 to your host, Ms. Susan Barker. Hi, Mike, and hi, everyone. We'll get started today. This should be pretty interesting. I'll go through my slides here. Remember, during the webinar, if you have a question, please post it in the questions comments box. And I will make you catch it so that it can be answered by Tara at the end. And so you'll have plenty of time to answer all your questions and answers from her, and I'll post them along. So the very best way to keep informed about connecting to collections care is to sign up for the announcements. And Mike is telling me that this thing can help. Is that better? And you can also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. If you need help during a disaster, you can contact the National Heritage Responders. And this is their number. It's available 24-7. And Tara is one of those responders. And then you can also, if you have a question, you can post it on the forum and you get an answer. And you can contact me anytime. This is my email address, so I'm happy to hear from you. And coming up, we're going to do a Twitter chat with ARCs on May 1st about preventive conservation. So you can check that out to use hashtag ARCS chat and you get 8 o'clock Eastern Day like time on May 1st. And then our next webinar for May 1st is hearing for his story about what's coming up. And we'll look forward to seeing you now. I'm going to turn this over to Tara Kennedy. Tara is a preservation services librarian at Yale. And she's a member of the National Heritage Responders Working Group. And she is also not only a conservator, but she's also trying to surprise us. So I'm going to turn this over to Tara and we'll get going. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Today I'm going to be talking about working with disaster recovery vendors. And I kind of called the title of the presentation of Winning Ambulance Chasers, because I often feel like in these sort of disaster moments when you are probably the most vulnerable, a lot of companies take these opportunities to take advantage of people in their situations. And I'm not saying all of them are out to get you per se, but I think it's really important for people to be prepared and to be aware of the pitfalls and knowing what questions to ask and knowing what to look for so that you don't get taken for a ride on the ambulance. So without further ado, I will start the presentation. So you're probably familiar with the emergency management cycle picture here that I'm showing here. So emergency management in general aims to reduce or avoid, if possible, potential losses from hazards, assure prompt and appropriate assistance to damaged materials, and to achieve rapid and effective recovery. And this emergency management cycle illustrates that ongoing process which all organizations should plan for and reduce the impact of disasters. Plan for it to reduce the impact of disasters. Be able to react and immediately following a disaster and take steps to recover after a disaster has occurred. And since it's shown in a cyclical process like this because it's never over, even recovery, even after the smallest incident, can still inform people about prevention and mitigation. So the four steps, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery are all part of this cycle. The mitigation or activities designed to alleviate the effects of a major disaster and emergency or long-term activities minimizing the potential adverse effects of future disasters in affected areas. Preparedness, that's activities, programs, systems that exist prior to an emergency that are used to support and enhance response to an emergency or disaster. Response, activities or programs designed to address the immediate and short-term effects of the onset of an emergency or disaster. And then finally, recovery. The long-term or it can be short-term activities and programs beyond the initial crisis period of an emergency or disaster designed to return all systems to normal status or to reconstitute these systems into a new, less vulnerable condition. So when I'm talking about working with emergency recovery vendors, you could be technically working in any part of the cycle because that actually could be covered in any one of these four. But I'd be focusing primarily on the response and recovery portion of working with vendors. So that'll be the context of today's presentation. So what will I be covering today? So I'm going to talk about the services that are offered by disaster recovery vendors. What to ask disaster recovery vendors before the work begins. Appropriate questions, answers to those questions and which questions they may ask you. And how to know if the vendor is doing quote-unquote the right thing. Are they doing right by you as an institution and customer? And how you can prepare with a disaster recovery vendor before the disaster happens. So I will be primarily talking about disaster recovery vendors in the context of collections recovery. Now any recovery company in theory can try a floor, but not every disaster recovery vendor can try a collection of materials or be able to find the resources to do that type of work. So that's why, because, well hi, this is also called connecting to collections care. So that's one reason why I'll be focusing on collection materials, but also it's kind of the rare animal of the kinds of disaster recovery vendors, so to speak. Well the first thing I'll tell you, and anybody will tell you is in preservation or in emergency management, is to prepare in advance as much as you can. Number one, I think it's just really important if you can is have freezing facilities available, and that should be part of your emergency plan. Securing facilities that would be willing to freeze collections is really helpful, because freezing materials buys you a lot of time to make decisions, like choosing the right recovery vendor. Even a simple chest freezer that does not have an auto frost function can be sufficient for even just a few objects in an emergency situation. So that can be really helpful. Emergency supplies, including replacement housing. So having supplies on hand, including rehousing materials to replace wet damaged housings, like the ones I'm showing in this picture from a disaster that happened at the Yale campus, literally last week, that will help you to recover in the interim while waiting to get help from the vendor. And of course with every disaster themed topic, webinar or presentation, we're all gonna say having your emergency plan up to date is key. And having all the information current will make response that much easier and faster. And actually I forgot, I have a poll for you all, and I'm not sure if I can drag that over. Let me see. It looks like I can. So, poll number one. So I'm just curious to see how many of you have actually worked with a disaster recovery vendor before. This is why I didn't know if this would be sort of old information for you guys, or if this is gonna be something that would be, I need more information and want to know more about it. Okay, so the majority of you all have not worked with a disaster recovery vendor tool. So hopefully I'll have a lot that I can inform you all about concerning that. Thank you. The big question, which company do I choose? So we've heard all sorts of advertisements on TV, different vendors. The one that comes to mind living in Connecticut is the one, I think it's called Serve Pro. I should say, oh, okay, somebody wrote me a note that I can ignore, okay. So you can see advertisements on TV for a lot of these disaster recovery vendors. The one that comes to mind for me is Serve Pro, and it's the theme or their catch line, like it never happened. I think Service Master is another one that's fairly popular. But can they do the kind of work that you need? And especially when you're talking about your collections or precious family possessions, when these things are involved, this is not exactly going to be necessarily the right company for you. Larger companies like Bell4, BNS Cat, and Polygon, which used to be called Munters, I believe, are international companies, and they have a lot more resources. But still, just because they're international companies and large, you still have to do a little bit of vetting to ensure that you're gonna get the quality of service you need. And that quality of service will vary in terms of the independent franchise you're working with. So if one company carries a name, one franchise branch carries a name of a company, it does not mean that every branch of that company is gonna be of the same quality. So if you've worked with a vendor in Connecticut under Bell4 and you moved to a facility in Kansas, you would still want to vet the company under the name Bell4 in Kansas because they may not be of the same quality as the people in Connecticut or right first up. And do you need a full service vendor? I mean, what services do these companies offer and which ones do you need? I mean, do you need a full service vendor? Usually large international companies that fall into this category, like the ones I mentioned, they can do it all. They can clean up a facility. They can rebuild drywall and they can also coordinate document recovery. And often what they'll do is contact out to other vendors to work for them. And that can be helpful in a very large disaster situation where you have all vendors that work under one umbrella, so to speak, so you have one point of contact. Or do you need only a specialty vendor? For example, some vendors will specialize in audiovisual recovery, for example. So it may be a situation where you yourself have to coordinate the work of several specialty vendors and it will just completely depend on your collections that you have and the type of emergency. And vetting the company thoroughly, I'm gonna say this like 95,000 times, like during this presentation. So you need to ask for references from a similar institution or places that have had similar work done. And if they can't give you any names, you wanna move on to the next company. So I have another poll for those of you who have worked with a disaster recovery company. Who have you used? Got a whole bunch of names there. And yes, if you've never used one before, click that one, because I know the majority of you have not. So, oh wow, we have a wide, oh that's out, wow, a wide variety. Cool, awesome, thank you, wide variety. What questions do you wanna answer that ask the vendor? So there are five ones I'm gonna talk about to start here and there are additional ones I'll have further on. So what document recovery techniques do you use? How long have you been in the business? Who will be my point of contact? As I mentioned earlier, can you give me at least three references? And what document security measures do you use? It is expected that the vendor will have a representative to come out to the site to see the situation so they know what type of situation they're dealing with. So you can have vendors come out to do an initial walkthrough or onsite visit and account setup and usually those they don't charge when they do that. And fees are agreed upon once the contract is set up. This is an FYI. Which document recovery techniques do you use? So the four I'm going to mention here are ones that are most often used. Vacuum freeze drying, desiccant air drying, cleaning and sterilization and digital imaging slash photocopying. So the best recovery companies are gonna use a variety of techniques to salvage wet documents because a method that is beneficial to one type of document could actually damage another. And you wanna ask the vendors for written documentation outlining their recovery techniques and describing their processes. Which I'm going to describe some of them for you here but it's good for them to also document, to give you documents that document their these techniques as well. So you have it in writing. So vacuum freeze drying is a great technique for recovering paper documents. It works using volumes using sublimation. So the objects go into these chamber like in this picture shown here frozen and then they are placed into this chamber which is freezing and a negative vacuum is pulled inside the chamber. And so the frozen water turns straight into vapor. So it's phase changing. They where we just skip the liquid phase of water. It's super awesome. It's great because it reduces distortion in paper while it's drying and it's really effective on coated papers like those found in magazines or in art books. If you catch it early enough it prevents the pages from sticking together like we find with some of the shiny papers that stick together. And you wanna be sure to ask for vacuum freeze drying only, not thermal vacuum freeze drying because that incorporates high heat into the process which you do not want. It's not necessary and can cause problems with your collection. So when people talk about vacuum freeze drying make sure that they're talking only about vacuum freeze drying and not thermal vacuum freeze drying. And it's highly effective like I said but not for all materials. A lot of the techniques I'm gonna talk about are safe when mostly talking about documents. Things like composite materials like photographic materials. It's not going to be appropriate for them. What will be? It's probably something more like this, desiccant air drying. So what that involves is usually working in place, working in situ. You seal off the space and you're bringing in extremely large dehumidifiers that dry the space quickly and efficiently. This is good if you have the space to do the work and you have a lot, I mean tons of material that need to be dried fairly quickly. When I was an intern at the National Archives, one of their storage facilities there was a large fire that occurred. And it was, it just seems like linear feet beyond the eye could see in terms of damage. So the techniques they chose to use was to put all of the documents in a space taking out a lot of them out of their boxes, placing them spaced out on shelving and they brought in these giant dehumidifiers that were essentially trucks that dried the space completely so that everything dried somewhat quickly but not so much that it would damage materials. And the reason why they had to do that because the volume of archives was so high as I say. And also there was a lot of mixed media. There was a lot of paper but there also was photographic material and it was hard to be able to separate the two out. So vacuum freeze drying really wasn't an option because of those two things. So we ended up doing the desiccant air drying. And one of the disadvantages of this desiccant air drying is that it does tend to cause distortion as you see in the picture here. So it's also not great for coated papers because it doesn't dry quickly enough. But in some cases, as in the case was for the National Archives, it was the best choice given the collection size and scope. So cleaning and sterilization, sterilization. I usually try to steer folks away from anything that's involving sterilization of collections. A lot of the recovery vendors are big on trying to apply whether it be deodorizers, ozone. A new one I heard was hydroxyl. Some sort of technique was hydroxyl and I hadn't even time to figure out what that was. And gamma irradiation, which is another method that people talk about for sterilization. I really recommend that folks not use these types of things but vacuuming with a HEPA filter vacuuming is really the best, safe, effective method of removing any dust, dirt, or mold spores on things once they've dried. These other techniques that quote unquote sterilize the documents and other materials. How they work is by breaking up or destroying bacteria, fungi, and viruses and they're all organic materials, but so is paper. So while it's breaking down the bad stuff that they're talking about bacteria and fungi and viruses and those sorts of things, it is also breaking down the objects that you're trying to save at the same time. So you're best off just doing the vacuuming. And asking them to skip all of the other extras that they're trying to sell you. So that is something I really emphasize talking to your vendors about because they will do it without asking oftentimes. And sometimes you find out after the fact that they've applied chemicals or have applied some of these techniques to your materials when you didn't want it to happen. So it's very important that you make sure that they do not do that kind of work if you're talking about materials that are going to be that you're gonna keep for the long term. Now for things that you don't need to keep for the long term, this is a digital imaging or photocopying is actually a pretty good method to utilize. So your materials have been that have been damaged were in flood waters that have been contaminated or extremely moldy and heavily damaged. And these are materials that don't have artificial value but actually have the value in them is within the text in the paper. This is a really good option. And there are vendors that will do this work for you. We had an archive here at Yale that we had acquired and there was one section where the paper was heavily damaged by mold. And there was no artificial value in the actual section of papers that we were talking about, but the information within the papers was super important. So we had a vendor do photocopies on archival paper to replace the original and the document recovery company destroyed the originals and we kept the copies, which would be safe for any patron to use. So like I said, it's a great option if you don't need to keep the physical materials and need only the information contained within them. Second question, it's a big question. A good question to ask is how long have you been in the business? So the best contractors in terms of their branches will have an established reputation. So you wanna find a vendor that has had at least five years of experience, as well as any industry certifications and ones that are members of professional associations associated with this kind of work. The employees that a contractor hires should be also receiving ongoing training and be up to date with the latest best practices. You also might wanna ask if they use temporary or full-time employees on site. Depending on the type of collections you have, for example, if you have rare books and manuscripts and you're gonna have people working on site, you should ask the company about their background check processes for permanent and temporary staff. Another important thing to know is who will be my point of contact. A good vendor will have a project manager assigned to you from the moment it starts and they should serve as your point of contact throughout the entire recovery process. And they will guide you through the process and assist with deciding what kind of work is needed for your institution and collections. And they will also help with logistics and keep you up to date on a project's status. One of the things about this industry is there's a lot of high turnover because it's heavy intense work. So people tend to get burned out so it's important to check in with your go-to emergency response vendor to ask about any personnel changes. Another really important thing that I've mentioned several times during this presentation is getting references. And as I said before, if you get any pushback from the vendor about them supplying you with at least three references, get assistance elsewhere. If the company represents you to do any kind of grief, that is a big red flag. You definitely should be seeking a different contractor if anybody is giving you any sort of grief or saying that the request is some sort of inconvenience. Checking online reviews as nowadays is actually a really good place to check as well. In particular, checking with the Better Business Bureau to see if anyone has filed a complaint against the company. And if there are complaints, the Better Business Bureau will list the actions that the company took to remedy the problems. And you can also check with peer or nearby institutions for recommendations if they've had similar events happen. And the references you asked for should be from institutions that are similar to yours. And you can get their point of contact, phone number and email. So if you have email, you can just send a list of questions and sometimes that's easier. But then you could also wanna have the phone number if you need to talk to somebody right away if time is of the essence. And you wanna have a list of questions that you wanna ask your references. Examples of what you might ask include how well did the vendor communicate with you? How clearly and frequently? Did you have any problems when dealing with the vendor? And if so, how were they resolved? What most impressed you about the vendor and its work? And of course, the biggest question is would you hire them again for a similar project? And finally, another big question to ask is what security measures do you use? Whether it's financial records, private donor information or an archival collection with restricted access, there's a good chance that your damaged documents could have sensitive information. So the company should have security protocols in place to protect your documents in terms of access regardless of where they're being processed. And these protocols include regular employee background screenings, using secure vehicles to transport items to different from your facility to theirs, clear chains of custody and defined security practices. And you can ask for these security practices in writing. The contractor should provide a secure environment during the recovery process and limit access to your documents to only necessary personnel handle them. And speaking of chain of custody of materials, tracking methods while items are at particular facilities is a really good thing to ask about. Do they use barcodes on boxes? Do they have paper lists? And this is also, as an aside, why it is extremely important to have your collection items at least inventoryed, even better cataloged so that you're able to provide a list of materials at the ready to track what goes out. The disaster we just had last week at our rare books and manuscript library, we were able to provide a list of the materials that went out fairly quickly because we had everything cataloged in our online system. So our head of access services was able to create a list and give it to the vendor and they could check it off as they went, as they pack the materials to go. And you do wanna ask us about storage security and environment, it's important to ensure the collections are stored safely and securely. And you can also ask to visit the facilities where the collections will be processed and where they'll be stored. So some other questions you might wanna ask the vendor. Can the work be done on-site or does it have to go off-site? Sometimes the work can be done with the collections in place. Sometimes it will need to be inventoryed, packed and spent off-site with the vendor. Molder mediation, for example, it can be contained within a storage space and treated in-house. It also can be boxed up and sent out to the vendor for cleaning depending on your institution's needs and the volume and other factors that may come into play when you ask that question. Do they own or lease their equipment? Ownership of equipment means that they have what they need already on hand rather than having to wait and get what they need from another party. So ask which equipment they have readily available such as dehumidifiers, freezer trucks, et cetera. And if they're a large enough company, they should have their own equipment. Third-party involvement, ask if they send your collections to other parties for treating particular objects. You may need to ask questions about those third parties as well. You'll want to ask for qualifications of these other parties, especially those who are calling themselves conservators or restorers. Conservators that are members of the American Institute for Conservation or AIC, let's follow a code of ethics, which includes properly documenting work performed. So it's really important that the vendors are working, if they are working with people who say they're our conservators, that they at least see members of AIC, professional associate members would be even better or fellows. And I've mentioned also permanent or temporary staff. Primary staff are preferable to temporary staff in terms of working, especially working on site if you're working in the stacks cleaning mold, for example. Temporary staff tend to be hired by the vendor per contract, and it may require additional security vetting, either by the vendor, you can require them to do that, or it may have to be done by your institution depending on the situation. But if you're creating a contract or an agreement with the vendor, you can actually specify that they have this particular type of screening done if they're going to use temporary or even permanent staff. And of course, the vendors will have questions for you. Their main question should be if we're talking about collections recovery is what type of collections are affected. The vendor will want to know whether you have unusual formats, like audio-visual materials that will require special handling or treatment. And they'll also want to know about materials that might require special security or have sensitive information. And do you have a priority list for your collections? If you don't, now would be a good time to make one. So if you go to the link that I have listed here, you will see a collections prioritization tool that I created to use at the Yale Libraries to help you prioritize your collection. It helps you and your staff prioritize collections in case of an emergency in an unbiased way by asking a series of yes or no questions which creates scores that create the priority. It's a painless way to create lists that has worked pretty effectively here at Yale. So I highly recommend people trying it and feedback is welcome. Facility amenities. The vendor will want to know about your facility. Do you have adequate parking? Enough electrical outlets. Is there an elevator if needed? Is it large enough for the equipment need to get to whatever floor this emergency is happening on? Is there a loading dock? I mean, basically they'll want to know the outline of your facilities that's affected. So floor plans are especially helpful for this purpose and having those readily available is important. And having those specific things marked out would be a great thing to have on hand. And insurance coverage is another big question. They'll want to know if you are insured through a company or if you are self-insured. Are your buildings and collections covered? Are they both covered? Are they on the same policy? Will your policy cover the collections if they're taken off site? As an aside, you will also want copies of the vendor's insurance coverage on file as especially if the vendor will be working at your facility. So how do we know if the vendor's doing the right thing? I cannot stress this enough. You need to agree on expectations up front. Before the work even starts, it is crucial that you and the vendor mutually agree and understand expectations on the work to be completed. Recovery vendors, they can do a lot, but they can't necessarily work miracles. So a memorandum of understanding, a scope of work document, project plan, whatever you want to call it. They're all potentially helpful documents for this to avoid this pitfall as it will outline the work to be completed and how it will be conducted. It's really, really important to have this because that is your go-to document if anything goes wrong. You said that you would do this. It says here, but you did something else. Here is the writing, what you're gonna do about it. So that's extremely important. And better yet, take that scope of work document, project plan, MOU, and put it as a contractual agreement. Putting those expectations in writing so that each party is held accountable. And I have included a sample contract for a disaster recovery vendor. It's part of the presentation. There's a link in the ambulance basers handout that you can download in the lower left corner of your screen. And it's really important to have an internal project manager having one staff member at your institution who is checking in with the vendor frequently and basically keeping all the balls in the air. Usually that's me here at Yale. So I can tell you how important it is to have that happen. In the disaster we had last week, we had a flood and the facilities manager and the second in command facilities manager for the building both were on vacation at the same time. So I had to manage the facilities, the collections. I had help of course from the conservation lab here at the library. But I had to kind of manage all these things and make sure that I kept communicating with the recovery vendor as well as upper level management. So having one person kind of filter all of this and keep all of that information getting to the right places is super important. I also recommend if you have the vendor working in-house if it's a long-term project, they mold remediation. Doing surprise drop-bys is always a fun time when they least expect you to show up just to make sure they're still following the rules that you set for us in the beginning of the project. And finally, it can be helpful to consult with a conservator before agreeing to anything. If you have anything that kind of raises an eyebrow for you or you're just not sure or comfortable with certain things that a vendor is proposing, you could always call the National Heritage Responders hotline and speak with someone who can help assess whether or not that is a good idea to do whatever the proposed treatment or process is. If the person you're speaking to on the phone can't answer the question, they have a whole slew of people that they can ask that they should be able to answer your question. So don't be afraid to use that phone number. It's not for just radical emergencies that it can also be for less urgent emergency questions. I mentioned some of this already too about preparing before the disaster strikes. You can vet local companies ahead of time and secure a company via the Request for Proposals or RSP process. So if you do an RSP to have a vendor on call before something happens, then you lose almost no time getting started. Plus you have the luxury of time to vet vendors ahead of time so you get the kind of service you want and need. And I included a copy of the RSP that I did for Gail to choose our disaster recovery vendor that we have on retention. It's in the bottom left corner of your screen, I believe. If not, I will get it to Susan. I'm pretty sure I put it there though. So like I said, they came in last week to assist with a flood in our rare book and manuscript library and they were able to come in, clean up much of the standing water and take some of the materials to be vacuum freeze dried. And we didn't lose a lot of vital time in the process. There are also many companies that have what they call their Preserved Customer Program. You can pay some of the money, it depends on the company. So you can be in the front of the line, so to speak, to be on their preferred customer list. But if you can't afford it and you tend to have a lot of emergencies too to poor building up keep, et cetera, it might be worth spending a little bit of extra money to have a vendor on retainer like that because they have to keep coming. It's worth having them on call. And another option, and I'm sad to say the list that I have isn't complete. Some states have contracts with recovery vendors that state agencies can use. So I have a few links to a couple of states that I could locate, but do look around the internet to see if such contracts exist for your state. The only ones I found were Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and New York. But I'm sure there are other ones as well. So that's in your handout. That's come to the end of my presentation. There's a lot of general information I provided, but I'm also happy to answer any specific questions that people have. And if I can't answer them right away, I'm happy to research questions and get back to you. And like I said, there are links and templates and other additional information that should be helpful to you that's available as a handout along with the contents of the webinar. So thank you. Thank you for your question. Okay, let's go through these questions here. And can you hear me? Let's see, Mike's trying to... Yes. Okay. Let me try to fix the sound a bit. Okay. Mike, is that better? Okay, good. All right. Okay, so Olivia Primanis said, from Austin said, with air drying, you usually end up handling the material more than with vacuum freeze drying. And that was more of a comment, but you can comment on that. You can. That's true. And it's depending on, I mean, of course, there's air drying where you're handling each object and doing interleaving and that sort of thing. For the, I'm thinking about these large term, these large disasters that it's the ones that I was thinking of, like the one at the archives, they did have to take the items out of boxes and space them out on shelving. So, yeah. And Rose Smart said, do you know of any instances where institutions in more remote areas have worked with a new recovery companies to establish or agree on protocols? And in connection with that, Sarah Hockey in St. Paul said, I have Bob Hirschowitz here. And here is what he said, we think that establishing or agreeing on protocols with every company is necessary. So, do you have any? I agree. Do you have any advice on what kind of protocols you need to establish for new people? I think I said a number of these things. Well, the contact outline that I provided as one of the handouts actually goes through very thoroughly. It's from the Library of Congress. It actually does outline a lot of the steps and protocols that you need to go through. So, that may be a good place to start. And it can also sort of inform, also the RFP is another one that that document I provided also was kind of the protocols you would need to go through. So, either one of those documents would be a good starting place for a brand new disaster recovery company. And just that will also kind of give you an idea. So, that document rose is down below in the handouts. And I'm not sure which one it is, but there's establishing a relationship with a disaster company and emergency response services for collections. Those are down there for you to download. But, Tara, what do you think are the most important protocols that you should get in line especially someone who hasn't done this before? Could you hear me? Oh, okay. Yes, I can hear you, I'm thinking. And you can't see, you can't see the thought bubble above my head, so yeah. Well, I think in terms of collections recovery, I would want them to be able to dictate how they think they would be handling the collection in terms of security, in terms of packing protocols. I would want to know what kind of methodologies they would be using to try to recover the material. I would want to, I mean, it's kind of like, I think you could ask all of these questions that I've already listed and get the information you need in combination with the RSP example and the contact in the Library of Congress. And Rose says again, in our area, operators are fairly new on the scene and use limited private conservator population for private art collections for volume. I don't think that they're up to speed and I'm not sure if it's worth it to pursue, worth pursuing as something that can be improved. So she's in St. John's in Canada. In our area, operators are fairly new on the scene and use limited private conservator population for private art collections for volume. I don't think they are up to speed and I'm not sure that it's worth to see and what something like can be improved. So part of what she's saying is that private art collection is really different from an institution, not collection. Yes. And if she has specific questions about a specific situation she's in, she may want to contact me after the webinar and because it sounds like she may be in a specific situation. She's writing something now, so we'll wait and see what she says, but we'll go on. Michael Nagy says response time is... What's the typical number of hours between discovery of disaster and items packed and out the door? And Sharon, Susan Duel said, Michael, this depends on the type and severity of the disaster. For example, if it is inside the institution or regional, it is also often dependent on having a pre-existing contract with a vendor. Yeah. That's it? That's it? So Rose says, where the market for the recovery of cultural materials is small so that the capacity might not be worth their while, the main market is domestic flooded house, for example. Yeah, I'm really not sure how to answer her predicament, so it might be something where we have conversation offline and she can give me more information about her situation. She says, sure, she'll do that. I think that would help. Kylie Maher in Honolulu says, wondering about case litigation examples that you could share that were in favor of the collection and then ruled in favor of the vendor and what happened to the collection or institution? I can't say that I had any examples that I know off the top of my head. That might be a question for our National Heritage Responders list. I might ask them to see if anybody has any cases. Yeah, Jess, younger is online. Jess, do you have any resources on that that you could post? And while we're waiting for her to instantly respond, which she always does. Yeah, she says, yes, let me look into that. Okay, and if Jess sends anything, I will post it along with the recording, the resources and all of that. And I note that there's one resource that is not in the handout and I will add that before I post it with the recording. Katherine Owen says, if your state has a contract with a vendor, make sure it's good for your agency. We recently got a grant for conduct shelving which Missouri has a contract for, but when it came down to it, our agency wasn't covered and it caused a delay in going forward with the project. Yes, absolutely. So any of those links where I've provided that information, absolutely make sure that you actually can qualify to use the contract. Absolutely. Yeah, particularly if you're in it in a larger institution. Yeah. Yeah. I saw someone talking about West Pass and their training for this kind of stuff is great. And also I wanted to point out that disaster to recovery companies can be used for other things than disasters. I was working with a small museum that had its collections in a huge warehouse that had no dust control, no control of anything. And it was full of things like dead birds and the collection had just been shoved in there. And then the institution decided they were gonna become a museum. And it was like this Promethean task to clean up the warehouse and the collections. So I suggested that they hire a disaster recovery team. And once they got over, being annoyed with me for not giving them a bid for how much it would cost to have me do it, they actually had, I think Belford come in and clean up the place. It took them four days. It was so much cheaper and much more efficient. So that's something to think about too. Yeah. Wow. Absolutely. Great example. Jess is adding something here. Oh yeah, Jess was looking, because I clearly, or Kylie was asking for one where I went in different litigation examples. One was in favor of the collection and one was in favor of the vendor and what happened to the collection institution so this is if there's a problem with the recovery so that someone's bringing suit at the end. Yeah. Okay, well, if anybody comes up with examples, I'll post them. And are there any more questions? If they're not, I just wanna let you know that in June we're gonna do a webinar with Priscilla Anderson from Harvard about going over your disaster plan, reevaluating it after a disaster to make sure that it's gonna go. So it's about reiterating your disaster plans which is really important to do after a disaster. So look forward to that. Remember the Twitter chat on preventive conservation on May 1st. Next week on the Society of American Archivists is having a Twitter conference on preventive conservation and you can join in on that. I put that into the calendar on the website. And for all of those, all of you that qualify, remember that the preservation assistance grants are due on May 1st and you can get that information at neh.gov. And let me see, William Bennett says, asking a vendor what quality assurance methods they use to evaluate completeness of recovery, drawing or sterilization can help to avoid a hidden problem that could evolve later. And not, Jess also said the SAA Twitter conferences this week, Thursday, the 26th. Oh, it's in a couple of days. Yeah, so tune in for that. We're all learning about this new world at Twitter. So if there are no more questions, I think that's it. And we'll see you next month for this really interesting webinar on care of globes. We get questions about them from time to time and we have some really wonderful examples and people who really know what they're talking about for taking care of globes. So let's see. Okay, so thank you very much. Thank you, Tara. And I will make some amendments to the handout and the webinar recording, the slides, and the handouts will be posted in a few days. And you will know that they've been posted because the ad for this will no longer be on our homepage. That's always my sign that everything is posted. So thank you very much. And we look forward to seeing you in May. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you.