 Hi, everyone. I want to welcome you to this course. I'm sorry about the mixup with the email addresses. FARC has been undergoing a change in the email, and I put in the old email. And then, obviously, what I put in wasn't quite correct. But it looks like everyone's here, so I'm fine. And you're fine. And I'll make sure that when I send out a message next week that everything is correct. So I just want to go over some things about the educational interface. So you got to the event, and this is what it looks like when it's going to be live. If you miss a live one, this is what it looks like when it's a view on demand. And you don't need to watch the webinars live. You can always watch the recordings. But you do need to watch the webinars in order. So you'll find the handouts here and the discussion here. If you need to tell us something or have a question for Samantha and the other presenters, then you can do it there. And let's see, if you need to reset your password, use this address info at culturalheritage.org. If you have any other problems, contact me. My email address is c2cc at culturalheritage.org. And if you have questions about the course content, as I said, put them in the discussion. To receive the Credly badge for this course, you need to listen to all the webinars and complete all the assignments. There's one large assignment that goes over three weeks. So you have time to finish it. And you don't need to listen to the live webinars, but you do need to listen to all the webinars. And you need to do the assignments. If you have any questions about the care of your collection, you can post them in the Connecting to Collections Care webinar that, at this address and the instructions for joining the community, you can find on the Connecting to Collections Care website. And so that's free. You can go ahead and join it. We'd love to have you. And Connecting to Collections Care has a free webinar coming up in August on Fired. And if you'd like to join us through that, by all means, do. And now I'm going to turn this over to Samantha Forsko. And she is our leader for this course. Samantha? Thanks, Susan. Great. So it's good to see some familiar names out there. It looks like everybody is finding the chat box. So that is good. So we're going to be talking today about conducting a general needs assessment. And throughout the course, we will be talking about what it is that we're going to do with those assessments. Hi, Sharon. Like I said, I do see some familiar names out there. But I'm hoping that everybody can do, as I see people have already started doing, and let me know who you are over in the chat box. If you could let me know your, well, I see your name. But if it's something different than what you have typed, where you work, what you do there, what your role is. And yeah, in the comments over there. So we can kind of get a feel for who is out there. And these will be your colleagues throughout the course. So I do encourage you to connect with each other. I think that's part of the fun of these classes, is getting to know your fellow participants as well. So definitely take advantage of the expertise that's in the room, as well as me and the other presenters. A little bit on my background, while you guys are telling me about your background. I am currently the preservation specialist at the Conservation Center for Art and Cirque Artifacts, located in Philadelphia. While I am located in Philadelphia, I'm sort of all over the country all the time. I work a lot, kind of, one-on-one with institution. A lot of different ways. One way, a big way, is doing a lot of these assessments that we're going to talk about throughout this course. But I also teach a lot of workshops, which is how I've seen some of you out there in the past. I am at a lot of conferences. I do a lot of different presentations. And I work with a variety of institutions. So while anybody volunteer-only institutions, do big institutions, archives, libraries, museums, government agencies, so sort of all across the board there. So hopefully, I will know about some of the questions you might have about your specific issues at your institution. Previous to my position here, I was a collections manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in LA. I do miss that sunshine a lot. So that's kind of an example of a really big institution that I have a lot of intimate knowledge with. And then previous to that, I was up in Portland, Oregon at the Regional Arts and Culture Council as a conservation tech for the public art collection. So a lot of experience working with a kind of government entity there as well. So a broad range of experience, hopefully, we will be able to help out with all of your issues. So let's talk a little bit about this course now. There's all different types of surveys and assessments out there, preservation and conservation. There are often times called surveys, assessments, evaluations, a bunch of different names for them. And they can be incredibly helpful collections care tools if you know how to use them. Too often, I see cultural heritage organizations receive these really useful documents only to let them sit on the shelf and collect dust. So this course, I'm hoping to help you kind of understand all those different types of assessments and things you might have done on your collections. And then most importantly, what you actually do with them after that. How you implement the recommendations. How you can use this as a tool moving forward. This is a four-part webinar series. There is some homework involved. We'll discuss that in a little bit as well. I will be sort of leading us through the webinars, but I will be joined in some of the other assessments, some of the other webinars, excuse me, mostly webinars 2 and 3 there with the additional assessments and then the fundraising one. I will be joined by some of my colleagues here at CCAHA. We have a lot of different areas of expertise, so I thought it would be nice to pull on some of them as well. The four webinars you see listed up there will be this one today, sort of the general preservation needs assessment, what it is, and all of that. Our next webinar will be on other types of useful collections care-related assessments. A big one there, what to do with your assessment using it for grant rating and fundraising, and then the last one will be using your assessment to map into a preservation plan. So I wanted to start talking a little bit there. A good goal for all cultural institutions is to have a long-range preservation plan in place so that preservation can sort of be taken on holistically and systematically. But how do you start the preservation planning process? And key to that is understanding the needs of your collection and what the steps might be. And a good way to start getting a handle on that is the general preservation assessment. So here at the Conservation Center where I work, I referred to the general preservation assessment as a preservation needs assessment. So I'm going to just call it that from here on out so we don't get any confusion. But just so you know, people often refer to this differently. Sometimes they call it a collections need assessment, a preservation assessment, a needs assessment, something along those lines. But just so we're all on the same page, I'm going to refer to it as a general preservation assessment or a preservation needs assessment. In today's webinar, we're going to talk about what that assessment is. I'm going to go over what's covered, the methodology for conducting this type of assessment, the pros and cons of working with an outside contractor to do this assessment versus working in-house. And then finally, we're going to talk a little bit, dip our toes into funding just for this assessment. As I mentioned before, there will also be some homework. I'm going to kind of get to that later, but just want to warn you that that is coming. There will be some homework assignments out there. But without further ado, let's jump right into today. So you may be asking, which is a very good question, what is a preservation needs assessment? And I've put the definition up here on the screen. So I won't read it to you. But really, the preservation needs assessment is the starting point for any kind of preservation planning, for any sort of other assessments you might want to just get a handle on what's going on with your collection. It is the first assessment you should do. And whether the next step might be that you do another different type, more targeted assessment might be the next step that comes out of it. It might be that you go for funding for a specific project. It's going to depend a lot on what your needs are as to what those next steps and recommendations will be. But it should be guided by this. What will result from the assessment is a written report, and that can serve as a guide for creating a preservation plan. It can just help you to sort of generate a list of preservation priorities, and might just help you kind of assess preservation needs sort of more generally. The report will help to evaluate preservation issues and sort of provide a greater awareness of the condition of your institution's collection. Recommendations highlighted in the report will address the collection's preservation needs and concerns in the areas of policies, staffing levels, building, maintenance, environment, security, emergency preparedness, collections, care, and preservation planning. So it's a pretty comprehensive document, but I do want to go over what a preservation needs assessment is not. It is not the sort of end product. It's not the preservation plan itself. It's a starting point. That's really key here. It's not the end all be all. You will have to take the recommendations that come from this plan and do something with them, whether that's mapping it into a preservation plan or whatever your next step might be. And we'll go into that, obviously, a little bit more. A preservation needs assessment is also not the same thing as an archival assessment. This one mostly applies to you archiving libraries out there. So maybe some of you might have already heard of it. If you're from a museum, this is probably something you wouldn't even confuse with it. But an archival assessment usually looks at kind of the way and process in which materials are arranged sort of in your repository. So a little bit different. It's looking at how that arrangement is not looking at all those big picture things we talked about. The preservation needs assessment is also not a conservation survey like the next two that I've listed there. We will talk about that one in detail later. But those two look kind of more closely at the item level. A preservation needs assessment looks at the institution and more that upper level, more of the big view, examining more closely how to care for collections as a whole as opposed to on individual items. The preservation needs assessment really focuses on the big picture actions to take to improve things as opposed to kind of those individual item level treatment. And then the other one, the last one that I often see confused here is the environment or building assessment. That one does sort of look a little bit at kind of the big picture. But it just looks at the building and environmental conditions that won't include kind of looking at a collection staffing level or your collections related policies unless they have to do with the building or environment. So I know it's confusing, which is why we're doing this course. All of these documents are definitely useful and worth doing. And there's definitely some overlap between all of them. But it's just important to kind of know what is what. And with that, I'm going to have Mike or Susan pull over our first poll of the day. And it is, have you had an assessment done at your institution? So if you have definitely had a preservation needs assessment, you can let me know. If you've had a different type of assessment done, a lot of times people know they've had some kind of assessment but have no idea what kind of assessment they might have had done. So if you could let me know. There are always some votes coming in. Oh, good. A couple of you have already had the preservation needs assessment done and a couple others. So that's great. We'll let that just kind of stream in. As we go through this, if you've had experiences, especially if you have had some of these assessments done, please do chime in. Let us know how it went when you had those assessments done. That can be helpful, again, to hear from the other people out there what their experiences have been. Great. We will go ahead and pull that poll off to the side. Thanks for letting me know where you are sort of starting off here. So let's talk a little bit about what is covered in that preservation needs assessment. I saw a couple of you said we had some sort of assessment done, but not sure which one. So this is what's generally covered in a preservation needs assessment. This is a sample table of contents from one of the assessments I've done here at the Conservation Center. And as you can see, it does really look kind of big picture. There's a lot of different topics covered, more sort of institutionally and not really delving into anything really in depth. This is not necessarily the only way to set these up, but writing assessments is a big part of my job. I have found this to be a helpful format for me. I usually do one, sometimes more a month, so I will say that I like this particular outline. But regardless of the format that your preservation needs assessment covers, or takes, this is kind of what should be covered. Obviously, you need some kind of introduction to give yourself a context about the institution. I like to provide some sort of shorter abstract and executive summary. I know sometimes we have board members who can't read more than a page, right? So I like to provide some variety of things there. Prioritize goals, and we will talk more about prioritization as we go through this process. And then you can see some of the bigger topics, collections management, covering things from preservation planning, funding, staffing, policies, access, all of that, your buildings and facilities part, which is pretty self-explanatory. Environmental management, which looks a little bit at sort of those HVAC systems and other issues like housekeeping, pest light, all of that. And then security and disaster, which can be a big, big issue, especially for some of our friends who might be down in the Southeast right now bracing themselves for some big storms. I also usually include collections care by format. So to talk a little bit more about specifically the needs of different types of artifacts and then a bunch more resources, because there's more resources out there than even know what to do with sometimes. So I'll organize them for people. And we will circle back to this for sure as we go throughout this. But I did want to talk, just give you a sneak peek about all of the many uses for preservation needs assessment. As I kind of pointed out in the beginning, this is really the first step to preservation planning. And then you can kind of use it as you're jumping off point to go in a lot of these other directions. And I do think the primary goal is probably to kind of that first one there, plan and direct guide your ongoing collections care effort, making a preservation plan is a really great outcome of it. I often hear that institutions, although their staff is often qualified to assess needs like this, it really helps to sort of drive the point home in a formal written assessment to be presented to the board, especially from outside input. It can really sort of help validate what the staff already knows. Sometimes that carries a little bit more sway. It often is required by funders to be eligible for grants. And that can be a really kind of tough catch 22. But it is the unfortunate truth. Sometimes you need funding to get the assessment, to get the funding to do the projects. So it can be kind of a circle. But it is often the truth. And in addition to many of the things that I do, I also am a grant reviewer for IMLS and NEH. And I can tell you from firsthand experience and we're reviewing applications that include a project that is straight from something like a preservation needs assessment. They're always much stronger and looked upon much more favorably by reviewers than those that don't. So even if it's not required, it does really help to have it as a supporting document. And of course, it does help you to generally improve collections care, even if you aren't able to make your systematic plan. It just sort of helps to guide you in some directions. Great. So now with any type of assessment, you can do an assessment internally with sort of in-house staff. Or you can have an outside assessor come in. And there are advantages or disadvantages to both. So it is important to kind of think about this when you are making the decision. Doing the assessment internally does have some advantages. The assessor says that someone on staff will really know the institution's values and functions will make it so sometimes the recommendations are kind of more realistic since they really sort of know the ins and outs of how things operate. In some ways, it can go faster. The in-house surveyors sort of knows where all the collections are housed. They already know all the peculiarities of storage. So they don't need to go on sort of a comprehensive tour. If given time, the in-house assessor is often able to kind of be more thorough. They know more of the details. They know what's realistic. And outside consultants' time is often limited. And it can avoid that additional cash expense, which is a big one for people I know. I do want to say that that might make it seem less expensive, but it is important to factor in staff time and salary for the true cost on that one. Of course, there are disadvantages to doing this process in-house. An in-house surveyor might sort of have their own biases. They might have sort of a clouded judgment, interpretation of a situation that might influence their recommendation. In-house people might not make suggestions because they might be afraid of having kind of a negative reaction to them. They don't want people to think of them as a bad guy if they're going to make something that's going to impact co-workers or themselves. So it's often harder to kind of be an instrument of change from the inside as well. So that's sort of a drawback as well. And whether it's true or not, the in-house surveyor may not be viewed with the same sort of credibility as having someone else come in. And oftentimes, parts could go faster, but parts can also go slower because an in-house staff member will have other competing job responsibilities while they are trying to do an assessment. And similarly, with outside consultants, there's some really great advantages, but also some disadvantages to having somebody come in from the outside. So again, just important to consider. Some advantages to hiring an outside assessor include that some might be more experienced. They've probably seen lots of different institutions, have a lot of different familiarity with diverse situations. They might be able to know what worked well for what other institutions that might work well for yours. They're also usually more aware of outside resources and can point you in what is kind of the newest breaking news in the field. There are usually a specialist in a particular area or type of collection, and that's very useful in making recommendations as their experts. The surveyor won't enter with preconceived notions or ideas. They won't have that cloud of judgment that we talked about. They'll be able to kind of look at the situations a little bit more objectively. They are removed from those political issues, so they can be the bad guy and say things without fear of being penalized or looked at as unpopular. The surveyor might also have more credibility as we talked about before, even if it's not really justified. And this is probably a big one. The surveyor will have the time to do a complete survey and then produce a written report by a specified date, which is nice, because you know what's going to happen. There are, of course, disadvantages as well. The surveyor doesn't know the institutional history or framework, which might make some recommendations a little bit more unrealistic or out of scope. Hopefully the surveyor will work with you a little bit to rein those in some. But that is sort of the negative side about not knowing those politics. And the kind of biggest one I think that comes up is the C. There is usually a C assigned to this. And that money might not be available up front. It might be difficult to reallocate. So we will talk a little bit about some funding of that. But I just wanted to point that out that there will probably be a cost associated. And as I said before, I don't think there is a right or wrong answer necessarily to whether or not you should do it inside or outside. That's really going to depend on your institution and your situation. I will say from having experience doing the process, having somebody else to walk you through it can be really helpful, especially if it's your first time doing it. And it does tend to carry a bit more weight, having those recommendations from the outside. Especially if it's for some other types of surveys and assessments that we'll talk about through, say something like an item level survey for conservation needs. You might have a conservator on staff, and it might make more sense to do it in-house. But for this first kind of general preservation needs assessment, it is nice to be able to have somebody out there to guide you through the process. Until you might be thinking, where can I find an assessor to help you out with something like this? So sometimes if you have gotten a grant or something, maybe a map assessment, or we offer assessments here through the Conservation Center, you might be assigned an assessor, which is great, so that makes it easy. If you are getting a CAP assessment, you will get an approved list of assessors ahead of time, and then you get to interview from that approved list. I would recommend, no matter where you're finding your assessor, that you do an interview process just to make sure they are going to be a good fit for you, asking them what their background is, making sure that they understand that you are at a little tiny institution, say, or you have some really tough government constraints or something like that. The FAIC has a find a conservator tool, and not all conservators do assessments, but oftentimes they do, so that's a good place to look as well. There are regional conservation centers. The one I work with here is the CCAHA, is a regional conservation center, and we offer assessments. But there's other NEDCC up in Boston. There's MAC, which is the Midwest Art Conservation Center out of Minneapolis. So there's a couple other centers out there that offer these sort of services. You might also have a local field service office. I see someone saying that they are an assessor for the New Jersey Association of Museums, which is great. You might have something local as well that could help out with that. And another great way to find people is if you had recommendations from a colleague. If somebody else has had an assessment done, and they loved their assessor, see if you can get in with them as well. So I did have another poll to pull over. Has anybody worked with an outside consultant on having an assessment? And if you have, maybe you could write a little bit about your experience in the chat box. If you haven't, you can take note of those people and maybe ask them follow-up questions afterwards. Oh, it doesn't look like many of you have worked with an outside consultant. So hopefully this is helpful in helping you to determine. Like I said before, you don't always have to work with an outside consultant. There are definitely projects that make sense to do internally, but it is important to kind of do the pros and cons of both. All right, great. I see some people typing up their experience. Awesome. I'm going to pull that aside. Please do keep chatting. I'm going to jump into sort of the next part of this, but I do want you guys to keep that discussion going. I am going to talk a little bit. I'm going to walk us through the process of doing an assessment now, and I'm going to mostly walk through it the perspective of hiring an outside consultant, because I want to prepare you for what to expect if you are doing that. But do kind of keep in mind, as I'm kind of going through the actual mess and bulk of this, you could at least theoretically do some of this in-house as well. So kind of think about that. The first thing that you're going to need to do when you are working on an assessment is to assemble a team. And so that is a really crucial first step. The team is going to be used to conduct the assessment. But then also, this is the same team that you're going to want to be using to do the next steps afterwards. You're going to want to have this team either make the preservation plan. Or they're going to be the ones who are actually implementing the recommendation. So assembling this team is a really important step. It's vitally important that you get the right players in place from the beginning to make this effort successful. Gaining support of as many staff and board members as possible is really an essential part of preservation planning. Obviously, all preservation must be supported by the administration if resources are to be allocated for implementation. So you're going to need their buy-in from the beginning. But equally important is the commitment from that non-administrative staff. If planning is to be effective. These are the people who are actually going to be doing the work. So it's very important that they are bought into it. Accomplishments will be greater. Goals will be reached more easily if staff at all levels are committed. So it's important to get that buy-in. All that being said, too many cooks in the kitchen and spoiled a broth. So while it is very important to have this team together, hearing lots of different opinions, get gathering information, the actual writing of the report and the actual, ultimately, writing of a preservation plan should be done by just one or two individuals to really have the best knowledge about the collection. Usually when I'm working with an assessment, I have one point person on the staff who I work with. And we work on that report together at the end. We get input from all the rest of these people. But it's me and the point person at the institution that really work on the actual writing. So I know that sounds so easy. We're just going to get buy-in from everybody. It's going to be very, very easy to do. And that's usually, that's often not the case, right? You sometimes can run into resistance from staff, resistance from the administration, not wanting to spend the money, staff not wanting to sort of change the way that they always do things. And I don't want to make it sound super easy like that. It isn't something that you can avoid and just say, no, that's how we're going to do it. And everybody's going to be OK with it. There will probably be some pushback. So it is important to kind of go into this process knowing that you want to make sure everybody is kind of on the same page with it. Much of the success of a preservation program really depends on the willingness of the staff and the administration to support changes. So you really do want that to be clearly evident from the start and to be sort of continually encouraged by regular reports on progress, checks that emerging recommendations will be approved. And you want to just, on a continuing basis, make sure that resources will be allocated. Staff time is going to be able to be used on this. Money will be available. That might mean depending on your institution you might need to involve someone from senior staff. You maybe wouldn't normally involve an apparent institution like a university representative or something like that. From the initial assessment to the actual preservation plan writing. And then also there's the issue of turf wars. But as a facility staff, as a playmate of your collection staff, they don't want to share the information there. It's really important to kind of educate everybody as well as to why we're working on this. Presumably if they're working at your institution they hopefully see that your collections are important and want to see them survive. So you can really kind of come armed with data, the effects of changing solid estimates on the cost of the changes being thought. That can really help if you see kind of stories in the news. Disaster stories are always a really easy one. I like to tell a story about how an institution I worked with once. They had an assessment done a few years ago about putting in a fire sprinkler system that was going to cost upwards of $1 million to install. And the institution determined that was too expensive. It wasn't a priority. So of course what happened the next year? They had a big fire. They had well over $1 million worth of damage. And it would have been really to their benefit to have gone through with that. So if you can find stories like that and save them it's definitely helpful to kind of get that buy in. Emily is talking about the staff having turned over since the assessment was done. And the new staff knew about the assessment. But they're on the learning stages regrouping. So we'll talk about getting your assessments refreshed. But if you have had big turnover like that it might be time for a new assessment because the situation might be different. You might need to start from zero here and assemble a new team and maybe consider that. But we'll hit on that a little bit later. Thank you for sharing that story though, Emily. Great. So now that your team is assembled the first thing that your team is going to be asked to do by your outside consultant is a self survey. A lot of times when I'm working with institutions on their assessments they say that this self survey alone is a very valuable experience all by itself. It gets everyone kind of in the same room and talking. If nothing else sometimes there's never been an occasion to ask how often is our HVAC system maintenance? So this is a good opportunity to do just that. Can be really helpful to get all those team members on the same page from the beginning. So typically when you are working with an outside consultant you will get a questionnaire that sort of guides this conversation. And that might be different depending on the consultant and the survey. But so for example at CCHA we have kind of a standard survey that we send out ahead of time. But it's slightly different than the one you might get from say the CAP assessment. But basically the questionnaire will ask you sort of all types of questions covering areas to be included in the assessment. I typically ask for the questionnaires to be returned at least one week prior to the scheduled site visit. This generally gives me enough time to kind of read through it to get a feel for what the situation might be before I walk into it. I will usually develop further questions based on those responses. It helps me to kind of guide my time when I'm on site. So I'm using my time in the best way possible. It helps to get some of those kind of pesky details out of the way too ahead of time like what is the brand of data logger that you're using? What is the name of the PES management contractor? You can just kind of have that all together ahead of time. There are also self-assessments online that might be helpful. If you are thinking about getting an outside assessor, you might want to kind of prepare yourself for what you're going to be going through. And like I said before, this process all and of itself is really helpful. So I've listed some online tools on the screen. There are websites linked to these in the learning platform on the FAIC website where I have a resources page that have links to all of this as well. But just to let you know ahead of time, your homework for this course will be conducting a self-survey and I will provide you the survey. So we'll all be doing this process. But just so you can have the information a little bit more, you can also use these to bookmark for later. Sharon is asking if your institution's funds are tight and you need to do a preservation assessment and has other guidelines that you can follow. So I would say kind of going through these self-surveys is a good way to start that process. And I'm going to talk us through a little bit more about that and hit on the answer to that, Sharon, as we go through. But this self-survey is a really good place to start. If you're doing the assessment or not, you want to assemble your team first and then the first thing your team will do is this self-assessment. Great. So your outside consultant will also want to take a look or if you're doing this in-house, you might want to just, you know, fresh eyes look at your existing policies or procedural documents that you've already created. I like to ask for them usually that same one-week outmark so I can just kind of look at everything together. And while I look through these, sometimes I will ask questions that are outlined or obviously missing from existing policies. So a good one I usually ask is, what is the acquisition process like? You'd be surprised. Staff often think they have a really up-to-date collections management policy that tells them all about the acquisition process. That doesn't say anything in there and, you know, or I find out that what they verbally tell me what they do for that process is completely opposite of what I just read in the collections management policy. So sometimes I think they're doing things correctly or, you know, up-to-date and there's a mismatch there. So it's important to double-check those things more often than not even more common than people having the mismatch there is that they'll submit policies that are decades old, don't reflect anything of their current reality and obviously don't do anybody any good. So that's kind of the more common situation. I've listed a sampling of policies that are helpful for me when I'm conducting assessments and are helpful for generally caring for your collection. And I know we could do webinars on each of these policies individually, so we won't go over them in detail, but I will tell you if you are missing any of these policies that will generally be a recommendation to create one, update it, frame staff on it. And I always recommend conducting training on them ideally annually, but at least every five years and updating. So that's another thing that you will want to keep in mind. Something else that I will usually ask or are any other assessments you might have had done, you know, though generally the preservation needs assessment is the best one to start with, I find lots of institutions have started with other assessments and that's totally fine. That does happen. It is really helpful if you've had a preservation needs assessment done in the past to take a look at it, even if it's old to kind of gauge how well you've done. Typically this kind of gets to the thing Emily was talking about earlier. You should have a preservation needs assessment conducted every 10 years. It's a really nice benchmark point to see how you're doing. Give yourself a sort of reflection time and see what you have accomplished. Or, conversely, to look at what might be a chronic issue that still needs to be resolved, something that's been plaguing you and you might need to turn your focus to it. If you've had big changes happen at your institution, you've moved buildings or you've had complete staff changeover, as the case was earlier, that's another good time you might need to revisit some of this. So this is not a one-time-and-it's-done kind of thing. This is a kind of constant review. Other documents may also be requested, including environmental data. If you have floor plans, things like that, your assessor might also want to take a look at that. After your consultant has had time to look at the documents, you will schedule a site visit. So the consultant will come out to visit you on at your institution. And every consultant is a little bit different in the way they like to structure these. I'm going to tell you about it from my point of view, how I like to do it. But if that's something you would want to talk about with your consultant as well, how they would like to structure something like this. I like to start off with staff interviews. Oftentimes, a lot of other assessors like to start touring the site. Sometimes that is helpful for me too, but I kind of like to sit down, get a sense of the situation before I start looking at things I often get distracted looking at the storerooms, and it's harder for me to kind of focus. So I like to do the interviewing first. I like to get to know people first, and then move on to looking at things. So you can do kind of whatever may be best for your staff. You can have a whole group discussion, like you see pictured here. You have everybody, all your whole team, come sit down for the interview. Sometimes it is better, though, to do kind of one-on-one meetings with people as well. I often call myself a collection therapist for this part of the job. Often when it is in that one-on-one meeting, you will get a little bit more frankness about, I really find it frustrating because the facility staff is so difficult to work with. They might not say something like that if the facility staff is there. So it'll sort of depend on the situation. You want to basically make sure that your consultant is getting the best full view picture of the institution. If there are definitely some staff and sort of political issues that you need to get out there, the consultant is going to want to do that. And this can help a lot with getting that buy-in from the team as well. If staff members all feel like their voice is being heard, then they're probably going to be friendlier to the cause. So this is a great opportunity to let everybody kind of get to say their piece about the issues that they have. You want to get kind of a wide range of people represented that every part of the organization is considered. It's helpful to see and hear the differences in opinions about the biggest priorities and concerns from the perspective of the director versus the collection staff versus the facilities folks. All of these perspectives are valuable and will give the assessor a more complete view of the organization. So some questions that you might ask will include things like what are the issues facing the institution from their perspective and what are their mitigation strategies. Sometimes a security guard has an excellent suggestion just nobody's asked them for it before, so it can be really helpful. What are their biggest priorities or tasks that they want to accomplish over the next five years? Something else that's important to ask is about past preservation projects. It's important to know what has worked, what people have viewed as successes, and just as important what has not worked and why or why not. This will make sure that the goals and priorities will be developed in a realistic way, hopefully. And then the big one, the one people sort of think about a lot is the tour. I know this one is kind of stressful for a lot of sites. It's important to know that the assessor is not judging you though. You're not getting a grade. You're not gonna get reported or anything like that. Just as often as I'm pointing out issues I see, I'm also pointing out things that people are doing really well. I always see really inventive storage solutions and really great ideas, and I am always good, I always point those out just as much as the issues. Every single site visit I go on without fail, the site always says this is gonna be the worst you've ever seen. And obviously now there is, of course, one that has been the worst, but more often than not, it's not as bad as you think it is. When your assessor comes in, resist the urge to clean up, we wanna see things in their kind of regular condition so we know what the situation is actually like. It doesn't do any good to kind of misrepresent what your storage is like. Your report's not gonna be helpful if the information is not accurate. When we're walking through, and we're going on this tour, we're gonna be doing a couple of things. Namely, we're gonna be kind of keeping our eyes looking for risks in each of the collections areas. Might be a big tripping hazard. Artifacts stack dangerously on top of one another. A leaky pipe, pest activity, out of range environmental conditions, or a variety of other things. This one I would say is probably the hardest thing to do as an in-house assessor. You can do the self-surveys, you can do the interviews, you can do all of that, but it's kind of hard to look with fresh eyes at your institution. You might walk by the shelf, or all of you are looking at the shelf right now, and you can name about five issues, just right off the top of your head, I'm sure. But if you walk by it every day, it sort of blends into the background, and you may not see it as much. So if you are trying to do an assessment in-house, I might suggest having a friend from another organization come by and do a walk-through with fresh eyes. That fresh eyes thing is really tough, and so you wanna make sure that you are doing it however you can. This is also a really helpful activity to do with your board or upper management in gaining institutional support as well, especially if they're a little bit removed from collections and aren't in storage that regularly. If they can physically see the overcrowding in storage, or the difficulty of accessing certain items, then they may be more likely to get behind the effort. A really mean thing to do is give them a call number, make them go retrieve something for you. Once I have to move 10 boxes to get to one artifact, they may have a little more sympathy for you when you are trying to tell them about how bad it is. Something else is if they don't wanna go to storage, maybe you might bring something to them. I have a colleague who was working with the Hawaiian Historical Society, and she told us about how she was having trouble getting buy-in from the board. So the collections manager and her went to the board with some microfilms that had been stored in really poor environmental conditions. They were literally just crumbling in their hands. The collections manager sort of passed the objects around the board table, literally crumbling as each board member touched them, and then suddenly they sort of understood why environmental management was so important. So all different parts of this process kind of get you back to that assembling the team part where you want everyone on the same page. I wanna be sort of constantly doing that, and this is a really great opportunity if you are encountering resistance. Anyway, if you are doing this with your outside assessor, at least with me, things get a little quiet in storage. That doesn't mean it's bad. I'm usually taking pictures, taking environmental readings, making notes. I might also be asking questions, putting things out, asking for more details. So it's kind of an awkward time when you have your outside assessor in, but this is also a really good opportunity for you to show your assessor some of the issues you might have pulled them about in the interview ahead of time or mentioned in your self-survey. I typically don't like to tour with the whole team. It's a bit overwhelming, so I usually will do it with just one or two of the collections people, but I have been on site visits where it is a whole staff affair. Again, whatever's gonna work best for your institution is good, but make sure that you are communicating with your team and also with your assessor. So that's basically the meat of how the actual kind of assessment goes. Then afterwards, there's going to be a final report, right? And it's really important to kind of be communicating with your assessor about that report. If they can do something, like show you an outline ahead of time like I did, and I'll kind of talk about what is included in each of those sections so that they know and if they want to make recommendations, like I've had people tell me that executive summary cannot be longer than five pages because I know nobody's gonna read it if it's past that mark. So I'll try to rein it in there. It's important to set a due date to make sure that you guys are on the same page there in terms of expectations. You might wanna decide if there's gonna be a draft for review usually following the assessment. I get home, I start writing the report and I have a million questions that I should have asked on site. So I often will just include them in comments in the side and then I'll send a draft for review and then they'll go through the comments and answer it that way. But you might wanna set up a separate meeting after the assessor has had some time to work on it. So communicate with your assessor and make sure you guys are on the same page about expectations, what the final product is gonna be and what the steps along the way are. There will be, if you have a good assessor, they will be prioritizing some of the recommendations but to help you kind of figure out the order in which you should do things and kind of giving you some broader goals. So make sure that you are reviewing those with them ahead of time and this is where you can come in and help with those sort of political issues and the realisticness of the recommendations. And then lastly, you do really want to share this report with your administration, with your board. It can be really helpful to show them that you're not crazy, everybody. This is other people are saying that we need to do this as well, right? Or it can also just help to validate some of the things that you've already gotten started on. You can say, look, we already started this and it was a recommendation that we do so we're doing great. But yeah, make sure that it doesn't just fit in that binder. Make sure that it does get shared. Great, so we talked about this a little bit already. I know that this all sounds all fine and dandy but how do you fund these things, right? There is usually a cost involved in this so it is important to think about that ahead of time. I did, again, there are more resources in your online platform. I have all of these grant programs listed along with URLs to some of them. Some of the URLs that have this grant is no longer available but will be next year so it can give you more information on due dates and things like that. The Collections Assessment for Preservation Program is a really good one. It's funded through FAIC and IMLS. It's a partially subsidized grant so that doesn't mean the whole thing is gonna be paid for. You probably still will have to pay for part of it depending on the fees of the assessor but it does help to defray the cost a lot. This one is really great because it includes not only that general preservation needs assessment but also a building assessment. So it's a two for one process which is really great good way to kind of kill two birds with one stone. The building assessment is definitely something that comes up a lot as a recommendation. A lot of the issues institutions have have to do with the building and making sure that it is up to date and safe for collection. Oftentimes a building, if you're in say like a historic cost museum, the building is the largest collection item so it can be one of the most important things to assess. Usually the person who's doing the general preservation needs assessment does not have an expertise in building and vice versa. The historic preservationist who does the building evaluation doesn't know necessarily what kind of box you should be putting those artifacts in and the person who knows what kind of box you're putting those artifacts in doesn't always know the details of the building but the two are so interrelated that it is really nice to have them together. Another program out there that people do a lot is the MAP program, the museum assessment program. This one is funded through AAM and IMLS and again it is partially subsidized so it doesn't mean that you're gonna have the whole thing done but you will get part of it done. There is a collection stewardship category. There's a couple of other categories of assessments that the general preservation needs assessment will fall into that collection stewardship category. This is a little bit more sort of self-driven. It has a lot of more kind of self-activities that you guys have to do back at your site but you do kind of get a guide with it as well and assessor who will help you through the process. I mentioned the local field services offices before we had the participant from New Jersey chime in before but a lot of times these agencies like your State Department of Archives and History or your State Museum, State Historical Society those sort of things will have a branch that does kind of outreach for institutions and will often do these types of assessments. Another hat I wear is the, I am the chair for the Field Service Alliance of AASLH which is the American Association of State and Local History. Something we are working on right now is updating our website to make sure that we have the correct contact information for all local field services offices. So there is a link to the page there and the resources page. It's a little out of date right now but we are working on updating it and it's a good place to start. Funding might vary depending on where you are and what the situation is, if there's a local funder but it's definitely a good place to get started and ask questions. There's the Regional Contribution Centers like I mentioned before. Here at CCHA we have two different funding projects. We have totally free needs assessments. If you are in the Philadelphia area or if they are funded by a local foundation, the William Penn Foundation, so those are totally free. We also have a national program as well that is funded through the NEH and that is subsidized at the $500 co-pay essentially. So that's another good option. The New Jersey one is fully subsidized, which is awesome. That's great to hear. So yeah, and you can also often hire people from those places if they don't have programs right off the bat. So those are sort of the programs that are in place but you can also get sort of standalone grants to fund some of these as well. The two good ones I think to kind of keep an eye out for are NEH's Preservation Assistance Grants. Those are $6,000 and no match is required. So you can use that $6,000 to hire an assessor who you might find from those other through FAICs, find a conservator tool or from reaching out to colleagues. Those are other places as well. So you can use the grant money to pay their consulting fees. Here at CCHA we have structured it so that a $6,000 grant will cover our consulting fees but that's definitely a conversation you will want to discuss with an assessor. The other really good one to check out and this is sort of a newer one, so I don't have as much experience working with this but IMLS just came out with the Inspired Grant Category which is particularly for small museums. It's really a great program. You can see there you can get up to $25,000 and no match required, which is amazing and unheard of. So that could be, you could get your assessment and you could even have a little bit of money for some implementation of some of the recommendations. So it's a really good one to check out. Of course, these are sort of competitive, these grant processes but this is a really important process so it might be worth spending the time and effort to hopefully getting it done. Great, oops, I went a little fast there. So I did want to pause here right at the end of the content for today and I do want to talk about sort of the homework assignments we have coming up. There's two homework assignments associated with this. There's a self-assessment as I talked about before and then we will do a prioritization activity. There's some instructions on the portal online so you can check that out and please feel free to get in touch with me or Susan if you have more questions about it. But in the portal, you'll find a download of a practice assessment or not a practice assessment, excuse me, a self-assessment. So you can sort of practice doing that first step, right? You can get some team members together and kind of go through this process. The document that I've provided is a modified self-assessment that we use here at CCHA. Usually those self-assessments that I give to people are about 30 pages long. I've edited this one down to 10 pages. You're welcome. So I know it seems like a lot that you do have some time to finish it. Just sort of logistically here with the course, we are taking a break off from webinars on that last week of July there. So instead of that, that is when your assignment will be due. I do not recommend waiting for the last minute to get started on this though. It is kind of time consuming. You'll have to kind of go and pull a lot of information. So I definitely would take a look at it now and get started on it now. Don't put it off to the last minute, but it will be due during our off week. I will get comments back to you by that last webinar. And we'll go over the prioritization activity a little bit later, but just to kind of give you a peek. We'll be pulling out priorities for yourself. I'll help you to think about how you are going to pull out priorities, and then you'll have to use that self-assessment to kind of pull some of those out and turn that in after the class is over. So those will be your homework assignments. Are there any questions on that? All right, I don't see anybody writing. So I will go ahead and let us go over right at the hour mark, so that works perfectly. Here is my contact information that you can feel free to get in touch with me if you need. There's also, as Susan mentioned in the top, there's the discussion online, so you can get in touch with me there. And I will see everybody in a week from today, same time, same place, and we will go into additional types of assessments that you might have. And I just want everyone to know, I am going to post the PowerPoint slides and the recording probably later today. I'll send out an email when they're posted, and the resources are in the handout. And remember, when you're posting your assessment the week of the 31st, you should post it as one document and as one word document with all of your stuff in it that will go through and there won't be any problems with it. Otherwise, I'll have to do some glitching around. So I think that's it. If you don't have any questions, then we'll finish. And if you do think of questions later, put them in the discussion. And that way, everyone can see them. If you have the question, I'm sure other people do as well. So. Right, right. And thank you, I think these are really good points about assessors and finding assessors and that kind of stuff. So thank you, thank you, Mike, and thank you, Samantha. And thank all of you for being here. So we'll see you next week, same time. And I will make sure that we have the correct address when I send you a note to remind you to sign in. Okay, all right, thanks. Bye. All right, thanks everybody. I will talk to you all next week.