 My name is Mike Morneau. I'll be your technical producer today. It's my pleasure to pass the audio over to your host for today's session, Ms. Elsa Huxley from Heritage Preservation. Elsa, if you'd like to go ahead whenever you're ready. Okay, great. Thanks so much, Mike. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Elsa Huxley from Heritage Preservation, and we're so glad that you're joining us today. I'm going to give a quick introduction to the community and to how these webinars work, and then we'll move on. Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History, and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Time. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the C2C initiative, including the bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars, and links to these resources are filed under the topics menu on the site. We will also file a recording of today's webinar there. About twice a month, online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource online at host's webinar related to it. The resources we posted for today's webinar can be accessed by clicking this photo on our webpage, www.connectingtocollections.org. If you click on that photo, you'll find a link to the Heritage Preservation Mayday page of today's featured resource. Our Mayday campaign this year is being sponsored by Rapid Refile. So, today I'm very pleased to welcome our featured experts, Lori Foley, Vice President of Emergency Programs at Heritage Preservation, and Lorette Amfleet, Chief of Collections Management at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. So thanks so much for joining us today, Lori and Lorette. Would you please tell us a little bit about yourselves? Lori, would you like to go first? Sure. Thanks, Elsa. As Vice President of Emergency Programs at Heritage Preservation, I'm responsible for coordinating national programs on cultural heritage and disaster management. The Alliance for Response, which some of you might have heard of before, is one such program. The Alliance for Response program builds bridges between the cultural heritage community and the emergency response community, hopefully before disasters happen. I'm also the Director of the Heritage Emergency National Task Force, a partnership of 41 national service organizations and federal agencies that is co-sponsored by Heritage Preservation and FEMA. When a disaster occurs anywhere in the U.S., the Task Force is poised to help connect affected institutions with the resources they need to respond to and recover from the disaster. With over 400 tornadoes already reported this year, 2012 is on track to be another record-breaking year for disasters. The Task Force also develops resources that can help cultural institutions and the public be better prepared for disasters, and I'll be sharing some of those resources with you today. Lori. Hi, this is Leigh Rampleet. I'm Chief of Collections Management for the Department of Cultural Resources in Raleigh, North Carolina. We are a statewide cultural entity. We have the State Library, 26 State Historic Sites, 26 Regional History Museums, the Office of State Archaeology, the Underwater Archaeology Branch, and lots of different arms all over the state helping people preserve and exhibit their collections. I also manage the North Carolina Connecting to Collections Project, and one of our focus areas is disaster preparedness. Okay, that's great. Thanks, Lori. Thanks, Lori. So we have some poll questions. I'm going to be pulling them over throughout today's webinar, and we'll start with just three right now. And I just wanted to encourage everybody throughout the presentation. Please feel free to start typing in your questions in the chat box there on the left. I see a lot of people have introduced themselves. Thanks so much. And we'll address your questions, some of them, as we go through the presentation, and others we'll be holding to the end, but we'll get to all of them. So we will start with some polls now. Here's our first one. What type of organization are you from? You participated in May Day before, 15%. And for number three, this is going to take up a little bit more space. So let's just take a second here. Half of the people are joining us today from a museum. We're an organization that is a hybrid of a museum and something else. We've got about 20% Library Archives, 23% Historical Society. This is a pretty good representation of what we normally have. Now I'm going to move our second poll up, so we have some room for our third question. I don't expect a lot of responses to our third question because it hinges on question number two. And the question is, if you have participated in May Day before, could you briefly describe what you did? Oh my goodness, I'm sorry. Okay, so we had a couple people say yes. 14% of you, could you tell us what you've done? Updated and provided our disaster plan for the Library and Archives. That's Christy Sorenson in Austin. Offered incident command system training. Adrienne Burnie. That was our May Day last year. Oh, okay. You know what's going on there. We've provided hands-on wet recovery training and coordination with an AAM webinar from Cara. Looks like that's all the people currently typing, so I'm going to pull that away. Thank you, everybody. And I think we'll go ahead and start and we'll interrupt it with some more polls later. And in the meantime, again, everybody, feel free to type in your questions as they occurred to you and we'll make sure that we address them all at some point during the webinar today. Lori? Great. Thanks, Elsa. So I'm going to share, have a quick look at some of Heritage Preservation's resources that can help you do one simple thing for preparedness. And the first picture that you see here is the poster. So one suggested activity is introducing yourself to your local Emergency Management Director. It could be the firefighter in your local community. It is usually someone related to the response efforts within a town or city. It could very well be a town administrator, but usually your Emergency Management Director is someone who knows all about emergency response. This poster is available as a PDF through a link that's on the May Day page that you saw in an earlier slide. And it provides you with a number of things, suggestions that you can undertake to become acquainted with your emergency responder. Because when a disaster happens, first responders loom large and are in charge. So let me back up a little bit. So inside this PDF, you'll be able to find some tips on what you should say to your local Emergency Responders, how to build a relationship with them, and what they need to know about your institution, everything from where the exits are, where your valuable collections might be, what your salvage priorities are, and how many people might be at your organization or in your community institution at any particular time. When disaster strikes, what are you going to do? This book, Field Guide to Emergency Response, provides clear and practical advice to help you through your initial response. This is available on-store right now through May 31 as part of the promotion for May Day. But you don't have to buy anything. There are a number of forms that are available that you can download from this URL that provide you with some information on tips. You can go shopping for disaster supplies. You can even take the time as one of your May Day activities to figure out what your collection priorities are and very important what your data recovery priorities are, because data, electronic records are often an unseen collection, and it's not until you've lost them that you realize, hmm, I should have done something about it. This might be familiar to most of you. This is the Emergency Response and Salvage Wheel. One side shows the initial steps that you should take following a disaster, and the other side walks you through the salvage steps that would be necessary for recovering nine different types of collections, anything from books and paper to photographs, textiles, and even natural history specimens. And this just out, we have transported the wheel, the analog wheel into the digital format, so we can no longer refer to it as a wheel app because it's not a wheel app anymore. It's not in the shape of a wheel. It's called the Emergency Response and Salvage App that's available for Apple devices. It's available free of charge at the Apple Store, and it is the same great information in the wheel, but in now a very portable format that you can carry with you and download to your iPhone, your iPad, or your iPod Touch. Great, I'll turn it over to you. All right. Well, my next slide is one that I, are indeed from you, Lori, rip off and duplicate is a really neat concept. I ripped it off from Lori, who ripped it off from someone else, who ripped it off from someone else, but there's no sense in reinventing the wheel when it comes to creating a disaster plan or setting up training workshops or outreach and surveys even. Use what others have done. Adapt other programs to fit your individual needs. Everything is different from institution to institution, but the basic framework, things that Lori has already discussed with us are there to help folks begin the process. Becoming fully prepared with plans and training and response kits can be overwhelming. So I charge everyone here to pledge to start, even with something small for May Day 2012, and set a goal to be even more prepared by May Day 2013 so that you do it in baby steps, but you get there in some way, shape, or form. And I'm going to discuss briefly what we've been doing here in North Carolina with disaster preparedness and surveys so that perhaps something that I've done can help someone get started in their state with their programs. We are working right now underneath an IMLS Connecting to Collections implementation grant. We started with a planning grant. Now we're under the implementation grant, and it's a partnership with many, many, many different bodies across North Carolina. The North Carolina Museums Council, the North Carolina Preservation Consortium, the Federation of North Carolina Historical Societies, the Society of North Carolina Archivists, the State Historic Records Advisory Board, the North Carolina ECHO Project, and MACKRANT and TACRIN, which stands for Mountain Area Cultural Resources Emergency Network and the Triangle Area Cultural Resources Emergency Network. And those are groups of colleagues from museums and libraries in those regions who are working together to collectively train and prepare should disaster strike one of the partner institutions, the others in the area would then come over and help with response. So that's a really great tool. TACRIN has enlisted Lori's help in its inception with the Alliance for Response Program. So we have had surveys in North Carolina to teach us what's going on with our institutions. And what we found is that North Carolina has 950 cultural heritage institutions in the state. That means there are museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies, historic sites, all over the place from... I lost my little pointer. There it is. Okay. Sorry, folks. From right out here at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in the middle of the Atlantic, all the way over here to the mountains in Cherokee. So we try to serve all of these institutions. It takes about 10 hours to get from here to here, if you're lucky. And luckily, I live and work right here in the middle of the state. So we are assisting these institutions with outreach and workshops. The largest number of our institutions are museums. And of those museums, 51% of them operate on budgets of $50,000 or less. So necessarily, they're worried about keeping the lights on and security going, and less about disaster preparedness and storage issues. So we're doing our best to help them in any way possible. Our cultural heritage institutions care for more than 13 million objects and more than 200 million linear feet of archival materials. That's a lot of the stuff of history to care for. And in this economy, budgets and paid staff, positions are shrinking, collections are still growing exponentially. Funding for improvements to facilities is not expected to do anything but remain stagnant or decline. Unfortunately, as I was told by a local Politico once, funding for storage isn't sexy. And neither is disaster planning. So I have to rely on things like Hurricane Irene to scare people into doing disaster plans. So Hurricane Irene came ashore in North Carolina last year. She proceeded to travel up the seaboard and do damage throughout a whole lot of states. But in North Carolina, we had areas that had upwards of 16 hours of hurricane force winds. And this image here is from the Outer Bank from North Carolina. And just to give you an idea, this is Highway 12. It's the only artery up and down the island. Over here is the ocean. Over here is the sound. And during the hurricane, this was over there. The road was covered with sand. They pushed the sand back up. The water is receded. And we were out there trying to help our institutions that were damaged. We had libraries flooded. We had museums and galleries flooded. Some of them flooded with sewage. We had historic sites with trees, fences, and structures damaged. 220 institutions were in areas directly affected by the hurricane. So unfortunately, incidences like that encourage people to get more and more prepared. But I would challenge people to not wait for a bad storm to be prepared. Our NC Echo Survey, which took place over the 10-year period ending in 2010, they found out that 72% of institutions had no disaster response plans. And again, I am not above scaring people into doing things to get prepared. We have the Lost Colony Costume Shop on the Outer Banks here. We have a whole lot of old and period costumes. The Chatham County Courthouse Fire here was a year and a half ago. The Chatham County Historical Association had exhibit space there. The Tweetsie Railroad Storage Facility completely burned to the ground, and our Thomas Wolf State Historic Site had a devastating fire also. These were all not in the last year, but within the last decade. North Carolina was ranked fourth in the nation last year for the amount of damage sustained to natural disasters. So we have plenty of incentive for people to prepare. We did a secondary survey in 2011 to see how people were getting prepared, had all of the outreach that some of our partner institutions had done to encourage people to write disaster plans, how had we been doing? And the number went down from 72% to 45%. So we see that as a victory, and a lot of institutions have worked to get a written disaster plan. The statistics are skewed by libraries and archives, though. Most of those institutions have written plans. Museums, however, particularly small ones, lag behind in the preparation of written plans. So we call it a hollow victory because of these next set of questions. And I think we're going to do some polls now. Isn't that right? So it would be interesting to see do you have a written disaster plan for people? Has the plan been updated within the last year? And do you hold training exercises to carry out the plan? Okay, so it looks like 40% do have a plan for people and 27% have a plan... Oh, I'm sorry. 27% of those have updated the plan with the last year. Do I have personal training exercises? And we're very fortunate that those of you are very honest who say you simply don't know about the plans. And so this is something that you can certainly use as one of your activities to pursue for May Day. It's really simply finding out if you have a disaster plan for people, where is it? Are people aware of it? Have they been trained in it? You might want to consider having some kind of activity to reacquaint people with that disaster plan because as we all know, when there's a disaster, people come first and foremost. So having that is all, all important and overrides any kind of collections questions about having a disaster plan. But then when you get to the question about having a disaster plan for collections, that was, let's see, we're calculating that now. And again, don't know is a very valid answer and that would help prompt you to think about putting one together or at least, at the very least, starting that conversation within your institution. Because it's not something that one person can or should do alone. It really requires one at the institution, whether it's a large institution or a small one, whether they're volunteers or no volunteers. My disaster preparedness coordinator in his workshop points out that there was an institution that had a fire, I think it was, and the volunteers who were at the site at the time of the disaster were doing all they could to bring out what they thought were important pieces of the collection because no one had taken the time to prioritize salvaging the collection. And most of the items that were pulled out to salvage were reproductions. So it's very important to train everyone on site on what's important about recovery from a disaster. I think it's sort of similar numbers here. Right. Basically, what we're seeing here on these screens are also what we found in our survey here in North Carolina that 47% of institutions with written plans don't have staff trained to carry out those plans, that 63% of institutions with written plans don't hold training exercises, including simple fire drills, which you need to consider personal safety first and collection safety second when it comes to the actual disaster. And 14% of written plans include salvage instructions, which is a small number, and 40% of institutions with written plans don't have a supply kit to respond to any sort of disaster. And the supply kits can be as intricate a supply kit or as simple a supply kit as you can afford, but having at least the basics of supplies to help with responses is really important. And again, most institutions don't preserve or plan to preserve paper and electronic records at all. With poll question number 5B, it's apparent that most people, most institutions don't hold training exercises. And it could simply be, I mean, how do you do that? How do you go about having a training exercise? How do you exercise a disaster plan? And there is a resource that we don't have a slide for, but you can find at rescuingrecords.com. You can also find it through Heritage Preservation's website. rescuingrecords.com has released a number of different hands available for sale, a number of different tabletop exercises. So you plug in the CD and it'll walk you through the kinds of questions that you frame that you would present to your staff. And so having a disaster plan in hand, you figure out you sit around and rather than having a full-scale disaster that you have to respond to, you're sitting around a table when things are quiet, when it's a safe environment to do this and have this discussion. And it walks you through, it sets up a scenario and describes an incident. And then it starts injecting certain things that are happening. For instance, the hurricane has just blown in the windows of your stained-black window. What are you going to do? And then you refer to your disaster plan. And if you realize that you didn't even think of that happenstance, you can then use that opportunity to rewrite your disaster plan to say, maybe it's not a good idea to have everyone gathered beneath that stained-black window as a good place to congregate. So having a training exercise, a mock training exercise is another level up. But a tabletop exercise is really a wonderful way to test your disaster plan, to see if people are really familiar with it and find any keeps that might really throw you for a loop when the actual disaster happens. And of course, another, the most extreme way to exercise your disaster plan is actually to pull it out, following the disaster and see if it provides you the guidance that you need or whether the guidance is taking you in the wrong direction after all. One always learns. There are always lessons learned after a disaster. Exactly. So I guess we could go to the next slide. Which is break the cycle. Training is key, as we've been saying, to stopping decay of written plans and improving your response. And by listening to our institutions in North Carolina, we have started to offer a series of hands-on disaster recovery workshops. And as Lori was saying, when you do it in a stress-free environment and you practice the techniques in a place that's clean, safe, you're not stressed out, you're not exhausted, and it's not your personal museum's collection that's been damaged, you can learn quite a bit. So these poor books and this poor bracket were nicely muddied by myself for a workshop that we did in the western part of the state. We were able to get boxes of books that were being withdrawn from the state library for our workshops. It's a weird feeling to destroy books, but it's for the greater good, so we do that. And these hands-on workshops really, really help our participants understand the theory behind the classroom work that they do. Do you want to pull over the next polls now, or do you want to wait until the slide? Whatever you would like to do. Let's do the poll questions back. Okay. Okay, so here's poll number six. I have a feeling I'm going to be... Well, wow. We'll choose someone at random from poll number seven to get a door prize. It has to be the right answer. Actually, no, I give everybody a number and then I ask Larry Rieger, our president, to pick a number. Okay. He sees me coming in high speed. Okay, 65% have practiced using a fire extinguisher. Well, that's good. We've got a lot of people familiar with the terminology of pass. I don't know if Dan Coke and Sprecher can win this one. He's a fire fighter. It's about half and half with the response kit. Not quite. Half and half. I see that we've gotten a question in there. I'm going to hold that one for a little bit, but Linda, we'll cover it in a little while. All right. All right. Ready for me to take these away? Sure. One of our more extreme hands-on disaster response workshops was a fire recovery workshop. And we created a mock museum. We called it the Burnsville C2C Museum. We had a complete collection of objects, books, and archives materials. We collected them from office spring cleaning efforts and free bins at local consignment shops. And we arranged the materials in a firefighter's training facility. We had exhibits, storage, and library spaces. All the spaces, solid temperatures, they all rise above 700 degrees. They all experienced water, smoke, and soot damage. Our workshop participants then used our written disaster plan, which there's a photo of it right here. And they used Laurie's book and wheel. We don't have the app down here yet for that. And I have an Android. And they used our materials to recover and triage the materials that were inside the facility. It was a great experience. It taught us some things that we hadn't thought about. One of the things that we didn't have in our disaster kit were pencil sharpeners. We had lots and lots of pencils with points that were being broken regularly and we did not have a pencil sharpener. So you always revisit everything that you have, as Laurie was saying, to make sure that you have everything you need in the event of a disaster. So we had the fire. This is my C2C staff down here, and they're happy faces. Glad that the workshop was over. And here are some more images from the event. This is the firefighter training facility, our brick building, which was our wonderful fire building. We had exhibits with the trains that were the accession from the Museum of History selections. And we had library archive materials. And then after the fire, we had people go in and triage things. This is that bookcase. It happened to be in the way when the firefighters came through with their hoses and it got knocked over by the hoses. It got water, the materials were stepped on. Then everything had soot damage, so over in the left-hand image we have our volunteer participants who are using foot sponges to clean a ledger book that was in the fire area. And the rolled storage tubes in the bottom photograph. We tested a variety of different materials during the fire to see how things reacted and responded. And the one on the left is covered with remade. The one in the center is covered with Tyvek and the one on the right is covered with mudlin. And we wanted to see which one did the best job of keeping the rolled textile from smoke and soot. And of course, the Tyvek did the best. The mudlin was second and the remade was third as far as protecting the textile. So it was very useful information. A lot of our institutions don't have big budgets for storage materials. And if we can help them with finding out what works the best so they spend their money wisely, we're happy to do that. So what are we doing for May Day 2012? We are doing a severe weather spotting workshop and we're partnering with the National Weather Service who will be leading the workshop. They're teaching it for us for free. And it's geared not just for our institutions but also for the general public. We had a swarm of tornadoes here last year in April and we've already had an active tornado season this year in the Midwest. So it's very important for people who have historic sites with large areas that might have numbers of visitors on their property in the springtime, they need to be able to read the weather and understand if a thunderstorm or severe weather is headed towards them or away from them so that they can plan for the care and protection of the spectators on their property and for their staff. So the Sky Warrant Weather Spotter Workshop is a very popular workshop and we're looking forward to offering that for our folks. I have a question for you, Lorraine, before we get off of that. Do you know whether that workshop would be available in other parts of the country and would people just contact their local National Weather Service Bureau to see whether that could be made available? That would be where I would start is contacting the local weather service office and asking them. I do know that here in North Carolina many of the meteorologists at some of the television stations will also go and do that sort of thing, too. But if you've ever watched the news and the newsman has said, a weather spotter in this county hasn't noticed the tornado on the ground, that is a severe weather spotter who's been to this workshop and has a certificate from the weather service. So it's a useful thing for the private individual and also for the institution. So I would start with the local weather service office and move from there. And finally, some ideas from Mayday R&D to rip off and duplicate. We've already talked about some of these things. Start your plan. Dust off your plan. Schedule a fire drill. Now, I don't recommend just walking by the fire pool and pulling it because that might not be a good thing for folks who might be having a meeting at the time. Plan your fire drill. Send an email to start the ball rolling, at least, to get people together. Plan a meeting where you can begin to discuss these issues. Survey your storage, exhibit spaces, and stacks areas for hazards. There are lots of, if you go with a critical eye, there are lots of things that you could see in your areas that you could do to either protect the collections in the event of a disaster. Pick boxes up off the floor. Don't store things near a sump pump, those sorts of things. Buy the field guide and download the app. Those are some very simple things to get ready for Mayday. And I will turn it over to Lori again, unless we're going to use polls. Well, before we move on, could I bring your attention to this question that Linda Gillow from Chadford, Pennsylvania, asked earlier, because it relates to the RIP-OFF and duplicate question. She said, are there sources for existing disaster plans for organizations like small historical societies with multiple historic buildings? Are either of you aware of any sort of templates that someone could go by? Linda, there is a free online disaster planning template called D-Plan, and you can access that at dplan.org.org. And it was developed at the Northeast Document Conservation Center. Actually, well, I was there, and I worked on it. And there's now a classic version, which is a huge, comprehensive, very large disaster plan. When we first started developing it, we realized very early on that people with very few staff, if there's just a single person or there are a number of volunteers, but no one with a lot of time on their hands, it was way too much to create and to enter. And so this online template also now has a D-Plan Lite version where you can enter the information, and the D-Plan Lite is really your response activity. So what do you do when you need to respond? And then as time and resources permit, you're able to go back and populate the full version, the classic D-Plan, and the information that you enter in your D-Plan Lite is still available and will populate the larger version too. So that's available for you to work with. And there is a way to have an overview plan for your main buildings, and then you can have duplicate plans existing sub-plans within your large plan that will account for different buildings or even sites that are related to, but not on the same premises. So that would be helpful. Also in one of the photographs that Leray had in her Burnsville Sea to Sea Museum picture, along with a field guide in the disaster wheel, there you go, is a small thing that, white, there you go, thank you, the magic Mr. Captain Kangaroo Arrow for you old people like me. That is a Tyvek container for the Pocket Response Plan, which is available through the Council of State Archivists. And it's a really great thing and it's again a very valuable response tool. There are Word documents when you fill out this form that you can download and populate. And on the one side, similar to the wheel, is your emergency contact information. Who do you need to contact in the event that something happens? And it would be people on your staff, because you have to notify your staff, any volunteers, maybe your board, your local first responders. There's room to populate it with anyone else that you think would be important to contact following a disaster. And on the other side are some of the, because it's a template, you can customize it to your liking on the steps that should be taken, how you should go about responding. So that is available on the Council of State Archivists website. And that is a wonderful tool. You fold it up, you print it out on 11, 8.5 by 14 paper, nip it a little bit and fold it up and put it in this Tyvek container and you carry it around in your wallet and it works wonders. We call it the Reader's Digest version of your disaster plan. Let's see, do we want to answer Joan's question? Where is the disaster kit kept? Sure, yes. It's kept anywhere that you know people aren't going to be taking the supplies from. So you need to mark a disaster kit. It could be in, I've seen it in a number of styles and formats. It could be in a large Tupperware or Rubbermaid container that you can tote around. You can fill a portable garbage can, trash can that is on wheels. You can stash your materials in there. There are also things online we could always direct you to that tell you how to build such a cart. But really you want it so that the materials are there, that you know that all the materials, one has taken the disposable camera out of it for a staff birthday party to photograph it and you're left without a camera. And you stash it in most, ideally you'd want to have it on every floor of your facility but certainly where people can't access it but where everybody knows where it is. Our disaster response teams that we're working with in the Macron and Takron area, each individual member of those teams has backpacks with hard hats and flashlights. But that's the uber highest level of preparedness but it's something that's really thoughtful to be ready for personal safety too. Okay, before we move on I just wanted to point out that Dan Cogutzbacher posted the URL for the National Weather Service classes there in the chat. And Steven Baxter just posted an answer to Shelley Howe's question which is the prep template. And then we have a couple other questions I think maybe. Well let's address this one first, Larry, actually before we head back over to Lori. Catherine Talbot in Manhattan Kansas asked, could you share your survey given to the state institutions that North Carolina survey you talked about? Yes, the NC ECHO survey, both the results of the survey and the survey document itself are both on the NC ECHO website which is ncecho.org and you can even see the whole 500 and some page final report if you're really interested in that. But the survey document and the survey results in summary format are easily available there. There's no spaces or anything in that? NC ECHO.org. And if anyone wants to email me directly I can be more than happy to work with them because it was a comprehensive survey. We did site visits on those and it took us 10 years to get it done because we were very much wanting to get to every institution out there. And there are some questions that we've since realized that we didn't need to ask and others that we should have asked. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. I'll go ahead and answer Susan Lugo's question. Great. Susan asks, hi Susan. How are attempts to meet with local FEMA reps received? The experience of some has been that documents, archives, and collections... Oh, let's see. ...has been that FEMA has not considered documents, archives, collections to be within its traditional mandate. Well, I have some great news for all of you. One of the things I've done over the past winter and into the spring now is participate in the updates of the national frameworks for FEMA. And one of the frameworks is the National Disaster Recovery Framework, NDRF. And for the first time among all six frameworks that exist now, natural and cultural resources for which our community... under which our community falls now has its own recovery support function. So what is that? The natural and cultural resources that we all hold so dearly and precious, and we consider so precious, are now acknowledged as worth recovering by the federal government. And this annex, this recovery support function for natural and cultural resources, states specifically that the federal government has an obligation to deal with them, to help the cultural institutions, the private nonprofits, deal with their collections. So that does not promise that you're going to be getting money to recover following a disaster, and that's why it's so important to have a disaster planning to know everything you can know about what's going to happen following a disaster. But it does mean that you will be included and you'll be... the cultural institution will be attended to in the process of recovery. And it is... it's like trying to turn the tighten if it takes a little while, but the word is getting out and I know that regional environmental officers throughout FEMA's 10 regions really are interested in trying to make cultural and natural resources a bigger obligation in the eyes of the federal government. And Susan, you're in FEMA Region 2 and they have a very positive outlook in terms of they understand, they get the need for the importance of protecting and helping cultural institutions recover following a disaster. So that's great news. And also one more thing, FEMA is developing, and I believe it's developed, but they haven't released it yet, curriculum at their Emergency Management Institute, which is where they were first responders and emergency managers can go for training. And so they have developed a module on cultural resources that describes the importance of them, where they're found and why they're important to save and how you might go about saving them. So that's also, I think, a good step in the direction that FEMA... we want FEMA to go. Lori, Susan said if anyone can turn it, you can. I just wanted to mention here, Dan followed up on the Disaster Kit location question by saying make sure you keep at least one Disaster Kit in a remote location in case your building or collections... I'm sorry, in case your museum or collections building is damaged too badly for you to access and retrieve your kits. I wanted to make sure everybody... Yeah. All right, do you want to keep going? We have a couple more questions, but I've got them pulled off to the side so we could finish and then go back to those or... Okay, why don't we finish up then and then we can open up for even more discussion. I think that's a good idea. When you go to the Mayday homepage on Heritage Preservation site, there's a button at the bottom that says Find Mayday Ideas. So if we haven't satisfied your curiosity in terms of what kind of activities you really think your organization might want to pursue, do go to that page because there are... there's a wealth of information about the kinds of activities that you can pursue. And some of them are more complicated than others, but find something that you know will be successful. And then, if you do that, you can submit a brief description of what your organization will be doing for Mayday or what it did for Mayday by May 31st of this year and you'll be entered in a random drawing to win one of four prizes generously donated by Gaylord Brothers so you can win two Leak Alert water detectors, six Rescue Disaster Recovery Cartons. These are lightweight plastic cartons that can collapse and so they're flatter. They're a lot easier to store. A Collections Protection Kit, which all fits into a 6-gallon bucket and I dare you to try to put all the contents back in again once you've taken them out. It won't work. And the same thing for the React Pass, which is another...which is a given. It's a disaster response kit in a rescue and you can collect all these pieces yourself, but hopefully you might even win it. And so I encourage you to take one simple step for emergency preparedness this year. Great. So shall we turn back to other questions and comments? Great. Sounds good. I have a question from Stacey in Michigan asking, any comment, suggestions, or stories on insurance coverage as part of planning or how to work with insurance providers in the immediate aftermath of a disaster? After Hurricane Irene, one of the institutions we were working with who had been flooded with sewage, they were lucky enough to have an insurance provider on their board. And he was their connection to getting recovery on the fast track. So you need a good...just like you need a good relationship with your first responders, you need a good relationship with your insurance company, too. They need to know what you're all about and you need to know what they're all about, what they will and won't cover. And a lot of smaller institutions don't necessarily ensure their collections at all or even well enough. And a lot of the fires that I've seen here in North Carolina over the last few years, the collections aren't completely burned up, they're damaged, and conservation work will have to be done to those items. And finding the funding for those conservation work could be part of your insurance coverage, but you need to have conversations with your insurance provider on how you tool your insurance policy. I'd like to add that one of the workshops that's going to be happening at the upcoming American Institute for Conservation Annual Meeting, the AIC Annual Meeting, is going to be on finding funding for disaster recovery, and it will include a spokesperson from an insurance company, a fine art claims adjuster, someone from FEMA Public Assistance who will talk about how you go about navigating the disaster recovery process with FEMA. And I know most of you probably aren't planning on going to the AIC Annual Meeting, but we do intend to have that information, we intend to have copious notes taken and that information will be available, so you can refer to it online. And I'd certainly be able to post when we have that information up, because I think it will be a very valuable workshop. And certainly contact me offline if you want more information. Thanks, Laurie. I just want to point out we have about 10 minutes left, so now would be a good time to put in some more questions to make sure we have enough time to address them before the end. I was thinking about maybe pulling over poll number nine. Laurie, in the right, is that time? Okay, fine. And while they're pulling it over, I wanted to ask Ron a pilot historical and cultural property protection annex for your hazard mitigation plan. I think that's great. And I was wondering whether you also did this through R&D, because Massachusetts had one, they developed one that was R&D from an existing, well, that one was actually rewritten from Massachusetts emergency management annex. And then the state of Rhode Island worked on one, and I know the state of Utah has been developing one. So I'd love to know whether you came up with this annex on your own or whether that was something that you were able to rip off and duplicate. So Ron Van Voorhis in Oklahoma said ours was a pilot annex for FEMA. Wow, I'm going to have to get in touch with you, Ron, to find out what you have. We'll share. 51% of our participants today, 63, recognize their local emergency responders by their uniforms, 22% are on a first name basis, 9% are local emergency responders, and 4%. We always encourage participants in our disaster preparedness workshops to invite their local emergency responders to their location, particularly if it's a historic house museum to get them familiar with the layout of the property, maybe get them invested in a pride in the history of the place. Our Thomas Wolf Historic House Museum in Asheville had a fire a few years ago, and the firefighters said that the house was fully engaged when they got there. And had it been a private residence, they would not have risked the firefighters going in to put the fire out, but because it was such an icon in the community and they knew about the property, they went above and beyond to get the fire out and save as much of the property as they could. So having that relationship with the first responders, letting them know, you know, how the best way to get into the site is and what you're all about is very important. I know Janine Treese, I think, is what she was saying she did for May Day last year. Last year, I gave the Altoona Fire Department tours of our historic home museum. We discussed emergency exits, hazardous materials, how to get the ladder truck up to the building, et cetera. Right along those lines about what you're talking about. Colleague one, he visited with a church and there was a fire at the church and the firefighters had to break through a window to get into the building to put the fire out and they broke a window that was a stained glass window that was period to the church. The window chest next door was a reproduction. If they had known which window was easier to break, they would have perhaps preserved part of the original fabric of the building. All right. Lori, Adrian asked if you could expand on the annex. Right. Adrian, the annex that has been developed in Massachusetts is an ancillary segment, component of a comprehensive, the statewide comprehensive emergency management plan. Every state has to have a disaster plan, emergency management plan, and every, I believe, although Dan, you might want to correct me, every city and town should have a disaster plan. Certainly if you don't have a disaster plan, you're not eligible for federal funding. But the annex provides guidance on who the players are when something happens. And so, for instance, for the annex on historic and cultural resources and historic properties, it says who are the people, who are the players that need to be involved in the discussions? What really are cultural resources? What role does the emergency management community have in attending to these resources? And it really helps provide justification and authority for you to speak up and say, hey, our cultural institutions are approved or are acknowledged in this formal emergency management document, and that means that you have to give us some notice. You have to give us some, as much direction and help that you can possibly do. Let's see, and there was another question from Beth. We have eliminated this no budget for disaster training and supplies, recommendations for sources of grants. In the short time available, I'd say one of the great places to do that is through the National Endowment for Humanities Preservation Assistance Grants page. NEH, I believe the deadline is going to be around May 1st or so, but if you go to the NEH site, you'll find that. And they offer up to $6,000. But you can't just say, Jimmy, $6,000, this is what I want to buy. You need to explain and have a rational discussion of why they're important. But I know in the past they have funded supplies and training. You have to include training for that. Last month we actually hosted one of these live chat webinars with Elizabeth Joffrian, who's a senior program officer at NEH in charge of these grants. A recording of that is posted on the website in the online event recording section. I'll actually post a link to it, too. But that might be helpful if someone's considering applying for that. Great. Great comments coming through. I'm also very impressed that more than half of you have a preservation plan for your electronic records. That's really admirable. I would say even a year ago the numbers would have been vastly different, and certainly more people would not. I think that's really... I think we're building up to having some horrible disaster that involves electronic records, and that's going to be the wake-up call to make these numbers change even more dramatically. But half off to you for planning for electronic records, because that's the top one with no... with an ever-changing landscape. That's one that we have to stay on top of. So, good for you. I'm going to take that poll away now, I think. I just put a link up to that preservation assistant grant recorded webinar, and she made her PowerPoint presentation available to us, too. There's a link to it there where the recording is, and I'm sure people would find that helpful. It was a great one. Okay. I think that about wraps it up. Alrighty. I have an evaluation link I'm going to pull over, and here we go. Oh, there it is from Beth. We read these evaluations really carefully when we're planning future webinars, and if you could just take a couple of minutes. It's an eight-question evaluation. It shouldn't take too long at all. Most of them are multiple-choice. But if our participants could fill that out, we'd really appreciate it. And I think that that is pretty much it. We've got a new series of webinars. Most of you should have gotten an email from me this week with a list of them, selecting a conservator, security for collections. That'll address some of those problems Jeanine was talking about with the break-ins. Collections, care and conservation, how to submit an artworks grant to the National Endowment for the Arts. That's with Wendy Clark, the museum specialist at the NEA. Care of plastics and wireless data loggers. That's a following up on an earlier webinar. I recognize some of your names, and I know you were on that one. It was a very popular request that we hold one on wireless data loggers. So that will be coming up in July. So Lori and Larray, thank you so much for your time and for all your information today. They've consented to let me post this presentation online with the recording. I should have that up in the next day or so. If anybody wants to download that and print it up. And it's always a, there's always our group discussion boards at connectingtocollections.org if you'd like to continue this conversation there. So thanks so much to Lori and Larray and to all of our participants for the great questions and the great participation. Thank you. Good. Thank you and thanks to all of you who joined in. Have a great afternoon. Have a great afternoon everyone.