 So here we go. Do you want to start, Annie and Holly? Are you ready? I'm ready. Sure. I'm Holly Robertson. Annie Peterson and I, I'll let Annie introduce herself in just a moment, are the coordinators of the preservation statistics program, which is the first thing that we're going to talk about today. I'm a preservation consultant based in Washington, DC, which is really code for taking a little bit of a motherhood sabbatical while I raise two toddlers and taking a couple years off from the field. But I do preservation assessments and grant writing, and previously I've worked at the Library of Congress, and I'm really interested in preservation statistics because I'm going to move my mic away from my mouth and hope this works a little better. I'm interested in preservation statistics because I've used them to great effect in the institutions in which I've worked. So, Annie, do you want to introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Annie Peterson and I'm the preservation librarian at Tulane University in New Orleans, and I've been working with Holly since 2012 when we started this survey on preservation statistics. So, today we're going to talk about preservation statistics first and then Leslie's going to come on and talk about the Heritage Health Information Program. How many of you are familiar with our program? We're going to have a poll in a few minutes. But preservation statistics is a program that's based in the American Library Association, ALA. Further acronyms for you, it's out of the PARS program, Preservation and Reformatting Section, and that's in the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. So, we're a function and effort of ALA. You can visit our website online where we've got all of our surveys, reports, and infographics, and other cool things. You can learn more about us there. Just a brief history of our effort. The preservation statistics project that's now hosted by ALA has grown out of the Association of Research Libraries program that was in place from 1984 through 2007. This program was open only to Association of Research Library members, so it's very library specific and furthermore research library specific. Our program is a bit different from the Heritage Health Index from 2005 and Heritage Health Information that you'll hear more about later today. It's issued on an annual basis. It's very quantitative, not qualitative, and we're seeking to document the profession. We're not able to speak about the profession at large. We're not able to make huge assumptions about the profession at large, but we document what we're doing now to try to decipher some trends. Our effort was really informed by a report called Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century that was issued in 2009 by an ARL visiting program officer, Lars Meyers. That report suggested some changes to the ARL program, which ended before those changes could be implemented. It suggested that the ARL preservation statistics program had questions and document how programs were reformatting collections, digitizing collections, digital preservation efforts, and more general preservation activities like disaster planning and environmental monitoring. It was very much felt in the field that we weren't capturing all that we were doing. So this report reflected the field's will that we start looking at these emerging activities and long-held activities that really dominated some of our time. Our effort is also informed by the RBMS Metrics and Assessment Task Force report. That's another part of ALA, the Rare Books and Manuscript section. And their report wanted to look more at these sort of conservation assessment and exhibit prep activities that a lot of their special collections, conservators and preservation people were doing, that was taking up a lot of their time, how many books were being prepared for exhibit, how many manuscripts were being prepared for digitization, general conservation assessments, and preservation assessments. So we took all of these into account when we started thinking about our program. Just to back up for a little bit and to clarify the timeline of our effort. In 2007, the Association of Research Libraries, ARL, issued its final preservation statistics survey. It was kind of quiet for a couple years. We didn't know exactly what was going on, but in 2010, they formally discontinued the preservation statistics survey. They did so to focus their efforts in other ways and to take time to step back and think about how they were looking at preservation. They're still thinking about that, we think. But the field kind of did some hand wringing and navel gazing for a couple years until 2012 when PARS, the preservation and reformatting section, issued an interest survey to see if institutions were still capturing their preservation statistics data. And it turned out that most of the ARL libraries were indeed capturing their preservation statistics data and many other libraries who weren't necessarily ARL members and weren't necessarily libraries, archives, and other institutions, museums included, were recording their preservation statistics. So in 2013, we issued the first pilot survey. It was for fiscal year 2012. We'll always be a year behind when we're talking about this. And that pilot survey was successful. We had a fair number of responses. So the following year, we issued another survey. We've been adjusting the timing of the survey each year. It looks like it's fourth. We'll issue our survey in the winter, shortly after the new year. And then we'll issue our report in early summer just before ALA. So last winter, we issued our fiscal year 2014 survey, fiscal year being however that's defined by your institution. And right now, we're working... Andy and I will leave this webinar later and go back and hammer out some data. To give you a little bit more of an idea of what the survey contains, in the first two years, we took everything from the ARL preservation statistics survey and added more in a bag of chips. So we captured information about administration and staffing, how many staff do you have, what kind of staff do you have, what's your budget, how much do you spend on supplies, et cetera. We captured that information, as well as general preservation activities, which was a new addition. These were activities like environmental monitoring, disaster planning, and outreach. We kept conservation, a mainstay of the ARL preservation statistics program, and added, for the most part, reformatting and digitization questions and digital preservation questions. Those were a major component, an emerging component, of preservation programs. Excuse me. Well, that survey was really long and we heard all about it. So this past year, in the FY 2014 survey issued this winter, we focused only on production-based questions. We took out all of those administrative questions and were holding them until fiscal year 2016, which will be issued in 2017. Again, always a year behind here. We're going to have a slide later about why you should collect preservation statistics. But this is just a quick overview of why we do it. We're really interested in... This is an all-volunteer effort, I should say. There's no funding for this at all. This is just a couple folks really interested in evaluating the current activities of our field. Are we still microfilming? How has library binding declined? What are we digitizing? Which formats? We're doing this for the field and for ourselves because we've all found this data really interesting. It helps us project and plan for the future to identify trends and emerging issues are things like library binding, which are frankly declining activities. It also, as a public service, records and publicly shares information about our profession. So I see the poll. Do you keep preservation statistics at your institution? And high five to the 63, 64% of you who say yes. And if no, I'd like to give you good reasons why. We've borrowed a slide from our colleague, Kara McClurken, who is chair of PARS this year. She's done a bit of some research on how people are using preservation metrics. And this is preservation metrics generally, but it aligns with our understanding of how folks are using the preservation statistics, our projects specifically. They're using this for advocacy, for justification, to support grant planning, to support program assessment and evaluation. We didn't realize at the beginning of our effort, our very much grassroots effort, how much and how important outreach and publicity would be. Quite frankly, we thought we could send out a whole bunch of email announcements and people would, because of course they were all collecting their statistics still, that they would come running to enter their statistics in our program. Well, it turned out that people need a lot of direct encouragement, a lot of direct contact. So we had a small army of volunteers last year contacting every preservation contact at every library and archive and institution that we could think of. We have a whole Rolodex of all of you out there. If we haven't bothered you yet, we're going to come and find you. But this has been a major learning point of our grassroots efforts, just how much time it takes to encourage participation. I think there's a bit of survey fatigue these days and lots of people have filled out surveys and it's an effort to enter your data. So we make a lot of direct contact and spend a lot of time on that. Our reports, we're really proud of the fact that we issue our survey in the winter and we have a report three or four months later. We really pour a lot of heart and effort into getting that out promptly. Whereas the old ARL schedule, it could be a year after you entered your data and your data would already be a year old before you got the report. So your report reflected your activities from two years ago. We have a Facebook page. We'll have a link at the end. We post a lot of fun things related to preservation statistics, as well as cool things like this infographic. We're trying to more interestingly display how we, some of our results from our surveys. I'm going to hand it over to Annie to talk about results from this year from the report to be released soon. Thanks, Holly. So we've got another poll up here. Did you complete our survey this year? And we hope so. But we know there's lots of people out there and we're trying to ever increase our response rate. So I'm going to just talk a little bit about the results from this year. The survey was open, as Holly said, from January through March 2015. And we're currently analyzing the data. And the report will be released this summer. You can see the reports from prior years on our website. So if you want to see what the data from the last years was like, you can look at that as well as the raw data. We release both reports and the raw data so you can use it however you want. So our response for this year, as you can see, and in last years as well, was mostly academic libraries. 64 this year with a smattering of other types of institutions. State libraries is a growing category that we've seen for us. We had more responses than ever this year. 87 libraries archives responded. We hope to increase that in the future. And we also had said in ultimatum for this year that if fewer than 75 libraries had responded, then we would have to rethink what we're doing for next year and maybe less frequently collect responses. But this is a great vote of support from the preservation community. So we'll continue with the annual survey for next year. And academic libraries we think we get the most responses from because it was sort of easy to continue collecting ARL-like data and to enter it into our survey. So I'll just give some snapshots of the data that we've looked at so far. This is one example of the data that we collect in the survey. If you look at, for example, unbound sheets, number of items conserved, you can see level one, two, and three, which is a holdover from the ARL survey, which we realize isn't perfect, but does give us a little bit more granularity than just asking for total numbers of items treated. So even if you add up unbound sheets here, you won't see the total number of items reported in the survey because there's an option in the survey to either report by level or by total number of items. So it's a little bit flexible in some ways like that. So however you track your data, we want it however you have it. So we can use it to track trends and compare over time. We can zoom in a little bit on this. Sorry, we're going to step back a little bit from that one to look at conservation activities and all of the different things that are propelling conservation activities today. So we ask questions about exhibit prep, digitization prep, conservation assessment, which can include like an item level preservation survey, outsourced treatment versus in-house treatment. So a lot of numbers there that can be used in different flexible ways, but gives us a sort of snapshot of the libraries that have responded and what is driving conservation and whether they're doing it in-house versus outsourced. So now we can look a little bit more closely at outsourced conservation for fiscal year 2014. And this is total numbers of items that the respondents had outsourced for treatment in fiscal year 2014. And you can see that unbound sheets really trumps everything. I mean, we also know that a lot of that is probably that they take less time to treat in some cases. Surprising to me, and maybe if you have any comments on this, is how few photographic materials were outsourced to conservators in 2014, given that in-house conservation in a library you would think tends to focus on book and paper. I thought maybe we would see a higher number there, but maybe some folks have comments on that. So in addition to the production data, which just can seem like a lot of numbers that we need to give meaning to, we have been trying to pull some stories out of the production data. And one of those stories that we've been interested for this year is inspired by this blog post by AV Preserve, entitled, For God's Sakes, Stop Digitizing Paper. And the link is there, so you can go read it and see that it's not as inflammatory as it sounds. But by far, libraries who responded to the survey and archives are digitizing unbound sheets. And we can look, even if you remove unbound sheets, audio-visual materials still pale in comparison, which is interesting because there's a deadline for digitizing AV materials. We talk a lot about obsolescence and how they're deteriorating rapidly. And if we don't digitize AV, we're going to lose a lot of it. Yet the focus on digitization is in, I'll go back here, either unbound sheets or microfilm, books and bound volumes, and AV is close to last except for historic and ethnographic objects and art objects. And if we further look into that and look at the AV formats digitized, we can see that there's a gap between what we talk about as being very endangered versus what we digitize. So there's not a lot of action around digital audio tape and the libraries that responded, despite being conversations about it being a very endangered format. There is a lot of activity around magnetic media, and a lot of questions are raised by that. Is it because of the content or the sheer numbers of magnetic media out there, the funding that's available, maybe that we're more comfortable digitizing that format. These questions can't be answered with the data, but I think they're raised and can be investigated further along with other sources of information. The data does provide us with more than just anecdotal evidence that at least amongst the libraries responding to the survey, we show preference for both conserving and digitizing certain formats. So as we've said, we have some questions in the survey that echo questions that were asked in the ARL surveys. So that allows us to over time take that information and track trends. And TLE here in the title stands for Total Library Expenditures, and I'll come back to that in a second. But if just looking at this graph from 2000 to 2013, looking at the total preservation expenditures as percentage of total library expenditures, and we can't go to 2014 with this because we didn't ask budget questions this year, we can see that it's been declining since 2000. And if we go back further, which we've done in some of the prior reports, you can see it's actually been declining pretty much since preservation statistics were kept. ARL suggested in the 80s that 4% of a library's budget should go to preservation. And we've never reached that 4% and have actually been going down ever since that statement was made. So this is one way that the data allows us to say preservation really is getting a smaller piece of the pie over time. It's not just that we feel squeezed in budgets. The data is confirming that. So to explain for a second why we use total library expenditure as a mode for analysis is we don't have the same pool of responses every year. ARL have the same pool of responses to track trends over time each year. We don't, so need to make adjustments because if we just added up the straight numbers, it would look like expenditures or binding or whatever number is way down just because fewer people responded. So looking at volumes found per million dollars of total library expenditures is a way for us to adjust for that. And I think this graph is no surprise to anybody that the number of volumes commercially bound has been steadily declining. Conservation treatments also seem to have declined. Something interesting you can turn to our other reports for though is that overall numbers of treatments in the past had declined whereas level of three treatments had increased. So even if the number of conservation was lower the hours spent on conservation had seemed to have just shifted. So look at the 2012 and 2013 reports for more on that. And then conservation treatments looking at different formats. Unbound volumes, unbound sheets have always been pretty high up there and total treatments. And Holly, I don't remember what this peak in 2007 was but somebody must have treated many unbound sheets in that year. This is the burden and the blessing of the preservation statistics program. One institution, probably the Library of Congress can really throw off some of our data. Thanks Holly. And then this final graph I think is another one that's no surprise to anyone is that digitization has gone up over the time that the statistics have been tracked. And again, this is bound digitization, unbound digitization and then other. Everything has been on the rise. Unbound sheets really shot up. So that's a sort of snapshot of the fiscal year 2014 surveys the different ways that we can track trends over time and look for the report where we will continue to get more and further into this data and maybe answer some of those questions that I've raised. And if you have any other, if you want to use the raw data we will also put that out there because that's something that we've always made available and would love to see people use. And if you have a new or different way of using the data please let us know. I'm going to turn it back over to Holly for some conclusions and how can you use the preservation statistics? Again, this is based a lot on what we hear from people who are taking the survey and using the statistics. For program assessment, for policy making you can kind of understand where the field is going and what the trends are and inform your activities in your own institution. A lot of institutions like to use these statistics for peer comparison. If you have, your library director, archives director or museum director always has someone in mind that they aspire to be like. And it's sometimes very helpful for you to know how the preservation activities are set up in that aspirational institution and to use that aspiration to your own benefit. Advocacy, again, supporting your staff request, budget request, in support of grant applications it's great to know how many X you did last year in comparison with, you know, the field and outreach efforts to boast your accomplishments. This is a big thing. In staff assessments, a lot of people look at your efficiency of staff and how their production capabilities are going and as well as in research. We have a group this year looking at whether digital digitization programs, digital preservation efforts are based in preservation programs and what does that mean for our programs in the field at large. We'd love to have your participation in the survey. I can see from a previous survey that about 40% of our attendees here are not previous participants. The next survey will be released in early 2016 right after the new year. We're going to release this current report in just a couple weeks around ALA. And in 2017, which is like two years from now it's hard to fathom this, we're going to release the staffing and budget supplement that we talked about earlier because while production data is really interesting it's that rich budget and staffing data that is sometimes hard to capture that's the goal of our effort. We're looking forward to partnering with a Society of American Archivists and American Alliance of Museums. We have a strong library contingency but we're ever growing our archives and our museum population. Again, you can find us in all of these spots and we forgot to mention our third partner Nick who's not here today. Nick is our data wizard and does a lot of the graphs that you see that compare the data over time with the AERO institutions but form the basis of our programs. Come check us out and be sure to ask any questions over in the comments bar if you have any information you'd like. Ending it over to you Leslie, are you there? Hi everyone, good afternoon. I was sort of just waiting for that change over. All righty. Well, thanks very much Holly and Annie. I really appreciate being partnered with you today. This is a good opportunity for us to talk about I think, you know, what are we doing in conservation and preservation and you reference HHI and it's certainly something that stands out I think that we have a lot of overlap in our respondents and also some of our questions but we have a slightly different take on how we do the data collection and what we're sort of after. And today I just want to give you a sort of overview of what we did in HHI in 2014. We did, I want to sort of stay up front I guess we did change the name from Heritage Health Index to Heritage Health Information. This is sort of a technical geeky thing to do. Index is technically something where you can combine information and then see what you get. Whereas the information is a little bit more accurate I think in terms of like what we capture and sort of the breadth of what we know and what we want to know about preservation and conservation. I was director of the study and I was at Heritage Preservation up until pretty recent and that's why I'm here giving this presentation today. I have recently taken a job at the National Endowment for the Humanities so my sort of, we're kind of wearing two hats today but kind of wearing sort of one. I'm still in research. My background is really in collection, not collections care but in survey research and different methods that talk and speak to the cultural sector. So I've done research in libraries, museums, archives at the institutional level but also a lot of sample surveys. So I'm kind of doing some of that stuff in-house for NEH right now which is sort of in conjunction with the 50th anniversary which is happening this coming year. So what is HHI? So I mentioned that we changed the name but really HHI is a comprehensive survey like the preservation statistics survey that Holly and Annie do about what are we doing in collections care. Larry Rieger who is the Director of Heritage Preservation really had this interest in finding out what are we doing all together? What are we doing across the institution? Because while AIC might support some of the technical aspects of conservation in particular and specifically conservators and as Larry would say the surgeons. Heritage preservation was right there next to AIC trying to ensure that the nurses or those who are doing collections care who may not be doing all of the technical work are still supported and have training and are doing things to contribute towards the future of preservation. And so this survey was really crafted I think sort of in the late 90s into the early 2000s in order to start getting a pulse on what are we doing across the community of all collections types and what are we doing to continue to preserve objects and what do we need to continue to improve. So this is a pretty major effort it's a pretty major investment from the big cultural agencies but also some of the foundations as you can see there it was a cooperative agreement between IMLS and Heritage Preservation but the National Development for the Humanities and the Getty Foundation and the National Development for Arts are also in there and are partners in ensuring that not only do we have success but also that everyone has it demonstrates everyone has a vested interest in making sure that not only are the results widely spread but that there's an opportunity for us to continue to get really representative data. So what you'll as a background need to know about HHI and this is accurate between both data collections which is that it was really crafted with the expertise and knowledge base of the major collecting institutions but also the agencies as well as practitioners and everyone has had some say and critique and input on not only what are we doing, how are we sampling but also the questionnaire development and that's really kind of important because you can ask just about everything but if what you're asking isn't going to help others and get a community to be able to act upon it like some of the same sorts of ways that Holly and Annie were talking about activating data and making sure that you're making the case that it's really important we wanted HHI to have that level of impact and be as useful as it can be and the questionnaire was tested and tested and tested over again to ensure that it also not only captured everything that needed to be done and that was giving folks the data that they wanted but also that folks were able to answer those questions because as you'll see in a minute the sampling structures and the ways in which we collect the data are pretty massive and there's somewhat of a large undertaking the questionnaire is also a living document and I highlight that for people because we do update and rigorously review the questions that are included so to better accurately talk about collections care practice in 2014 not only did we review the questions that would still be accurate and usable from the 2004 which is almost all but then we really updated the questions on digital preservation because we know a lot more about what we're doing now or we want to know more about what we're doing now so I encourage folks because this is a mostly federally funded project the questionnaire and the components that are released from HHI are really public documents which means that you can continue to use the questionnaire as an annual assessment if you wanted to or however often you want to do that kind of assessment you know the great success from the 2004 study was that it had these sorts of known impacts and as Holly and Annie accurately stated the more data we have the more advocacy we can do the better we can make the pitch that we need more dedicated effort and support in this area and I think it's sort of telling and I pulled these these three things these three bullet points sort of to show you the different ways in which people have been using the data as well not only just at the institutional level but also at the association level and the ways in which foundations are changing you know here internally at NEH where I am now preservation and access takes the results and the data from the survey incredibly you know seriously as well because it might impact you know how it is that they're thinking about programming and the funds that are available so those kinds of things can all be you know like taken into account and which is why also you know doing the study that we were doing it is important to get could a broad scope on the community. One of the things that was the outgrowth of the HHI 2004 was the connecting to collections and I wanted to give a little shout out to Mary Rogers I believe Mary Rogers is here and I believe this is her brain child she was at IMLS and was overseeing this massive effort which is really as it says a multifaceted initiative there were so many components to this but the data from HHI revealed that there was quite a bit of improvement needed not only in collections care for you know environmental controls but also in staff training and staff training was really one of the biggest deficits the field was seeing at the time and so a lot of these efforts that you see here that connecting to collections did including this online community which brings us together today really are in an effort to continue to build capacity in the field and heritage preservation felt like it was an important effort that not only were they wanted to be partnered in but they also saw the rich outgrowth of being able to continue for more care in this area and IMLS really invested a lot of time and also all of these resources and really the big splash from the 2004 data collection was a report called the public trusted risk and that title has kind of a it says what I think it's meant to say right so a public trust at risk we're very concerned that the objects that are being cared for in public trust were at danger of being lost of not being preserved and the recommendations that came out of the 2004 study really showed that the recommendations said we've got to do more not only do we need institutions to dedicate more to the day to day operations but you know those disasters are really going to come upon you when you least expect it and if you don't have that level of responsibility if you don't have those kinds of supports in place in order to make sure that it happens how can you do the day to day operations how can you be prepared so measuring our progress to date that's where 2014 comes in heritage preservation had an interest in not only fielding this survey to take up a pulse of where we are in collections care but also to ensure that the data collection could be ongoing there was some debate about how often this should be done because a national sample survey can be done in many different ways but the census is only collected every 10 years and 10 years seem like a period of time in which we could see some of the efforts and some of the results of things like C2C and the grant making and the bookshelves that were given out there and see if we could maybe not assess the impact of those particular initiatives but to see if overall we were on a higher tide after some of those efforts had been made and so what we ended up doing is a repeated cross-sectional design we could have gone back to the exact same institutions that we did ask that did participate in 2004 that would have been like a panel survey but panel surveys are usually done kind of in quick succession of each other a panel survey is really good for clinical trials you give someone the medicine and then you see within like a week or two you measure them at the time one at the beginning of the week and then time two again at the end of the week to see whether or not the medication had some kind of impact so at 10 years time you can't exactly expect that a lot of institutions would actually still want to participate but you can ask them if they want to participate so we structured it such that it's still a cross-sectional survey which means that we're inviting folks to participate but we have a broad sweep of the collecting institutions in this country and that it's not required it is voluntary and if we get enough representative types then we'd have accurate mathematical accuracy to the 2004 data and the sample is kind of broken down exactly the same way it was in 2004 which is that we have purpose of sampling and we also have randomized sampling you know the purpose of sampling was really a list of institutions that are of either a certain size of collection or a certain level of significance of collection and that was really decided I don't know you know like 2002 2003 something like that and that list was reviewed and updated for the 2014 collection the obvious institutions on that list are Sony and the Getty the Metropolitan Museum of Art all university libraries all university museums all the state historical societies, state archives, state libraries state museums what else is on that list you know all of the NARA units so a certain size and a certain level of significance reading that those institutions are relatively stable probably they have a sizable collection they can speak to what they're up to and they're probably doing a fair amount right there's kind of like a sort of maybe ongoing right practice at these institutions and that's kind of how I think of them is the folks who can probably say more to like this is a program that we have right institutions across the country that otherwise don't fall into that category were then compiled and they were randomly selected and that might be you know independent archives or historical societies or others that maybe a little less known about exactly what they're up to what their collections care practice is on the regular if you've seen our survey if you've probably seen Annie and Holly's survey you know that these questionnaires are long and so the easiest and fastest way to get people probably through that series of questions is to do an online survey that has to do with really the fact that if you can get folks to say I do X but I don't do Y they can skip over Z because they said no to the Y question and so you can kind of move through and channel people towards the finish line as fast as possible the completion time for HHI is estimated between one and three hours and a lot of folks like Smithsonian and Library of Congress would say what a realistic and accurate timeline and I would say well not for Library of Congress you know it'll take you like a solid month to get that kind of data together however for the Leslie Lange Historical Society yeah an hour is relatively accurate so there's a lot more historical societies out there than there are Library of Congress's so you know that sort of doesn't average out all that evenly but you know ultimately speaking online survey is in our our best effort to get everyone through as fast as possible Holly made mention of this I think which is that outreach is incredibly important survey response is not what it was 10 years ago and that's pretty accurate across all fields of data collection we've been seeing a slow decline and I know that you mentioned Holly the survey fatigue in the cultural sector and I think survey fatigue is much bigger than us survey fatigue is pretty big it's pretty prominent you know Gallup has you know a tough time sometimes getting their polling numbers for political races and such so you know realistically speaking follow up follow up follow up is the only way you kind of get the sort of responses that you're after and we went out to participants at least five times we did have an army of volunteers some of you maybe who are participating today might have helped us do some volunteer outreach a lot of the things that resulted from that follow up were not only the response rate which we'll see in a second but also the fact that we in-house at Heritage Preservation handled all of the technical support in order to ensure that our data was being accurately recorded and that folks were interpreting the questions the same way that's a core component of also ensuring that you know folks not only can complete the survey but that everyone's completing the survey the same way and that really helps when you're doing these large samples so as I mentioned the sample it's enormous unlike preservation statistics heritage health information is all collections types and so long as you meet these criteria the first three here you are basically eligible to take HHI so if you're an archive historical society library museum archaeological repository or scientific research organizations so archaeological repositories are you know like designated by the Army Corps of Engineers but it's kind of an overlap between museums and libraries but effectively things that are archaeologically dug up and things that are properties that need to be housed somewhere but are not necessarily being housed in like a warehouse right scientific research organizations that's kind of like a catch-all term that can mean kind of a many different things it can mean independent science research centers there's some of those for sure and they have really large collections but also biology departments at universities count inside scientific research organizations you know the HHI questionnaire and the goal is to really talk about objects and to talk about the practice of caring for those objects regardless of your type of object and so noticeably we don't have architecture in here because that's a whole different you know bag in terms of actual preservation but you know biological specimens, biomedical specimens and these sorts of things are being cared for under cold conditions you know just like some paper objects and such right so that's why we've got the wide bret them there the reason why we only collect from non-profit institutions is because non-profits have fiduciary responsibility in order to care for the objects in their care and so that's it's not that if you were for-profit institution that you wouldn't care about these but the ways in which we think about purpose and goals and education and some of these sorts of interrelated ideas and how it is that the collections are at the core of some of these goals that's really where the non-profits kind of fold in and as you can see a little bit more over time which is that all sizes and all types the only other geographic containment is really within the U.S. and the territories there so we do have the Virgin Islands, we do have Guam we did reach out to Mariana Islands I don't think that they responded though this year it's sort of hard to get a hold of but as you can tell I mean from all of these criteria we really do have a broad reach in terms of the objects that are being collected and so the survey really speaks to practice across these institutions so the timeline is actually kind of an overlap with preservation statistics we didn't go into the field until October of last year and we really hoped to go into the field a little bit earlier we didn't want to overlap with Holly and Annie just to sort of not stress people out too much but we had a little bit of a hang up the federally funded survey you got to go through some clearance prophecies and that takes a little bit more paperwork than everybody's really prepared for most of the time and we really tried to avoid going into the holidays and we actually ended up extending data collection into February because we ended crossing into the holidays which slowed things down a bit the final report which is like a public trust at risk although we'll have a different title is sort of underway this is kind of my assumption of what the title will be we'll see and the publication should come directly from IMLS it'll look very similar have sort of the glossy overview and there will be comparative statistics between 2004 and 2014 my understanding is that supposed to come out on or about the fall of 2015 so you'll see more fulsome data around that time there'll be sort of a press release at that time the data will be made available at that time and when the data becomes available it'll be hosted in a couple different places IMLS has its own data catalog which is where they're going to be hosting it and then the National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture has also graciously agreed to host the data it'll be anonymized when it's public there will be a micro data file which has institutional names associated with each record available but only under confidentiality agreements from IMLS directly okay so to the response rate so as we mentioned survey fatigue so 20% is pretty good in terms of target we don't really see response rates from national sample surveys of this kind or really any kind the targets are between like 18 and 25% so we're kind of right in the middle there and that makes me happy as you can see that ended up resulting in 1800 institutions responding so that's still a large number of institutions being able to give us accurate data when we did review the sample as I told you we reviewed what we had collected last time not only from the questionnaire but we also reviewed who was in and who was out last time 2004 the sample universe was 35,000 institutions what we know today even with some of the bad directory data that exists in the cultural sector we still came up with a 50,000 institution list from which we drew the final sample I think it's back here so it's 10,500 institutions you see up there were actually our sample and we got 1,800 of them which is 20% 20% response rate and that's pretty good especially since we had 50,000 that's something that I take as a big pride moment this is what we are finding so you can see on the left hand side that the type is pretty spread across and libraries and museums make up bigger components and so that's why there's more of them that actually responded we're pretty accurate pretty representative across region on the right hand side and a little bit less from New England but that's okay couple of the early things we've seen too we've seen quite a bit of spike in the visitation counts part of my assumptions about what exactly is happening here is that we're just getting better at actually counting how many people come in and out of the door and also far more accurate in being able to report on how many visitors are coming to our websites and so you could see that 7.4 billion went to 99 billion for online visitation alone so that's really driving that spike that we're seeing in visitation wanted to give you this quick little snapshot just to show you something that I think is really interesting which is what are the biggest needs of conservation and preservation you know what we found in 2004 is that you know the greatest need was in staff training and staff training is actually like the worst on this list it's at 56.5% the biggest need now it looks like is inventorying and cataloging and being able to do general condition assessments is close and you know close behind and environmental controls is not far after that so you could see those four big things right so cataloging and inventorying general condition assessments environmental controls and staff training are still some of the biggest pockets that we have need for improvement on and I think that's kind of interesting because what you saw in 2004 really was that staff training was the biggest concern but we are starting to look at some of the analysis on that and it has improved quite a bit but we really need to be able to look more at the object so now that we know more about what we're doing we really need to know what condition those objects are in and what we can do to improve them and actually do assessments that help us know what the conservation care is what is the next step and even though heritage preservation after its long you know dedication to collections care practices is unfortunately shuttering its doors this month and you know the work and the wrap out for HHI is actually being managed in house internally at IMLS but you know I think that it shows that we really did have great funding and support for this particular survey and also you know there was a long time dedication and as you can tell I mean the connecting to collections care online community now exists here at FAIC and you know a lot of these things have grown and have a life of their own so there's a large commitment I think to continuing to improve care and you know was really at the helm of some of that so big thanks to him and thank you for your time today it's been really great being able to share this with you okay if you have questions put them in the chat box but in the beginning we have a couple of questions what are unbound sheets this is Holly I'll take that pardon our ease with the terminology here we get so wrapped up in our data sometimes you forget to explain what the heck we're talking about unbound sheets are the manuscripts documents prints everything that's in between a bound volume which is a book or even a newspaper and art objects which would be you know paintings so it's the unbound stuff that's not art I guess I would say what makes up archives predominantly okay and I'll add that we do have an instructions and definitions manual that goes along with the survey every year so hopefully institutions are interpreting all of the different terms the same because we spell it out there okay anybody sell and I hope I said your name correctly in Lexington we have a slew of AV materials which are and we're hoping to apply for a grant on any suggestions on great grants for these types of projects we've already looked at IMLS and NEH so any of you can answer that I saw Lee Price already said over in the chat box looking at Grammy Foundation and National Film Preservation Foundation both great suggestions and I also thought just look in your local state historic records review reports the shrabs they sometimes have funding which is actually finaled from the National Historic Records Commission Public Records Commission NHPRC for small projects within the state so try that too and a great starting point is the NEH Preservation Assistance Grant which is a quick $6,000 but it can bring someone on site who's an expert in your AV materials to do an evaluation and to give you some information about steps going forward which make a great foundation for an implementation grant that you would later secure to actually care for the materials Yes it's really important if you to have a survey or to know what you need to preserve I remember years and years ago when we were starting with grants for photographs there would be grants that would say we have a 100,000 photographs and they're all important and most of the funding agencies aren't going to buy that anymore so you need to know what's important and what's not we also have a question about are there any headlines or key statistics to share in the collection storage section of the upcoming HHI survey Thanks for asking that the data and the report are not press ready yet but overall we've improved our storage quality so the percentage of institutions with improper storage has fallen the collections stored in containers too small to properly fit the item has also fallen and the institutions that reported damage to collections because of improper storage has all fallen we're talking about something on the order of about 15 percentage points in terms of like I should say an increase I guess so that it can we can all say that it's doing better yeah so there's another one that says in HHI so we should see the results driving funding towards these new priorities now that the trending is shifted from staff training I see so should we see the results driving funding oh you mean from IMLS and NEH I assume is what that question means I would not speak for any of my colleagues in the federal government to say that priority for funding is shifting based specifically on these particular results because they'll make judicious decisions and like I said I'm in research and so I make recommendations but how it is that professionals who are doing the grant making a little bit closer probably to knowing on the ground what people need will take this into mind but I wouldn't wouldn't be surprised if you see that some of this has an impact on how we see what people either putting in grants for because you probably see some of that in relationship to the fact that it's a big need and maybe NEH is also making an address to that and I think I can't speak for IMLS specifically because I'm not there and I'm not sure exactly what the museum's program will will do and not do based on the results of the finding I have a question do you do the three of you do you have discussions with the granting agencies when your reports are ready or you just put it out there and let them ruminate on it this is Holly no we don't have those discussions yet our program is still so nascent and it's our population of respondents is so small but every time I see a grant a grant funding staff person at a conference I make no fail to mention it to them and to have a little with our results and some areas of need not that they listen to me and would that Leslie were so powerful so HHI is actually done you know from the inside out right so IMLS and NEH and NEA are funding it and so the conversations around how important this is have to do with you know really an impetus for making sure that we have the data on hand but you know I think how it gets used internally changes and it depends on who it is that might be making those decisions I know that the colleagues here at NEH are you know you know especially from preservation and access in particular are really really invested in making sure that they know what's in the data because they want to know what the pulse is they want to know what folks are doing across all types of collections but you know we together haven't had any conversations and IMLS is really sort of the spearhead in terms of actually releasing the results so they have what I've prepared for them and they'll be making that pitch and selling it later I want to put in a pitch for HHI I used that first survey to go to my state legislature and to help get money which allowed us to begin small museum pro so yeah yeah the data from HHI is I gave those sort of three examples at the top but that those level or those three examples that I drew for this presentation are literally three of like a list of 20 that heritage preservation kept tabs on over the last 10 years really seeking out not only press reports but also notes from the field about the importance of the study and a lot of it really did feed into HHI having you know the second data collection there was always intentions of doing it again but you know the impetus for doing it at the 10 year mark for making it happen for the data to be collected really did come from the fact that people seriously and they wanted an update because it was becoming too at that point which is like I said before the same thing as the decennial census right like about you know the 7 or 8 year in you're like okay where's the rest okay so if we don't have any more questions I'm going to ask you not to have survey fatigue and please complete the evaluation which is right here and to remember that next month we're going to have something on social media and collections and that the recording from this webinar will be ready in the next few days and I will post it to the now archive because this is over in the Connecting to Collections Care website so thank you very much for coming thank you Annie and Holly and Leslie for a really nice presentation and we'll see you next month okay bye bye thanks everybody thank you