hand, things like that that might be there. And this might look familiar. It definitely covers a lot of similar ground to a preservation needs assessment. In a lot of ways these assessments are similar. A holistic view of the organization is key in both assessments in order to prioritize. In the preservation needs assessment, you use the noted issues to map sort of into your preservation plan, taking it to sort of invite sized chunks, which we'll talk about later in the fourth webinar of the series. And in the risk assessment, you identify the issues that can't be solved and use those to guide where you're going to write your emergency plan. So who should be involved in a risk assessment? And like a preservation needs assessment, assembling a team is a really crucial first step. It's really important you get the right players in place from the beginning to make this effort successful. And again, like the preservation needs assessment, more the merrier to a certain extent. It will probably be a similar group of those that you gathered before, but you might want to get a little bit more focused on your security folks, make sure they're a little bit more involved in the situation. And some additional players you might want to include in your risk assessment would be the first responders. They can often provide a different point of view in a situation and get you thinking about issues that you hadn't really considered before. You know, they can let you know exactly what they plan on doing if there's a disaster at your site. And this is important to know because how they respond to a disaster could be a huge factor in your recovery. If the fire department, for example, is responding to a fire and they spray everything with some like pink goo or something like that, that might cause an issue with your collection. So it would be great to let them know ahead of a time, hey, just use water, no pink goo for us. I was doing a risk assessment for a historic house museum a while back and they told me they had a tour with their local fire department. The fire chiefs are telling them about, you know, how they would be breaking down the walls to get into the fire if it broke out in this one area and the site went, wait, wait, wait, it's a historic house. If you break down all of our walls, you know, it's basically the same thing as the fire burning it down. So instead, the fire department installed something called a knockbox on the outside of the house, which has keys to the historic house in it. So in the event of a fire, the fire department had to get in. They have access to the knockbox, but it's locked up and secured otherwise. So they could get in without having to break down walls. So that might not be exactly how the fire department works in your area, so that's why it's important that you have a talk with them during your risk assessment to really know what they would do and know what might be some mitigation strategies there. I always, one suggestion I like to make is doing an annual walkthrough with your fire department and hearing what kind of solutions they might have for some of your kind of helping them, having them help you conduct your risk assessment. The fire department will also kind of, you know, let you know if there's access issues, like ambulances, medical personnel, but it's always good to make sure another site that I work with frequently learned this the hard way. They had a donor reception. One of their donors had a medical emergency, and they found out that their museum was at the end of this very windy pathway. They found out that the ambulance, once they had all the donors parked along the side of the road, could knock it down that windy pathway. Luckily, the donor was okay. It was just dehydration. There happened to be a doctor also at the donor reception, so everything worked out. But they learned that they couldn't have parking along the side of the road. They mitigated that strategy by creating a parking area, which they now use, and this changed their parking event procedures. Similarly, it's important to have a walkthrough with your police department. They might be able to spot places along the perimeter that might be easy to scale, places that might be easy to break into, or just, you know, have security thoughts that you might not recognize. So, invite your first responders over, and don't forget the coffee and donuts. That always goes a long way. I have another poll question here about if you guys have relationships already with your local first responders. If you could let me know over there. I have another site, who they throw an annual thank you event for their first responders, where they come in and give them some kind of theme tours, so it's really kind of a nice way to have a fun event at the museum. But then it also sort of helps to keep them aware, to know that they're there, and helps you to sort of manage that relationship. It looks like people, some of you have a really excellent relationship, so that's good to see. They tour the site regularly. I love that. I wish every place would do that. And the no, which is great. All right. So, I'm going to go ahead and pull that aside. And then we will talk a little bit here about some tools for risk assessment. The actual process is really similar to what we discussed for the preservation needs assessment. They're sort of that same self-assessment portion, a review of existing documents and plans, staff interviews, and then, of course, the tour. The tour might be helpful for an assessor to do with an emergency manager or a first responder, but that information can also be collected separately. I've put a couple of resources to help you through this process on the screen. Susan mentioned that there is the risk assessment webinar as well that she's going to add to the links, which should be great as well. So, these are some places where you can get started, again, to look at some of those online assessments and other sort of things like that. I said before, but I'll mention again real quick, the trickiest part is not necessarily identifying the risk, but it's more of that reasonable mitigation strategy. And I actually really like the form that AIC's Risk Evaluation and Planning Program, that first resource up there, uses to tackle this. It's one of the tools we use here at CCAHA when we're conducting risk assessment. So, I'm going to go a little bit into the details there. This is the matrix system that they use, and don't worry about copying this down or anything. It's available on that FAIC website that is linked to. The basic methodology, they get a risk rating and a feasibility impact rating. So, each of those identified risks is given a numerical score, rating on a scale between 1 to 25. The risk rating is calculated based on sort of the potential for that risk to arise, and the impact that it would have on collections should it occur. So, the lower numerical score, the lower the risk, the less likely that it will occur, and the higher it is, of course, the more likely it would occur. Then you kind of put that right next to the feasibility impact rating, which looks at those mitigation strategies that you've thought of. So, suggested mitigation strategies are given a same sort of numerical score. The feasibility impact score is calculated based on the achievability of the mitigation strategy, which in many cases can mean affordability or staff availability sort of a different meaning for you, what that means. And then the impact of that mitigation strategy would have on the long-term preservation of the collection. So, strategies with the higher feasibility impact rating score determined to be more viable or would have a lot more impact. And those with the lower score are, you know, either financially or physically impractical or they would have a limited impact. So, you can put these scores kind of right next to each other and really think objectively about where to spend your time and money if an identified risk has a higher risk rating and a high feasibility impact score, that sort of low-hanging fruit, it would be a simple fix that would really make a big impact. So, something you should definitely do. A way to think about prioritization can really help you sort of figure out where you need to spend your time. And then, of course, the ultimate goal, as I said before of this, is to make an emergency plan. In that assessment, you will have looked through, you will have thought about all the mitigation strategies, you will have ranked them, rated them, and there are going to be things that you cannot mitigate, right? So, those are the things that you want to put into your emergency plan. So, this can really kind of help guide that emergency planning effort. So, you are not done. After you finish your risk assessment, you need to take that to move it on into your emergency plan. So, this kind of wraps up the risk assessment portion here. Are there any questions about risk assessment before we move on? Oh, great. All right, great. So, if you do have questions later, please put them in the discussion section. We will make sure to get to them. I am going to welcome my colleague onto the line next, Heather Hendry. She is going to let us know a little bit about conservation surveys. Heather is the senior paper conservator at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. And prior to joining CCAHA, she worked as a conservator at the Wiseman Preservation Center for Harvard University Libraries. She conserved historical prints, watercolors, and modern art at the Yale Center for British Art and tackled national conservation issues at the Canadian Conservation Institute. For several years, Heather also maintained her own private practice. She holds a master's in art conservation, specializing in paper from Queens University, a professional associate of the American Institute for Conservation. Heather has presented numerous papers and workshops on conservation treatment, preservation and salvage, artist materials, and technical examination of artwork. So, we're very lucky to have her on here. While I'm passing over the line to her, I'm going to also put up a poll question. Have any of you guys had a conservation assessment done? So, while you are answering that, I will pass it over. Hi. I'm actually surprised at how many positive answers we're having on this conservation survey. This is great. I'm actually wondering, as a follow-up, would this in-house conservation surveys or having people come in, if anyone wants to pop their opinion into the chat, that would be interesting to me. Because the conservation survey is a big part of what we do. When we're doing a conservation assessment, there's actually two main types that we do. So, I'm going to spend a little time talking about each of them, the collection assessment versus the item-level conservation survey. Both of these assessments, I want to make clear, these come into play after a preservation needs assessment has been completed, and the recommendations have been put into action, which is a whole other step that you don't want to say, well, we've assessed their preservation, so let's move on. You assess your preservation, you take some actions, and then when you get to a certain point, then you start looking at your collection more specifically. So, the collection assessment can be fairly specific. It could be your collection of glass-point negatives and nothing else, or it could be very inclusive, and it could be everything that you own, and so we would work with you to figure out what it would take to review whatever collection or sub-collection that you've selected. So, the smaller and more uniform the group of objects we're looking at is the more specific recommendations can be, but it's really a question of what your institution would need most. And again, is your collection ready for a conservation assessment? This was an assessment where I arrived, and there was a big puddle on the floor of the storage room, and so this collection, they do not need a conservator to spend days cheating a single object if it might get wet the next week. They need to focus on overall collection preservation first. On the right, you see paintings that are stored on the floor next to a trash can with food waste in it, and again, these are very, very global issues, so we're not going to be looking at individual artwork at this point, we're getting into what are the things that you should do for overall collection conservation as well. So this would be a collection assessment situation. This collection has already tackled all the issues of housing, storage, environment, and security, so they know where everything is, they're following the standard preservation guidelines, and they can identify what items they're most concerned about for both the curatorial and the conservation questions. So this collection is ready for the item level survey, and if you're looking like an episode of hoarders, it would probably be better to start with preservation than to go to a conservator right away. So ideally, the collection assessment would focus only on the condition of the collection, and if the collection is narrow enough, there would be specific conservation recommendation and possibly even a ballpark price for doing a lot of conservation work at the end. But you rarely find that condition issues just exist in a vacuum. So if I were to see, because I'm a paper conservator, if I were to see that all of the edges on every paper are torn and crushed and nothing has been put into folders, the next step is to put things into folders, not to do the conservation to mend those edges and then put them back into the same environment. So when I'm doing a collection assessment, it's usually connecting condition issues to any ongoing causes. And so it usually leads to more holistic actions rather than individual treatment. When you're preparing for a collection assessment, we do a pre-visit questionnaire much like a preservation assessment would, where we try to just sense the goals for your survey and gather as much information as we can so that the site visit is the most effective part. And this is a great example where when we're doing a collection assessment, we don't expect to look at every object, so we need to look at a sample that represents the overall collection accurately. And so it's also not a good representation if we only look at the most important objects or the ones that are requested the most or the ones that you might be most worried about, even though those are all important factors too. This is a section from a spreadsheet with a collection I worked with that they did a great job choosing a representative sample by thinking through exactly what their collection contained. So each of those lines is a category like these are letters or these are newspaper clippings where we could assume that they had a lot in common, and then they picked a sample that represented each of those categories. And so when I went to survey, I ended up looking at 18 boxes instead of 67, but we could feel really confident that those 18 boxes would reflect the whole collection. When I do the site visit, there's usually one person who acts as a point person, but there may be many people I need to interview to learn more about their area of responsibility. And similarly, I want to visit any space where the collection materials might be even temporarily, so the storage rooms are very important, but that could include even the hallways or the loading docks or anywhere that they might be for any reason, whether it's exhibition or use or any sort of consultation. Once the collection assessment is finished, these are some sample recommendations that you might get. So you see, I'm not really calling out individual works, individual pieces or objects of what needs to be done when we do the collection assessment. The recommendations will really be a lot more general, and there may be percentages as well in that say 10% of the collection needs remanded or is in a dangerous condition for this reason. You see, it's mostly not describing treatment, it's looking at the collection as a whole again, but from the point of view of a conservator rather than the preservation specialist who is a little bit more general than the conservator. Moving into the item level conservation survey, which is the other type that we do, the item level is looking at each object on its own. And it's usually done, I'd say, in preparation for another project, which might be digitization or an exhibit or a conservation funding grant. So the level of detail will vary depending on the future goals and what the objects are that we're looking at. So in archival collections, getting ready for digital imaging would get a different assessment than fine arts that's ready to be exhibited. And depending on the complexity of the object, we're looking at between 25 to 100 items a day, which is moving really fast for conservators if we have an object come into our lab, we spend a minimum of an hour preparing the condition report and the treatment proposal. So the item level survey is really maximized for speed. When we do the item level survey, all of the information is entered into an access database as we go. We're spending 10 minutes or less on an object, so anything that we can do to minimize the typing will let us look at more of the collection. One of the things we require would be an item level with at least a week before we arrive so that we can preload the accession number of the artist and the title. For archival collections, it's usually not useful to treat a box as a single item because one box could contain all sorts of materials. There could be a stereotype in there. There could be letters and parchment and newspaper clipping all in the same thing. So we can treat all of the sheets in a single folder as one item, but having sheet counts for the folders makes a big difference. And having the items accessible is also important. So when we're on site, we have a limited length of time that we can't spend that time waiting for the objects to arrive. Usually if we're doing a survey, there will be a staff member who stays with us and spends their whole day bringing and taking away the objects as well to get to as many as possible. I'm going to show you what a conservation survey looks like. We try to keep it on a single page per item so that it can be seen really quickly as a whole. So this is the section where we would identify the objects and make sure we can point this information to the specific object. And it is always good to preload this before we show up. And I will mention your collection really needs intellectual control in order to do this because you have to know exactly what your things are for us to describe them on an individual level. This is the area where we write about conditions. And most of these fields have pre-populated entries that are very, very brief. They say things like light, moderate, or heavy. So we're not writing in great detail about the exact location of the stains or the exact length of the tears. We're noting if they're there and how severe they are as well. And then this is the entire section of the treatment recommendations, which again, we try to keep it really brief so that we keep moving through. One thing we can't do is we just cannot do spot testing when we're on site. So the proposals that come out of an item level survey are sometimes not as specific as when we get it back into the lab. That might change a little bit what we can do. But at the end of the survey, when we've compiled all of the information that we've gathered, you'll get these deliverables. And the clients usually use our item level surveys to apply for grant funding or to budget a conservation project that might spread over several years. I think that having the price and the priority rating from a conservator's point of view will add a lot of information as you discuss how to proceed. So our rankings are not telling you what you must do, but having the knowledge gives you the power to plan and to balance everything with all the other considerations of your institution. I think that's the full description of all that we do for our survey. So if there's any questions, are we dealing with these now? Okay. Anyone who can type really fast can do questions. And we'll wait and keep that open now while I'm on the line. Hi, Claire. I feel like because we're coming in as an outside vendor, Claire asks, does the curator sometimes set treatment priorities? What we would usually see is that the curator will select items that will go into the survey based on their priorities and saying, the appearance of this really concerns me or this is the most important piece in our collection. And of course, the curator will make the final decision about what gets treated. But when I'm talking about the treatment priorities that we're providing, it's completely separate in that we're saying this is something that will get worse if it's not dealt with. So this may be completely unimportant to you as a collection, and you may say that's okay if it gets worse, but we're giving you the conservation take on it, and then you add your curator take to it as well. All right, great. Thank you so much, Heather. That was wonderful. We are going to move on to our next speaker. If you do have more questions for Heather, you can put them in the discussion section, and I will pass them along to her later. But thank you so much for that. Our next speaker is Dianne Feiga, who is the Director of Preservation Services here at CCHA. She's going to let us know a little bit more about digital preservation assessments. So here at CCHA, Dianne works with cultural organizations to conduct preservation assessments, assisted emergency preparedness, develop policy and planning documents, and develop and present preservation-related educational programs. Previously, Dianne worked for the Brooklyn Museum, Library and Archives, the New York Public Library's Preservation Division, the Conference Board, New York University's BOPs Library, and Kent State University's Special Collections and Archives. She received her MSLIS with an archive certificate from Pratt Institute, and she is recognized as an SAA digital archive specialist. So while we're switching over to Dianne coming on the line, I'm going to go ahead and pull over our poll question if you have ever had a digital preservation assessment before. Hello. I'm seeing so far, mostly noes, well, entirely noes, which is not at all surprising to me, because this is relatively new as a type of standalone assessment. So let me jump into my presentation. Great. So before I fully jump in, I just want to give a little bit of a shout-out to NEDCC and Lyricist, with whom I participated in an NIH-funded project to develop a template for digital preservation assessments. Previously, this was not a widely standardized process, and it's excellent that going forward, those of us who might conduct this work in the field will have some continuity and somewhat of an agreed-upon framework. So a fair amount of the information I'm going to present this afternoon will come out of some of the material put together through that initiative. So over the years that I've been conducting assessments related to preservation with collecting institutions, it has, this is probably not a surprise to most of us, but become more and more evident that the needs of digital collection, whether those collections have always been digital, what's known as foreign digital, or if the digital files are reformatted surrogates of some analog item, the needs of those digital collections are multifaceted and complex enough that they can't necessarily just be smooshed into an assessment of the physical collection. So typically, the general overview needs assessment that Samantha talked about last week that we conduct only barely scratched the surface of looking at digital collection and digital preservation. So just within the past few years, we have begun focusing more effort on conducting separate digital preservation assessments. So that's why it doesn't surprise me at all that it didn't look like any of you have had a separate assessment like this done. So just to get us all on the same page, I want to start off by establishing some definitions and information about just what we mean by digital preservation. This definition on the screen here from ALA is really great. It's pretty general, but it, I think, hits home all the main points of what digital preservation is. It combines policies, strategies, and actions to ensure access to this digital content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time. So those three points that I pulled out on the bottom there are kind of just distilling that even further. Digital preservation is a long-term commitment. It involves or should involve policy development, and it involves a lot of dedication to the content, so we can continue to access that reliably over time. What are the threats to digital preservation? Most of these identified on the slide are pretty self-explanatory, technological dependency, as well as technological obsolescence, so if a certain file or program can only run on a certain type of software or hardware, and that type of software or hardware becomes old, which happens increasingly quickly, of course. Media deterioration, that's both just completely physical degradation and loss of information due to physical forces, but also loss of context as well. So loss of context in this context, what I mean by that is how many of us, I would again be shocked if it wasn't 100%, but how many of us have dealt at some point with a long list of digital photograph file names where they're just image 1, image 57, image 83, and that means absolutely nothing when we're just looking at those file names. So that lack of information there, that could be considered a consequence of a lack of digital preservation. So a digital preservation assessment will help an institution assess and document its digital preservation needs. This will be accomplished through discussions with digital preservation stakeholders at the institution, which may include IT staff, collections staff, administrative staff, and others. The consultant who conducts this assessment will usually make recommendations for improved digital preservation in a report to follow the site visit. The site visit will focus on preserving digital objects, which may in part address digitization practices and techniques, but digitization itself, that actual process of reformatting or re-recording or imaging some type of physical content, that is not going to be the main focus of the assessment. So what we're talking about this afternoon is not usually a digitization plan or a digitization workflow assessment. It's a bit bigger and longer range, bigger picture than all of that. So here is just a sample table of contents for a digital preservation assessment. We're going to go through most of these sections in a bit more detail throughout the rest of the preservation. Excuse me, throughout the rest of the presentation, just to explain what the final written report will usually comprise. So first we're establishing the general overall organizational structure of the institution, the overall way of the land to see where digital preservation fits in with other activities to determine broad level responsibilities, et cetera. Here we would identify things like the authority structure. Is there a board or a similar governing body who makes the ultimate decision? Is the organization part of a larger institution or a larger structure? So this is obviously the case in an instance like an academic division or a collecting unit within a university, but could also be something like the fact that a public library is technically part of some specific city or county infrastructure. We also want to know broadly about the organization's preservation practices and commitments, not just for digital preservation. So who has responsibility for preservation decisions? Is there a particular unit, a staff member with that responsibility, et cetera? Is there something like a collections committee in place that helps guide or make decisions about collections care? Are there any existing preservation plans in place for collections? Of course, we can't have a full understanding of the institutional context unless we know what the collections are as well. So this includes both analog and digital collections with more of an emphasis for this assessment on the latter. But again, it's important to identify how these digital collections fit into the whole, so their relationships and connections, et cetera. So this section is where we would also identify more detailed and granular information like the types of file format collected and things like that. Designated community may or may not be a familiar term for many of you, but basically it's just identifying who uses collection. And again, primarily, of course, for this context, digital collections. But also how they're used, how your services are tailored to meet the needs of those communities, et cetera. So for example, a community of non-academics using collections largely for personal interest and edification is often going to have very different needs, particularly in the way that digital collections are managed and displayed than a more scholarly research community who are perhaps primarily interested in using your collections for publishing. And then finally, this institutional overview section might also be a good opportunity to simply list organizational strengths. Previous, fairly recent accomplishments. Other assessments that have been conducted and how the organization used the outcomes from those. Grants secured and promising funding opportunities. Examples of fruitful collaborations and alliances. Examples of collections used outside the institution in interesting, prominent, or otherwise notable ways. So I broke staffing out of the rest of the organizational infrastructure because it's so very important to consider who actually has the responsibility for digital preservation. A huge part of digital preservation is simply the people. The right infrastructure, staffing, knowledge, ability to provide access, and important and easy to overlook sometimes, capacity to commit to digital preservation. In a vacuum starting from scratch, we would always recommend establishing all of this infrastructure in advance, but at the point of the digital preservation assessment, we're largely going to be in the position of evaluating how these resources are actually playing out as well, of course, as recommendations for what an institution needs to do to get to the next step. So again, where does digital preservation fit into the staff structure, the organizational chart of the institution? Basically, what department is it in if you're within a somewhat larger organization? What is the reporting structure like for those roles? So who can make decisions, set policies, develop, develop and evaluate procedures? Ideally, each staff member with some responsibility in managing digital collections should have a formally clarified role. So the assessor will look at job descriptions and compare those to how things are actually playing out, formally identified responsibilities versus the responsibilities that just tend to fall on people's plates. So remember, it's always best to have something identified in writing in a job responsibility. That gives it a lot more credibility, evidence of commitment, and gives the staff member the power and authority to build that into their day-to-day work. So the staff needed for digital preservation that includes staff to work on the digitization itself, if relevant, and everything that comes with that, like selection, prioritization and preservation. We'll talk more about that later. But creating metadata, file management and backup, web design and technical support, researcher and reference support, and then overall project management. Staff training is also really integral here. Ideally, an institution will budget for staff training on an ongoing basis as standards and practices and understandings change in this field even more than others. And also remember that staff will change and new staff will require more training. They come on board. The report will also give an assessment and articulate the current landscape for the institution in terms of available resources. I always want to be very careful to point out that resources are not just financial. People, time, and the institutional level of commitment are very important, although sometimes less quantifiably measurable resources. So this list just shows some examples of the many different types of resources that are involved in managing and caring for digital collection. A bit further down the line, this list could also include things like estimates for future costs, like software and hardware upgrades, backup and other digital preservation solutions that we'll get to a bit later in this program. Is there a digital preservation policy in place? A significant part of preservation needs assessments is often looking at an organization's collections management policy and then providing recommendations to strengthen or update it. So similar, we want to do the same with policies related to digital collection. A written digital preservation policy provides a basic framework to guide all decision-making regarding the digitization of collections or collection of form digital collections and their subsequent youth management and preservation of the resulting file. The policy identifies the scope of content to be preserved, outlines roles and responsibilities, defines standards. The development and adoption of a digital preservation policy is really important for setting priorities, managing expectations and addressing potential challenges and issues. The process of developing a written digital preservation policy really helps to ensure that the institution's staff have time to grapple with fundamental questions regarding digital preservation and that concepts of preservation are incorporated into the entirety of an organization's digital collection. So the policy will explicitly state the organization's commitment to digital preservation and establishes objectives for a broad digital preservation program. So once the larger questions are addressed in a digital preservation policy, the institution is going to be better prepared for the long-term process of developing and implementing a digital preservation plan. Which is a separate and somewhat more intensive thing, just like a preservation plan is going to be a bit more involved than having a preservation needs assessment done or writing a collections management policy, actually putting that into a strategic plan for collections, that's a more intensive process. But advanced strategic planning for digitization is going to ensure that the work can move forward in a timely manner, with staff responsibilities assigned and achievable benchmarks identified. Other relevant policies and plans that might be reviewed as part of the process include those shown here on the screen. I mean, basically, it's everything that impacts collections care and management. All of these may have some impact on digital preservation, as they have fairly institution-wide scope and implication. In analyzing processes and workflows, this is where we get into a lot of the meat of digital preservation, the actual actions and functions around what previously in this conversation may have seemed somewhat more theoretical. So this is going to differ depending on whether you're actually reformatting material or just collecting born digital, or both. So if you're actually reformatting analog material by scanning or other imaging or recording processes, looking at that process and workflow is a really important part of this. So how is selection determined? How are the procedures for imaging actually carried out? What procedures are in place for dealing with physical preservation needs? For example, if an item is too fragile to be safely scanned, how is that situation handled? Are workflows recorded? And then immediately after that digital file is created, how is that file handled at the point of creation? Are there multiple files created, a preservation master, an access copy, for example? What are file naming protocols? For born digital collections, we're also looking at how the digital content is created and overall workflows, but obviously that process is going to be a lot different. This may be the case when institutions are creating their own digital content, digital photos, capturing websites, recording oral histories. You may also be ingesting born digital content from other sources as well. Here, of course, standards, file naming and quality assurance is going to be integral as well. And we would also want to look at engaging the content creators in establishing standards from earlier in the process, ideally at the point of creation, although, of course, that's far easier said than done. Metadata is a huge part of digital preservation. All of that data about data, the information that's recorded with the digital content, is vital in maintaining intellectual control and being able to access and understand the digital materials later. So an assessment of the metadata would evaluate who creates metadata, what type is created, what the workflows for that are, the standards used for metadata creation, how that metadata is being stored and managed. And then finally, in this section, we're going to evaluate what types of documentation measures are in place. We've touched on this a bit already, but are workflows and policies documented? Is that documentation clear and usable for whoever needs to use it? If there is documentation that's considered usable, is it actually used? Is it actually part of the process to consult documented workflows? Is it updated as necessary? Is there a built-in mechanism for updating when needed? And this is just another, this is kind of reiterating and simplified look at the different step processes and phases involved in somewhat of the short and medium term life cycle of digital preservation, the kind of getting started point. So longer term considerations will come a little bit later in our conversation. Of course, one of the important things to consider in digital preservation is working with legacy media, so older formats of equipment and media on which information is stored. Of course, a great deal of that legacy media that holds content, including older digital files, has serious preservation concerns. So this assessment will also identify those older physical carriers of digital media in your collection. Well, not only older, it'll just identify the physical carriers. Give recommendations for physical preservation when possible, and often give recommendations for migrating in new formats. Another very important part of this assessment is looking at the digital storage and management tool. So what actually happens to these files? Where are they stored? How are they managed? Consider just how important it really is to keep door, maintain, find, and retrieve records when you need them. Some files over time may need to be edited thereby creating multiple versions. And all of those versions are going to need to be tracked so that a specific version can be found when needed. Excuse me. We all need a system for file management where we can locate files quickly and easily and when needed. Where you can restrict access to only authorized users. So digital files can be saved in an insecure environment using a server or encryption. Where you can store the documents, the files for both short and long term use. And where you can keep a safe copy to handle disaster or damage. As with digitizing large collections only the digital version is being used on a regular basis. There are going to be backup copies that are stored often in some different structure than the access and use copies for day to day use. A lot of digital security as with most collection security is going to come down to just that. Who has access to collections? But in this case there are some additional considerations as well. So not only who can access the files but who could potentially manipulate them or manipulate the metadata. So just because you can open a file doesn't necessarily mean you can edit or alter it. Are you monitoring data authenticity and integrity by doing actions like check from which is whole another ball of wax for a different webinar but it is part of the digital collection security landscape. If you are working with external vendors what are their security and authenticity practices? So most of this conversation has been about the contents of that observation portion of the assessment but what about the actual next steps and recommendations? I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here because again this would warrant its own whole webinar but I did want to just introduce some terms out there for the top strategies for actually pursuing digital preservation. So backup is here in bold and the first bullet point under that replication is kind of just a fancier way of saying backup. Again, ensure there are more than one copy of digital file. Emulation, oh I'm sorry my notes have a different order. Let me actually go over this on here. Refreshing is copying digital files and content from one storage media to another example of the exact same type of media. So transferring a file from an older CD to a newer one but of the same format. That's refreshing, just resaving. Normalization that is taking content that's maybe in an older format and updating, financing the content itself to fit into a newer format of software hardware usage. Migration is transferring digital resources from one hardware or software generation to the next. So essentially upgrading the format without trying to provide the content. It's not always possible to make an exact digital copy when you're using a different system or software but the goal is to get it as close as possible to the original at least in terms of content. An example here would be saving a document from an older version of Word into a current file format. So doc versus docx. And then finally emulation. Emulation using new versions or iterations of obsolete system on contemporary computers. A great example of this is that happens fairly often with older video games. So arcade games or early Nintendo system on contemporary computers, developers have emulated that software so you can have a similar environment for using files. So there are I'm going to essentially open it up to questions now in terms of my little closing feel. There are so feel free to start typing but there are so many different ways to collect digital materials. Of course collections can be born digital with sometimes little to no direct connection to anything that exists in physical form or on the other hand they can be digitized whether that means scanned, photographed or digitally re-recorded. Some institutions that are digitizing choose to purchase their own equipment and digitize on site while others outsource the job. Similarly with digital preservation, some larger organizations will work with some vendor or consultant to identify digital preservation practices for them. Fragile materials demand special consideration and again I mentioned this earlier but when all of these issues are thoughtfully considered by the primary stakeholders it's going to tremendously increase the likelihood of long-term success in digitization and digital preservation and through digital preservation assessments we want to try to help institutions identify those opportunities and next steps. I am happy to take questions now my email address is also up on the screen here if you want to shoot me any questions later or you're interested in more information. Emily asks do you think there's a need for discussion about cloud-based versus on-site storage? That would absolutely be included in a digital preservation assessment where how the files are stored basically where and how the files are stored is absolutely going to be part of an assessment and I'm not here this afternoon to really make a recommendation either way that would be up to I think the institution situation and their resources and having a conversation I think there are definitely benefits and drawbacks to both cloud-based and on-site storage and certainly Emily if you have specific questions about benefits and drawbacks we can have more of an offline conversation but basically it would be part of this type of assessment. Craig asks if we have recommendations for digital asset or file management software whether either server or cloud-based so that all users have an appropriate level of access. I actually I don't know what our possibility to extend information to you later is but I would want to check with our manager of digital imaging here I think that she as far as actual software in system she is going to have a much more to date framework of information and so Samantha can we will check with Maggie and Samantha can send out her thoughts on that yeah look Claire I think Samantha since you're all in the group together I think that Samantha will send it out to everyone alright well again I am definitely happy to take questions via email or offline off webinar if you have them I am going to pass this back along to Samantha so thanks for listening this afternoon great and thank you Diani for joining us so great it sounds like there are lots of lots of follow-up questions to that we'll make sure to get information to you as soon as we can so I just wanted to send a couple reminders here for next week we have our next webinar which will be on what to do with your assessment fundraising and grant writing and we'll be joined in that one by Lee Price who is our director of development here at CCHA the week after that is when your homework assignment is due and if you have started on that super if not I recommend you start on that soon let me know if you have any questions about the homework but it will be due on that in between week and then we will be finishing up on that first week of August there August 7th I did want to address a question that came up in the discussion already which was about collections documentation I believe if I was interpreting the question correctly that topic would be covered in the collections management section of a preservation needs assessment where we would sort of talk about the documentation one of your fellow students had a really great answer in the discussion section so if that is something you are curious about go check that out as well and if there aren't any other questions I will go ahead and let you all go through today but thank you so much for joining us and I look forward to speaking with you all next week and thank you all and thank you Diani and Samantha and Heather Heather yeah yes so we will see you next week remember that if you have any questions you can put them in the discussion and we will make sure they get answered and if you have any problems please let me know and I think that's it thank you very much, thank you Mike and thank you Samantha