 So you, one of our hosts, Susan Barger from DFAIC, go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. I'm the coordinator for Connecting to Collections Care, and we are really pleased to be offering this webinar with the Canadian Conservation Institute. So I'm going to go through a few slides. If you need to reset your course password, you can contact info at culturalheritage.org. If you have other questions, you can contact me at C2CC at culturalheritage.org, and we'll take care of them. If you need to find out what the time for the webinar is, use a time zone converter, and here's one, there are a lot of them. And when you're looking at the platform and you've signed in, you can find the handouts and discussions. It will give you the time that a webinar starts, and the webinars are always on Eastern time, that's New York time. And it also will say, like here on the left, this event should start at blah, blah. And then once the webinar has been posted, if you look on the right-hand side, it will say, View on Demand Recording, and you can listen to the webinar there. You need to listen to the webinars. It doesn't matter if you listen to them as recordings or live. I see we have people that are up at 5 o'clock in Australia. They're good for you, but you don't have to torture yourself. So as long as you listen to the webinar, you're fine. The best way to keep in touch about connecting to collections care is to join our announce list. This is the address to do that. Or you can like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. And for people in the US who might be affected by the flooding, this is the 24-hour emergency hotline for conservation. So please feel free to avail yourself of that. And without further ado, I'm going to send this over to Simon. Simon Lambert from CCI will be the coordinator for this course. So Simon, take it away. Thank you, Susan. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. I'm very pleased to be able to offer this first-ever Reorg online course, which is a six-part webinar series. And I just want to start off by thanking some of our partners, because this is a collective effort to get this content over to you. And so first of all, the Kekirpa, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Belgium, ECROM, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and Stash as well, who brought this opportunity to us and allowed us to create this course for you. So we are a lot of people from all over the world, all connected right now. We're 156 participants signed up from 22 countries, so it's very nice to see such a widespread of participants. And I'd also like to thank Connecting to Collections Care, our online community for hosting and producing the event. So thank you very much. Overall, what you can expect to be able to do at the end of this six-webinar series is that you'll have developed a basic Reorg plan to improve collections access and care in one of your storage rooms. So you'll be able to either do that, or if you follow along with us webinar by webinar, you will have your plan ready by the end of this course. So that is an indication of the course objectives. And we are starting today with the first webinar, which is called Introduction to Reorg Fundamentals. And what we hope to be able to achieve today is we'll be going through two different case studies, showing the implementation of a Reorg project in Canada and another one in Belgium that will be presented by one of our partners. And you will be able to recognize the four phases of Reorg, the four components of Reorg, and the 10 criteria for functional storage. And we'll also be touching upon some of the key factors in successful Reorg projects. So we'll be talking about teamwork, about reusing and adapting existing equipment, and also how to engage your community. I do want to mention that the Reorg method is available online on the eChrom website. The Reorg methodology was developed by eChrom in partnership with UNESCO and has been adapted for distance learning thanks to a partnership with us at the Canadian Conservation Institute. It is available in four languages currently, and more languages are coming. So English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese at the moment. And so a lot of the exercises we'll be referring to or the worksheets are all found in these resources. If you don't have time to jot down this URL, if you Google eChrom and Reorg, you will find this resource. Before beginning this first webinar, you should all have watched the Reorg tutorial video. If you have not watched the video, you received an email earlier this week from Susan giving you the link to the video. So it's just an overview, but we will not be covering the same things that are in this video, so I do encourage you to view the video first. Just to summarize what was covered in the video is that Reorg basically includes four components that we're looking at. So we're looking at building in space. We're looking at the collection. We're looking at furniture and small equipment and management. So those are the four key components of the Reorg method. It includes four phases, which we'll be going through today, two times, one for the first case study and one for the second case study, and it includes 10 quality criteria. Now, before we go any further, I should introduce myself. My name is Simon Lambert. I'm a preservation development advisor for the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa, Canada, and I'm co-hosting this first webinar with my colleague, Marieline de Boupap from Belgium and also known as Marjo. You can call her that. And she is the Head of Preventive Conservation at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Belgium, or KIK IRPA. Now, for the first case study, I want to take you on a trip to Truro Nova Scotia in Canada and we'll be going through a step-by-step through this project, which will help you to understand in practice what do the four phases of Reorg look like in practice. And I want to thank Margaret Mulroney, who's the curator-administrator of the Colchester Historia in Truro Nova Scotia, who shared her slides and her space for us to implement this project at her museum. So Nova Scotia is on the eastern coast of Canada and Truro, and the Colchester Historia is located where the little place marker is. The Colchester Historia is run by the Colchester Historical Society, which was founded in 1954. It's located in the downtown core of Truro. It includes both a museum and an archive. We have two full-time staff working there and several volunteers. There's an exhibit space on the first and third floor and the storage is on the third floor, which is where we'll be focusing our attention today, and also in the basement. There are archives on the second floor and the collection comprises approximately 6,000 artifacts. In the video, you'll recall that the first part of Reorg is called Getting Started, and the idea behind this first phase is to create the best possible conditions for a successful storage reorganization. So at the Colchester Historia, where we worked in 2016, we had a team of 15 museum professionals who were available to work for three days. So that is the timeline of this project. And the context for this project was a workshop. So of course, when you are working in your own museums, you may have 15 professionals, but you may not have 15 professionals. You may have two, three, four people working, and your project will then likely be a bit longer. But this is just showing what was accomplished in those three days with 15 people. In terms of the skills that we had in this group, we had someone who was very, very comfortable with carpentry, so that was very useful because as you'll see, we put those skills to use. We had people who were very experienced in box-making, enrolling textiles, in various collections management-related activities as well. So it was quite a skilled group. We had also prepared some working areas. So we had a swing space and a work area. The swing space is a very critical requirement for any Reorg project, and it's usually necessary in the Reorg project to empty the collection storage area, or at least part of it out of storage in order to reconfigure the layout. And so it's very important to have a space where collections can be moved into and also have an area where work can be done. And sometimes that's dirty work like carpentry and things like that. So those areas need to be accommodated and planned for ahead of time. In terms of floor plans, we did have a floor plan, and our materials and supplies that we had included measuring tapes, gloves, tools, and also storage shelving, which I'll go into a bit later. So that's kind of an overview of the conditions we had going into this project. As I mentioned, the storage that we'll be looking at is on the third floor of this institution, and it's kind of like in an attic space with some wonderful slanted feelings that are very challenging to work with. You can kind of see here inside the storage area and I'm talking about these slanted ceilings. So at the far back of this image, you'll see that from the floor to the ceiling is about three feet or one meter, and then it goes up to the highest point of the room. And you have this wonderful sprinkler pipe that goes through the floor and kind of goes then onto the ceiling. So it's an obstacle that we had to deal with in this project. You can see here a little bit on top, this sprinkler pipe going above the collection from the bottom. And you can see also on the back wall where the ceiling begins to slant. So we have all of this space that's basically unusable against the wall. So that's a big challenge we had in this space. More images again from the same perspective as the source slide showing you a little bit what is going on here. So we have a lot of collections on the floor. We have just things not necessarily grouped by type or by size. We just have access issues, let's say. We're not really able to respect that two-object rule, which we'll be talking about. So we're not able to retrieve objects safely without moving more than two other objects. So we have this issue here with accessing the collections, images, going to slanted ceiling. And this is from the other perspective. So the pipe would be back to us right now, looking towards the other end of the room. And you can see still the sprinkler pipes up top. These are some of the textiles. Here we see another room which is called the props room or the props storage. And that is where the intention was to store all the objects that are not accessioned but are being used for various purposes in display. So mannequins and things that are not accessioned. There were actually a lot of collection items that were accessioned in this room, so that was one of the things that we had to deal with as part of this project. Here we have just a sneak peek into the basement storage, which we worked in the basement, but we didn't address this specific issue within this project. But you'll see what happened after we left. And so this is an idea of the floor plan of this storage. So the blue line shows the line of the ceiling, the slanted ceiling. So this kind of rectangle in the top right corner of that plan is the highest point of the room at 3.5 meters or 11 feet. And it kind of progressively slants down in those two directions to hit the wall at about three feet. So that's kind of how slanted the ceiling is. We have some collections, some non-collections on the floor, so things that were not part of the collection that are not accessioned, and some collections that are on the floor directly as well. And here we have this vertical pipe coming through the floor. That's an obstacle in that area. And this is the pipe going through the room. So in terms of the 10 quality criteria for Reorg, so these are kind of the basic things that one would expect out of a functional storage area that's designed for staff to be able to work with the collection, to be able to use the collection for their museum activities, to meet their mandate, to engage their communities. And so these are the things that Reorg says you should expect out of a functional storage area. So I'm going to go through them one by one, and at the same time, assess what we had in that storage at the Colchester Historium. So at the time of the workshop, we did not have one qualified member of staff that was in charge, although we had someone who was hosting us and who was the curator. She was not formally in charge of storage, and so that was not met. We did not only have collection objects in storage. So we had a range of non-collection items, and we also had collection items which were outside of storage, as I mentioned, in that props room. We did not have separate spaces dedicated to what we call support functions, so an office, a workroom, equipment storage, and storage of other materials like packing materials and things like that. So everything was kind of a little bit everywhere. And we did not have, well, we did have objects placed directly on the floor, so we did not meet this criteria on either. Every object did not have a designated location in storage, and it could not be located within three minutes. Now, I can see, I can hear you people kind of looking at three minutes and getting kind of nervous. Three minutes is what is the time that we would consider to be acceptable for a small collection, so 10,000 objects, one or two storage rooms. If your institution is larger than that, or if you have off-site locations, obviously this number would change, but this is just an indication of what you could expect for a small collection. And the point here is that we're putting a number on it. We're not saying located quickly. We're saying in three minutes, because that way, if in time, it starts to take 20 minutes to find objects, you know that something's wrong, so we're putting really measurable benchmarks between one of these. Similarly, if you look at number six, which we did not meet either, is every object can be accessed without moving more than two other objects. And so we did not, as you saw in some of the slides, meet this either. Objects are arranged by category. This is not the case. So by category mean mostly size, type, shape, access requirements. So we'll go into the categories a little bit more in the second webinar. We did not have key policies and procedures, and they were not applied. We did, however, have a building, which is good, and storage rooms that offered adequate protection for the collection, which is a very good thing. We did have a sprinkler system, which is excellent as well. Every object is free from active deterioration and is ready to be used for the museum's activities. Mostly everything was in a good condition, and mostly everything was ready to be used for exhibition purposes. But the problem is you have to find these things, and that was the big challenge. These two takes us to the storage condition report, as you recall from the video. And the goal here is to document the state of storage and to identify the major issues that are affecting collections access and conservation. So for the management component, we found that there were, the roles related to storage and the responsibilities related to storage were somewhat unclear, and some of the key procedures for managing the collection were not formalized. In terms of building in space, we found that the building offered reasonably good protection. However, the space was 100% used. There was no free space for anything else to be added in there. And some non-collection items were found in storage. So we did have some props that were in the storage area and some collections that were in the props area. There was an inefficient use of vertical space, and there was an inefficient use of floor space, and we'll be going into all those spatial calculations and estimations next week in webinar two. Access to the collection was difficult in some areas. In terms of furniture and small equipment, the units were over-full, so 200% full, which means that you would have needed two times the amount of units that were currently in that room to store the collection adequately. Collections were inaccessible. The inventory was incomplete, and there was no functional location system. I should say there was no reliable location system. There was a functional location system. Well, there was a location system, but it was not reliable, therefore I guess not functional as well. For phase three, which is the action plan, that's where you define your tasks and establish a timeline for your project. So for our project, I'm just going to bring up this floor plan again that we have for the space and remove all the drawings that we have there just to get at the floor plan with only the storage units that are there. Our plan was to increase the usage of floor space by adding some rolling shelving units in the middle of the space when it was determined that the floor could handle the load because we wouldn't necessarily be adding a lot of heavy things. We'd actually be removing some things from that area. And so we found some shelving units that we'll go into a little bit later, but the plan was to replace some of the units that were there and to install some rolling shelving, to use the room height a little more efficiently to store the costumes, and to install some wall racks for long and thin objects along one of the walls that you see on the right wall. Here's the before and after of those two. And what I'm highlighting in yellow is the areas where we were going to be using the floor space a little bit more efficiently. And that doesn't really give you the full picture because we were also going to be using the vertical space more efficiently. So if I just show you that before and after, it doesn't give a full impact of what we were going to be doing in that space. So just keep in mind that we're also working on the vertical space, not only the floor space usage. So this is just a quick sketch that we had posted for all the participants to know what the objective was or what the final result would be after this workshop, the plans that I just showed you. And what I'm going to do now is to list what the different mini-projects were for this larger project. The mini-projects are ways of dividing the task at hand, which is to reorganize that storage area into smaller tasks that are usually associated with an object type or what we call a category, which the categories we'll be talking about in next webinar. But think of them as different storage systems or object types. So here we have the first mini-project. We have textiles or clothing that need to be rolled. So the situation now is that they're in a pile somewhere in the storage or they're in cardboard boxes. So what we need to do is to create a rack system for these rolled textiles. So that's one of the mini-projects. And to that project we can assign, in our case we had 15 people, so we can assign two people to work on that. Another project, a mini-project, was the textiles and clothing that need to be hung, so especially the long ones here that we're talking about. So right now they're in a unit that's overcrowded where they're not accessible. And so the idea is to create a hanging rod system, so a wall-hung rod that we can hang the textiles on. Similarly, the shorter textiles, the ones that are hung, are in the same situation right now and we do need to hang those as well. But they're being considered separately because they're a different sub-category of the textiles to be hung. So these are all separate little mini-projects. Textiles, clothing to be boxed. Right now they're stuffed in drawers which are overcrowded, so what we need to do is to create boxes and to mend boxes. We have some paintings that are lying on the floor and the idea there was to create a slotted unit, so a compartmentalized shelving that you could slide the paintings into to use the space more efficiently and to avoid having the paintings directly on the floor where they could fall over or be kicked or something by someone. And then we had these long and thin items. And so the idea was to create a rack system for them because right now they're being stored on the shelves or on the floor or in piles. And so the idea with these long and thin things, think of canes or spears, we didn't have any spears in this collection, but that kind of long, thin item that if you place them on a shelf, you're not using the vertical space on that shelf efficiently. So we had to find a different way of storing them in order to get those shelves for three-dimensional objects. Here we also have small to medium objects that we needed to send them. Oh yeah, so these are the robust items. We need to send them to the basement. So the ones that won't be really affected by basement conditions, we could send them to the basement and regroup them by size. Then we had other projects that were of a different type. So we have this issue in this particular case where we had, like I mentioned, a museum and an archive. And at some point in time, they were using the same accession number system. And so whenever a document would come into the archive and an object would come into the museum, it could happen that they would be given the same number. And so in the database, you basically, when you search for something, you could expect to find an object and actually you were finding a document. So we had to remove the objects that had these duplicate accession numbers. And the curator identified that this had happened between, let's say, 2015 and 2017. This problem occurred. And so while we were doing this reorg, and we would be handling almost every object, it was a great time for us to look at every single accession number. And if we found some that were between 2015 and 2017, we would isolate them so that the museum staff could process them later because they would need to change the accession number, reaccession them. Another mini project was the preparation of the basement. At the moment, as you saw in the first slides of where I was showing the basement, there is no space whatsoever. Everything is overcrowded down there. But we did find some units that were located in other parts of the institution that we could repurpose and adapt to create temporary storage for those objects that we were removing from third floor, the robust ones. And so the idea was to adapt those units and to create a temporary location system for those objects. And these units that we found held some books that were being used in a book sale that was happening every weekend. And there weren't that many that they weren't, let's say, stored efficiently. And so we could get a few of those units for the collection. We also needed to prepare the prop room because at the moment it was storing both objects and non-collection objects and collection objects. And so we needed to make sure that that was very well segregated so we had no collection objects in there and only non-collection, that clear division. And we also needed to prepare the compact storage units. So as you saw in the floor plan, we were going to be installing a whole row of units in the middle of the space so all of those needed to be assembled and to be prepared to accommodate the collection. These are the main mini-projects that happened throughout this experience at the Colchester Historium. And what we did is we had this Gantt chart that we created which basically splits each different color that you see there is a different team working on one or more different mini-projects. So maybe we grouped all the textiles together and that was a group. And within that group then they divided who was going to be dealing with the textiles that are rolled and who would be dealing with the textiles that are hung and who would be dealing with the textiles that are boxed. Over the three days then we could see how the tasks were divided and as people would complete the tasks they were invited to use the red pen that you see hanging there and color in the boxes so that every group could see what others were doing and where they were in terms of the progress of their tasks. And we'll be showing you as part of this webinar series how to create one of these charts well. So the implementation is then once you've developed your action plan which we've gone through with the chart and also with the mini-projects then the implementation is actually the practical work which our workshop focused on. So you can see here participants assembling the storage units together. That's me in case you've never seen what I look like. I was preparing the units in the basement for storage and end up with the most glamorous tasks of course. Create the boxes for textiles. So here we have a group learning how to make boxes and making boxes. We have a few of us then relocating the more robust objects to the basement in a temporary storage location. This is a swing space that we used which was a kind of a training room, conference room, programming room that was right next to the storage area which was empty. And so this was great because and really was key in the success of this project because we were able to set up some temporary shelving in there to accommodate all the objects coming out of storage because you have to think that when objects are in shelving units in storage and you want to empty that room, you also have to provide shelving units in your swing space. Otherwise if you're using the floor or tables those will fill up very fast. And so we were able to actually use some of the rolling shelving units that we were going to be putting back into storage to temporarily house those objects. And as those were being emptied then they could be installed in the room to accommodate the objects. This is us as we were emptying that central section of the storage where we were going to be installing the rolling shelving. So we're starting to take the objects out and remove the storage units. And this is a little bit more as well from the other perspective where we're also emptying some of the textiles that were hung in those plywood units. This is a room that we had to temporarily isolate all those problem objects that we found. And so these are the objects that had double accession numbers. So we were able to segregate those from the others as part of this process. So this is where we put them. As you can see now it's continuing. We're emptying the central section even more. We've removed all of those plywood units that had the textiles in them. And we're not removing everything from this room. It would be false to say that we emptied the whole thing. But we removed everything that would be in the way of us reconfiguring the layout and whatever could stay in there such as this textile unit and some of the units on the perimeter of the room, which weren't going to be really changing, we left in there just to minimize unnecessary handling. And here we're rehousing costumes that were found in drawers. We're using the pegboard to optimize space. And this is the pegboard that was actually the back of the units, the textile units that were made of plywood. The backing of them was pegboard. So we were able to repurpose that pegboard to hang some of the long, thin items. We're using vertical space more efficiently by creating a double-tier hanging system for garments. And we're also creating a makeshift hanging system for rolled textiles using recycled materials from those same textile units. As we dismantled them we reused the wood and we found some chain in the basement and so we were creating a hanging system. And this is all for us to be able to use that planted ceiling, which was a lot of space that we needed to be able to use. And so we created this hanging system for textile. Around the room, around the perimeter of the room as I mentioned, we didn't remove everything, but we did rearrange objects by type and by size in order to improve space efficiency. So that's what we're doing here around the room. You can see this is the chart being colored by the groups as they progress through the tasks. I'm just going to show you some before. This is the view before the reorg and this is after once we've installed the shelving. Located at the center of this room are the textiles, the box textiles. Other perspectives for after and after with those pegboard units installed on the planted ceiling. This is the self-evaluation, the reorg self-evaluation, which you will all be completing for your own institution or for an institution you work with as an assignment at the end of this webinar. So this is the before situation. There's been a little bit of improvement in the management area, improvement in building in space, selection, furniture and small equipment. So this is after three days. And of course the reorg isn't the final, you can't expect to finish everything within those three days or within your reorg project. There's always going to be work, detailed work that can happen afterwards like object rehousing or the inventory also needs to happen, but that can happen after. So the real goal of this kind of first initial physical reorganization as we call it is to regain access and to regain control of the collection so that you can go into those more detailed projects afterwards. So these are the ten quality criteria before the reorg workshop and this is after. So we still do not have designated location in storage and the objects cannot be found within three minutes because for that to happen we needed really to go through the inventory and do that and that was done by the staff afterwards. And we still did not have the key policies and procedures but the staff did work on that afterwards and those were done as well. So just some data for the project here. So those 15 people working for three days, that's 338 person hours. The budget was 5,000 Canadian, 3,800 US, 3,300 Euro. Apologies if I don't have your currency. But the idea is it's a relatively small amount and most of that went towards the storage units that we had to purchase the rolling shelving for the center of the room. We were able to reuse and repurpose plywood from the existing shelving and pegboard from the existing shelving. And the materials that we purchased included corrugated plastic for boxes and also for some pre-assembled boxes that we used and also as I mentioned the sliding shelving units. And the modular sliding shelving unit system we used, I'm not going to give any brand names but it's readily available and it fits, it's these tracks that have these wheels on them that fit directly onto these tracks that you lay them down directly on the floor like train tracks and they snap into each other. And you don't need to screw them onto the floor so you do need a level floor to use these. And you can't store things that are very heavy on these shelves. They do have a limited load capacity and so you want to check that whatever you will be storing on these will not make the shelves bend because we did discover that in one workshop that extremely heavy objects that were even there temporarily didn't make those shelves bend. So you have to make sure that what you're storing on there won't be too heavy. We did publish a few articles on this project in Stash so those of you who aren't familiar with Stash, this collection of storage solutions that was piloted, that was spearheaded by Lisa Goldberg and Rachel Lahrenstein who are co-coordinators of this workshop. And we have a couple of articles of the different storage solutions that we used in this project up on Stash. So what happened after the reorg, after we finished the project? And this is a very important point because it highlights the benefits of doing a reorg project. So a few weeks or months, I can't remember, after the reorg project there was a water main burst right next to the museum. Now in the second image, you can see in the upper right corner of the second image, that's the museum there, that brick building. So really close to the actual museum and then water came into the basement. Yes, thank you for the arrow. And water came into the basement. Now because we had gone through the basement as part of the reorg project to make room for those objects that were coming out of storage temporarily, we had removed everything from the floor. And this saved a lot of objects that were then not in contact with water as a result of that flood. So the benefit of doing the reorg here is improving your emergency response and preventing damage through things like floods. And so it's not just about just tidying up or sorting things like creating order like you would in your basement or in your garage. There are more far reaching benefits to these kinds of projects. Here is another example of before... Okay, so this is after the reorg still and the team at the museum continued to work on their basement after we left. And this is how it looks like before and this is after. So we can see that the team that was trained as part of this workshop that worked at that institution was so energized by this process that they continued to work on their basement because they knew that that was the next area that they could now tackle since their third level storage was reorganized. So since then, they've been able to complete their inventory. They mentioned that 90% of their objects have been photographed. Everything was uploaded to the online collections database, which you see a screenshot of here in the lower left corner. And they're now able to feature those objects for their community on social media. So every couple of weeks, they have objects from their collection that are beautifully photographed and that they can engage with people from their community, which was not possible before the reorg because this is kind of what their image documentation looked like before. They were able to do their inventory and do their photography project and this is how their image looks now. So as a result of the reorg, they were really able to get a handle on their collection and to do detailed work like photographing their whole collection. That's it for me, so I would like to pass now the presentation over to Marjo from Belgium. Okay. Thanks, Simon. Hello, everybody. I'm Marjolaine and I'm talking to you from Brussels, the capital of the European Union. I'm going to show you a two-week reorganization project in one of the storage areas of our National Museum of Art and History. In October 2015, we reorganized the folk art storage of that museum. As you see on the map, Belgium is a very tiny country with almost the same surface area as Maryland, but ten times more inhabitants per square mile. In you see a map of Europe with Belgium almost in the middle and Brussels is one hour driving from the North Sea coast and is squeezed between, I'm going to try to find the arrow, France, the Netherlands and Germany. Besides being a tiny country, we also have a complex governmental structure with three communities and three regions, which implicates that we have three official languages. The Art and History Museum lies in the middle of a park, right here in the middle of the park in the center of Brussels. The folk art storage lies on the first floor of the building here in yellow and has a very particular half-circle shape, as you see here on the Google view from above. It's a very uneven storage and we reorganized mainly the light blue part of around 3,000 square feet. With the arrow, yes, you see the light blue part. The yellow part was added during the reorganization project to receive very big objects. And here I show you, like, a long corridor with sections divided by walls. Here you see walls and when there are no walls, there was furniture. As you will see later on, the main entrance is here. Here you see the kind of improvised entrance door to the storage with the collection in cabinets who serve sometimes as walls to divide the storage into smaller sections. Cabinets with objects above the cabinets, electrical wiring, a glance towards the end of the corridor, open shelves and non-collection on the floor, a view again of the corridor or a view on the corridor and on your left you see theater puppets hanging on bars covered with white cotton bags to protect them from light and the sinister view. But anyway, this is a glance into the small yellow room at the back of the storage. I want to go into detail into the collection, but all the cabinets were filled with collection. Like you see here, a dollhouse, an open display or dollhouse which was covered, a covered boat, theater panels which were stored on pallets, a piece of a wooden horse. I give you a glance of all the cabinets that were filled with collection and different kind of collection like books, ceramics, boys, metal pots and textiles, walking sticks, wall puppets hanging in cabinets, thick puppets, the ones who were covered, the horse, painted theater decor on pallets and open wooden shelves with no location system so the location system is inadequate. In some cases the cupboards had a location system but it was really not complete. Anyway, in the collection you find big objects like this dollhouse. A specific thing in this reorganization project was that you see the smallest objects of the collection are the tea sets to put into the dollhouses. Here is one of the dollhouses covered but so these very tiny objects were connected or were so tiny and we had to cope with these kind of objects and the big objects like the dollhouses. So we had to cope with very different sizes besides the fact that we were going to have to reorganize almost 12,000 objects in 120 pieces of furniture. Before launching this workshop, eight Belgian colleagues got trained into the RIOC method by Gael de Gichin from ICROM and you see him here in white and you see us working here in the folk art storage preparing the upcoming workshop. We were becoming a solid teaching team because after the training of trainers I launched a call for participation in Belgium to the two-week RIOC workshop which was finally held in October 2015. 16 museum professionals were chosen to join the workshop and on the right you see Lina Willis, who is the curator of the storage. She is giving the first visit to the storage and here you see her showing the collection to the participants while we also created a classroom for the few theoretical courses and like proposed in the method you definitely have to foresee a common area to have coffee breaks and also a place to install tools and working materials for the whole workshop. Now the self-evaluation form shows that for three of the four components, one, two, three, the four components Simon talked about already, a reorganization project is needed so due to the fact that the storage is already filled up with 120 pieces of furniture, these last components on furniture and small equipment only needed small improvements. Compared to Simon's Canadian Museum we can add one more fulfilled criterion because this storage, the folk art storage, had at least one qualified member in charge, which is Linda. Let me show you details of the two-week workshop. We got started with a group of 26 Belgian museum professionals and 16 of them are working in eight different museums and each museum allowed two colleagues to join the workshop because all eight museums had a storage to be reorganized after the workshop by their respective collaborators. You remember also the eight trainers or the mentors and I am here in front of the stairs, my light packet so you know how I look like and here you see us all together at the beginning of the workshop being a group which had to become a team and working in team has to be learned and truly takes a lot of time. A good team consists of eight characteristics. First of all, you need a common objective for the workshop in Brussels this was to reorganize the folk art storage according to the plan which had to be accepted by the curator, according to the rules of the museum, according to the reorg method by regrouping the collections in the blue and the yellow room in team with no object damaged and no personal injuries. The whole reorganization project had to be completed within two weeks by noon. The second characteristic is about language and it's not about the fact that in Belgium we speak three different languages because I solved this problem by using English as a teaching language but the characteristics of using a common language within a team means that you agree on all using the same words for example for cupboards or cabinets or shelf units and you have to be sure that everybody understands each other when using these terms. And here you see us in the classroom and Gael de Guichin is teaching the whole group what to understand by collection and non-collection. You will hear us talking about collection and non-collection Simon did it already in his presentation but this has to be explained and the green, you see the green cards people have in their hands and the red cards show you visually during a teaching course if everybody understands the same or agrees when discussing a certain topic. The third point is the common management of time. It's a key factor to get a team and the work on track not only during a workshop but also if you would start your real project by your own. During the two weeks in the folk art storage one participant was responsible to keep up with time and it doesn't mean strict time management but it means that you check if all the work has been done in time and you verify if someone needs more or less time and you try to adapt. Common management of time I show you one slide again and the common method we use was of course the real method. The fifth characteristic is my hobby horse. It's not only because it's about making fun and having pleasure but it's because I truly believe strongly in the power of this characteristic within team building. Not only having pleasure doing work but also when you organize lunches and dinners or parties in the evening. Within a good team each one has a clear task and during the workshop we divided the storage into four different sectors. You see here the plan of the storage which I showed you before. We divided the storage into four sectors one, two, three, four and we divided the group into four teams and all groups were going to study four different sectors. Each team had a color and you see each team working in his sector. Besides the clear task you need there is the respect for each other's work and here you see the technical team of the museum helping us to move one of the heavy doll houses. The technical team, nor the cleaning team were efficient participants of the workshop but you will see them on most of the group pictures because without them our RE-ORC project would not have succeeded in time. You need a recognized leader during a RE-ORC project and perhaps it's a bit weird for you to imagine us recognizing this crazy white guy which is Yael de Dichin as our leader during the workshop but remember having good times as a characteristic. I show you a picture of him explaining some stuff to the teaching team because he is the leader but I show this slide to show also that Linda is standing there, the curator and she is the one who had to take the final decisions because she is the responsible of the storage of course. She was also the one who checked our daily working plans and here you see on the everyday working plan you see the objective of the day with a checklist of tasks and the time it had to be done. Each of the four teams made these kind of working plans every morning and Linda could follow what was going to happen that day in her storage. She was full time with us during those two weeks. Being a group at the very beginning and how you see that you become a team after two days of team building these results in a fantastic team and you need this team because this team starts now working on the storage condition report which is the second phase of the workshop. As I mentioned before the overall team was divided into four teams of six and each team studied different sectors. The numbers you see here are from one to nine. I added some others but the workshop was mainly working with the nine sectors. You see them on the plan of the storage and we really worked on the sectors one to nine. For example the yellow team works on the sector or the space one and two and they were analyzing the furniture and non-collection items and the other teams were also working on other spaces or other sectors and analyzing the furniture and the collection. Here you see them measuring furniture, measuring height. One of the participants is counting items of the collection in open shelves and she is analyzing the collection within her sector and we all needed Linda, here you see Linda, to help us count and identify the collections in the cabinets. As the inventory was not complete we decided to count all the objects in the collection which means around 12,000 objects or items. She had to help us because she knows what is in the cupboards, and some objects you see, many objects were covered in silk paper or were wrapped. Each team drew the plan. You see here first plan, plan one of the methods and then you have the plan two with the fixture. I go into detail. You have fixtures like electrical wiring and water pipes and here in this second sector of the storage you have an electrical talent device at the bottom which is one of the servers of the museum. I'll explain it later why it is important. Here you see an overview of plan number three of the storage with furniture. So you see drawings of the furniture on the sectors and on the overall plan. This is the detail of the blue team working in sectors six and seven. And during this storage condition report phase one of the most important and exciting steps to undertake is to walk through the collection and put sticky notes to identify what is collection and non-collection. And as the curator could not always be around each team we also provided blue notes to stick on those objects which we were not sure of if it's collection or non-collection. So you see here the results on top of the cabinets you find non-collection with the red sticky notes and the items in the cabinets and in the small drawers will remain collection. The results of this exercise need to be transferred on plan four which is showing the floor occupation in the storage with the collection in green here the collection in green and non-collection in red. So each team draws this plan for its sector and at the end we assemble all sectors into one plan. You see the blue team working on their plan in the corresponding sector. After two days and a half we had a detailed condition report of the management the building, the furniture and the small equipment and the collection. And this worksheet 6 of the REOC method gives you an overview of the composition of the total of all collection items. So in yellow here above you see sector 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 until 9 and here on the left each type of collection in the overall storage like basketry, books, dolls, iron objects, textile and costumes and I'm trying to find very visual. When you see the textile and costume collection you see you have 291 items in sector 1 225 in sector 2 and for instance 1 in sector 5. This detail of information is then used to regroup the collection items which are dispersed all over the storage but Simon is going to explain you this next week in the second webinar. With 56 metal cabinets, 13 metal drawers 17 shelvings and 11 wooden cabinets we counted 30% floor occupation which means that the storage has enough space to receive additional furniture and has the potential to gain additional space but these calculations will also be explained in the next webinar. After identifying the mostly no existence of first small equipment in the storage we were ready for phase 3 which is drawing the storage action plan and so we were going to plan the reorganization of 12,000 objects. Firstly you have to define and find storage solutions for specific and complicated objects which are called the art liars like I show it again the big doll houses, the theater decors and each team needs to find solutions for each sector or space in relation to the type of collection which is going to be stored in that section. Here you see the yellow team who is creating a plan for a newly consultation and study room mainly due to the existence of this server in that part in the beginning of that part of the storage we decided to create a study room with non-collection items where authorized people or unauthorized people like visitors, researchers and technicians could work without entering the room hosting the collection. So we added a second door to the storage and here you have a study room with no collection items and then starts the new storage. This drawing shows the gain of having team members with different drawing skills in your team and here you see the red team working on its proposal using red paper furniture cutouts size to scale the green team who is working with green cutouts. All teams present their storage reorganization plan to each other to finally achieve the overall and future plan number five of the storage. This is the reorganization plan and on this plan you see immediately which furniture from for example the red team has to be moved to another sector and vice versa. I'll show you now how we shuffled all these cabinets and collection items during the last three days of the workshop. It was all about regrouping collections and furniture of course and first all objects on the floor and above cabinets were moved to the yellow room and you see non-collection on top of a cabinet moving heavy objects with a trolley moving over both. Afterwards all empty and non-collection cabinets were moved out of the storage. The Gaelle and the participants getting out empty cupboards which were not good to use anymore and this is a space outside of the storage full with non-collection items. Then all 12 cabinets with non-collection books were moved to the study room with the help of the technical team and we created a space for transit and for making handling supports. Here in red on the right side of the all over corridor this is like the swing space Simon is talking about but we didn't have a swing space we made a transit space within the storage. Pictures of ceramics in transit transport materials collection items in transit where we wrote on the tape the identification of the new location so where we had to bring the objects to and then we transferred the toy collection object per object and these were 15 cabinets of toys which were moved into the storage room and mainly coming from this yellow room a glance of the toy collection and here you see Linda and Alicia emptying one of the cabinets so after three days of complete shifting 120 cabinets and 42 shelf units were moved 12,000 objects were transferred we worked 2,000 man hours during those two weeks and only one shelf unit was bought and this is the final plan of the folk art storage with the study room the first entrance, the study room the second entrance and you see visitors now have access to the big corridor which we decided to be the exhibition corridor because on top of each collection section you see the paintings, the stone and ceramics we recreated exhibition cabinets I will show you later on how it looks like in real life it took us two days for team building and getting started two and a half days for making the condition reports of the storage two more days for planning the reorganization and three days for implementing it here you see here you have a view of the exhibition corridor before and after we walk so this is the corridor before and after it's not super attractive but you see that due to the lighting we could finally see something and you see here the closed cabinets on top of the different sectors and but when you open the cabinets during visits Linda can show now an overview of most important and attractive collection items this is the study room before and after here you see heavy paintings which were stored on top of small cabinets and which now are stored in open boxes on wheels the painted panels of the theater decars are now stored in the one and only both shelf unit here on your right tiny metal objects are stored into little drawers little drawers and the self-evaluation after reorg shows huge improvements now you have to look after reorg only key policies and procedures have to be reviewed and the visibility of the reorg project helped the curator to obtain additional budgets to buy conservation material furniture and equipment so after we all left she and her assistant started individual object conservation they were finally able to update and complete the inventory and the attractive storage allowed special visitors to enter and visit the storage only a few weeks after the reorg project Linda invited the friends of the museum to visit the folk art storage for the first time and this event resulted in the purchase of two of the most precious objects now and reaching the collection thank you for your attention thank you Marjo, that was fantastic and I do want to highlight this aspect of community engagement and once again being able to use collections to support the museum's activities to support the museum's mandate this is actually part of the assignment for next week so we'll be going very shortly into questions but I just want to go over what you all have to do for next week and one, the first thing is to complete the reorg self-evaluation for your own museum or for a museum that you work with and there is a question in the assignment that you'll be receiving if it's not already available on the platform it will be uploaded shortly which is in a Word document there about how do you plan to use your collection after you've done your reorg so think of an innovative creative way that you can use your collection in a way that you maybe cannot use it right now but that you would be able to if you had visibility of it or if you had access to it and so we just want to get you thinking about that dimension because it's so so important that many of our participants are saying we really have problems communicating that to our management that they look at this project and initially they think well so you're just going to clean up so what's the big deal some people who are maybe not familiar with the context that you're working in may not fully grasp the benefit that this kind of project can bring so it's really important to communicate it into those terms as well that you're doing the before and after self-evaluation results and you're showing vast improvements in management, collections, furniture and the building but also from your stakeholders perspective what are you bringing that you couldn't do before that's really key. Thank you so much I do have just a small question from Arjo before we go into our questions from our viewers like our project in Canada in Belgium you did eventually after this workshop you had some individual museums who implemented projects much like we did in Canada and these museums were much smaller and we're working with much smaller teams and I would argue that that size of museum is probably similar to the museums that are listening in today so may not have 20 people working on their project so what would you say is the big difference between that workshop experience where you had all these people working together at the same time for a very short amount of time and how your participants working in a smaller context, smaller museum with fewer people how is the difference between those two experiences I think if you remember the slide where I showed you that we reorganized the whole thing like 12,000 objects with 2,000 man hours of work we were around 28 and we did that within 20 days if you have a real small real project or project on your own you are doing this on your own the same amount of work or the same work we did in the big workshop it would take for one person it would take you around one year of work counting the working days and eliminating the weekends so of course it takes much more time when you are on your own or when you are in a small museum it's the fact that you are in a team and that you are full time two weeks together and you have a big group of people who can work intensively on the problem what I want to emphasize also is that the fact that you are in a team and that you can help each other and encourage each other is perhaps also one of the strongest points of a workshop or a big project and that's why I think you really need to when you are doing a small real project or you want to start to reorganize the storage in your museum don't do it by your own please don't do it by your own because it's so important to have a backup or to have many people seeing what you are doing you really need that momentum and that encouragement from the different team members all museums who did a real project in Belgium they all managed to do to finish in the time limits that we asked them to do it but the one and only who was by her own she had much difficulties and she is still working on it we keep in touch with her she stays into our network but it makes it all much more difficult for us I guess the issue is that when you do a workshop like this you're really blocking your time and you're not in your own institution you're away from work and you're able to devote all of your day to doing this but when you get back to your own institution you have meetings, you have visits you have programming, you have fundraising to do like there's a million things that need to be done on top of reorg so what our participants are facing are challenged with is blocking off and carving out some time for this project because it's not like they're giving extra time they're taking off other projects to do this so they need to find time and what participants have said is I really need to write that block off like they're the Friday afternoon or the Friday of every week so that I keep that for reorg only because otherwise it's very hard to block off the time and for our project we said we had 340 person days so if you're working an eight hour day for that size project that's about eight and a half weeks so what we did in three days you do in eight and a half weeks that's if you're working full time so it is kind of something to consider for sure so it would be I see many people are connected now I also have this Facebook page and a lot of social media it's very important to stay connected to each other and I'm happy to read questions and replies from the participants who are the people who join us to listen to the webinar because it's very powerful and it is getting us out of our isolation Are we ready to start questions? For sure, yes. Before we start I just want to go over a few things I will add the links from the webinar slides and I'll post the slides and the recording in the handouts the recording will be posted where it says access the recording and the other things I will post in the handouts for each week and you need to view the webinars in order to get to the next spot so whether you view them live or as a recording is no problem but you need to view them and for those of you that are going to get the crudely badge which is an electronic recognition you need to listen to all the webinars and you need to complete the assignments and so that's just the bare bones of it so let's see there was a question about the budget in the Canadian project and I think you went over that do you want to say anything else about the budget? No, I thought there was a comment about the museum being able to access a federal grant to implement the project and that was to cover exactly as was said in the comments to cover the cost of the storage equipment so that was yes, exactly so it was $5,000 Canadian I think it was $3,500 US so I'm not sure exactly the conversion but it's a small amount and that doesn't include staff time of course that's just for equipment Yes, I'm sorry Go ahead Go ahead Perhaps we didn't mention that the method is especially also made for small museums who really don't have any money and who would do a recoup and reuse furniture, existing furniture Simon mentioned it also where you can find in the museum stuff that you can use and when I launched the strategy in Belgium I specifically asked or told the museums in the call for proposals that they only needed to foresee around 3,000 euros to join us and so you see these are very small amounts Yeah Let's see We posted a lot of resources on making boxes and also if you look on the Connecting to Collections Care website or in stash there are lots of methods for making boxes Maria Garcia Morales says doesn't a pegboard expel a lot of volatile compounds? Yeah, so pegboard does off gas but what we're really concerned about is pegboard being in contact with objects that are vulnerable to that offgassing and so as you'll recall in the first before slides that pegboard was directly in contact with textiles which are actually more vulnerable than the objects that ended up being in contact with it so the objects that were put on the pegboard were wooden objects mostly they're canes and whenever there were textile elements to those things like I know that there's a few umbrellas those were wrapped Yeah, so it's really a question of is it vulnerable and we kind of tend to go with this risk-based approach which really there is a lot of best practice that says avoid all of that stuff off gases but if it's actually not harmful to the collection and it's not actively damaging it or if it's safe then why would you not reuse it to have the collection? So that's kind of where we start from is there a risk and if there isn't then Okay Was the choice to hang clothing items made primarily for space considerations? That was one of the considerations and currently we considered what could be hung safely based on a range of criteria. There's actually a very good CCI note on textile storage that goes over different criteria for assessing what can be hung, what can be rolled, what can be boxed and so we kind of went by those guidelines in terms of what we decided should be boxed. Some stuff that was hanging at the beginning we did end up boxing and of course at the end of these three days it's not to say that everything is stored perfectly there's still a lot of work that can be done to improve the situation but it would have been impossible in the before situation to even think about doing things like putting everything on padded hangers because there's no place to as you put things on padded hangers it doubles the size that you need and so there wouldn't have been any place to do that and to store it effectively through that first physical reorganization part for them to be able to do all those detailed improvements afterwards. Sylvia Marino says, do you have plans for very small institutions those who only have two staff members, no collections manager and nearly zero staff but I know Sylvia has students. Most of the people who are working you saw two examples here of two workshops where we had a lot of people working at the same time for a short amount of time our project was 10 times smaller than the Belgium one in terms of the surface area but a lot of our participants all of our participants who are working and using the reorg method on their own are actually have one or two staff so sometimes it's one permanent staff and volunteers and sometimes it's just two staff and so the reorg method is really designed to be scaled for those and that's really what we're going to be focusing on in these webinars is institutions with small staff and limited resources, that's our focus so even though you saw these two examples to start with everything else is going to be really focused on that reality. Okay Berlin Lois says she's interested in archaeological collections so this would apply to any kind of collection, yes? Yes, we've had all kinds of institutions with all kinds of collections applied from libraries, archives art collections historical community museum collections everything there's no real limit to what you can use it for and in Belgium we also even have churches who try to rearrange their objects or the collections they have they use the method to get a good reorganized space to store their precious objects Baird to Yuli he says I don't have handouts if you look on the Elevate website which is where you connected to the webinar the handouts are there so you'll find them on that website so and they're not below Simon do you ever include time and other in kind contributions in the budget or have recommendations for museums who want to make a case for this kind of project to the management or their board of directors so the grants that our participants access here that are available in Canada I'm not familiar with all the grants in all the countries who are participating today but our grants are 50% matching funding grants and so they typically what our museums are doing is they're using all the staff time that they're devoting to this project as the in kind contribution for the project so if it's $7,000 total budget half of that will come from just staff time of the institutions because very few of them actually have any money to put towards the matching portion and so they're all using staff time and then I think the recommendations for museums that want to make a case for projects for the board of directors I think you really need to show them what the benefit will be for them so apart from being able to access your collection and being able to store it properly for it to look nice all my inventory is complete I think we need to move beyond that and show what the benefit is going to be for the community and that's really where I think we need to focus now is we figured out the technical component of this but now we need to really sell it from a community benefit perspective what's the bigger picture here what's the point yeah Nancy and everyone I will put in the I'll send you a note from the Elevate platform so you can download things we've really run out of time here but there's one really important question that Fabiola Corona says which is in the introduction to the self-evaluation tool it says if you have more than one storage room fill out one evaluation per room how do you consolidate all your room evaluations into one final report we don't typically do that we tend to leave it out like by room just because doing an average of those scores then can skew the results towards the bigger rooms and so I wouldn't you know sometimes it's like a small room that has a lot of problems with very few objects that are less valuable let's say but you have a large room with a lot of objects that's doing fine so that can make things look better than they are and so you might want to consider just leaving it per room as you're communicating that score what do you think about that just one other mechanical question here and then we're going to have to stop Lindsay I'm a rust truck probably just massacred that how would you like participants to complete the assignments if participants are on leave or between an institution apply the assignment to their path position I'd say that's probably fine is it? yes definitely that sounds fine so we will see you next week for the next webinar at the same time and remember you can watch the webinars live or you can watch the recording and this is great thank you very much thank you all for tuning in sorry Simon