 Susan Berger, from the FAIC. Go ahead. Hi, welcome. I'm glad to see we have lots of people from the east who are taking snow days. We hope that you're enjoying the snow. I wish we had some here. So let me see. If you have questions about caring for collections, you can always go to our online discussion forum, and you'll get an answer from a real person quickly. So feel free to use that service. And you can keep informed about what we're doing by joining the C2CC announce list, which only is two or three messages a month. And I want to tell people who have been receiving our announcements and who have Yahoo email addresses. Those have been being purged. It's by our listserv because Yahoo rejects them. And if your email address has been rejected five times, the listserv removes it. So if you have a Yahoo email address and want to use this, please go and sign up again. Thanks. And you can also keep up with us on Facebook. We're also on Twitter. You can always contact me. This is my email address. And if there are any disasters, you can always contact the National Heritage Responders. This is their 24-hour hotline. And next month, we have two webinars, one on the care of industrial artifacts and one on working with emergency recovery vendors. So be sure to tune in for those. Today, we have an entirely different kind of webinar. We've never done anything like this. And our presenter is Anna Dodie. She's the curator of the Muter Museum at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, which is a really wonderful museum. She's an experienced forensic anthropologist. She oversees the Muter Museum's disturbingly informative collection and works to provide a unique experience for its 175,000-plus annual visitors. And she's been at the museum for over a decade and has overseen the refurbishment of most of the museum's storage rooms, which is what she's going to talk about today. In 2014, she became the director of the Muter Institute, which is the research arm of the Muter Museum. And she still retained her title as curator. And she's lectured extensively in both the US and internationally. But this is her first webinar, so we're going to give her the chance to go. So remember, I will be paying attention and collecting all the questions. You can just put them in the questions comments box. And I'll save them for Anna to answer at the end. So go ahead, Anna. Well, this is, like I said, this is my first webinar. And I'm really excited to do this. But I'm sure there's probably going to be a bit of a learning curve. And this is basically a presentation that is based off of a lecture I gave in November called The Cabinet of Death, Tales of Conservation and Storage from the Muter Abdatory. Now I know that you are not able to speak, but you can actually give me comments and questions on this question and comment section to the left. So this is going to be a little bit interactive. And I always say I'm not above bribery. And so what I'd like to do is the first thing is I'm going to give a prize for the first person who can tell me the correct definition of the word abdatory. So if somebody can tell me, and I'm going to be, this is the honor system, don't use your Google definition. If you know the word, the definition for the word abdatory, please let me know. And I will actually get your mailing address from Susan. Excuse me, I will mail you a little something from our Muter gift shop. Now I saw that has the sound been turned up? It sounds like some people can't hear me very well. I am speaking pretty loudly. So let me know. All right, so I'm not going to look at the things. I'll just, whatever the first person tells me, I will just give them a little bit of a prize. All right, now moving on, because I do have a lot of slides and a short amount of time, I always like to talk about what are my goals for the lecture. So hopefully I can meet all of these goals in the time I have. I'm going to give a brief overview of the college, the museum, and the collections. I'm going to discuss how we can serve our unique specimens. I'm going to talk about how we present the types of storage, this type of storage we use to house our collection, to showcase the unique storage issues in parent and medical museums collection. I'm going to discuss the importance of continued storage upgrades and the preservation of our collections. And of course, I'm going to slightly disturb you. That's just pretty much the nature of our collection. First, a brief history of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Now a lot of people know the Muter Museum, but what they don't know is that we're actually part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. They are our parent institution. And the College of Physicians is not a degree-granting institution. It's not a medical school. The term college is actually like a colleague. It's actually a professional society. It started in 1787. And it was started because Philadelphia is the birthplace of American medicine. And so we were home. Philadelphia was the home of the first medical school and the first hospital. And as time went on, they found themselves with more hospitals, more medical schools, and there was a bit of competition. So they realized they needed to find a place where they could, all the different doctors and representatives of these competing institutions could meet on a kind of neutral platform. And that's how the College of Physicians came about. And like I said, we were started in 1787. We've been in continuous operation ever since. And our mission hasn't changed. We still provide this neutral ground. We still want to provide an educational atmosphere for medical knowledge. And the Mooder Museum, of course, is an integral part of that. Now, the museum came along much later after the college was founded. And it actually became this handsome gentleman right here with the mutton chops, Dr. Thomas Dent Mooder. And he was, of course, a fellow of the College of Physicians. He was a quite popular physician at what is now called Thomas Jefferson University. And unfortunately, at a fairly young age, he found himself in ill health. And he decided to bequeath to the college his entire teaching collection, as well as a substantial endowment. And let's face it, the substantial endowment is the reason it's called the Mooder Museum. And as you can see, you have these loom louts over these two dots over the U in Mooder. And that's why it's called the Mooder Museum and not the Mooder Museum. But most people, especially around here in Nillis, have the Mooder Museum. But we keep trying to educate people about the importance of the new lounge. But in the end, Mooder Mooder, just come down and say hi. So Dr. Mooder was very adamant about the collection being used for educational purposes. And really, that's what we are all about today. But what's interesting is that in our over 150-year history, what's changed is that it's the demographic that has changed. And what we have to do is remember that about 40-plus years ago, almost everybody who came to the college was a medical professional. And that they had a base knowledge of medicine. And now, almost everybody who comes to the museum, and there's quite a bit more people. When the museum first started, there was a couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand people a year who come to the museum. And now we get to 175,000 people who come to the museum. So while the collection hasn't changed much, our way we present it has changed. So that's just a little bit of information about background information about the museum. Here's a little picture of our lower floor. And in terms of presentation, one of the things I'm going to really highlight here is you can see how densely packed we are. And see, we just have lots of objects. Our object per square foot ratio is extremely dense. And that is just the nature of our collection. You can also see we have these cabinets. And that's kind of called a salon style format. And that's very, very common that you'll see in Europe. And we've got that, of course. That was kind of how it was based. That's the reason it was based here. That's the reason we had it the way it does. And it has its challenges. I mean, aesthetically, it's very pleasing. But of course, it has its particular challenges. So I'm going to talk a little bit briefly. I'm just going to talk about the types of collections that we have. And I'm going to go through this fairly quickly and kind of give you little definitions of the types of collections. And we'll go into a little bit detail about that as we further in. But just in general, wet specimens. What am I talking about when I say a wet specimen? I'm talking about any type of biological specimen in its own fluid. And we have over 1,300 wet specimens in our collection. And here are some examples here. That's actually a good example of one that we're actually working on. And again, we'll talk in more detail about osteological specimens, bone specimens. That's just another fancy word for bones. Again, the vast majority of the osteological specimens that we have are human bones. But we do have some animal bones. And that's just the nature of, again, our collection. Hold on one second. I think it's been having some problems with the audio. But OK, dried specimens. So with the dried specimens, we don't have quite that many of them. But again, the ones that we do have are very, very delicate. It seems to me like my audio is going in and out. I'm not sure why. I'm moving my head a little bit with my headset, but not a lot. So I'm not sure exactly what's going on with that. All right, here's another little trivia challenge here. If anybody wants to be the first one to tell me what they think this object is, they'll get a prize. And I should say you have to tell me the name of the pathological condition that this specimen represents. That's the kind of thing that we'll see. The first person who does that will get a little bit of a prize. Again, from our wonderful Mootor Museum gift shop. So again, dried specimens have their own unique challenges. Models. OK, well, we have wax models, plaster models, paper machine models. They're all different. And it's really interesting. A lot of the patrons that come up to me in the museum often want to know, why do you have these, and a lot of the times they use the term fakes, why do you have these fakes mixed in with the real things? And it provides a good teaching moment for me, because these were never meant to intentionally come off as fakes. They're actually very, very important teaching specimens. For one thing, refrigeration and different types of preservation were hard to come by for biological specimens. So it's very important that they have accurate models again in the 18th and 19th century. And so models are very important. Sometimes the models were needed because they were actually allowed to keep the biological specimens. So a good example of that would be this is a plaster death cast of Chang and Ang Boker. That's the reason why the term signage twins exist. And of course, their bodies are now buried in North Carolina. But we were able to have this cast of them. And in fact, we actually have their actual wet specimen conjoined livers right below them on display. Now another good reason to have models is because this is an example. Unfortunately, I don't have a scale here. But this is about, I would say, five times the size of an actual hand. And it's a plastic model. This was a good teaching specimen, especially had many students. And some of them were farther away and couldn't see the detail of anatomical structures on the clothes. So it was very good to have enlarged anatomically correct models so that people could actually see the structures clearly. And this is our Madame Dimash, the widow of Sunday. This board of specimens is an accurate representation of what she looked like. And it's showing a corn mutating. So again, very, very important, very relevant models and very important to us. Of course, we also have significant instruments. In the collection, we have chemicals, pharmaceuticals, new name that we have, many, many, many types of these. And of course, they represent their own unique storage and conservation issues as well. And of course, so many other things. And sometimes they're just very hard to classify. And they just kind of need their own unique classification system. For instance, we have here, we have right here, this is our soap lady. So she's not a mummy. She's not a skeleton. She's not dried. She is her own unique, adiposeared body. So and if she has, I could do an entire lecture on just her alone and her unique conservation issues. We have historical medical photographs. Of course, they have their own concerns and conditions. This is an iron lung. What do you do when you have extremely large instruments, extremely large pieces of material? These are just a few we'll try to touch on. Now, our collection is also some things are old, some things are new. And that's what's really wonderful and unique. And another thing is some of these, we are actually an active collecting institution. Some medical museums no longer collect. They're not interested in this new material into their collection. We are. And we're interested in receiving new things, whether or not they're new in general. So a good example of that would be, this was an acquisition that came about around 2011. These are the slides of Albert Einstein's brain. And those, again, they came to us in 2011, but obviously they're a lot older than that. And then what I'm actually really interested in, as the curator here, is obviously a lot of our collection represents 19th century pathological conditions. And they represent 19th century public health concerns. So obviously, we have a lot of symbolism. And that's wonderful. I love symbolism. I love tuberculosis. It's great. But also, I would like to start collecting things that are more representative of 20th century public health issues. And of course, that represents its own problems. But what I'm very interested in are getting, I like to call, primary donations. So primary biological donations. What am I going to say about that? Well, this is a great, and I'm not going to ask you to guess what he knows about this. Probably one person in this entire group who doesn't know what that is, Alex, the only reason she's probably going to know is because she's my former intern, and that's fair to the rest of you. But this is actually my husband's gallbladder. And I should like to say he voluntarily donated it. And apparently, I also have to say that, yes, he actually didn't have it taken out for medical reasons, not just because I wanted it. But this is a great example of a primary donation. So he is still alive. I probably should have also mentioned that he's still alive and well. And he was able to sign the deed of gift and give me gallbladder. And of course, gallbladder conditions are still happening to this day. And well, it could have actually killed you back in the 18th, 19th century. And if it could still kill you today, it often doesn't. And it's a good example of also. This is my first ever separate diabetic feet from a 65-year-old diabetic patient who, again, is still alive and well. And I'm very grateful that they were able to make that donation. And this is another great one. This is, by the way, is my esteemed director, Dr. Robert Hicks. And this right here is a jar picked. Don't make that because it is a classification of a mental disorder. So again, I'm kind of going off on the standards of our collection. But all of these are very interesting. All of them represent challenges to deal with in terms of conservation, storage, and display. And another thing is some of these, we don't actually have a full outright ownership of. So this is a good example. This is a series of Habermashe models that are on permanent at the Wisdar Institute. So I wanted to do any conservation on these. I would have to get official permission from the Wisdar Institute and have to go there. And another issue here is, what do you do with this? How do you get recommendations on best practices of how to conserve something when it's literally only one of a kind? This is a Marie Curie piezoelectric device. There's only, I believe, one other sort of like it. It's not even actually quite like it. And that's at the Curie Institute in Paris. And so again, so let's talk numbers. Because again, when you're dealing with conservation, you're dealing with storage, these types of numbers are very, very important. So the entire College of Physicians building has 75,600 square feet. The Mooder Museum in the college has in total 10,923 square feet, which represents about 14.45%. Now of that, of the storage capacity, we only have 3,545 square feet. And that is under 5% storage. And that is basically all we have. Another thing we should mention is that there is no off-site storage at all. So that's something that I am. That is all the storage that we have. We have no off-site storage. We have no anything other storage than that at all. So we do the best we can with the little space that we have. Another thing I should mention is that, like you saw those pictures, we have quite a lot of our collection on display. So most museums, especially, I shouldn't say most museums. A lot of large museums have just a fraction of a percent or a very little percentage of their collection on an exhibit. And we have, depending on the status of our inventory here, between 12% to 15% of our collection on the exhibit. So again, we put a lot of space. So all right, OK. So we're working on trying to get the audio to be a little bit better. Let's see if we can hope that's better. All right, all right, let's see. Let me know if that's better. Moving on. All right, conservation. Here we go. All right, osteological conservation. Now, what I'm talking about this, first I have to talk about our articulated skeletons. We have quite a few articulated skeletons, meaning that they are put together in general anatomical order. And there's lots of different ways to articulate a skeleton. You can have naturally articulated and artificially articulated. And we have both. You could also have them mounted and unmounted. And so there's different ways that every single one of those types of articulation or mounting will have their own unique type of concerns. And again, we probably won't be able to get into detail in all of those. And that'll be a good thing to tackle in the question segment if you want to ask the questions about that. But I'll try and get to as much detail as I can in the time that I have. Now, this is my wonderful collections tech, George Brugonis. He came to us many, many years ago as a volunteer. And it was just so incredibly wonderful and useful that we told him that, no, you can't be a volunteer. You need to be our collections tech. And we're going to KU, and you can never, ever leave. And he's been great. And he's been here with us ever since. So here's a great picture of him taking one of our skeletons and doing some repair on it. You can see that what we're doing here is we're just doing some cleaning and repair issues. A lot of the things with the skeletons is just getting all of the dirt and grime off of them. One of the biggest issues we have here at the museum is that for years, we did not have any types of dust mitigation. They were not in any types of protection. They were just open to the elements. And when I say elements, I mean, this was smoke, grime, dirt. Some of them were on exhibit for so long. They were subject to things like oil lamps, things like that. And it was really bad. So lots and lots of just dirt grime over the years. They also had, again, I'm sure many of you probably deal with the issues of some of them having varnish on them. So that's another issue right there. So again, here you can see some conservation work that we're doing here. The wires, of course, that we, the metal that you use, we have to be very careful. Metal can get old, it's fragile, it can snap. That's a big issue. We always have to talk about physics, gravity. So as the skeleton has been hanging for decades and decades and decades, that, especially if you're dealing with a artificial articulation, you have got this hole. You've got this metal that is using the gravity and bearing down on it. It's just, you can call that hole to widen. It can cause the detector to go to be greater. It's just not a great situation. And so we have to just kind of take a look at the skeleton and determine, can it even still be safely displayed? Or does it need to be taken off display? Here's a good picture, you can see that we're doing, again, just kind of taking a look at it. We're doing a combination of cleaning and rewiring here. And that is my, that's Tova, that's Tova's arm right there. Now this, I believe you should have a handout. It's called the, let's scroll down here, it's an icon paper. And it actually, if you have time to read it, you know, obviously not right now. It details this whole hurdle skull mounting project that we did. This was quite a few years ago. One of the issues that we had, it's kind of an interesting, I mean, it's a wonderful project, a wonderful problem to have. But it was still a problem, is that we were a victim of our own success. What I mean by that is that when this building was built, and you saw one of the pictures, the first picture of our upper level, we have this mezzanine that goes around. And when this building was built, it was built for our fellows and our fellowship. It was never meant to house 175,000 visitors coming through a year. So one of the biggest issues we had was vibrations. And that was never, the biggest collateral damage we had was the hurdle skulls. So that was our wall of 139 skulls. And they hit that on exhibit for 100 plus years. And one of the things you could really see was the damage that, especially with the teeth, because people were walking along the mezzanine, they were causing vibrations. The vibrations were traveling up through the case to the skulls and literally rattling the skulls and rattling the teeth out of the skulls. I mean, it's just a very bad situation. And so what George did is he created these specialized mounts. And again, I don't have time to go into detail exactly how we did it, but I did provide the paper that has all the details for that. But these specialized mounts that were designed to absorb the vibration to do that. Because I should say that we did bring in architects and we did look to see how can we minimize or mitigate the vibrations on a macro level throughout the museum. But really it was just not just cost prohibitive, but it was this huge massive infrastructure involving just jackhammering into the foundation, the concrete. And it was just something that we really couldn't undertake at the time. So we decided, okay, how can we assess what specimens are having the worst of it and tackling it that way. So this is what we were able to do. And it was really the kernel skulls that were in worst shape. And this is what we were able to do. And it really turned out wonderfully. So this is a good before and after. Before they were on these really horrible mounts to be perfectly honest. And after them you can see that they're on these wonderful, wonderful, beautiful ones, better pictures. So again, you can see right here, this mount here, that goes right up through the foramen magna. Okay, so what that designed to do, the foramen magna is basically that big hole in the bottom of your skull. And so all of the weight, the pressure of the skull would rest on the top of your skull right here. And so the vibrations would just rattle and the entire skull would rattle around on this and the twists would turn very, very bad. This other type of mount used this three prong method where these metal tips would rest on three, that very, very delicate points on the skull. So I don't even know which one was worse. I think they're just absolutely horrible, especially when you had this vibration situation. So again, they want us to switch to a bone bridge. So I think we're gonna have to pause for a moment to do that. So hold on, everybody. We're gonna try and do something. So please pause. All right, can people hear me now? Hold on, we're just dealing with an echo. That's me. Okay, go ahead, please. All right, can everybody hear me? All right, can everybody hear me? There we go. Okay, I think we're okay now. I'm on my phone, so I'm off of my McDonald's headset right now. All right, let's see if we can proceed. I apologize for that. So where was I? Let me get my, all right, I am showing you now the horrible mounts, and we're gonna go now to the nice mounts. Nope, we're not gonna go back to that. We're gonna show you. So that actually, what you're gonna see now, that's the, I actually, you should be having a copy of that, the impractice, okay? So if you have any questions for that, you can use, you can look at that publication, but of course I'm happy to answer anything about that. So we're gonna move on now because I know we had a little bit of a hiccup in time, so I'm gonna kind of go a little bit faster here for what specimen conservation, okay? Now obviously, this is a huge topic. Just gonna touch on some of the basics of some of the things that we do here, and you know, there's some things that we can, there's my arrow, that we can touch on there's some things that obviously I'll try to get to as best as I can. But for us, I mean, everybody has their own goals for the wet specimens. For our main goals is our stabilization. So we wanna make sure that all the ones that we have in formaldehyde or formalin, we get them out of that. And why? Well because it's just formalin for us, it's very caustic, you know, we do not have any hermetically sealed cases or cabinets for our visitors, so anything that goes on display, of course we do not wanna, we wanna make sure it does not have any formaldehyde or formalin in it. We wanna make sure everything of course is in a stable container with a proper seal. And of course you wanna provide a stable storage area to safely store the specimens. Those are our main goals when dealing with our wet specimens. So how do we, you know, this is, this is of course the rest of the thing I'll talk about is how do we do that? What you're looking at right here, this picture is actually what I was talking about with Chang'anang before. This is their preserved specimens right here. This is their preserved, their preserved and conjoined, I should mention, livers right here. And my arrow's not working. But that's what that is right there. And it's kind of hard to see but there's actually a very little area there of conjoining. And that, where is that, that area was where the band was, where they were conjoined. Which is really interesting because Chang, how do I say this nicely? He liked his alcoholic beverages and Ang was a tea totaler. And so one of these livers is a little cerotic and the other one isn't. And I bet you can guess which liver belonged to which twin. But I digress. Anyway, preserving solutions, there are so many. And again, a lot of these specimens, when they came to us, and again they came to us at all different time periods, they came to us from all different places. And they're still coming to us. Like I mentioned, we still are actively collecting. And when I started here in 2004, one of my first jobs was to kind of assess all of our wet specimens. And this was a very interesting job and I did it in a room with absolutely no ventilation. So probably why I have significant gaps in my memory in pretty much 2004, but. So anyway, preserving solutions, what's really interesting is that again, the majority of our wet specimens are mid 19th century. Now, what's interesting is that formalin really, it wasn't invented until around, I believe it was around 1880s or so. And it didn't really figure out that it made a good tissue fixative until around the 1890s. And so what's interesting is that, if we have certain types of specimen containers that we know absolutely can't have formalin in them because of the way that they're sealed. And again, because formalin hadn't been invented at the time that they were initially put into their container. So that's pretty much interesting. But for the rest of them, it could be alcohol, it could be formalin. And then we've got these other really interesting preserving solutions. Methylsolicolate, that's actually like an oil of wintergreen. And really interesting thing there is that that is highly, highly toxic, but only if ingested. And so when you smell it, it's not entirely pleasant. It's kind of like a sickly sweet, again, wintergreen, but it's very toxic in that instance. We also have phenol, glycerin. And again, especially with these 19th century collections, we have these proprietary solutions, which is short for saying absolutely no idea what's in them. So especially dealing with these 19th century collections where we have these proprietary solutions, we're kind of going in there blind. And we really have no idea what we're dealing with. And so we're very cautious. We make sure when we're opening up the specimen that we do so with the utmost of caution. And what we basically need to do is just kind of assess the general condition of the specimen. And I should mention that before we do that, we kind of have a grading system for our specimens. They're kind of given a number grade between one and five. One being that they're in good shape. They don't really need any conservation. And five is really bad. So five is they need care absolutely immediately. Let's not really hesitate. So obviously, the fives, when we do the triage, that we just do that we try and get to the fives as quickly as possible. This is one of our semester-long wet specimen interns. His name was Soyo. And she came in, and she was a very interesting intern in that she had advanced degrees in both biology and art. So she was very interesting in that she came to us with these two kind of complementary skills that we were able to utilize. And so here she is doing some conservation on one of our fetal specimens right here. So this is a good example. All right, so I'm going to kind of walk you through a, I'm not going to say a typical, because my experience here is I just cannot give you a quote unquote typical specimen. Every single one is unique. But this is just an example of how we would kind of do a wet specimen conservation. So this is one of our specimens. It's actually 3, 4, 7, 9. So this is the initial picture. You can see that actually we haven't done anything to it. This is what it looks like. So you can see it's very, very dark. You can't even really see the specimen through the fluid. And again, what kind of fluid is it? Absolutely no idea. OK, so once we take the specimen out of the fluid, we can actually see that we've got a situation here. We've got residual mold encrusting the specimen. But we also, basically, we can do a sniff test. And we can find out that, OK, it's got a phenol smell. OK, there we go. Now, are there extremely scientific ways of doing chemical testing to determine the type of fluid that you have? Absolutely, absolutely. There's lots of ways. And they cost a lot of money. And we do not have that capability. So if you do have that budget, or if you are part of a larger institution that has access to a chemistry lab, by all means, go ahead and get that done. But if you are a smaller institution, you're going to have to do, probably have to do something like we do, and find these work around and do the best that you can do in the absence of these large budgets or the absence of having these types of expensive equipment. But I do recommend just don't stick your face in the wet specimen jar and take a big whiff. I'm not advocating that. So next thing we have to do is mount assessment and fabrication. So one of the things I should say is that, yes, we don't have a chemistry, huge chemistry laboratory. We don't have access to a lot of those to an SEM or those types of things. But we have, over the years, been able to slowly amass specific types of equipment that have helped us. So we actually do have a glass cutter. So we have our own water distilling. We can make our own distilled water. So we can do certain things like that that have been able to greatly help us over the years in maintaining our wet specimens. Now, in terms of the mount assessment, we can see here that the glass rod that this specimen was on was broken. So what we did in this instance is we attempted to create a new mounting frame out of acrylic. And this is all a learning situation. We're always trying new things here. And we found that while the acrylic frame was stable, the glue joints failed. And so that's something that we've been experimenting with over the years is that finding a good adhesive that can maintain its integrity in different types of liquids, especially solvents is very, very key. So it turns out that we weren't able to do that, but we were able to use a glass plate that we cut and we actually drilled it for putting, and then we used sutures to actually mount the specimen. So we rinsed the specimen with a deionized water. And this is something that, again, this takes a very long time. We're actually giving you dates here. So this 10 slash 25 means, again, October 25th. So you can see when we started, you start out with a fresh deionized water solution here. And then what we're doing here is the goal is you're bringing up this solution into eventually 70% ethanol and, again, 30% water. So that is our preferred solution for our specimens. And that's what we tend to use. Now, again, if you're in the UK, you aren't allowed to do that. In the UK, I think, for the people I've talked to there, you have to use a Kaiserling solution. So wherever you are, talk to your departments, see what solutions you're able to use. We are able to use a 70% alcohol, 30% water solution. Now, another thing that we've also found out is that there are certain solutions that once they are in that, they can't go into anything else. If you have a wet specimen that is in a methyl solicillate, it can only ever go into methyl solicillate. Now, that doesn't mean you can't take it out, clean it, clean the jar or put it into a different jar. But what I am saying is that it has to go back into that same type of fluid. If you try to put it into a different fluid, it won't go well. Don't ask me how I know that. So that's one of the things. But if it's in a formalin, if it's in a phenol solution, it can then go into a ethanol water solution. In fact, one of the things we know is that an object can be fixed in a formalin solution for even just a couple of days. And then it can go into the ethanol water solution, and it will be completely fine. It does not need to be in formalin for days, weeks, months, or years for it to be quote unquote fixed. It needs a very small amount of time. In fact, one of the issues we have kind of the opposite issue that we're dealing with for us is that we do have specimens that have been in, unfortunately, a very high concentration of formalin for decades and decades and decades. And then we're dealing with the aftermath of that, trying to get all that residual formalin out of the tissue. And again, that's something that we're dealing with, and it's causing issues. So one of the things that hopefully will be able to get a chance to talk to a little bit more. So you can see here, you cannot put a specimen just immediately into the 70%. It has to be brought up gradually into the solution. Obviously, you want to put it back into a cleaned container. It can either, if you have to, again, assess the situation of your original container, is that container stable? Does it have any cracks or defects that might compromise it? Now, the restored old label, that's interesting. If you can see here, let me get my arrow again, this is the original label right here. That is external to the jar. This is our new label. This is internal to the jar. And that is a special, I believe, Tyvek-like material printed with special ink, and it's on the inside of the jar. Now, why would I put the label for the specimen on the inside of the jar, not on the outside of the jar? Anybody? Bueller, Bueller, first person to comment on why I would put it on the inside of the jar. Wins a special, let me see, I will mail you, there we go. Wait, outside of the jar, I think it was Michelle. Is that you, Michelle? All right, Michelle, I'm going to give you plushy syphilis from our store, OK? So Susan, make sure it's Michelle that gets some plushy syphilis. Remind me, OK? All right, that's exactly it. You cannot, if the label is on the inside of the jar, it can't fall off, simple as that. And also, we use an ink that won't fade, because I'm not going to tell you how many wet specimens we have with partial labels or labels just with nice little adhesive patches where our label once was, because I don't want to think about it because it makes me sad. But we have quite a few. And it's just very, very frustrating because that represents lost information that we may or may not ever get back. And we all know that a missing label is a missing link and it's information that is gone and you just can't get it back. So I highly recommend doing this. And what I can do and will do is afterwards I will provide specs on exactly what we make our internal labels from, because I don't think I provided that in my initial materials list or any of these things. So hopefully Susan will remind me to do that. And I'll provide that for you, because I really do think it's very, very important. Again, so again, remounting the specimen, we did this with a glass plate and resealing the lid. What do we use to reseal the lid? We use a clear silicone caulk. And again, I'm going to try and do this quickly. I'm not even sure how we are on time, but we're behind on time. OK, I use a clear silicone caulk because it's not permanent. OK, and it provides a very, very good seal, but I can easily open it up to top off the container with more of my solution. So that's something that's very, very important is that I don't want to use anything that is going to be extremely hard to get it off when I'm doing conservation, because it's just going to be a situation where there's no such thing as a perfect seal. I mean, if that could be my one mantra for wet specimen conservation, if that's the one thing I would just repeat over and over and over again, that would be it. There is no such thing as a perfect seal. Just acknowledge it, accept it, let that acceptance move through you like a wave, and use that knowledge to deal with it, basically, and know that you are going to have to deal with fluid leakage, with seepage, with evaporation, with all of those issues that come with it. I use a very, very, very high tech method of maintaining my eye on the fluid lines of my specimens. And that's called a China marker. I take a China marker, and usually a red one, because it's nice. And of course, these are usually the ones that are not on display, although I think I use the ones that are on display as well, and I just take it and I mark the fluid line right there, and I give it a date. And then maybe a year down the line, if I see the fluid line is down here, I know I have to address that. So that's one of the basic things that I do that's like I was, obviously I was kidding, very low tech, but very effective. And I can actually keep my eye on the fluid situation that way. So again, we're way beyond the time limit on that, and that's just a sampling of the wet specimen things. And hopefully I'll be able to get to a lot more with the question and answer period. Now I'm going to talk about some non-biologicals. Well, I guess a couple of things in here are biologicals. But for the most part, I'm going to talk a little bit about what we do with some of these unique specimens of the Chevalier Jackson collection. And these are the Chevalier Jackson collection is a collection of over 2,000 objects of various sorts that were all, and the one unique thing about all of them is they were all removed from people's throats by Dr. Chevalier Jackson. So it's a collection of swallowed and aspirated objects. And so they were all removed over the period of time from, actually over the period of the career of Dr. Chevalier Jackson. And so, again, when I say different things, I mean, it's everything from safety pins, which, by the way, he called danger pins. And I now personally call safety pins danger pins. Straight pins, buttons, toys. There are some food-related objects. You name it, dentures, plastic, pieces of plastic, all these different types of objects. And so they're all different types of things, but they're all on these unique little framed, matte-framed little compartments. And we have them all displayed in kind of flat files with plexiglass over them. But each one of these, so this is glass-coded here. And again, I'm going to go over this pretty quickly because I believe I did provide you with a paper that we did on this. So you should have a little bit more detail about this. But this was really interesting because, of course, this was all done. Dr. Jackson was born the year after the Civil War. And he lived to be in his early 90s. And he practiced up until a couple years prior to his death. So we're talking the majority of his practice with late, late 19th century into the 20th century. And so the objects there that he collected really reflect that. So of course, one of the issues that we had is that what he used to mount this collection is all acidic. So this paper is acidic, the map board is acidic, everything. So we really had to deal with this. So really quickly, and again, you'll have to, you can see, these are just some of the things that we had to deal with here. So every single one of these we had to remove. We had to put on non-acidic paper. We had to clean the wooden, we had to repair the wooden frame. Remember how I talked about we have our own glass cutting instrument here? That came in very handy when we had to cut our own pieces of glass. Everything had to be deacidified and remounted. I think we just replaced everything, remounted it, and then relabeled. It was a very labor-intensive thing. But here's a very good example of a before and after. The four conservations on the left. And you can see, now, you can imagine this times, oh gosh, I don't even remember how many of these individual units that we have. If you can imagine, we have over 2,000 objects. So this is quite an undertaking. But it was, again, well, well worth it. Again, you should have a copy of this. So that's why I'm kind of sorry to be so brief. But I figured, let's go through this quickly, because you have a nice article that kind of sums it up. And let's talk about storage quickly. All right, storage issues. All right, when we're talking about osteological storage issues, they have much less issues than, of course, our wet specimens. So basically, if a living human likes the way the room feels, the skeleton would probably pretty much like the way it feels, too. So you're looking at a relative temperature, relative humidity. One of the things we're really trying to work on is keeping dust down. That's a big issue. Skeletons and dust do not get along very well. And like I said, gravity is a big issue here. We really have to watch about long term storage of our articulated skeletons. Because we really have to remember that the longer the stress is put on these specimens, that even though they're not being moved, even if they're in a storage situation where they might not be having significant vibration, or they might not be moved, or anything like that, they might not be what we would think of being as taxed in any way, shape, or form, the nature of the gravitational pull of the planet pulling on their joints, that is enough to cause them stress. So that's something we have to take into consideration. But unfortunately for us, the nature of our specimen storage, and this is our osteological storage collection, this is the same room I should mention. You can see here that this is then and now. So to the left is the way it used to look, and to the right is the way it looks now. But you can still see that we have no way of storing our skeletons in any kind of horizontal position. So they are still having to be stored upright. They're still at the mercy of gravity. But some of the things that we were able to take care of, and the things that I'm very proud of what we were able to do, first of all, we have mobile shelving. That was a huge thing, because that was able to greatly reduce, or greatly, I should say, increase our storage capabilities. We have all of these are antimicrobial. I think I lost my green arrow is not working again, so I don't know why. But if you can look down, you can see the green shelving. These are called metro shelving. They're all adjustable, so all of the, and they're not even really, they're very small gradations. So I can really adjust them very fine. The granularity is very fine on these. So I can adjust them very easily. And I can, so again, you can see that they're very different. All of them are at kind of different levels. They're moving on the tracks. Everything is acid free and archival. So even the shelves themselves are antimicrobial. I've got everything padded. One thing you can't see, and I don't think I have a picture of it, is there's even a giant, it's basically like a giant sticky pad on your way into their room, and that's a dust catcher. So it catches the dust on your shoes to kind of reduce the dust. Because one of the things they had in the old wet spec, in the old osteological room, I should say, is if you look to the left, let me see if my, still not working. But if, oh wait, here we go. All right, see that there? That is old plastic sheeting. And they basically had like these shower curtains going across the skeletons. And that was just, all it was doing was just gathering dust and making it even worse for the skeletons. And so we realized that that type of physical barrier was just actually trapping the dirt for the skeletons. It was just not a good situation. And you can see here again, dirt, you know, they had a lot of this situation where the skeleton material was being wrapped in. But again, if you're wrapping dirty material, you're not, it's not doing any good, it's not helping. And having the plastic wrapped thing, we just realized it's just not a good situation. So the best thing to do is we cleaned everything. Every single one of these specimens was again carefully cleaned and put in this bright, nice, wonderful storage room. And again, the cleaning was again not done with any kind of, without any, you know, solvent or anything like that, it was distilled water, very, and a lot of it was dry brushing and using very special types of brushes and things like that. It was very kind of, you know, very low maintenance, just very simple, but very, very effective. You know, we really don't wanna use harsh chemicals or any types of solvents unless we absolutely needed to. Now, when it comes to removing, when it comes to removing shellac and stuff, that's different than you obviously need to do something with that. But when it comes to just general removing of the grime. Now, you're probably wondering how good are these tracks and when it comes to how smooth are they? Well, the one thing I should mention is that the bones are quite light, okay? So these units are not very heavy and as a result, they glide very, very smoothly. And so I wish I could have embedded a video of me actually moving these because they glide seamlessly and the specimens aren't jostled at all, okay? But that, so one of the things though, that we had, gosh, how many years ago do we have the earthquake? The one that started, there was an earthquake, the epicenter was in Virginia. And it did actually, it was about four years ago. And that gave me enough of a, oh thank you, 2011. That gave me enough of a pause to realize I think I am going to install maybe some earthquake bars or something along those lines just in case to help out. I'm gonna look for some funding to get that done. So when the shelves are the way they are right now and they're compacted, they're pretty good. But of course you've got the always one shelf that's exposed like that. So I am concerned that if we have another earthquake, I might be leaving myself vulnerable to that. So that is something that I'm actively trying to deal with is getting some protection in that way. And I actually went to the material, the museum support center. I think that's what it called, of the Smithsonian. And I went to the invertebrate section and they have some beautiful storage there and they have the earthquake bars because I believe they had some significant, I won't say, they had some damage after that earthquake because they were a lot closer. And I was talking to one of their employees there and she gave me some recommendations. So that is something that I'm actively looking into. So I actually have a lot of wet specimen storage tales. So when I first started in my wet residence here in 2004, this wasn't even, this wasn't even, this was the, I can't even show you what the wet specimen room looked like. I moved everything into this wet specimen room. Notice if you will, the carpet. There was no climate control. There was absorbent tiles. There was, it was so bad that we were only allowed in there for about five minutes at a time and it was extremely hazardous. So what we, I was able to get the funding and that room turned into this room and you can see it was very similar. And I installed a special air handler that did six air exchanges per hour so it basically sucked out all the fumes, filtered them and sucked them out. And then again, this is the same thing we're dealing with. These are metro shelving, antimicrobial shelving with archival foam. I should mention these are not, metro, these are not movable shelves shelving. These aren't movable shelves but they have the foam on them. And these, this is a poured concrete floor and then I have, I have excuse me, hospital grade tiles. Every single surface in this room is designed to not absorb odors. And that is very, very important because if you have anything that can absorb odors, no matter how much air you have, you have sucked out of your room over time, it'll just creep up on you, okay? That the smell will just creep up on you. If that smell creeps up on you, you won't be able to spend any time in there because it'll just start causing headaches and start causing issues. So you really have to make sure that everything in your wet specimen storage area won't absorb odors. So when it comes to storage, in terms of your personal health and safety, you have to think get, you know, you have to think, you have to think very, very much in getting the proper ventilation and you have to think in terms of getting all of the, no, no, nothing that can be absorbent. So that's very, very important. In terms of climate control, we had not one two redundant cooling systems. Now our particular issue, we never had to worry about heating this unit because we have, even though we are in the basement, there is a sub-basement to our college and that we are kind of almost directly underneath a main artery to the boiler. So it's basically, if you think of the boiler as the heart of the college or underneath like the aorta. So a huge amount of heat comes under this floor when the heat is turned on in the winter. And so believe it or not, we have to keep two of our coolers on most of the time in January and February. So our air conditioners are on 24-7 and they have to maintain, we like it to be no more than 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Ideally I'd like to keep it around 68 degrees Fahrenheit with the humidity between 40% humidity is nice, plus or minus, 5% is fine, but it's really the temperature that I'm more concerned about and it's 68 is my golden. It can go down to 65, that's fine. It never, ever, ever should exceed 72 degrees. That's bad. So that's what I like. Now, we recently upgraded to a new wet specimen storage facility. And this one is absolutely wonderful as well and you can see it here. This is our in-house conservation. So this room as well as having the storage also has, we can do our conservation in-house. And we had that in the other area as well, but we can actually have a longer space here. You can't see it here, but I have a dishwasher. I have a dishwasher, people. So I can actually really properly clean my jars. I have all these cabinets. I have a wonderful amount of space here to do all of my conservation in the same climate controlled area where the specimens are stored. That's really, really key because unfortunately some of these specimens are never, ever going to be able to go out on display. They're just too delicate, okay? So are those dog training pads on the countertop? We prefer to call them medical pads, but yeah, they are. Okay, I know I'm really running low on short on time. All right, mobile storage. I'm calling it just now because there's no now and then. We have not got around to doing any kind of conservation on that. And you can see that it desperately, desperately needs it. And I'm aware and we've got about 16,000 objects in our mobile storage that have to be properly stored and conserved and that is definitely high on my radar. And I'm definitely going to be addressing that very soon. So of course I called this the cabinet of death and why am I calling this the cabinet of death? Well, my boss loves hyperbole and we do have this one cabinet in our mobile storage that has been dubbed the cabinet of death because when you open it, there is, how do I say it, an odor, quite a pungent odor. But those of us who are well acquainted with the actual smell of death will know that it does not smell like human decomposition. What it actually smells like is decomposing organic varnish, which I think actually smells worse than a decomposing body, but that is purely my opinion. But what I love here is this is actually like baking soda circa 1980 something. And when I first, I just thought that was great. And I'm keeping it there. Why? Because I can and it's just, it's a relic from Gretchen's time and I thought it was cute and I'm keeping it there. Eventually it'll go when I am getting around to redoing this, but so that's our big cabinet of death and I think it's probably a little bit of a let down for everybody who's wondering what it was. We're just gonna briefly talk about this because we are running very, very low on time, but I wanted to show you that this is a aerial view of the College of Physicians. And one of the things a lot of people don't know about us is we have an amazing library and we actually have a library stack storage. The museum has a small amount of space in our stack storage, but the way that the stacks are configured in the building is actually really interesting. And it's interesting because you, I always call it the TARDIS configuration because we have a three story building, but we have seven stories of stacks. So if anybody is a Huvian, it's actually funny. If you're not a Huvian, never mind. And you should be. All right, this is a cross section. So what you're looking at here, this is our library stack. So look at the bottom, look at the bottom right. This is our library stacks here. Okay, so when the building was built, this is a wonderful representation of what the priority of the college was at the time. So think about how much space the museum has. Think about how much space the library has. The library was the star of the college. Okay, things have changed. I love the library, but it is no longer, it is no longer the driving force of the college. The museum, other than the endowment of the college, the museum is the revenue generator of the college. So one of the things we are looking to do is to figure out how we can utilize some of this stack storage for increased museum exhibition space. So we'll see, fingers crossed that in the next year, if we can raise the capital, we're gonna be expanding the museum exhibition space, maybe some storage space, maybe things like that, to hopefully greater, to have some expansion. But I really wanted to show you guys the stacks because they're absolutely amazing. Is this a glass floor? Yes, this is a glass floor. What have I learned about this? Well, I have learned one very important thing. When you take people on a tour and you take them on a tour of the stacks, you must ask them if they have vertigo issues before you take them into the stacks because otherwise you might have some problems. What you're looking at right here is you're looking all the way down through seven stories. If you drop your pen down, where I should say pencil, if you really shouldn't bring a pen into the library stacks, it's gonna go all the way down to the hell mouth. And if you don't understand what a hell mouth is, you should. Okay, moving on. I'm just dropping Buffy the Vampire Slayer references. All right, we're really running low on time. We're gonna go in here now to storage issues. Loss of climate control, what happens when you lose climate control? Bad things happen, bad, bad, bad. Remember when I said that we have issues with having it's very, very hot in January and February? Well, we used to not have two redundant air conditioners. We lost one of the, we lost our air conditioner in February. I got very, very hot in our storage area. This is what happens right here. What is this? This is a lovely combination of lipids and formaldehyde. And this is what happens when solution, when it comes out of solution. And the only thing you can do for this is again, keep it in a cold environment. This is a physical problem. What we did is we just took this, the specimen out, rinsed them off, put them back in a clean solution. I'm gonna have to go through all these really quickly. I know we're really running low on time. Second thing, specimen is damaged beyond repair. What are you gonna do? People, let it go. Not gonna do you any good. Storage issue number three. This is my iron lung. Where is my iron lung? My iron lung is in the hallway. Why? Because there's literally no other room. So what do I do? I put up a display card and I treat it as a very, very, very special treat when people get to come back behind the scenes tours. They actually get to have a little experience. So nobody knows that this iron lung is in the hallway because we don't have room for it. They think they're getting a little treat. So now all of you know, and don't you dare tell anybody any different. This is an extra special treat. Everybody got that? Moving on. Issue number four. When your collection is trying to kill you, I actually have an entire, entire separate long lecture on what do you do when your collection is trying to kill you. Most important thing to do is don't panic. Know who to call. Are you gonna call the bomb squad, the hazmat squad, the CDC, follow your protocol. That's basically what you need to do. If it's radioactive, who are you gonna call? Well, in our issues, we basically have a guide. Do I have a radioactive guide? But one of the basic things I do now is I have my own radiation detector. And every single specimen that comes, or every single new donation that comes to me, whether it is paper-based, whether it is anything innocuous, it will get scammed. Because one of the things we have learned, the hard way is you never know what's radioactive and what's not, especially if it's medical. So lessons learned. For instance, just because something is empty does not mean it's not radioactive, okay? I think I'm probably gonna be scaring a lot of people right here, but of course we all know what residue is, right? What this is, and also one of the things that's interesting is even if it does say that it is radioactive, it might not be. This is supposed to be a water crock with the entire base of which is made with radium. You're supposed to fill this up with water and drink eight glasses of irradiated water a day, you know, for health reasons. We actually did have one that was real and that has subsequently been removed. This one is actually a fake. So of course, we did keep it because it's a fake and it's not causing any problems. This is actually really interesting and I wish I had more time to talk about it, but one thing you have to be very careful about is the status of your chemistry. Whether or not you have pharmaceuticals, whether or not you have chemistry or chemical products, are they still in their liquid form? Are they still whatever form they're supposed to be in? Are they crystalline? Are they liquid? If they're supposed to be liquid and they are crystalline, is that a bad thing? A very good example of that would be picric acid. Picric acid, when it is liquid, is completely safe. Picric acid, when it is dried out and it has become crystalline, is completely not safe, people. It is not safe. It is what we call a concussive explosive, okay? It will explode if you jostle it, okay? So this is one of the things where you really need to go back to your collection and just do a search for picric acid because that's exactly what I did. I was on a listserv. I saw somebody asked a question about picric acid and suddenly I saw the entire thread of that conversation blow up, pun intended, and that got me thinking maybe I need to do something about this. So that's exactly what I did and lo and behold, yep, I had picric acid in my collection and so what do I do? I call the bomb squad and I call the bomb squad, I tell the bomb squad, my situation, the bomb squad says, well, it's an explosive substance but it's not a quote unquote bomb. You need to call the hazmat squad, fine. Call the hazmat squad. They said, well, it's a hazardous substance but it's an explosive hazardous substance so you need to call the bomb squad. Are you kidding me? So this kind of went on back and forth till basically I threatened to put an egg timer on the box that this was in and called 911 and finally one of the bomb squad guys took pity on me and actually just showed up, I to this day I don't even know if he did this on their books, off the books, I don't know, I don't care. He showed up in full hurt locker, you know, that full on guard, he was carrying a, again, an extremely high tech piece of equipment, it was a five gallon paint bucket, it was half filled with sand and he came in and he took the jar and it turned out the jar just had a little bit of residue in it but of course we didn't go in there to find out and put that jar in the bucket, filled it up the rest of the way with sand and walked away. We call that an emergency deaccession so that's how we handled that. You just gotta do what you gotta do and so I hope none of you have to go through that but if you do just know that there are ways to do it. I've heard a lot of situations where people have actually had to detonate their picker gas in their parking lot, we're in the middle, we are literally in the middle of the city so I really don't think that would have gone well but that again, you know, that is an option if you're in a more rural situation. If that does happen, please get it on video and send it to me. All right, last, I think hopefully this is one of the last things to do is of course, you know, I'm sure everybody has these issues, what do you do when you find smallpox scabs in your collection? I'm sure everybody's gonna have to deal with this at one point or the other, right? Because we sure did. This is a really flattering picture of myself in some level one or two PPE. We found, again, what I should preface is what happens when you leave your director unattended for one day, I took my staff on a field trip actually to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Bethesda, I don't know if there's anybody here representing from that museum but if you have a chance to go there, I highly recommend it, it's a wonderful museum but I took all of my staff except for my director there and my director decides to go snooping around mobile storage and basically he decides, he's like, I'm gonna look into our phlebotomy section, our bloodletting section. It looks in our bloodletting section and finds, wait, they also look like bloodletting kits, I'm gonna open them up, open them up, oh look, those are vaccination kits. Those look like smallpox scabs. Okay, I think I'm gonna take these out and put them on my desk on paper plates because that is the smart thing to do. So he does and he calls me. Meanwhile, I'm in a van, somewhere between Maryland and Pennsylvania, I get this call and I'm like, there are no words. Well, there are words but I really can't repeat them right now, exactly what I said. But he's like, you might wanna call the CDC tomorrow and let them know and of course I was like, yes, thank you. So I called the CDC the next day and I believe the technical term was I threw him under the bus. And I said, this is what my director did and he came so close to having his butt quarantined for three weeks, it wasn't even funny. But it all worked out, it actually all worked out, believe it or not, amazingly well in the sense that we were able, we actually turned this, what could have potentially been a nightmare into an amazing international smallpox vaccination project. So we were actually now that we found this amazing collection of smallpox scabs. Again, long story short, we were able to get DNA from all of these scabs to find out exactly what kind of vaccination material they are and it turns out they're a really interesting type of orthopox. So what could have ended up being like a mooter hot zone or we could have ended up causing who knows what kind of plague. Instead, we're probably gonna get a really nice article in the New England Journal of Medicine. So it's kind of a lemon lemonade situation here but I still should preface this with, really much don't leave you direct or unattended. So it could have been a scab story but instead it had a happy ending. So again, one of the things I always talk about is why preserve, why are we doing this, why are we spending so much time and money to ensure that these sometimes disturbing, definitely not the most photogenic types of specimens are preserved. It's because as you saw with the scabs, these are so incredibly important. They represent a vast amount of medical and historical knowledge that we can actually use to enhance our knowledge about medicine, about the natural world, about all sorts of things. And it really, one of the things I'm doing now as director of the Muta Research Institute is I'm harnessing the inherent informational power of these objects to help us better learn about ourselves humans to better learn about how we get sick, how we get better. So we are saving lives with our collection and with these scabs and these orthopoxes, we're actually working with the CDC to help them better figure out how to cure or treat monkeypox which is endemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has a 30% mortality rate. It kills kids. So we're gonna try and really help them. So again, these 19th century collections really do have 21st century relevance. It's up to us to save them. It's up to us to get the word out that they need to be utilized by these scholars that very often dismiss us. And it's really just something that we really want to spread the word. So again, these are just two examples of some of the publications we recently did with some of, not recently, but a couple of years ago using one of our cholera specimens. And so again, please don't discount your specimens. And again, I always encourage you to make them available to researchers because it's that collaborative situation that really helps. And again, our job is to store them correctly, to preserve them correctly, and then to make them available to be used. So that's again what the Muda Research Institute is doing. One of the things I always talk about is I like to give a shout out to the CCAHA, the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. They don't really do a lot with the biological specimens, but they've really given us a great preservation plan. They started it with a 2008 to 2012 plan, and it was my kind of touchstone. I was really able to utilize that as a way to not only provide a checklist of me of things that I needed to accomplish, but it helped me show to my superiors and to granting institutions, look, this is stuff I need to get done according to this CCAHA and according to this governing, to this expert opinion. These are things that I need to get done to be the best that I can be, so please give me the funds to do it. So if you can get a preservation plan done, I highly, highly recommend that you do it. I mean, obviously it does not have to be done with CCAHA. There's lots of other places that can do it, but to have a preservation plan done is just so, I found it invaluable. So basically in conclusion, I like to say that one of my basic things is, you know, you may want to, you may not be able to, you know, think outside the box, but I definitely encourage you to think outside the jar. So thank you, and I have no idea, I apologize for all of the audio issues, but if we have time for some questions, be happy to answer them, and of course, you know, I will definitely make a point to answer questions in a written format if people are not allowed or can't stay online afterwards. So thank you so much. So can you hear me? I can hear you, Susan. Okay, all right, I'm going to read out the questions. I also want to please remember to do the evaluation, and we'll go on for about another 10 minutes, and whatever are not answered, I will give, the questions that aren't answered, I will give to Anna, and she will answer them in writing, and I'll post them with the recording. And the recording, the PowerPoint slides, the handouts, everything, once it's posted, you won't see the advertisement for this webinar on our webpage. So once you no longer see that, you know, to look in the archives. Okay, so the first question, how or what samples topped off, there's some questions about that later, and I think you covered it, but let's go on to the next one, and when we get to the specimens, we'll answer that. Why the big change in the type of patronage over the last 40 years? Ah, that's a great question. Well, basically, it's because of the way we made the museum accessible. So we started, I mean, we still are a fellowship-based institution, so we are a professional society. We have what we only have about 1,400 fellows, that's it. And so about 40-plus years ago, it was really only the fellows that came to the museum. I mean, maybe they brought their medical friends, and then we used to have a lot of medical conferences here, but the general public did not know the Mooder Museum existed. And it was Gretchen Warden, who was the curator before me, and she started here in about 1973, and she started out like, both of us kind of worked our way up. I came in in 2004 as an assistant collections manager, and I believe she started in 1973, kind of in the same way. And she became the curator in the 1980s. And so she ushered in a new era of really making the public aware that this museum existed. And it was under her that the attendance rose from a couple hundred to a couple thousand people a year. And by the time of her death in 2004, we were getting about 60,000 to 66,000 visitors a year. So a huge raise in the amount of people that we got a year. And then from 2004 to now, we're at 175,000 visitors a year. And I can't take credit for all of that. I mean, it's really just a testament to how interested people are in, well, basically in themselves, in humanity, in the human body, in what makes us tick, in all the different ways things can go wrong with us. And we're just inherently curious about ourselves. And that's what we show here in the museum. And I think that has a lot to do with it. Yeah. And then there was a question about the early slides. Or what we see is, are what we're seeing, is it an exhibit, or is it storage? And I think those are the exhibits. The very first slides you saw, that was, I can go back. I think. I don't know if there's a way for me to go all. People seeing what I'm showing? Yes. I'm just going to go all the way back. And while you're looking on our, let's see, are your models a session pieces of your collections? Yes. Yes. And what percentage of specimens are on exhibit versus storage? Yes. That all depends on our inventory, which we're still working on. I would estimate we have approximately about 11% to 13% of our entire collection, not just specimens, but our entire collection is on exhibit, which is a fairly high amount, I believe. So what you're looking at right now, this is our upper floor. And so I think one of the issues I was talking about, that's a big issue, is our vibrations that are mezzanine. So where my arrow is right now, this is kind of where you walk in. This is the main entrance. So you walk in, and one of the first things you see, you see Dr. Mooder's portrait. And you turn here. And this is a mezzanine. So this whole area around here, there's no support. I mean, it's perfectly safe. We've had it assessed. But when you have a lot of people walking here, you have vibrations. And so one of the problems that we have was the vibrations translating it to the specimens and causing damage. That's one of the things that I had to take care of when I was here. So and you can also see, again, the reason that we're able to have so many such a high percentage, relatively, of our specimens on exhibit is because of our object to square foot ratio. It's quite dense. So if you take a look here, we pack in a lot of things to see. So while we are, again, while the square footage of the museum is pretty small, if you are coming here and you're reading the labels, it'll take you a good two and a half to three hours to get through the museum. Yeah, I know that the first time I went to the Mooder, it was open on Tuesdays, if it had been shining for the past five Mondays or something. Yeah, you just raised a really good point. I should mention that we are open not only are we open seven days a week, we're open 361 days a year. So if you want to talk about a nightmare in terms of curatorial issues and how do I put up a new exhibit, it's called I spend a lot of nights at the museum. I have to do everything after five. So if it's a small thing, I can get, my usual working hours are eight to four. I stagger all my employees. I have some that work past five o'clock. I have some that work before. So we all are here a little bit. Some of us are here a little bit before opening hours, which are 10, the museum is up from 10 to five. So myself, I am an eight to four. My collection manager is a seven to three. My exhibit designer is a, he's usually at like a 10 to six. We all do what we have. And then of course, we're all on standby. We're here later or earlier whenever we need to be. OK, let's see. Do you have any specific processes or advice for storing models made of different types of materials? For example, plastic arms with rubber tubes to stimulate or simulate circulation. That's your name, Robert. Yes, are they talking about when the model itself has multiple different types of material? Yeah, I think so. One of the things you just have to be careful about is to make sure that the material, I mean, if you're dealing with rubber, it's an issue of this time. It is going to harden and break over time. Make sure all of the, if there's tubing, it's well supported. I don't really know if there's anything, if there's any fighting against entropy. In many cases for us, if we're going to display something, and it's like a stethoscope for instance, and it's a stethoscope that had tubing that absolutely just cracked over time, we have two options. We can either replace the tubing and make a point saying the tubing has been replaced, but the metal parts are original. Or we can lay out the broken tubing. I really don't know, and maybe somebody else can say if there's anything you can particularly do to maybe delay the thing. I think just keeping it in the proper temperature and humidity will delay the hardening of things like rubber and plastic. It's also what kind of plastic it is. Is it plastic that was made, kind of the early plastics, like bakelite? That'll be different than kind of more modern plastics. So plastics are their own beast. And also it's like you ought to make sure that, again, heat in plastics don't go very well. Light, light in plastics don't go very well. So yeah, you just really got to make sure that you're maintaining the proper temperature, the proper humidity. Again, cooler is always better. Heat for the majority of all of your specimens is a majority of your collection is bad. But again, you don't want obviously freezing cold temperatures. Don't let the climate control fail if you live in like a northern temperatures too, because then you deal with making the plastic or the rubber become extraordinarily brittle. So that's some of the issues. So you want to maintain. It's all about maintaining a consistent climate. And we all know exactly how hard that is to do. So again, like I said, especially with my wet specimen storage unit, I have redundant. I have two Fujitsu slimline units. So if one fails, I have another one. So if you have a capability of having an external or a redundant unit, another thing to think about, does everybody have a disaster plan? I mean, that's another entirely separate webinar. And an entirely separate thing you have to talk about is your disaster plan. And you have to talk about your backup power source. Do you have generators? Do you have what kind of generator is it? Is it the type of generator that is hooked into a gas source so it automatically kicks in six seconds after you lose power? Or does a physical person have to be on site to start it? Sorry, I just gave you another webinar to do. But these are the types of, these are all tied in. Because you have a catastrophic loss of your climate control. That's it. But in best practice, at Bayesian, you just want to maintain that. And so you're talking about a relative humidity in the cooler temperatures. We're going to do a webinar on preservation of plastics, I think, in November or October. And the end of next month, we're doing a webinar on contracting for disaster recovery with, so, attention to those. And I'm going to ask you to ask one more question, and then we're going to have to go. But you mentioned that you had an added post there, let's see, you had a soap mummy or a soap. So what is that? The soap lady. The soap lady, she is an adiposeared body. So adiposear is what we call a taphenomic event. So it's a post-mortem manifestation. When a body, when an individual dies, and their body enters an environment that has very specific elements involved. So in this case, she died, and she went into a situation where there was a basic pH of the soil. It was anaerobic. And in most cases, there's a higher moisture content in the soil. However, the basic moisture of the human body will also suffice. But those criteria, like those basic things, those combine. And the body fat on the person undergoes a chemical change. And it turns from body fat to something called adiposear. And adiposear is a waxy, tallowy, soapy-like substance that does two basic things. It forms a protective barrier around the body. But also, and this is kind of very important, insects don't like the way it tastes. So it hinders them in the decomposition process because insects are key in the decomposition process. So basically, that's the reason why she's so well preserved. And so the question is for displaying upkeep, how do you maintain that? And that's going to be the last question. OK, well, it's a very easy question. She's, OK, how do I put this? She's shelf stable. So do I have a picture of her? She, I think she is. OK, there is absolutely no extraordinary measures taken. She is, there's no refrigeration. There is no desiccant. There is no, there's nothing. I have nothing. She is in a glass. She's an a plexiglass case. And all I do is I use fiber optic lighting. I don't put any halogen lighting on her. But she is in the exact same temperature as the patronage. And she's absolutely fine. She is actually one of my more, she's less high maintenance than my wet specimens. I see, Mike just put up a link to that. So I'm going to send you the rest of the questions for you to answer. And I'll post those answers, questions and answers with the recording. So if you, in a couple of days, when you no longer see the ad for this, you'll know to look to see all the questions and answers. But thank you so much. And thank you everyone that was here. And thank you, Mike. And we will see you in a couple of weeks when we do the next webinar on preservation of industrial artifacts, something entirely different. So thanks. Cool. All right, well, thank you so much. All right, take care, everybody. Oh, and Susan, send me those people that I'll get out. I will personally email them some plushy pathogens. Yes, I'll send you everything. Awesome. Thank you. All right, take care. Bye, everybody.