 Seeing Elsa Huxley, who will take it from this point. So Elsa? Hi, thank you, Susan. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Elsa Huxley. I'm the Director of Communications at Heritage Preservation. And we are so glad you're joining us here today. Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This site is designed and produced by Learning Times. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the Connecting to Collections initiative, including the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. And links to these resources are filed under the topics menu on the site. We will also file a recording of today's webinar there. About twice a month, the Connecting to Collections online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource and hosts a webinar related to it. The resources we posted for today's webinar were three videos produced by the National Park Service. And they can be accessed by clicking on this photo on our web page, which is located at ConnectingToCollection.org. Today, we want to welcome Brigid Sullivan, conservator at the Northeast Museum Services Center at the National Park Service. Brigid is going to share her expertise on housekeeping at historic sites with us. Thank you again for joining us, Brigid. Can you tell us a little about yourself? Yes. Number one, it's really delightful to have the opportunity to take part in these Q&As, these wonderful webinars. This actually is my very first webinar, and I'm all excited about it. I have been a conservator for the National Park Service for many years now. How many? I don't think I'm going to read that myself. But I started out as a conservator with ethnographic and archeological collections. But since about 1980, in the late 1980s, I became more and more and more and more and more occupied with historic house museum settings. And now I had been in the Western region, hence archeology and ethnography. And now I'm in the Northeast region, which has a plethora of historic house museums owned by the National Park Service. I cover the region, the Northeast region, of the Park Service. And that's sites from Acadia up in Maine, all the way down to Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. And many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with all the National Park Service sites in the system nationwide. And we do have a lot of historic house museums. And we provide in-house training for our housekeepers. And we have a pretty ingenious government agency. Of course, we have protocols pretty much for everything. And so I'm happy to have this opportunity with some of you I know are not from big, big large museums that might have many different departments and with us, museums that are actually a nationwide network where we have every resource in the world. So I just thought that I could share with you some of the guidance that we've used and developed over time dealing with a variety of different historic sites from the very, very fancy to the most heartwarmingly humble. So we have a little bit of everything. That's what we're going to talk about today. I'd like to know, Astley, are there participants? I see that there's five of you online. Are there participants from a museum other than a historic, interiorist museum, a historic fractures museum? Anybody from a conventional museum where it's not in a historic setting? No? OK, well, that's good. That's what we're going to talk about. So that's pretty much it in a nutshell. And because I've been involved for so long doing collections, doing museum housekeeping plans for parks, we really have evolved it into something that really seems to work both for the service of the museum and most importantly, not most importantly, equally importantly, the historic structure in which it is hovered. To come up with something that is really thoughtful of all of the different facets of museum work that accompanies really a housekeeping plan. So a housekeeping plan never is something as simple as, well, dust twice a week and do this and that. The plan really is the central component of a strong preventive conservation program that serves both the museum collection and the historic structures at any park or in your case, in any museum setting. When it's developed thoughtfully, an improved museum housekeeping plan really provides a framework for consistent care of museum objects and historic interiors by institutionalizing this more fundamental preservation effort at the museum management level. So if I split back and say park management, just know that it's in my blood. The green and gray portions of my blood. But anyway, so it's a real management tool and you have to really look at it that way. Conservation, as you know, has two aspects and that is preventive conservation. And the other one is remedial conservation. Preventive conservation is really the first line of defense against victory race in the museum collection. And that's what housekeeping actually is. It depends on the adherence of a plan by the entire staff over time, not just one single employee. No single employee is responsible for the care of all of the objects in the museum collection. And it really requires teamwork on the part of the curatorial division, the interpretive division, the maintenance, and the administrative staff to ensure that preventive conservation at the park or at times of say park, just read museum in your mind, is an ongoing process. So that's the true foundation of using housekeeping. And one reason that I'd like to point out that the various aspects that are involved is not just the housekeeper, it's not just the curator, but it is the maintenance staff, the admin staff, the curatorial staff. You have to look for and think that what the interpretive goals are of the site, above and beyond, that this is simply what the preservation requirements are for various kinds of materials in your collection. I've got some slides. I think I'm going to put some up, and we can talk off of the slides. Did you want to do any of those polls? Oh, polls, yes. Yes. Thank you for reminding me. Sure. Could you set them up with the polls? Yes, I'll do that. I wanted to also let you know, Bridget, that your audio was cutting in and out a little bit as if you were looking away from your phone. Oh, I'll be very careful not to do that. OK, so here's our first poll. Yes. The audience, just go right ahead and tell us about your experience. Just click on the radio button next to the yes, no, or don't know. It's possible that some of our audience is listening in a group situation, and so they're looking at their colleagues and saying, you push the button. OK, well, it looks like, for the most part, they don't know. Would you like to know about staffing, Bridget? Yes. OK. How many staff is at each site? Do you have full time? Do you have, for instance, I'd be curious of knowing who does the maintenance of the exhibit? Is it volunteers? Is it part staff? And are they trained? Do they have training? That all of the museums that are responding to this have one to five full time employees. How many have closer to three? And you know what? I'm getting some feedback from the audience that for some reason the radio buttons are not working, which might be why we're not seeing very many responses. Let's try that again and see if they are working now. They're working for me over on my other computer. Well, now, see, I'm getting some variation here. 20% has all volunteer staff, whereas about 70% have one to five employees. Well, now it just switched up to 100% has one to five full time employees. This is puzzling. OK. Well, so we're in the ballpark. Yeah. All right. Let's just keep going on then. So how many, I don't know if this is one of the poll questions, but how many of the participants are the ones that are actually doing the active housekeeping? Or are you directing others to do the housekeeping? You know, perhaps people could just type it into that Q&A box. Oh, there you go. Instead of putting the polls and then looking at an idea. In the poll, putting the phone down. Oh. No, no, no, the audience can type in the Q&A. They can hear us, but they can't talk with their voice. So audience, you have to use your fingers. Thank you, Connie, for getting us started. It doesn't feel OK when you. Is my voice still fading in and out? It sounds much better to me. OK. Because I know that Donna Miller complained about that as well. Not through the actual housekeeping. How many have trained, have training in housekeeping? Should I put that in the question thing, too? They can hear you, and they can just type into the. Oh, OK. I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking. No vote. No one has. OK, that's good. One thing that we have as part of this webinar is a downloadable information that's really going to set you up with discussion of techniques that are appropriate to use on a whole variety of materials likely to be found in historic site museums. And not only that, handling rules as well. Because handling is so important how you handle something. As a matter of fact, I think in one of the videos that you saw, I think it was the National Park Service one. And it was talking about how important a vacuum cleaner is in housekeeping. But I would say, with my years of experience, that the most important thing, the most important tool in your toolkit is actually you. And I mean, not to say that you're a tool. I remember that used to be a perjuret as years ago. But the tools that you possess, and those are your hands and your eyes, you see and you handle. If you don't have that ability, that sensitivity to approach a museum object carefully and knowledgeably, then the handling, no matter what the housekeeping is going to be, that the handling will just completely have an effect on the object. You could drop things, et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, so then I give a whole list of handling various kinds of things. General rules. How to handle furniture. Obviously, you would never in your own house push or pull furniture. Or you might. I, myself, in my own house have been known to do such a thing. But these are long-trying, true lists that I'm happy to share with you based on many years of experience. And these are also from a variety of sources as well. And then as a housekeeper, also, there is the distinction between preventive treatment and remedial treatment. And that's sort of the distinction between conservation in general. And housekeeping, as I said, is the primary goal. The primary fortress of preventive housekeeping plan, preventive housekeeping in any museum. The flip side of that is remedial treatment. And that's what conservators actually do in their labs. I've got a conservation lab. Then I have conservators working. And we're actually doing hands-on treatment. But housekeeping, actually, a little bit less now than it used to. But it also can involve what I would class as remedial treatment. And what remedial treatment is, to me, would be something like polishing silver. And the goal that I would set for any museum would be to rely only on preventive conservation and get everything up to a state that the preventive care, the housekeeping preventive care, can take the entire place of anything that might be construed as a hands-on, more aggressive treatment or a remedial treatment to optics. I'm going to show you some slides. OK, where shall I go? I've got a whole bunch from various parts of 2011. This slide, this image, is at a historic house museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. And when I keep preventive conservation, this is my, what's wrong with this picture slide? And we're going to be talking about placement of furniture right now, placement of exhibits. And when I understand that when you're in a historic house museum, oh, this couch was always here. Oh, this table was always here. But in certain circumstances, you can, within the spirit of the reconstruction of the historic interior, make some changes that will remove collections from certain harm like this. OK, what do we have here? We've got a inlay table. What is really sensitive to moisture in late wood? OK, we've got a plant sitting on it. Ah, the plant's been watered, hasn't it? You can see that the crusty salt rings, even on the pot that it's in. Oh, that can't be good. And then also, you know what? It's right in front of the window. Ah, let's see. What is really sensitive to light damage? You know what? Inlayed wood. And you can see the sun completely on that. But hang on, there's more. What is very sensitive to changes in temperature and relative humidity? Any kind of layered object, and that includes inlaid wood. And if you look, you can see that that little table is right over a heat retrofit. So your eyes are going to tell you that, you know what? That's maybe not the place that we're going to put this old historic table. And we're certainly not going to put a plant on top of it that has to be watered. So those are the kind of decisions that you can make. You can make the decision that you would, you don't move it away, certainly away from that. If this is where the great man himself put the table, it can't be moved. Maybe you could turn off the register. And certainly, certainly, certainly, you can close the curtain. Because light is a really, really, really, really damaging thing to collection. And a lot of times, this is great. OK, OK, wait, wait, wait, nine. Here we go. So this is Edison. And this actually is where the great man's thought. And the light went off, the great man was there. You can't really move the chair. The interpreters would not stand for that chair being moved at all. But you can see the damage to the textile. Textile light, as you know from experience, really bleaches the Jesus out of dyed materials and the denatured silk. And it does all kinds of horrible things. But there's no reason, really, that you have to have the light pouring in like that. You could be, if this is the historic house, you could, if you have the luxury of having staff, do what the owners would have done. And if that is the sun, makes it a solid path around the house, close the curtain. You could do that. Or if you don't want to do that, there's a lot of our historic houses use. And I think the great effect, kind of spendy, but boy is it worth it, the shade that transmit light, but cut it down quite a bit. And you can see pretty much, you can see outside, you can see that, you don't see everything clearly, but it does cut down on that solar radiation, both the heat aspect and also the visible light aspect. That's something that I think all historic houses should think about, would be shade. And I know that there's sometimes, oh, well they never would have had shade. But you know what, you have to make, you have to make some sort of compromise that's gonna work. You probably can figure out something that's gonna be working. And then also, you know, with the windows, people used to use, and still do continue to use coding or film for UV, to filter UV. And so that's what UV is, of course, the most active element in the light spectrum in terms of destroying things. So that's something that I would recommend too, but as housekeepers of any kind of historic house, you need to be aware of the changes of the day. You need to know what's gonna happen, when, at what time, and beyond top of things. Just the way the people in the house who lives in the house would be on top of things. Now, this is great when you have a large house, but I sense from your poll that we don't have those kind of sites that have lots of people looking after it. But anyway, but just be aware, and if you have the frontline possibility, really consider if you really, really, really want to have the windows open at that time of day. Can you close them? Is there anything else that you can do to remove that aging to the theory that you can really throw out both an agent of the period of life away from the museum collection? And as housekeepers, you're in the trenches. You know exactly what's going on out there, and you can make the decision to close it or remove something from the exhibit. This is at Fort Vancouver, up in Washington, and this is the death of the key factor at the fort who was an ornithologist. And here, right in the light of day, is something that is hideously sensitive to light damage, and that is natural history assessment. Anything with feathers, anything with protein, things like that, bleach, and you've seen probably buffalo stuff, buffalo and birds and things like that, museums that have just achieved an old history, natural history museums who achieved a sort of color of a sort of faded out ginger snap over time, and that's what it does, the feathers and the fur and everything else. Now, what can you do about that? Oh, but he always, that was his task. He always had his stuff there. Well, one thing that you could do would be to take those slats, flat things. What I would do is I would turn them so the slats don't point down, they point up, and that's going to protect a little bit more of the mounted ornithology thing there, or also a shade, but since it already has the slats, I would use the slats first to see what you have. And also work with, when you're doing stuff like this, work with a light monitor so you can see what effect your actions have on mitigating a situation that you know to be troublesome to the objects that are displayed in this setting. Okay, where will we go now? That's in line. Let me go, go to, oh, I know where we're gonna go. No, we're not. Here, now this is Cape Cod National Seashore, and this is the Peneman House, which is the house of an old sea captain, very well entrenched on the Cape historically, and the house is wonderful, but the house is actually falling apart. Now, if you look at this, if you look a little carefully, you can see many, many, many things. If I say what's wrong with this, choose five things that is problematic for display in this area, and you're probably gonna see the mold on the ceiling, the water damage everywhere, and that's gonna tell you that the largest object in the collection, which is what, the building, the building's always the largest object in the collection. You have to be very, very, very aware of what's going on with the building. That something bad is happening to the building. Now, what that's gonna do is translate, it's gonna transmit all of its bad energy to whatever museum collections you have in this area. Also, when you're looking at the environment of a historic house, if you have a moisture problem, you're gonna have insect problems, and that's gonna be a problem for your collection. If you look down at the baseboards on the Peneman slide here, you can see that some chewing insect has been selectively eating a certain color in the wallpaper, and we see that a lot in historic houses. And there's a lot of mold on the, you can't really see the carpet, but the carpet is chewed, chewed, chewed, chewed, chewed by insects, and it's essentially the west is gone and there's areas of just warp alone on the carpet. So that's the whole enchilada of everything that can happen there. All of the environmental agents of deterioration are working very hard at the Peneman house. Housekeeping, you want to be, what you wanna do is be aware of the whole effect of the microclimate and macroclimate of the house and how that's gonna affect the furnishings and that's going to dictate your walkthroughs and how often you're gonna go into the structure, et cetera. And then in a situation like this where the building itself is so, so, so unable to support even a decent climate inside, I would say that this would be, there should be no museum exhibit in this house at all. As a matter of fact, there's nothing wrong with doing a museum exhibit of the house itself because that's the history of it. Very few objects actually relate to Captain Peneman in the house. There's a bedroom upstairs, there's this and that, but that doesn't serve the purpose of preservation and it doesn't really serve the purpose of really informing the visiting public of what is going on, what had gone on, what is the historic significance of this house. So that's the Peneman, the Peneman parlor, it still looks like that lots of places don't look like this. The interpretive goals are very important when you do a historic furnished house. What is the, what are the message, messages that you're trying to give? What do you want the visitors to understand from the historic setting and how can you maintain that? Now this here is I think a really good one to illustrate that point. If you look at the image that's on the left, you can see right there, right by the kerosene lamp is a little mouse. And then what's in that laundry basket? Ah, I believe that might be a cockroach, you're right. Now this brings us to IPM issues. The housekeeper is also the front line of IPM, integrated pest management, but I'm gonna step back from that having said it and just say that actually the mouse and the cockroach are an integral part of their interpretive scheme. This site is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. And what they're trying to do is to give a faithful, a faithful representation of life in the day. This is the Gumpert apartment. I don't know if any of you've been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, but it's fabulous and I think everyone can go. So that's part of the interpretive scheme, those things. So, but normally that would be something you couldn't move fast enough to get your IPM traps out and this and that and see something like that. So the interpretive goal is super important and that's another reason why the Pentamin House doesn't work is because Mr. Captain Pentamin never would have lived in abject squalor, which is what it is now. And you know, some of our sites are very, very fancy and some of them are not. I mean, we go from every place to, you know, the most humble of vernacular architecture and in our structures all the way up to like the Vanderbilt mansion and stuff like that. But one thing that, one of my favorite houses I think is probably Maggie Walker. And I don't have a slide for Maggie Walker, but I'll just tell you about it. Maggie Walker was the first black woman banker ever in Richmond, Virginia. And she has a house that she took enormous, enormous, enormous pride in. And the National Park Service and their historic furnishings plant. See, we have historic furnishings plant in this place because what that does is it really studies everything and says, well, this is what is significant. This is the significant area and this is what it's gonna look like. Now, what we say for Maggie Walker, the National Park Service, that would be me, you need to keep in mind that the home requires a high level of cleaning. Maggie Walker took great pride in her home. She recognized the value of her presence in their presentation, which were a vital aspect of how she saw herself and how she represented her success to her friends, clients, and neighbors. Cleaning should be maintained at a high level with silver polished, cut glass, washed for brilliance, textiles clean and pressed, influenced, polished and dust-free. And that says it all. That's actually the goal of the housekeeping plan at Maggie Walker. Now, would that be the same at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum? I would suggest that it would not be the same. You can go down to more and more humble sites and see where am I gonna end. Let's go look at some mold. Now, oh, why not? Okay, this is actually Adam's, you have to go ahead and write on Adam's, but this is in the servant's kitchen. And as you're cleaning, you have to really be aware of looking at that thing in terms of the housekeeping needs and everything else like that. With this, you see, oh my God, it's that dirty, when you look at that, oh, I gotta clean that, oh, I'm the monoleum. But actually, what you're looking at is mold. And mold can have all kinds of appearances and you're not really even sure that that is mold, but anytime you see something that is moldy, you really wanna get out there and do something about it. So if you go through your, if you do your housekeeping plan and go through and walk through the house, keep your eye out for all of these agents of deterioration and the whole phylogenetic scale of what can go wrong, starting from members of the third kingdom, phylogen, whatever, namely mold and things like that all the way up to clumsy housekeepers and tourists that come in and sit on a couch and break it, I mean, that kind of stuff. But in between there's impacts and that's why we have our IPM plan. Do people have an IPM plan? Hello? We'll ask the audience to put that into chat. Somebody gave up because they can't hear me. Every once in a while, I'm not sure what was going on with that individual. We didn't have an opportunity to troubleshoot. Every once in a while, it says if you're moving away from your handset and it becomes a little muffled. Oh, okay. Amy has answered that she has no formal IPM plan. Okay, I see that. Okay, the IPM plan, just like a housekeeping plan, it's ancillary to a housekeeping plan because it lets you know when you're gonna do your walkthrough and when you're gonna look for what creatures are inside of the house that are gonna feast on your collections. And typically in a historic house, it's gonna be, if you have wool carpets, it's gonna be domestic beetles, eating all of the protein wood, and I mean the protein wood, the wool and silk and things of that nature. It's gonna be creatures that just come and go if you have a whole bunch of spiders in your house, that means that you have an insect problem within the house above and beyond the spiders because that's what the spiders are feeding on. So traps and a really close eye out for instances of insect damage to collections let you know that in your housekeeping plan, you better get a program up there to go around and really inspect for insects and set up a trapping plan for insects as well and there's various insect traps that are out there in the public and there's quite a lot written in the literature about integrated pest management for museums. So that is part of your job really because the housekeeper is the one who goes through and looks at everything. And even if you're not on a schedule, if you're not gonna look in this room, if it's an attic, you're gonna go up there at least once a week because you wanna see if, is there a leak up there? Is, are there rodents living up there? I mean, those kind of things. So you're policing, you're not just cleaning the area, you're policing it as well and making sure that everything is there, nothing has been stolen, nothing has moved around and things of that nature. So mold everywhere, where should I go now? Now, when it comes to bringing everything up to a spit polish, like Maggie Walker would have done, you can get into trouble with that too. And it's more, more back in the day, back in the day as they say that these kind of, I haven't seen anything like this for a long time. That's polish residue and that is damaging to the wood. It's very, very bad for the metal, et cetera. So if you're gonna polish anything, see polishing metal, to me, that straddles, I mean, you jumped over at that point into the remedial conservation camp. And I'm not saying that you can't go there, you just have to go there with knowledge of what you're doing, how to apply polish and things of that nature. Some of the guidance I gave you in your downloadables, we'll talk about that. But if you see anything like this, you just, and it's very, I can tell you it's very hard and actually a conservator should come and do the cleanup on that because once the silver polish settles like that, it becomes concrete. And so that's just something that should never have happened. Polishing, everyone says it's a feel good thing I wanna polish this up. But polishing really, really, really is something that is not reversible. And preventive conservation really wants to have something that is a little bit less treatment and more prevention than polishing. But yes, you do periodically polish, but just make sure that you have, you're using something that is okay to use on any surface, particularly specular metals like silver, particularly plated specular metals, which you can wear the plating off as well. So I don't know if in your smaller Historic House Museums, you do have metal that needs the polishing and things like that, but that's addressed in your guidance as well. That's right, we have a supply list that we'll be providing a link to both here and afterwards in the discussion boards and people can refer to that. Right. So now, Moll, know what you're looking at when you do your visual inspection. And how often do you think people should do those visual inspections? I know you said going up to the attic once a week. Is it once a week a good amount of time for someone to go through the whole house? Well, it depends on how large your house is. I would say definitely no longer than two weeks. Okay. And it depends, yeah. And it depends really on what your visitation is. How many visitors? Are you open? It depends on things like, are you open? Does the public have to walk through rural fields to get into the farmhouse or whatever your situation is? Is mud and dirt and water likely to be trampled in by visitors? How many, what is your tour group size? For a house like Adams, they have had a longstanding thing that they bring I think like 14 to 16 people through at once which is, it's horrible. And I can say that because I work for the parks. And we've been after them to lessen that too because that's all of these people going upstairs. All, you know, if they have backpacks or whatever and then there's trees of their code, it's rubbing along a wallpaper. You just have to be kind of aware of all of these, all of these situations that arise any time you invite a visitor into the house. Above and beyond them touching things. Well, just their presence there could be a problem because they could be tracking in this and tracking in that. And also the way the house is interpreted, does the interpreter stand on the front porch for instances while the screen door is open, you know, and all flies come in and everything else like that. You just have to always, always, always, always focus as the housekeeper on keeping bad stuff out and treating everything that's in there on with an appropriate treatment at an appropriate interval. And I do think that the guidance that I gave you was gonna work. And that means that, you know, you're not always gonna be on sort of a combat of relationship or whatever, you know, with the interpreters because it's a close partnership, housekeeping and interpretation. And if you get together and work together, I know that you're gonna be able to find something if you cook in an open fireplace in your historic house. I mean, that's something that has many, many, many issues related to it. But just know that when you develop a housekeeping plan, it's gotta be reality-based. It's gonna be based on who comes to the house. When, at what time of the year, does it close for winter? Do you have an open season, you know, all of those things and just plan accordingly. It's ideal for a historic house. If it has a period of closing, because that's gonna be when you come in and you're really, really, really doing your cleaning. If you have rugs on the floor, you're gonna roll them up. You're gonna, you know, vacuum the back, you're gonna vacuum the front. And all of this is available. All of this information on how to do that is available and in the literature that we provided you with names of, et cetera. But just be aware that it's not, it's not just one person doing the housekeeping. You have to be part of a team. Because if you're not part of a team, you know, it simply isn't gonna work, particularly if you have a historic house with structural, shall we say, issues. And then you want the chief of maintenance to be your best friend at that point. And I think I've talked enough. Do people have questions? What do you want me, what do you want me to go? Tell me where you want me to go I've been wondering about what the most common mistakes are that you see. And I wonder if you start talking about that if it might. The most common mistakes I see is overcleaning selected pieces. Okay, what kind of pieces? Selected pieces might be something of iconic importance. Like it could be the work basket of, you know, grandmother, whoever, that is dusted all the time. Things that are, things that are dusted, things that are visible to the visitor and well, two things I say, okay, overcleaning things that are visible to the visitor because it's easy to do. You sell what the visitor sees this, the visitor sees that. But then also you have to snap your brain around to see, well, wait a minute, what is in the visitor seeing and how does that contribute to my workload as a housekeeper, you know, is the floor on the porch dirty? Is it dusty, you know, these kind of things. And that affects the other part of the question. That's going to affect what's happening in the house. You know, if you have, in the summer, if you have the windows open and screens up and things like that, but just get to know your house and what its needs are and certainly think about what the visitor sees because, you know, you don't want to do everything if the visitor isn't going to see it. You want to do everything that needs to be done and need to do and nice to do really are two different things when it comes to housekeeping. For instance, we have, I'll give you one site and that is Marsh Billings, a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful house up in Vermont. And it is high-style, Eastlake, high-style and beautiful, you know, pier mirrors and God knows what else. And so the visitors come in and anything that has a really, really, really, and Longfellow House would be another one, has an impact on the visitor when they first come in and slap their eyes on the room and take everything in. Nothing bells, you know, negligence than a dusty glass table or a dusty mirror or something like that. That's the kind of stuff, you know what? Does it need to have that done? Well, it probably doesn't need it every day, but what it does need to do is to be ready for a visitor according to when the visitors come. You never want anything to have a lot of dust on it because dust attracts moisture and it holds it against the object. It's very, very, very bad, for instance, on guilt frames. It holds moisture against the object and if you have something that is very complex and layered like gilding, you just don't want to have dust around. But do you want to be, you know, just completely, completely only dust-oriented? No, you know, you have to also look, you should go through the house at where visitors have been and, you know, the pathways and things like that and if visitors, you know, on banisters for stairs, we had this one situation. I almost put a slide in, a slide in to show you guys, but it was too repulsive. That main banister of John Adams' home in Quincy that had such a deposit of lipids, that's oils from your hand, lipids on it, that it actually added topographic texture. Wow. You know, I know that's pretty, that's pretty gross. And so we, you know, we do, and they say, oh, you know, we're cleaning it, but anyway, it just adds and adds and adds and adds. Now, also a lot of problems that you have with housekeeping is gonna relate to past treatments. Have people been, what have they been putting on the furniture for years? How have they been polishing it? Are they waxing stuff? Are they pledging? Are they using pledge? Are they using, you know, other things that you might use in your own home? But you never, ever, ever would use on a museum object in a historic setting. So, and those things can take their attrition too. So. That's a playlist will help people know what they should. Yeah, the supply list. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, and some things that are available, like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, I put them onto swifters. I love swifters. I love anything that keeps your eye, that has some sort of a long wand kind of thing. That, so you can keep your eye on what you're doing, rather than using a rag or something where you can't really see how it's affecting the surface. For instance, when I dust something like a chandelier, anything, you know, any piece of bocage, ceramic, or I always use a long, handled, soft painter's brush. And because I'm keeping my eye on what's there, you don't wanna have any cleaning tool that you're using that's going to, that's going to get in the way of your being able to do a visual assessment of anything. So that's what I see, your eyes are like so important and your hands are too. And neither, your hands never want to go where your eyes can't go. When you talk about a visual assessment, what are some key things people should have in mind when they're performing one of those? I would say change of a visual assessment would be change of a luster, you know? It does, if you get some sort of, you know, you can sense oily deposits or something like that. And then also another thing that I can readily pick out is if you have fly specks and things of that nature, you know? And a lot of it is gonna be, you know, you visually inspect for mold, always mold. And go up in the attic because the attic is, the house is the largest object in the collection. I just can't stress that enough. And do a walkthrough with your maintenance guys and don't be aware of that. But when you handle something, again, use your eyes and use your brain and have a plan before you actually do something. And never let anything get in the way of your visual access in cleaning anything. So, um... In the video they spoke about when you're doing these assessments, there are some pieces of furniture that are so large and moving them is in itself very dangerous. You have to, you have to have two people. And for a lot of things, and that would mean anything that's on a ladder, for instance, you really can't do that yourself. And so, even though you might be the front line housekeeper in your institution, you, there's gotta be somebody, an assistant, a docent, you know, hopefully somebody with training is gonna be able to help you. But the guidance that I gave you has general rules for handling. Following, I've given you guidance for installation because installation would be as you set things out in your historic museum, can you put this directly on wood? No, you know, it would be better if you would put it on some unique barrier between this material and that material. For instance, between metal objects, such as silver and brass candlesticks on wood surfaces, put some mylar there. Between paper, like letters and documents in a wood surface, like if historic letters are sitting on a desk, you have to do that because these materials can affect each other pretty seriously, especially given the fact that you have a climate that floats freely generally in houses. And it's gonna be, you know, sometimes quite humid, and if you, you know, I mean, it just, it's good. So be aware of the installation thing because I tell you what materials you can use and pretty much why. And it's a short list, it's only nine tenants of faith there. So, and then the handling rules that you have, there's the general rules, and then I go on for furniture. Furniture, never push or pull. If it's made of composite objects, do this. If it's marble pots, do that. So it's what I tried to do and what other sources similar to this have done is to, you know, look at things with what normally a person would do to it and look at the object itself. And the cleaning depends really on the object as well as the skills of the cleaner. You know, the cleaning techniques completely depend on the object, I guess is one thing. And with the handling of it, you know, never move small objects by hand. Always put it in a basket or a box. Never put a light and heavy things in one box. You know, I mean, those sorts of kind of things that when you think about it, you say, oh yeah, you know, duh, of course. But it's nice to have them written down, especially as you will leave a housekeeping plan, hopefully everyone's gonna run home and do one. And you're gonna be able to really with the information that I've given you, you're gonna be able to do a pretty good stab at it. When to wear gloves, when not to wear gloves, you know? How to handle fabrics. And on and on, it's all there. Okay, and I'm posting right now some links to those documents and we're posting them online to our general discussion section. Yeah, and then also I've given you the cleaning techniques, what you can do for your architectural surfaces, your walls, what you can use. How can you clean, clear, finished, and painted wood? Which you know, if you have a big visitor ship, you're gonna have kind of attrition on a lot of the, not just like remember the Adams, I don't ever want to remember the Adams banister. Oh my God. But you know, those sort of things, you know, the people leaning against and hand prints on brass escutcheons around doorknobs and those kind of things, any sticky wood. What can you use? And you have a lift now for architectural surfaces. And that would be the wood moldings, the vacuuming of the floors, the this and that. What do you do if the wood is unfinished or worn or it's wood that has an unstable finish? So what I tried to do is to think of everything that you're gonna encounter and give you guidance for that in the cleaning techniques section of your handouts. So, what else? Okay, I wanted to mention the manual of housekeeping that we're gonna give out to one of our participants here today. After we sign off, we'll pick one person at random and we'll be sending them a copy of the National Trust Manual of Housekeeping with our thanks for participating today. And I wanted to also mention that I posted a URL for our evaluation for today's webinar and we'd love to have your feedback. Okay. I'll explain in future one. I'm trying to think if there are any other, does anybody have any other questions? Before we wrap up, we have about five minutes left. I was sort of hoping, while we wait to see if there are any other questions, if you could say something about inspecting the envelope of the house. You've touched on it a couple of times. Yes, yes, yes, yes. How important that is. Is there anything you could tell us about that? Well, obviously, the main entrance when the outside comes inside is through windows. And you wanna make sure that your window hardware is in good shape and you don't have flipping and sliding and things like that. And look closely at the casements. If you have termites, for instance, always look out for termites. You're gonna see it in softwood that's been wet for a long time. And at that point, your IPM is gonna have to jump into place and you're gonna have to do something about that because that is definitely gonna affect not just the largest object, but the littler objects inside as well. So the windows are a big, big, big, big issue for me. Be very, very, very mindful of windows and that the hardware is okay and they're going up and down and things like that. Look around, always around baseboards too because you're gonna see insect activity there. If you have a fly season, that's where you're gonna get the insects, you're gonna get flies, which are a nuisance. And plus they do, I will say delicately, poop all over everything, fly specs, which is very damaging to metal. So you wanna make sure that that's your IPM plan is dealing with that. But also the dead insects. If you see dead insects anywhere in the house and that includes the attic, get rid of them because they're the protein source for the really, really, really nasty carpet beetles and the guys that are gonna move in and not just eat the cellulose, which is what the wood is, but they're gonna chomp down on the settee, the carpets, you know, and things like that. So that's your walkthrough should, and I say no more than two weeks should go by without a walkthrough and the walkthrough is gonna, you're gonna have your IPM hat on, you're gonna look for bugs, you're gonna look for signs of bugs, you're gonna switch out traps as needed and read up on IPM plans because there's a lot in the literature about that. You're gonna have your interpreter hat on, too. And you're gonna look at what do people often see, does the tour guide handle something specifically, hold it up? Well, this is the great man's wine glass or something like that. Just be aware of how the objects are used in the house and look at those objects and make sure that there's no attrition on them. If you also, a very important thing with housekeeping is do you have seasonal displays? Do you celebrate, do you decorate for Christmas? That's a biggie because you're gonna have pine needles and all berries and everything else in the house. Just to make sure that the housekeeping takes any trace of holiday displays or use, a special event use out of the house. So what else can I tell you? Anything else? Shoe coverings. Do you recommend that people wear those? I recommend that people wear them as needed. In most of the historic houses I've ever been in, you don't walk on historic carpets. There's always visitor pathways. You seldom would walk over an unprotected wood floor because there's visitor traffic, visitor parkways. It sounds like you're gonna drive your car. Don't do that. But runners, you mean? Yeah, runners, that's what I mean, runners. Most people have runners. If you have like a ballroom floor that is very fancy and inlaid and everything else like that, you might ask them to put booties on, but mostly that would be for high-style houses and the best defense really would be to have a confined visitor pathway because you never want visitors to wander like excited molecules inside of a container bouncing off the walls. You wanna contain really where they're gonna go, how fast they're gonna go, and what they're gonna see. That makes a lot of sense with good visualization, too, for managing that traffic. All right, well, we are at three o'clock, so I think it is time for us to wrap it up. I did wanna mention also, though, just on the IPM front, we hosted a webinar a few weeks ago. Oh, Barbara Cumberland was there. Barbara Cumberland, yes. Barbara Cumberland, yes. Oh, oh, great. That's a great point. You had the best. We have that archived on the Connecting to Collection. Great, you had the best there, right? Yeah, so that's another great place and we posted a lot of resources that they shared with us afterwards, so I think people have follow-up questions about that. That's one place where they can look to get some more information. Okay. And I think that that is all. I wanna thank you so much for it. Well, I hope it was helpful. It was, it was, and this will be archived so people can refer other colleagues to it. And I also wanted to mention that we have two more scheduled webinars coming up, one on Thursday, the 27th of October. Yes. Care of motorized vehicles. Ooh! Wednesday, November 9th, flag rolling and storage, right in time for veterans. Oh! I hope it works. Okay, now what is the, the vehicles? Care of motorized vehicles. And what date is that? And that is on Thursday, October 27th. Oh, I'm so there for that, because we have a lot of sites that have seriously historic vehicles. Oh, great. October 27th. October 27th, and it's on. Thank you! Thank you, thank you. And we'll have a featured resource posted soon. Oh, good! Okay, well this is a wonderful thing that you're doing for the museum community. Thank you so much for your time. It really is. Thank you, well your information was wonderful today. All right, well I hope I said something useful that people will be able to take away with them. I am certain that you did. Okay, all righty, thank you. Thank you, thank you all. Okay, bye.