 Susan Barger from the FAIC. Go ahead Susan, whenever you're ready. Hi everyone. It's nice to have you here. I'm so pleased to see we have two people from Guatemala. We've never had any Guatemalans before. That's great. So I'll get started. Happy New Year. If you're looking for information about Collections Care, be sure to check out our website. There's the online discussion that you need to be registered for, but that doesn't cost anything and it just takes a few minutes to register and you can post questions. And I have a whole army of conservators who catch those questions and answer them for you. And there's resources and there are over 120 webinars that you can download and listen to. And so keep up with our community. We have new webinars coming, new discussions, more resources. You can keep up by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter. And there's also the Connecting to Collections Care announce list, which is only for announcements. So if you don't get that email, you can go to this website here and sign up for it. And it won't overload you. It's maybe two or three announcements a month. And you can always contact me. This is my email address. It's also in the website. So if you need to get a hold of me, this is how you do it. Next month, we're going to have a webinar on Care of Quilts. And then next month, we're having one on oversized materials, architectural drawings and maps. So pay attention to those. And I also wanted to let you know that the cap, we just now called Collections as Estimate for Preservation. The applications open. They'll be open through March 1. And you can apply. It's usually on a first come, first serve basis. And it's a great program. So if you qualify for a cap, be sure to do that. Now I'm going to introduce Jean-Louis Bigaudin. And he is from the Image Permanence Institute. And take it over. Jean-Louis. Okay. Welcome to everybody. And I have to start thanking Suzanne and Mike because they facilitate this webinar. And we are really glad to participate. So what I was going to do this afternoon is really to provide with some background information about this web application. How we dreamt about it. And how we thought it was really, really needed for the field. And I will then certainly give you a tour of the application. I will not look into all the detail. But I think you will have some good idea about what it can do for you. So one of the main goals really is to, if I have to pick one sentence to define our goal here, is to make the archivist librarian and all the people who are in charge of collection way more self-reliant that maybe they are. And everybody who step into a collection and you have so many material there, it's a little bit daunting and it's always difficult. Okay, where do I start? To do the best thing and to take the right decision for the collection. So of course, during the past decades, I have to say, there have been a lot of tools coming out and we certainly did our shared IPI. This is what I call the archivist toolbox. So you have a various publication and tools there who address each of them some specific problem. But at some point, it's always a little bit difficult. There are like dots or like stars, you know, in the sky. And how do I connect the dots and to really make the best decision. So this is really from this aspect that the idea really of filmcare.org came up and yes, we can imagine some place that all those various data solution option where to do things will be collected basically organized into a methodology that really can benefit the people out there. So there is, if you go to the home page, basically there is what I would call two tracks there. There is one track who focus on learning and teaching a little bit about film materials and the other track which is really more like a like a tool to assess collection to make conclusion to implement the strategy. So I will go through those in these hours and I want to give you a little bit some reason there. Why not focus on a web application instead of doing research of a particular film materials or a particular narrow problems. I think we are at a point now after maybe I would say easily 30 years if you go back to the to the 80s that we know enough to probably stabilize and protect for extended period of time those materials. That is what it is. We also have can develop some tools that need to be put into use of course and that need to be put into a kind of overarching basically strategy and that's really the goal of this web application. Today it's really easy to forget about physical preservation for many people because you can go in any conference where we will not talk mostly about pixel and scanning and so forth but there is an incredible wealth out there and you all probably know that better than anybody else. So preserving the film and its original form is the first and facilitating that is really the main main goal of this particular web application here. The other aspect that are very very important and I would like to resume to resume what we have to do in only three bullet points. Number one we had really to understand what a film is what it's made of to really protect him against decay. Second I think he has been demonstrated and demonstrated again and again that the the really the most important factor is really provide an adequate to suitable storage of to those collections. And third let's say we have all of this we can't just walk away so we have to really monitor not only certainly the condition of the environment but also what a film is evolving to. This means the condition of the film. So that was really the main reason so we want a tool we deal with film in a wide sense and not do only about movie or only about still only talking about microfilm. We want to have a tool with a great education component. We want a tool also that can facilitate a decision-making process and sometimes the task is very daunting because there is so many so many parameters that can be come to your face basically. So the whole thing we really try hard to present this into a really concise form and and that is the challenge we really put in front of ourself there. So let's go for the first track which is basically learning about film. Again here you have I will not go through all of them but probably the main one. One of the things which is very important certainly when you talk about film is they can come in many many many format as I mentioned just earlier. It can be flat film or many applications and actually the nature of the plastic since the film is always on the plastic support can change not only in terms of in terms of when the film has been made but also the use of the film. So to help the people since it's the first step knowing the film right identifying the base is very very critical in that aspect. It will not be the same solution if you are for example polyester base versus a nitrate base materials. So we can categorize those format in eight categories that you can basically if you don't know anything you can go through and learn. So what is asked to you it's only a help to identification. The first thing you you might be asked to answer here if you know the period you might choose a certain period of the materials. So that would be in this particular area here where you can click on one of the period. If there is a marking where you can fill out this and then you have a series of tests here where the goal is to narrow basically the possibility to identify that particular base. So in this particular case for example it's an example we have a film in the in the 80s safety you can make a test of polarization tester here you will end up by your polyester. So the idea is not certainly that you will take every piece of film that you have or every material and go through this this methodology or use this tool because as you use a few time if you start from nothing you will learn. Initially all those little parameter who helped to identify the nature of the film they will become really part of your brain. So in this particular view you can see how to carry the polarization test and that will help you for the first time. Another example I think that I put here is okay everybody can know if I have a film coming from the still camera or if I have slides so that will go in this category you can do the same approach here you can click on the date and here it will give you a choice. So doing again and again there's always new people helping volunteering in archives if you teach you can certainly use this particular tool here to to teach and learn to identify those plastic. Now the other important component of course of film material is the image material itself and again here just to give an idea about I would say the eventivity and the creativity of of those inventors there is a section here that will help you to again have a sense of what is out there if there is dye if there is if there is a transformed silver if there is only silver particle if there is a technical dye versus a commercial dye. So this particular part of the of the of the website is supposed to help you with that. This is an example how you will learn from that you have different views of the materials this is an example of the duvet color where you have micro photography cross section where you can see here the color screen on that picture here this is a cool thing to see of course and above you have the emission and the silver particle. So this is the kind of thing that you can visualize here. Here is an example about a technical film where you have a cross section in this particular case here you can see that doesn't look like a chromogenic three-layer structure here but you can see the dye diffusing into the gelatine here in this particular view you can see the silver particle actually who are there in the gelatine just to increase contrast in this particular material here. So going forward you have another very important very important aspect here and that would be the visual what we call the visual decay guide. So what it is and what is structure here the information is not organized by processes it's not organized by even materials like nitrate versus acetate it's really based on what you see. So you can imagine that you are on your table inspecting firmware here and you will recognize something. So in this particular case as an example here you click on dye fading what you will find in this particular part of the website is an explanation of what happened what caused it what to do about it and a variety of images that can help you to map the possibility. This is another example about plasticizer exudation here so in this particular view here you have actually this is a full-coded 35 millimeter firmware here and what you see here is the plasticizer who came on the surface on the magnetic layers. So in a way this is the same type of decay that you can see here which is actually a photographic flat film here where you see actually the plasticizer here which is literally pushing the emulsion on the top. So this part of the website there is a wealth really of pictures I just couldn't resist to put a little bit more certainly pictures and you can see that this type of decay was a big deal with microphone of course in a microphone when you lose a little bit of the picture you might lose a lot of information. Also on this track of learning about film you will find a timeline which unfortunately as it is now it's really focusing a lot on motion picture film and that is something that we should certainly in the future complete but what you find here so you can at any time you can choose here an event for example here in 1935 and then you will have an illustration about okay here this is a Kodakom who came into on the market here so you can scroll certainly again and again and you have this event and as much as we we can you have illustration there who sometimes can go back actually to the other part of the website. Also on the homepage there is a place here which is about the resource and under this this category here there is different tools I will not go into those now because they will come up a little bit later in the other part of the site. So now there is the other track of the website which is really caring for the collection here and to explore this actually this is where you need basically to to sign up but first I will give you some background information. This part of the of the website really is certainly storage-centric and this is because as I said at the beginning that the most significant parameter to really extend the life of those materials is really really by providing the right storage for the collection. So how this idea came from you can actually find literally a publication early on in the 60s and so forth. We already talk actually about storage but really the first first first publication that provides prediction in terms of stability this is a publication that was published in in 1970 Peter Augustine that worked for a long time at IPI, worked also a long time at Kodak and he was a Kodak at the time and the story goes is that actually him and his two co-writers of the paper they had to go in a room published this and it was really the first time that you could see a prediction in terms of die life expectancy. So how that was done at the time and it didn't change until today the methodology just have been evolving in refined and it's by incubating basically materials at different temperatures when you are dealing with some reactions some decay which is really dependent of temperature whereas the iron new scientists in the 19th century tell us that there is a way to plot these data in such a way that you can extrapolate. So you get a liner here and you can extrapolate life expectancy that will be on this axer here at any temperature that you can think of. So in this particular case here if you wanted to know our material will last at home temperature what you have to do is just follow this line and you will have a life expectancy. So this basic principle has been used for decades for a lot of materials and a lot of the data that is available today this is what they do this is how the color guide came basically and what it tells us here well it tells us that room temperature 70 Fahrenheit color dye will go through significant significant decay after 40 years but if you put this at 35 Fahrenheit or 2 Celsius the same level of decay is likely to occur after several 600 years. So this is one example the same idea if you think about nitrate decay unfortunately the scope of the studio nitrate is much much smaller and the estimate are a little bit wider in terms of prediction but it's also telling you the same thing if you decrease the temperature which is going further down here actually the life expectancy is increasing so in this particular situation here a minus 10 Celsius you could actually for this particular sample extend the life expectancy up to 500 years. So one of what it said to you to us is that the nitrate actually can last also if it's in the right oh okay I have to go back here I'm sorry. Same thing with acetate of course this is the way it works room temperature 40 years called 35 it will be 500 years. So we learn a lot about this and we try to expand that. So one of the question that we we also had is what is the critical points when we certainly have to do something and you can see that when you look at the life of acetate a firmware here you can follow that particular curve over here at the beginning the acidity which means the degradation is increasing the degradation is expanding here up to a point and then you go very very very fast. So as soon as you are in this area here you don't have much time to to react and do something. So one of the one of the tests that I like always to to bring you up here it's try to answer that question can frozen storage stop in a way the degradation and for that we put some sample where here at this critical point that we call the auto catalytic pointer here inside freezers and over over time we look at what was happening there was two set of samples some samples it was the same film basically and some sample were kept at room temperature in the lab here and some sample in the freezer in the lab too and after five years six and a half 10 years 15 years 25 years we again measure the acidity of these materials and the good thing is that of course in the freezer we never never see any change up to now at room temperature the film are gone for a long time already. So this is where we came to this idea of having having those adidas strips. At this riff what it was this slide is not quite right because it's supposed to be some color from blue here to yellow but it's not there but it's okay so we came to this idea of putting a message base indicator on a piece of paper a c roll and then testing and then having those level of acidity that and the change of color here that tell us basically in a very yeah in a semi-candidative way the acidity that's it's the condition of the film here so to organize those readings here it's always a good idea to you know develop a graph like this one here and what it tells us from level zero to level three this is the acidity and the which is increasing and the condition of the film certainly is going down and down and down so there's two set of data here that was really used on the develop develop ipi we have some film collection here and the blue actually are the data when the film were tested in 1995 and the red were the result when we tested them in 2009 that's been 14 years later so what you see here is kind of shift to the left here where you have more level three and you don't have any more actually level zero and basically in that time frame which is 14 years actually the collection significantly it's a very very significant world shape so all this and this is just a summary of the thing we we have done here we can collect what we think was very very important and what we did study it's the infection by everyone important parameter what kind of poignant or marginal role enclosure may play what is really the impact of microenvironment and and especially what would be the benefit of using adsorbent like molecular cells developing diagnostic tool defining some handling pathways so those are the things really that we we explore over time and that we we use really to design that particular web application so this the challenge is there was really to to translate observation prediction experience from from the field survey techniques statistical approach to sampling and so for and to and to something useful and and this start to to structure a methodology that when you go to the site you will see here there's some time we'll go from characterized and then prediction overview recommendation implement monitor so those basically are the pillar of the approaches that we develop here and that we will go through those so the first thing you have to do if you want to explore that track and at this day I think there is something like almost 600 uh account that's mean at least it's almost 600 I don't know institution or people who have explored this part of the of the web application here um that's only and that's just a little the day point this appointment here only maybe 10% went up to the way and do survey collections and so forth but the first thing uh you you need to do here is uh to sign up that's free so you email password this is a classic thing and and then uh you can also and you create your your account there you can also choose Fahrenheit or Celsius depending where you are in the world and um and then progress so maybe you remember the first step it's really characterizing so you have to get organized uh you you may have a just a small collection at home and a few a few film or you have a small amount of film in your library but you can have also a building full of stuff so you have to to decide certainly if you want to approach your preservation issue as a whole that's been the whole building collection or if you are interested in individual collection basically so uh once you have to uh when you decide is that you can go and you start by naming by uh indicating and entering the type of temperature and humidity you have you maintain the storage or maybe maintain by itself if you don't have any hvc system and also decide what do you have what kind of materials you have in the storage so the system will store all this information um and it will stay there and you will only you will have access to that information uh using your your past world so this particular thing uh will give you an overview here as you create your collection you have a list that will go on and on and um and second it's a can summary so the next thing you can do is start the preservation overview and uh behind the scene i would say every time when you said you put a temperature um actually the storage of your your environment your environment will be categorized you will get a name and it will be either room cool cold or frozen so this is something that uh an approach that has been developed in the in the msqr and one of the two i was talking at the beginning and basically what it is it's uh define a range of temperatures that really will express the type of impact that this environment will have on the material you kept in next and this slide you will not say it is the background it will give you a can summary every time you you build on and this is evolving over time basically because if you create collection and collection or acquire collection you can you can add to it it gives you really a quick look in this particular example here you can see that this particular collection here who has a temperature a home temperature so that's can be you know between between 60 and and and 70 so this is really not a good this one for example here which is a frozen environment certainly might not be a priority it tells you also what you have in those collections so this is really a first look and and uh and this is in a way uh the first thing you need to know before going really further so next uh we will go into giving some recommendation there and this is uh you will have a view like that so you will again find uh the name of your collection appear here you have one collection here another one IPI collection genre recollection and so forth and depending uh depending on the type of material you have the material appear here you will have a bunch of collection there a bunch of recommendation just depending on the materials you will also link to some tools for example in this collection here there is color materials so you have some recommendation about color here and you will lead you suggest to you to go to the storage calculator for color the way this one look like it's really uh it's really an extended and digital version of the wheel that was in the color guide that IPI had published so here you can do your own assessment though first you have certainly the actual condition in this particular case uh is 21 Celsius sorry that's in Celsius so uh so that this is uh 70 about uh Fahrenheit and the temperature and it also give you a number of years here if I can read right here 38 years at this condition here um you might be satisfied probably not so you can explore by basically choosing different conditions so you can move that cursor here and you can save those results they will appear in this window so very quickly you can have here in this table various alternative of storage and and start the conversation about between what you have what you might want depending on the life expectancy at you need for your mission and and and this is a way also to communicate and and also to learn how for example effective yes to lower the temperature if you do the same movement with a relative humidity if you talk about chemical stability or natural edging certainly certainly you will not see the same change so that's that should help uh you know to to see the various implication of any change you do so the the next thing there is also tour here there is also uh in this particular collection we have acetate right so in the acetate paragraph here you might suggest to here hey why not to you uh think about doing uh a condition assessment of the acetate collection so that's related to the to the survey tool that is integrated in the in the web application so the first thing uh when you want to do a collection assessment and again it can be something very daunting yes oof either i have a small collection and this is easy because it's easy to test every item or you have a large collection and this statistical sample will be a really the the only practical solution so integrate into uh into the tour here uh you have uh an option to determine how many samples how many items should i test to have uh i think it's a 93 confidence level um and plus minus 3 uh percent error so you can enter here you can enter the size of your collection if you know it and automatically you will have an indication of how many how many samples uh you should really test to be statistically uh accurate so in this particular case this is the collection uh 10 000 i can't really see on my screen about 10 000 item so i should test just over a thousand i guess in this particular collection it's only 10 000 item so here i can get away with 650 item actually if i have hundreds a collection unload item actually i should test hundreds everybody actually to have a good um testing so this is really the first the first thing you have to do before getting into the second thing is probably to have an idea about uh how to use the eddy strip because here we are talking about acetate assessment uh for conditions and that's uh we can we can talk about this in the in the in the question so the other thing we tell you here so you can uh you have two option but for now you have only one option but uh you can enter the result and actually this spreadsheet is generated automatically by the by the by the web application so if you need if you need let's say a thousand samples you you will generate a thousand or and as you go it will tell you where you are 20 percent from your goal or 50 percent and as long as you don't have 100 percent actually you will not be able to to generate the survey report that you need in the future we are working right now into developing a procedure that should be able to import excel spreadsheet into that table here because if you go with your computer in the storage area you may not have anywhere any connections with internet and so forth so so it will not work for you so this is something uh that we will work on so let's go to the report and see what kind of information you get there well what you get there uh basically you get two two graphs and this histogrammer here uh give you really a picture of the condition based on the eddy strips reading that you have performed and it's an indication really about the proportion at each level it's an indication of the urgency really of the situation here in this particular particular interest of course here is everything which is 1.5 and above because this it's at and beyond the auto catalytic point and that's if you remember the graph a little bit earlier it's really really the time where the decay will accelerate so this is this particular portion of the of the of the curve so here this point here correspond to this sample here basically when you have a level tree actually you don't know exactly where you are on the curve you are at least here or maybe above because when at a certain acidity level the strip turn yellow and then stay yellow and so forth so uh this is really a museum of the problems that you may have but what is interesting here is this particular uh this particular area here also sample here it's allow us to make some prediction prediction so one of the question that uh we can uh ask ourselves for here when I look at this is how long you will take for this samples here for this data here to basically go into this particular level and be in a critical condition there so in this particular instance here at the bottom of the report you have this graph here so we give you a picture basically of the level of today 30 35 percent or something like that of the film or in critical condition that's my level two entry but in five years five years in five years it will be half of the collections and why is that in this particular case is because the material is stored near home temperature at 70 Fahrenheit so this is the type of of invocation information and data which is really really critical because it should it should make the point and this is another another use of this web application what we hope is that it helps everybody to formulate and quantify the level of needs of a particular situation think about when you when you apply for grant right Susan was talking about the CAP application grant here so this is typically this kind of work can be probably done within the the framework actually of those grant and and you can really make a case and develop a scenario and black and white you can give number certainly about the needs of that particular collection in your institution in your library or wherever you are so this is something you can really play now you can also make some prediction yourself by using the storage calculator for hesitate it's a similar tool as the calculator for color but one there's one big difference actually and this is the fact that in this tool you can focus on the film which is really degraded up to this critical point the autocatalytic point and then you can formulate the question how long you will take for all those materials before they become in a critical condition and very soon after being damaged and and being lost so you can the same thing you can choose various temperature here and various humidity and looks the way it affects not only the stability of freshly processed film as a data film as this indicator here because frankly there's not many anymore in in archive today but the key point is to look at those the one which are already degrading and the one already how are the at the autocatalytic point something you can save the data you can export all the all the all the the data here and you can see by looking at this color on here you can see the factor of improvement in this particular case by decreasing the temperature so you generate data basically that's just what you do but that will certainly are very very objective once so you you have done all that you probably how in a phase where you stopped probably dreaming that's is what I want that's is this type of stories that my collection made this is what will be good for my institution and there is a lot of step certainly before before before getting there so this is why in the other tab that we call implement we can try to define I think it's the eighth step implementation process which basically basically is things that you have to think about before going forward it propose basically a kind of way to go step by step and in some particular case that you have decision to make you have decision to make what will be the best story solution for example for for your for your institution should I look into a macro environmental that's mean a vault or a space that that I will put all the material inside and so forth should I look at a macro environmental solution and using seal container and so forth I mean there is several options there that actually are discussed so in this web application so and you go in summer in some of this area here I can really see on the screen but you you have link actually here will give you more information and and key point really for you to decide so this is an example here that you can find either from the implementation page or from the resource tab over there the first one basically compare two different alternative of storage what I call the macro environmental approach and the micro environmental approach in one in the second one here you control the all bolt in the first you create basically microenvironment so to give an example using molecular sieves and in in seal container will appear in the in the notice so this is a micro environmental approach will impact certainly the flow process the workflow and a lot of different things like this but this is something we will help you to compare the other resource so here it's again it's a comparison between various way to implement storage at low temperature so everybody can't have a large cold vault not everybody in need to build a large cold vault depending on the volume of the collection depending on the sector you can certainly use like home freezer and so forth so but because of this there is some handling some precaution to be to be taken and this particular resource to go into that that aspect here so this is something this is not an interactive part of the website but there is certainly a lot of information that you can dig and a lot of link that you can explore to answer some of the question and friendly once you have what you need maybe or you are going in that direction you still have to monitor your collection and this doesn't of course implies that you have to monitor the environment it's also implies that you have to monitor certainly the collection itself you have to put in place for example handling a procedure that will avoid damage because a good example here will be avoiding avoiding condensation on the materials and for this so there is some indication in bullet point here to help you to figure out it doesn't have to be really complicated it just has to be effective and we can go over when you have some some question or so on this it goes down the list monitoring the condition of the collection that's something which is important especially especially if you don't have a cold environment as we learn as I show you well if you have a frozen environment things will not probably move for a long long long time if you don't have that actually the ongoing deterioration of the film will not stop so you may need actually to monitor all the collection again it can be done statistically and you can see where the collection is going so in this table here it gives some suggestions some time period here that you should follow up some guideline and you can see that if it's frozen well you don't have to do that very very often at all in the other case you certainly have to pay good attention to that so the other the other aspect of course is a collection is not a static thing there is new materials will come in screening those materials it's certainly and knowing at which condition they are and what they may need in terms of storage is very very important it's a matter of material flow there the importance of of enclosures actually this is something that over time it become actually less and less important if you talk about acetate materials it was a time that it was a big deal it was also a big marketing deal but there is no enclosure release that can solve can give a satisfactory answer to the program of chemical decay of acetate film so this is the storage that we'll do that however looking at enclosure will can and not rusty enclosure who are compatible with photographic materials that is very very important and should certainly keep in mind over time they certainly and this is the last step of here they said certainly the situation may evolve seems like well personal may evolve people may retire so new people may come so I think that the education component also it's a very important one because the film if we do our job will be there and certainly we will have to take care of this for a long long time and at least it's a it's a goal so there is only three important words that I can say and if you before you go and use that web application I think we should have those kind of tattoo and think about them we certainly need at least a sufficient level and knowing what kind of component a film is in a simplified way we don't need to to go into the nitty gritty of all the variation but understanding the material is really key storing and the proper storage it should be our goal and we are certainly not there because often we don't know also how to pay for it and again monitoring for a long long period of time is also very very essential so it's this morning I was looking at the film care activity and as I mentioned earlier there was almost 600 people that at least the account that are being that are being used for this and it's also give a give some a statistic here when the people enter and create a collection and and put the condition they are there in the in the in the storage is there it gives some kind of a kind of picture here so it's in a way telling that there is something like almost 60 percent of the materials are stored at home temperature and we all know that well this will not last forever the material will not last forever and this really just okay almost the 30 percent in cold or frozen storage so this is not quantitative it's just numbers basically number number of situations like this again when you look at the statistic I mean the acetate are all over the place it's by far by far the materials that are the most present in in our archive and depository and so this is also one of the reasons that focusing on this particular material it's it's really really important and this is really moving all this material into cold and cold and more suitable environment this is really the ultimate ultimate goal of this web application and the people doing by by themselves the archivist the library this is this is the most the most important it's not that I don't like to get email with questions or phone call but I think it's a way way it's a lot more efficient to try to and to to use this and learn at the same time uh the kind of mechanic of film preservation so uh and finally but not last uh maybe it doesn't look like that but for any project you need funders and any age I have to say almost uh single-ended handed really as as support everything about film preservation that IPI has done so I would like to thank them and of course a lot of intern went through IPI uh either from internship programs that we create with EMEA and the Sestnik school and those have really really contributed to to the whole project and thank for test sites advisors and so forth and of course my colleague uh uh who are the key of this of this goal here so I will stop there and I think I think there's quite a few questions so uh I will go to Suzanne then okay um I'm gonna bring over the evaluation I think yeah here's the evaluation link because I often forget it so please the evaluations are very important so please fill it out um and we'll go through these questions uh and I'll just give them to you the order that they came um okay how can you do cold storage on a budget and limited space space and uh Grant Briscoe says they have a bunch of negative slides and a couple of films currently kept in in uh canisters yeah and so so we have a couple of questions sort of along that line how how do you okay and actually that question came up before you started in in your tool okay so um I think okay the question is how I basically and develop a budget right depending on the size of the collection right basically so uh I would say that for the size of the collection and the volume of the collection uh first you have to know let's assume that you need uh you you have acetate or color materials and that we all know that these materials really need the colder the better right so if it's a small collection uh and really small let's say that you have less than 19 cubic feet of materials right in this particular case you certainly will have enough uh with a typical household freezer so there is a very good uh publication actually in the topics uh I forgot the number the Susan uh Sarah Wagner wrote where she went to the mechanic of estimating all the costs the particularity of using this type of freezer is that you really have to package the materials because this type of freezer don't control the humidity and and at this condition uh you can run into into trouble basically in term of mechanical decay softening of the gelatin and so forth so in this particular case you will rely on the packaging and uh the best packaging there is certainly is the kind of aluminum for packaging that you can either buy at the size available or even customize yourself and and use a big role so so this will enter into the budget uh you have to think about certainly two two layers is better than one because it's always defect and you will not look in your freezer for a long long time if you don't ever need access to the material this is one one of the option uh you certainly need to budget probably the the time you will have to spend to do that there is an excellent document also I think we put in the in the end out uh developed by the National Park Service about cost storage there is even video who show you uh how to do that in an effective way and organize I think that will be maybe the best for you to look into and as I said the the paper from from Sarah uh she goes in great detail on the various price so you will have to update this price but I think all the guidelines are there and and um so I don't freeze there I don't know between 700 800 dollars something like this so evaluating the the volume of the collection is key first I would say okay there's a question if you store in a freezer what is the best way to keep well actually you just covered that on moisture and condensation that's packaging right uh whereas uh there's two things when you use the own freezer of course and you have the packaging you are safer there when you retrieve the material the condensation will occur on the outside right so the trick here is to to really open or cut the seal when the the material is above the temperature is above the dew point of the room but to make it simple uh you know overnight warming up or 24 hours that's what the people do because it's easy to remember and then you can access uh to the film and it will not be any condensation now if you have a a big or small volt let's say and and you and you walk in and retrieve the materials and in that particular volt uh because the humidity and the temperature is controlled you don't have a packaging because you don't need it in this particular case you should use some type of uh moisture proof proof packaging which could be as simple as a cooler that you use to go camping or picnic or uh freezer bags they come in large sizes some type of container that basically will avoid the condensation of the object and and that's it uh so even even uh plastic tub would do the trick really and again here i would i would i would wait to be simple you know overnight or 24 hours even so and you can go to the website uh in the resource there is a tab there that will indicate uh really the uh how many takes for there's a few examples there for a 35 millimeter uh a film or a box of film to equilibrate in terms of temperature you will see that uh most often it's a matter of hours really uh but just to be safe you know you can you you can increases that it's better to uh to be on the safe side through in a question will condensation damage the film well condensation um if in in my uh okay i don't know if she talked or he talks about a roller film or um a flat film of course the film are processed in in accurate solution right developing fixing and so forth so in a way they are used to water right uh but uh the thing is you will probably have some some change at the surface of the film in term this is it will be a kind of kind of physical uh it was almost a mechanical decay there in a way because you will have a marker now if you make a print from the negative chance are you will not see it actually there's a question now uh just for the for the role if you have a role here and for whatever reason you have a lot of condensation the moisture it's it's kind of swelling and and depending how much moisture the actually the gelatin is absorbing it can become like a glue literally right and and so here again you you you have a risk for mechanical damage of the film if you stay as the as a role blocking you know when you have blocking on the roll where this is where you have a lot of moisture and then the thing dry up okay does the temperature need to be as low as three and freezer well you know uh when you uh i mean the freezer you buy actually okay even for your house uh it's about where you get then you can you can adjust it of course um but this is what you get uh roughly you know this is the the settings uh i put here now every degree down well it's get better but at some point you know the big freezers let's say uh the big freezer who ours you know thousand and thousand of cans so they're often uh because they're they're built right and that's you have the energy costs who came into the auction often they are between 20 and 25 uh for a night it seems to be um um a good a good point to be for the collections on we've had a couple of questions that are along this line uh Chris Alsop says he's part of an amateur historian group that's trying to preserve local history and that they've a bunch of film film strips slides and they're not really sure where to start and he says are there any tips for a beginner who discovered a collection of items which may not have been stored correctly over the years okay well uh i think again here uh he could certainly uh i don't know extensive the collection yes but using some of the resources which are here and i am thinking in particular about the the visual decay guide and also the the Bayes identification guide um i think in conjunction with looking at the materials and looking at the website what what you see now does it look like a distortion of this so look at the distortion where it came from i mean this would be a good step the mixed collection um and not necessarily a problem because there is again here a sweet point if you want to do the the right the right i don't know how big the collection is talking about but probably there is a lot of dye fading i would say uh if the material are older than 40 years uh a lot of slide maybe pink uh maybe he can if he had some some uh some movies maybe starting to smell like uh some kind of vinegar uh but using some strips certainly would give him some indication if the purpose of learning i would suggest is that he look at the material and use the website if it's the purpose that this would be the best if it's the purpose of preserving the whole thing i think you can go right away and find a small container and and go through the motion of storing them at low temperature depending on the values and so forth michael negis says i i notice you're not mentioning smells different smells by type or strength of smells if the film already i'm assuming you're already at the critical stage well the same the same as the smell is uh there is a lot of different generation of archivists and preservationists and so forth that uh there's a kind of objectivity a subjectivity in in the smell so you can have in some time in the description list you have so i think it smells like a naphthalene or like uh rinse butter and so forth so uh this thing as you just said uh the decay is already there it's already uh probably even so visually you don't see the decay process is really engaged and in an advanced state so the registry for example the first level of change this is something that you don't smell it's it's even so even so we can detect the one party per million of acetic acid in the air but the the a distrip will really sense uh below that and the other thing is not necessarily healthy to always you know to to work on that and smell okay there's some questions about how about transferring things to dvd or copying things but i want to say a little bit later um there's someone who says um we have a huge collection of nitrate sheet films that came to us after storage and years of storage in an outdoor garage so so so um what is incredible with with nitrate is that number one number one uh there is a lot of nitrate in collections uh i mean even so where you can read that 80% of the american cinema uh pre 1930 has been destroyed sometimes it has been destroyed just to recycle the silver actually uh but uh the nitrate which is surrounding air most of them it must be pretty uh pretty uh stable in relative term basically and uh i mean negatives in in enclosures more stable than if you had a can of of a i think i think really the main difference is uh the nitrate when it starts decaying the auto catalytic effect there because you have a strong acid which is playing a role and so forth i mean when it starts to decay it will disappear relatively quickly more quickly even than an acetate so if you think about a role film in a can often you have quite a relative important mass of film there you know and and which mean a lot of catalysts that can be generated there that's mean even a faster decay uh with um um flat film it can be different because you you are not necessarily in that particular contain situation but i remember still before i came in this country actually um actually it was in a in a museum in far the shallow shishon they had acquired a collection of postcard and postcard negatives from the beginning of the 20th century so all the negative roughly four by five uh were nitrate base and uh they started to uh rears in those materials and they rears those material in type of a pretty popular in a sleeve which uh were really really relatively uh relatively sale i mean not sale completely but relatively sale and in a few months there was some of those quite a bit of those negatives they completely disappear in a matter of three three five months they they were gone i mean the old gelatina was completely decomposed by the acid produced by by the decaying nitrate so no no no no that's what nitrate fire two of them so uh yeah i remember that you mentioned that they were films not um yeah yeah um kind of there have been a couple of questions about on is cold storage feasible when you don't have an item by item inventory um i said again cold storage feasible when you don't have an item by item inventory um yeah yes yes and uh definitely uh i mean the item by item inventory again here and this is uh this is an irony because when we start uh working on the idea of the 80 strips um that's it was beginning of the 90s actually the idea at the time was to identify diagnostic and identify any single item as close as you can be it's already degrading and that should be segregated from the rest of the collection because of the of the you know infectious behavior and so forth that was uh that was the first intention but over the years once you have the tool actually uh you realize that to do the right thing for the collection it's really to do a statistical statistical sample and to take the right decision and move the whole collection into cold storage the other advantage also is if you don't have you know when you acquire those collections uh let's say fat fair may can be in poor enclosure you have tapes uh pressure sensitive tapes you have all kind of things who are in a sense not compatible with the photographic media who can create problems but you know what instead of spending and never be done reusing everything uh segregating everything putting the whole collection into cold storage this is the best thing for the collections because everything will be slowed down and everything will be mitigated okay basically um so we have uh yes if you can put things in cold storage um but the perfect is the atomity of the good what if you've hit the auto catalyzation point before you get oh he's talking about inventories before you've done an item by item inventory so what what you're saying is put things into cold storage as soon as you can um right well the same the same so in the so you can go back to to the presentation there and look at the the little experiment that I talk about when you had a bunch of film that were at the auto catalytic point and then they were they were separate in two groups and then one group was put in a freezer the other group was staying in the lab and after 20 years uh I couldn't see any any increase actually in the acidity in the one where in the freezer the other one there was multiplied by 20 at least so I can guarantee there I can I can guarantee that at least 20 years and of course way longer there will not be any significant change it's it's a good way to to to stabilize so this is done actually that has been is done in the larger scale for example large large archives may they know they identify a group of material or collections with quite a bit of decay so this collection will be put at minus 15 let's say close to zero for a night volt and then the rest of the collection might be a 25 for a night so and this this kind of solution of the idea is the same if you talk about a small collection or a large collection basically okay this in principle we have about 10 more minutes um let's see can your tool account for a storage environment that's not stable year-round that's a tricky question because actually uh actually uh the tool here assume when it does the prediction that uh the temperature you put in remain at that level now there's two things we know that the reality is rarely the case and actually now we're there for our cost saving purpose is even an option to sometimes let it fluctuate but that's another discussion now if you're doing the resource of the web application here you will see there is a few tool here which is called impact of time out of storage of the materials so it's not exactly the answer to the question here but this table give you a sense of if you use the material that's been actually by using it the material will be moved from the storage environment that you pay for and put in place as a freezer or whatever it is to the viewing room maybe we could be warmer we could be more humid and so forth so depending on the time that a material will do this during the year let's say one day two days one week etc depending on how many times the material is required basically it gives you a sense of the what you lose basically in terms of life expectancy you may you will see by looking at those data that if you have a frozen storage actually well let's say you you can expect 200 years very quickly actually those 200 years will become 100 and we will go on 80 and so forth so there is certainly a loss there which is in a hand and you can you can come to the conclusion here the collection that is huge heavily you can ask yourself is really worse worth it to to have a freezer if I constantly use more materials and this is a question that need to be asked at the probably the curatorial level where you are because it's true that you lose relatively quickly the benefit of low temperature yeah we have many more quick questions and we have four minutes so um what are the recommendations in case of a power outage Kristen Sarkis Corsoni says I have a film canister of high fidelity of recording tape that has white dots on it what are those dots and uh finally is it best to digitize before freezing since uh if you were taking things in and out of storage that would be more damaging to fragile film right okay when okay so the first one the power outage so if you have a freezer you have a power outage don't go and open the door to see what is happening inside this is what maybe you know we are tempted to do don't do that uh a freezer uh a freezer is actually a piece of equipment which is really really well insulated and uh it will take uh in some case 48 hours before actually if you have ice inside that it will start to melt actually so the recommendation here is keep your cool and uh the power outage of course if you last for um for an extended period of time it's a different different story but even if you have some ice inside the freezer you are supposed to have a packaging right so the water should not actually damage the thing so I will start to be worried you know it's after after 48 hours there is no power uh I would transfer the materials but it should be safe because there is a packaging around now okay uh the tape the white dots uh again here look at some of the pictures that there is in the visual decay uh plasticizer exudation uh it might be something or something to this um make sure uh actually I don't know the the periodic there um it's I don't know it's it's probably it's it's probably not uh not an acetate actually um but um you have in those magnetic uh layers the formulations are quite complex and uh it's difficult to really map what there is some oily component there is uh what they call lubricant and that's can also happen that it can emigrate to the surface it can be that certainly uh that's what the people talk about um and uh there have been several attempts really to uh to identify to identify what kind of what kind of tape will be more at risk than others to try to find markers to have a more proactive approach to tape uh there was some some people like Bertrand Levitrain of course that you know a few years ago uh he was thinking to to to develop like like like a database really that we could use to to prioritize what we should be doing right and uh but this it's it's in your miracle to happen because it's so so complicated and uh best to digitize before freezing and then we're gonna have well so yeah the the towing and freezing the freezing and towing aspect of the materials actually this is something that has been tested there is uh in the 80s when they were going into the space with film there's a paper by David Koppel from Kodak 1985 they did extensive testing uh and uh look at what was happening at the at the gelatin gelatin layer at the base uh level and so forth and they never really found any significant problem with uh freezing and towing even you know repeatedly I mean it was very very very extensive a test so um I don't think I don't think you have to be worried about this it would be my sense and what a wonderful tool I'm so glad you could give us a tour and I hope a lot of people will use it well it was my my pleasure let's say goodbye to everybody we'll be back uh in February with the thing on quilts and I'll post the recording in the next few days along with the handout bye bye okay oh you're welcome thank you thank you Suzanne