 share my screen real quick. I like seeing everyone's comments about whether I am jealous for all the people who are experiencing somewhat cooler weather. As many of you know, I'm located in the Florida Keys where it is taught like normal. So, but anyway, it's fun to see where everyone's from. Well, again, welcome. And before we really dive into things, I do want to say I would like to acknowledge that this webinar is being moderated on the traditional lands of the Micasukee and Seminole people and their ancestors. And I pay my respect to elders, both We're just going to have a couple of quick technical notes today, kind of some of the stuff you just heard from Mike. And then we're going to go on to our program for today. My name is Robin Bauer-Kilgo. I am the CDC care coordinator and you just found Mike Morneau. He is our senior producer over at Learning Times. Many of you have probably already seen this, but this is our home on the web. This is connected to collections. Connecting to collections.org. On that website, you're going to be able to see where you can sign up for upcoming webinars, upcoming courses. We have a couple of plans for the fall. They're going to be opening for registration pretty soon. You will also find the full archives of our entire switch of what we've done. And there's a huge archives there of prior CDC care webinars, CDC care courses, which do become free access a year after they've originally been posted. And our curated resources area, which is also really useful to everyone as well. I might also point out that we have a link there to our online community. So if you're new to our program and you want to post a question to it, sign up for it. We have this fabulous group of volunteer folks who will come and help you come up with a really good response when it comes to collections care and collection storage questions. We do have two places on social media where I post information regarding upcoming events. That is our Facebook and our Twitter feed. So I feel free to join those or link to them if ever you want to get upcoming information. As Mike said, we're using Zoom webinar for this program. There are two boxes which might be accessible for you. One will be the chat box, which is again the thing to say hello and what kind of weather you're having. The other one is the Q&A box. The Q&A box is really there for questions and answers. So if you have a question during the presentation today, we encourage you to use that Q&A box. It helps us track the questions. You can even throw one in there as we're doing the program and we'll jump back to it at the end during the Q&A period. So today we're going to be doing choosing materials for collection storage and I'm going to stop my share real quick. My screen is nothing. Very, there we go. We're going to be doing choosing collection storage today. Our presenter today is Maggie Hill Kipling who is an objects conservator in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Maggie spent the bulk of her career in Tucson, Arizona working on cooperative agreements with the National Park Services Intermountain Museum Services Program where she conducted collection condition surveys, implemented and advised on storage rehousing and move projects and treated a wide variety of historic archaeological Native American cultural materials. So I'm going to go ahead and hand this off to Maggie and we will see you back at the end of the Q&A period. See you soon. Hi, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. Hi, I'm so glad to be here with you all today and I would also like to start by acknowledging that I'm speaking from the traditional ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakota people Minnesota Makoche. This land has seen a history of violent colonization and suppression of Native peoples and non-white people. I want to celebrate the contemporary Dakota and other Indigenous peoples who live here today and honor their ancestors. I also want to acknowledge that this violent oppression of non-white peoples has continued into the present day here. I'm speaking to a block and a half away from where George Floyd was lynched last summer and in recent years and months the Twin Cities has also seen the murders of other Black men by police including Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Kobe Dimak Heisler, Dolal Eid, Dante Wright and Winston Smith along with others whose names we may never know. I think that it's important for those of us in museums to acknowledge that the role of museums and our institutions has often been tied to colonization and while our work is to care for the physical objects of history and culture well-doing so we can work to amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and this can really happen in all aspects of museum care including storage. So with that we will turn to our discussion of storage. I want to first say that there's a lot of kind of this idea of the ideal museum storage and you're not doing it right unless you're there and there's a lot in between bad museum storage that's actively damaging your collections and the most beautiful state of the art and any step forward towards better storage is good and so any incremental change you can make in your institution given the limitations that you may have in terms of budget in terms of facilities in terms of storage size any change forward is good so that's what we're working towards. Don't ever feel bad that your storage is not ideal as long as you are doing the best you can do and making those forward movements you know up until and including when you are this beautiful storage. So I just kind of have some some images to show this. This is that kind of historic European cabinet of curiosities and you've got a whole host of materials stored together on top of one another. You've got insects and you've got things nailed up to one another broken glass the whole the whole thing and you can go from that to really crowded storage but you're using good materials to better but still crowded storage to state of the art beautiful amazing magazine worthy storage but anytime you're doing those incremental steps forward that's what we're trying to work with because we do live in the real world. So in our discussion today we are going to discuss a whole host of specific materials how to choose them ways to use them and why you would choose them for certain applications and not for others. We'll talk about how to kind of assess the stability of these materials why that's important and we'll also take some time to troubleshoot specific attendee challenges that folks were able to submit ahead of time and then hopefully during the Q&A we can maybe address some additional things if necessary. We're not going to go into great detail on museum storage furniture or environmental controls or in-depth design and fabrication of storage maps. There's a lot of resources out there for those things and in the resource list that you can find on the page for this webinar there should be some links for some other things including some past C2C webinars that address some of those things in more depth and we're also not going to discuss every single product or type of material that's out there. There are a ton and there are more all the time and there are a lot that I'm not even familiar with but hopefully you'll have the tools to start to figure out how to assess those and assess whether they're stable whether they're things that you can use in your in your collection storage and then if you don't know how you can move forward with figuring some of that out and I just want to kind of go back to the start and good storage is preventive conservation. It is the most basic thing you can do to protect and care for your collections. If you haven't heard of all the agents of deterioration before here they are. We have physical forces, thieves, vandals, displacers, fire, water, pests, pollutants, light, incorrect temperature, incorrect relative humidity and custodial neglect and association and good storage can really address all of these. And here's kind of a diagram of all the different kinds of parts of storage. You've got your building which does a lot to give that ground of your environmental envelope. You've got the rooms that things are in and you can have environmental controls happening at the room level as well as at the building level and then you have your cabinets and shelving that can be another additional layer of protection and then you have your box or container any additional enclosure that there might be and of course your object that's in there and we're going to mainly be talking about that box container enclosure object area and these two colors the green and the blue for the box container and enclosure are intentionally very close because sometimes those things overlap sometimes you don't have both of them sometimes you only have one or the other and we'll kind of talk about why why you may have enclosures within boxes or you may not have a box or a container and things may be may be straight on the shelf. We'll talk a little bit about how your shelving interacts with your box and enclosure today as well. So back to these agents of deterioration when we're looking at your facilities and furniture they really focus on all of these these big things little less with the physical forces except where you're talking about earthquakes you can incorporate some of that into your furniture in terms of earthquake strapping and other other ways to help to protect your materials but otherwise those facilities and furniture are dealing with with most of these ones in terms of your individual storage choices they will affect everything to some degree really those physical forces that's going to be your primary place that your storage is is really holding up your protection of your material but also that custodial neglect and dissociation making sure that your your piece all stays together that your catalog numbers are are kept with your object your any pieces don't get detached and dissociated and lost from your from your other object and then also you can do microclimates to deal with things like incorrect relative humidity and your containers can help to deal with light damage and again microclimates to help deal with pollutants I kind of have started to think about designing storage and breaking it down into these like seven s's which I hope will be useful for you there is looking at your size and shape of your object and how that interacts with the area that you have to store things with so what what are your limitations in space are you working with shelves are you working with hanging racks do you have cabinets with drawers do you just have large open areas and huge giant objects and ideally what orientation and shape should your object be in is it something that is best stored flat is it something that can be upright how how is something going to be safest you may not be able to do that in your existing storage so you're going to then be thinking about what kind of compromises you might you might make and how to do those most safely and then support that's really looking at how well actually I'm going to go a little more in depth of these as we go through this live so I'll go through a little more quickly there's your support your surface of your material looking at the fragility of your surface or other surface characteristics sensitivity meaning cultural sensitivity how are you storing your object so that it is most respectful to the culture that is associated with that object do are you giving say to the peoples who are culturally associated with that object and making sure that is cared for in a way that is respectful to those traditions and then access making sure that your objects are able to be accessed by researchers or by cultural groups for cultural use and how best you can give access safely for your object and then looking at special environments like microclimates like increased air circulation there's a variety of things that we'll talk about there and then the stability of your storage materials so I always like to kind of start thinking about the what I would like the storage to look like and then choosing materials making sure I have stable materials that fulfill those goals so again looking at size and shape what are your limitations of that storage the orientation I kind of covered some of this already do you have really big objects how are you going to store these really big objects safely and protect them from the environment do you have a little tiny objects how are you going to store them and keep them organized and safe and protected and there's a variety of different ways that you can accomplish those goals and here are some some other things you have a couple of items of clothing either hanging storage or flat storage and how these things can be padded out and protected large textiles potentially being rolled if you have access to rolled storage there are also ways to store large textiles safely in boxes and kind of thinking through those things and what your limitations are is is what's going to be helpful and support this is where we're looking at your individual materials and what they need to be safe in terms of those physical forces there's a piece of a taxidermied great horned owl here and this was made to be hanging on a wall and not given no storage space to store it hanging on a wall safely so that it's protected how can you store that this is a an upright that was made so it could be hooked on using its existing hook but also supported down at the bottom so not all of the weight is is going on that hook and it's not relying on that only that one hook to protect the object or a piece of ceramic that's round bottomed how do you support it so that it's not rolling this solution is using a piece of polyethylene backer rod to create a pot ring or nesting fragile material inside nice little padded containers there's a lot of different ways that you can approach that support and surface are your surfaces extremely friable there's some fragile organic archaeological materials on the left that are there's a burned piece of wood that's got a lot of friable carbon on the surface other plant material that just by its nature does a lot of shedding so how can you reduce the shedding you want both padding to protect it in terms of any vibration removing any of that but you also want a very smooth surface so that just being on a surface isn't abrading that surface and causing more damage on the right you see a pot that was inside a cardboard box for transit and you don't think that a cardboard box is abrasive particularly but you can see where the paint actually transferred and there was some damage that that took place because it was in contact to with this box moving so what very very smooth surfaces can be used or how can you protect the surfaces better in storage and then this concept of choosing culturally appropriate storage in in the work that I've done in the southwest there's been a lot of interactive interaction with tribes that have told us that their preference has been for natural materials not using synthetic plastics these are some pots at the Arizona State Museum that were stored in padded stockinette cotton stockinette pot rings because these were felt to be a little more culturally sensitive culturally appropriate materials to be in contact with the pots than like ffm pot rings and there's a variety of ways that you can come to these decisions but the best the best things that you can do is consultation one of my colleagues Audrey Harrison who's Navajo in Arizona had a really great example of this work when she was working with some planes dresses from Grand Teton National Park there was a mother's dress and a child's dress and the child's dress had actually been um identified as a NAGPRA material um if you're not familiar that's the Native American Graves Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1890 I believe and that governs how a variety of Native American cultural materials can be treated by museums and because this was a NAGPRA piece the park service and um and the parks don't seek to display it at all and give it special consideration during storage in the ultimate hope that it will be repatriated um and during consultation it was actually determined that this child's dress that was um a NAGPRA material was actually associated with uh another adult woman's dress and the tribe expressed a desire for them to be stored together um and for them to be stored with sage it was determined in discussion that there couldn't be active smudging taking place but to to store them together and so Audrey was able to work with the curator at the park and the curator at the storage the NPS storage facility to make sure that that could happen and that these dresses could be together they could be protected um and stored together and stored with with appropriate materials to honor their traditions and that I thought was a really great example of making sure that these culturally appropriate storage solutions could be made to happen and then we have access these are some boxes in Guatemala these are from the site of Awateka in and the Patan region of Guatemala um and it was excavated by um archaeologists largely based in the U.S. and at the end of field seasons um all of the excavated materials are handed over to a government storage facility as I recall and these were particularly items that were um um were seen to be potential uh exhibit objects so they were probably going to be accessed more than other materials and so storage was designed these are all going into um into several trays you see there's actually three different trays here um there's one photo that has um the top on and that's it with the top off showing all of these different objects you can lift out the trays you can kind of see everything easily um and it's also this was it before um before the rehousing into into these and they all fit into a file file style box um to go into the government storage facility and to be best protected there but also easy to access um also you can have tiny materials um here's a little bone all um and it's stored in a bag it's on a card and with the Lara padding and it slides into this bag it can be stored upright with a number of other objects so you can kind of go through them really easily and quickly and see everything without taking them in and out but it is also really easy to take in and out or there's this archaeological textile um from Tonto uh National Historic Site and they this is stored in a mat so that you can see the object and it's actually not stitched down in any way to this backing so that researchers who are wanting to really closely examine um the weave structure can do that and do it from both sides you're actually seeing both sides here um in this picture so you can see how um how accessible it is to researchers and yet it's got a thin layer of this is stable text over the top so that it's actually held in place when the when the mat is closed but that mat just easily opens and you can see it you can actually flip over the textile and access both sides if necessary and there's a muslin backing on the on the backing board that through a nap bond can help to keep that textile in place um without having to stitch it down and then we have these special environments um there are a lot of different reasons to create special environments and I I say special environment and not a micro environment um just because there are other things besides that and we'll get into that a little bit you may want to control humidity um or control oxygen you may want to protect the object from outside pollutants or to contain hazardous materials or to absorb materials that are actually being generated by the collection object that can be harmful to either itself or other nearby materials or you which all of those things are these are micro environments that you would create but you also may want to increase air circulation for certain materials that are off-gassing where actually using an absorbent might not be the ideal solution and we'll talk about that a little bit so plastics in particular are a really big challenge and there are a few at the park service that we had identified as being particular storage problems that we wanted to address um PVC is one uh polyvinyl chloride plastics so you're thinking those kind of some of them are made to look like leather a little bit rubbery surfaces like this little pouch on the left and one of the problems with PVC um is that it it um seeps some of the plasticizers that are in in the flexible PVC um PVC pipes don't have the same same kind of issue that hard PVC but um the flexible PVC has plasticizers inside of it which tend to seep out over time and your normal plastics that you might be more familiar with using in storage like polyethylene um actually can absorb those plasticizers and and drive that that um that reaction forward where the plasticizers are leaching out they're being basically sucked up by the polyethylene and so we need to use very specific materials for storage of PVC to make sure that that doesn't continue and so this is stored in mylar the other um suggested material that doesn't um absorb PVC or react or doesn't absorb the plasticizers in PVC or react negatively is glass which is not always the most ideal storage material given that it is breakable is heavier so mylar polyester is a really nice storage material for PVC and it's also clear so you can still see the objects so this is stored in a little PVC pouch and then put into an archival storage mount on the right is um a small little toy soldier from manzanar and that is a really interesting object it was identified as potentially being yule which is a natural rubber that was actually produced at manzanar um for during japanese internment and it was um only produced for a short period of time there so it's a really unique and interesting object um and we don't have a positive identify identification on it but it it appeared to be possibly a yule object so um particularly important to preserve and this was actually stored in an anoxic environment so this is a laminated plastic um sheet known as escow that's been heat sealed closed with an oxygen absorber enclosed in the bag and that little pink dot you see there is um an indicator and it stays pink as long as there's low oxygen um when the oxygen gets higher which it eventually will um escow is a really good vapor barrier but it's not perfect and so eventually that will um that will turn kind of a purple or blue and then we'll know that the environment needs to be changed out but then there are other plastics like cellulose nitrate or cellulose acetate which generate acidic vapors when they're in storage and when they begin to deteriorate and those acidic vapors can be damaging particularly to metals around them and to other materials and they will continue to to generate um acyclic um degradation process if they're enclosed with acidic vapors so one of the best ways to deal with that um is to actually increase air circulation so this was a solution um at at the NPS storage facility whack in Tucson um developed by Dana Senghi there who um where all of these materials are stored and you'll notice that many of they're stored in a way so that as much of the surface area is exposed to air as possible which is a little unlike other storage mounts we might use but this is to make sure that as much air is getting by and dissipating those acidic vapors as possible and these are stored high up in storage and in an area where where there is a little more air exchange than other areas um you are less likely to want to use absorbance with these kind of things because the absorbance can become quickly depleted and potentially um even dangerous um you may be aware that cellulose nitrate um particularly when in films um like negatives um can actually become somewhat combustible doesn't tend to be as much of a problem with um plastic materials that have that have been made we haven't really seen much in the way of combustion of those spontaneous combustion as with negatives and historic films so these aren't generally stored in cold storage like negatives are but this is um this has been a really interesting and cool storage way and I'm really I'm really interested to hear in the future how this how this goes and if it has really successfully slowed down degradation of these objects. Another place where you want to create microenvironments is often low humidity storage for metals. Some metals are extremely sensitive to humidity particularly iron when there have been chloride present and they can drive their degradation anywhere over 15 percent humidity so getting really low humidity in storage much lower than than you would want in the rest of your storage can be really important these are storage containers that have been made using plastic gasketed boxes like you would use for food storage these are polyethylene boxes they're much thicker than other polyethylene so even though polyethylene isn't always a very good vapor barrier the increased thickness in testing showed that it was able to slow that build up of humidity within the boxes and then you've got silica gel placed in here as well in the back on this drawer you can also see another object that is using that escal and these actually even tend to hold up better over time we did notice that in certain in certain situations the silica gel was getting exhausted rather quickly in these boxes whereas these escal packages were holding their humidity low for a really long time so anytime you're doing any of these micro environments it's important to really go back and look and see what you're what you're actually maintaining and making sure all of these have humidity indicator cards that you can view from the outside so that you know when you your humidity has gone up so that you can address it without having to open boxes and introduce humidity or whatever it is that you're trying to control like would be other would be oxygen and then here's kind of the meat of of what we're going for which is the stability of our storage materials anytime you're buying commercial materials it can be a risk it's always preferable to buy from an established archival museum or conservation supply company they tend to have have testing that they can produce results for oftentimes they've actually done audio testing sometimes that's not possible and whether it's because you're in a in a part of the world where you don't have archival storage companies that that specifically supply those materials or for cost or for availability of various types so when you are buying commercially you do want to look for acid free materials acids are damaging to most materials that we want to protect in our museum storage and so that's kind of one of the first things you'll look for you there are perma life paper which we'll get to in a little bit is kind of the standard for archival storage but photocopying and printing paper is generally fairly stable there's a lot of calcium carbonate fillers that have been added mostly because they're cheap and they're they make the paper nice and bright white and they actually tend to be such a large alkaline reserve in the paper that it it keeps them stable for a long period of time so when you're printing records or need paper for other things you are generally okay using your standard photocopy paper but there is no guarantee it's not classed as acid free so that is something you should try to look for plastics the plastics you want to try to look for from museum storage here in the us we have numbers for recycling on a lot of plastic materials so you want to look for numbers one two four and five um number one is polyethylene terrap salate um and then you've got high density and low density polyethylene um got uh oh i've got polypropylene on my slides twice sorry and polypropylene um again when they are commercially available products you are likely to have additional plasticizers that have been added and well the plasticizers in polyethylene might not be as obvious a problem as plasticizers leaching out of historic pvc um they can cause problems so when you're using plastic bags things like ziplock bags that you buy off the off the shelf of the store may be less ideal than little baggies that you can buy from um your archival suppliers um is also with with baggies in particular um often as as we saw in that slide earlier if you're if you've got bags that are sized really well for your objects that can help make your storage safer for your materials you can store things stacked together almost like index cards and they can stay safe and stable you can you can build housing for them that is smaller and uses less materials so there are a lot of reasons to um use various sizes of bags that may be more appropriate sizes for your materials than like one large sandwich bag um and then textiles this is probably a place where you can do pretty well commercially um in conservation and museums we tend to use a lot of cotton muslin unbleached cotton muslin and that you can get commercially really easily and I would just say to make sure that you wash it before using there's almost always sizing and starches that have been applied and those we want to get rid of um and that you can just wash and dry in your normal washer or dryer situation and and that will be helpful um starting off with paper products and now we're getting into those archival materials that we're that you can get from your archival suppliers you can use everything and there are applications for everything from tissues through normal like bond weight paper to folder stock or thicker card stock um boards and then corrugated boards um if you have to use materials that are not necessarily acid-free or you don't know you have old reused materials that you're using you can use papers that you know are good to line the interiors and to line any places where you may have contact between your objects and your storage material so using an acid-free material um can be really useful um just to line a material if you have to use regular corrugated board um lining the inside is a good first step to to protect in your objects and I just want to quickly talk about buffered versus unbuffered paper and why you would use them buffered papers um or boards use um for tissue uses an alkaline reserve that's been added this can help to do a few things that can help to um absorb acids that are generated by materials that they're in contact with um and it can they can help to maintain their own stability over time both in terms of those those acids coming from other materials and any acids generated from wood paper pulp that was used to make them uh buffered materials are great to use with most paper artifacts with cotton and other plant-based textile materials and fibers but you don't want to use them for most photographs particularly color photographs or with protomaceous textile materials like silk or wool that's where you would want to use unbuffered materials um whenever in doubt go with unbuffered um unbuffered uh even if you're using them with acidic materials they aren't going to actively damage your object um whereas using buffered inappropriately can actually cause damage to um some materials and then there's also materials that have micro chamber um technology um some of them are called micro chamber some of them are called art care it's a product manufactured by nelson frame bridge and those actually um have zeolites built into um into the paper products and zeolites um are aluminum silicate um structures that can trap um other materials inside of them be they pollutants acids other things like that so they can very actively help to preserve your materials in a way that even buffered materials cannot um buffered materials will do some um neutralizing of excess acids but the zeolites in the art care products actually can can more actively pull out and trap acids and other materials that are in your objects so they can be really cool when used appropriately but they are also very pricey so just some some photos of different materials again there's there's tissues you can use them for wrapping materials for interleaving you can use them for bunching up and and adding padding to to textiles um there's your permalife paper um and you've got card stock and folder stock you can use them to make boxes and trays that the heavier weight ones or even the light weight ones can be used for small uh trays and boxes for little lightweight objects um you can use them to make support boards to go into bags um there's really you can use them for interleaving in between things um or heavier boards for making boxes um mat board for making mats um that can be used really as a good good storage material for flat objects um and then there's um uh boards used for cardboard tubes that can be used to store textiles or large flat flexible objects um and you can see a bunch of those tubes on the right um and then corrugated board um and I'll just point out that um there are different types of fluting on boards um and I believe it's that the um the eflute is actually like thinner and stronger and the eflute is a little bigger and bulkier and you can get those double corrugated um I haven't seen cross corrugated board in a while which is when you have the corrugation going one way in one board and the other way in another and that makes for a much stronger board support so if you have a really large object that you're needing to create a handling tray or a support board for um that cross board is really good but you can also make that yourself by taking two pieces of uh regular board and and gluing them together um great for making making boxes um there is also bigger um thicker heavier weight materials um this is called a hex amount I think um and it's kind of a hexagonal structure in between two boards and that is a lightweight material that can be used for for even bigger things and then moving on to plastics we've kind of discussed some of those different types of plastics um some of the guesswork is taken out when you're buying them from archival suppliers but the kinds of materials that you're looking at are going to be boards foam blocks and planks foam sheets um thinner plastic sheets um like the mylar that we talked about tyvek is a polyethylene um that can be used and comes in different textures and weights um Teflon um just like the Teflon that is inside your non-stick pans and that we are hearing more about why that isn't a good idea to cook with but it can be great material for collection storage um in those earlier slides I showed of the um the organic archaeological materials um those cavities were all lined with Teflon because it's very smooth non-stick and it is really nice for those very soft friable surfaces you can also use it to wrap things that are very sensitive um without it then pulling off some of that surface so there's a lot of ways it can be used it's not always the um easiest material to work with um but it's it's a really useful material when you have really fragile things um just polyethylene sheets that can be used for dust covers um or for wrapping certain things or for making your own bags you can heat seal poly polyethylene sheets into custom bags um and of course those plastic bags that you can buy to two size all the different sizes that you can get so here's kind of a look at the different plastic boards and and foams that you can use um at the on the bottom there's coroplast you can use it in much the same way that you can use all of the paper boards but sometimes plastic board is preferable um you can carve um this ethyl foam polyethylene foam into shapes and cavities and cutouts um you can use it for posts in between different layers of boards when you're storing multiple things together in a box um there's a couple of different kinds of baccarat that are available um this is round the round baccarat that's kind of the most common there's also this um uh trapezoidal baccarat that's now available um sometimes you can get um trirod it's I don't think it's so readily available anymore it was originally manufactured for use in building log cabins so it's this triangular um much finer cells um foam polyethylene foam in triangles um that was really great because you could cut it and it was very smooth on all surfaces even the cut surfaces you can see on this um trapezoidal polyethylene these angled surfaces are the cut surfaces and they're a lot rougher so you have to be careful of how you're using it or covering that with another smoother material if it's in contact with objects but both this and this can be used in a variety of ways to make bumpers for trays to keep objects in place um to make rings you can see a ring here you can see a ring here so there are a variety of ways that you can use those those types of baccarat and then there's your various sheets and um and other products um there's the thin foam sheeting you can get in a variety of thicknesses that can be great for lining things um this is volara um it's a really beautiful closed cell foam very soft um really nice for for cutting small things um cutting little cavities um i really like it for those card mounts that go into bags to cut out a little a little space for them um you've got your tyvek that comes in this soft much more flexible surface or the very smooth um little more rid little more rigid little more foldable and this is what that teflon sheet looks like over on the right um that you can use to kind of conform and lie into um into cavities that you're lining i like to kind of cut or use it with ethophoam and i'll cut around the edge of the cavity partway in and tuck it in with a spatula or bone folder to hold it in place and then there's clear plastics in the middle there's mylar it can be used um not just for storing pvc but it makes great enclosures for paper materials um there is tube um two polyethylene sheeting that you can get and we found that really interesting for storing um uh potentially pesticide treated animal skins um and bird skins um so not the not necessarily the taxidermied materials that are big and like formed into poses but the natural history collections that are just a little bird skin i think i've got some some images of that in here as well and then there's textiles and nonwoven sheets um you'll see the cotton tool tape on the left that's actually so useful for so many things tying things together tying things on you can make little tags and labels with that that can be stitched to to things um you can use it for nonadhesive joins um so if you want to tie a box together and not be using any adhesives for the box it can be really useful for that um creating handles for trays there are so many things that you can do with um cotton tapes um we use a lot of polyester batting um with with um either tyvek over top or um of course the cotton unbleached cotton muslin um i mentioned stable text earlier which was a really nice polyester fabric um that could actually be like melted along edges to create really fine um seams um and like even heat cut into shape and that unfortunately is not available anymore the closest thing available now is a polyester organza which can be used kind of similarly and silk creepling can be used similarly but because it is silk it also can can degrade over time a little more easily um remand holotecks are both spun bonded materials that that can be used for a variety of things including interleaving including support fabrics including covering things and then materials used in specialized environments um there's oxygen scavengers um there's rp systems which is revolutionary preservation systems which is a material developed by Mitsubishi and ageless are kind of the two most commonly used ones in conservation and with those oxygen scavengers you need to use a vapor barrier marvel seal which is an aluminized um laminate material um or escal which i showed before um marvel seal i think is a little easier to get but because it's aluminized it's opaque in color so you can't see through it um whereas the escal is nice because you can actually see through it so that means that in terms of access you can get visual access for an object much more easily so the bag doesn't need to be opened as much to see objects to do inventory to do whatever else that you might need to do with with an object that um with the escal you don't need to open and then desiccants um which also um are good to use with vapor barriers um that's like your silica gel and that helps to reduce relative humidity inside um an environment and then there's those polyethylene gasketed boxes those food storage boxes that we talked about um those are really nice in terms of access because you can just pop them open to get access but again we do see some leakage of those a little more more um a little quicker leakage um in terms of the humidity um getting in and those aren't as good for using with the oxygen scavengers um because uh when when the oxygen scavengers work they reduce the volume significantly in a container and so that would suck in and then it ends up in those those gasketed boxes it ends up breaking that seal um when it starts to suck in and then you just get get everything coming in which may be part of the problem that we've observed with the gasketed boxes and the desiccants as well and then there's um those art care boards that I discussed before in the zeolites um those are really great for enclosing things whether it's framed prints or um other materials you may have materials that have a lot of um smell to them even if they've they've been in a fire um zeolites are really good at absorbing that odor and then there's silver cloth or um there's also corrosion intercept uh both used um to help to preserve metals um particularly like uh for the corrosion intercept you might use it for um copper alloys and the silver cloth used for silver those both have sacrificial metals embedded in the material that corrode before the pollutants will reach the object that you're protecting and these are some examples of all of those on the top is the marble seal so you can see how that is not uh you can't see through it but it is a really excellent vapor barrier um the silver cloth below there and on the right those are those um bird skins I was talking about using that polyethylene tubing to heat seal and then adhesives um we these are again just for mounts these are not materials that we'd use on your objects but hot melt adhesive um there are a couple of different ones available there's a lower melt that's available for foams and a higher melt that's available for board um double stick tape um and then we found again um in sun tribal consultations where we're wanting to use more natural materials um wheat starch paste or fish glue um fish glue is nice you can buy um high-tech fish glue already made and so it can that can be really convenient to use and it dries a little more quickly than wheat starch paste and then there's not a piece of methods like I talked about with using the cotton tapes and tools that you want to use you need boards to cut on different kinds of knives for cutting your foams and carving your foams tools to uh fold um there's a bone folder there to cut metal rulers um it's a whole variety of different types of tools available we really found I really found that using ceramic knives is really nice with foam um they of course if you drop them they will break they can get shipped really easily but they do cut through ethyl foam really nicely and now we're to the point that we have some specific challenges that were submitted by a couple of webinar attendees who are hopefully here with us today um and I'm not I I'm not sure whether they wanted their institution's names so feel free to pipe up if you want to um to say that it's you so I didn't I didn't associate your names or institutions but if you if you want to take credit go for it this one was um submitted um from an institution that um annually has an event where they have to remove all of their um art from the walls in in several galleries and currently their method for storing these is using these pool noodles which are ethyl foam which are actually a pretty great material because these are probably commercially available ones they may have some other materials in them that might not be ideal but it's actually a really cool idea um the concern that that person who submitted it had was that the pool noodles um might not be as effective for that separation as possible but also that they had some frames that were really ornate and that might be being damaged by them and that concern is is really quite accurate um putting on and taking off these pool noodles in this way really could be damaging to the frames so um what I would recommend is just this this is from um in the resources I sent I um linked um cci notes and this is from a couple of different cci notes 10 10 2 and 10 3 this is using padded blocks so using um a big foam block that's that's wrapped in in stable materials to keep the painting up off the floor you want to keep um keep objects whenever they're stored on or near the floor you want to keep them raised up and that's both to keep them clean keep them a little safer from from a whole variety of things from pests to being kicked um and also for water any sort of water emergencies giving them a a couple inches off the floors is going to be very helpful and um the recommended way of temporary storage of paintings is just using these padded blocks to keep things off the floor separating paintings with boards with rigid boards corrugated board generally um and you want those boards just to be bigger than each painting and it's generally best to face um but your painting on the back you probably don't want facing the wall but then the others you want facing the wall and you don't want more than like four to five paintings together and it may actually prove to be a lot easier to do this a lot quicker than the pool noodle solution so I hope that this is useful and then um the other submission I got was for a museum that is a collection of large industrial machinery um let me just fix this slide for a second I don't know what happened a couple of um a couple of shots of their storage where it's a lot of large industrial machinery they're in the early stages of doing a complete overhaul of their storage right now they have large objects mixed with smaller objects that know that they're going to be adding shelving and rehousing small objects onto the shelving and I I think that the largest question was kind of how to address all of these large objects and right now you can see a lot of the large objects are stored on pallets on the floor and pallets are a great way to keep things up off the floor as I as I mentioned before um but you can see here there's Harley Davidson's stored on here you can get really large shelving and I know I wasn't going to really get into shelving but getting really large purpose built shelving that can support um some of those large heavy objects putting those large heavy objects onto shelves means that you're going to also have to have appropriate machinery to use them and such as pallet jacks and forklifts and securing the things to the pallets that are being put up higher um large objects also might need custom very strong cradles to kind of keep them in place and strapping to hold them onto the onto the pallets and then things that are staying on the floor which is acceptable as long as they're raised up on those pallets keeping them protected from dust and light with dust covers and this one is a dust cover made with Tyvek you can use polyethylene sheeting you can even use muslin depending on your your needs plastic sheeting will be more likely to protect from water if if that's a big concern and Tyvek will allow a little bit more air exchange as well the textiles Tyvek's kind of that middle ground it'll give a little bit of protection from water but not total protection from water but the polyethylene sheeting will also allow you to see what's there without having to to lift it up and look so there's just some some suggestions and I hope that's useful and I think that we're about there for questions and answers now so I will uh peek at the questions and answers that we have that was great thank you I was just sitting here thinking but like I've been in this field for about just 15 years now and even like being a registrar and it's so good to just have these sometimes it's almost like refreshers of being like oh yeah like little things that you just kind of remind yourself of yeah if you don't deal with a particular type of collection or I don't know it's just something you haven't thought about in a long time it's just nice to kind of hear the information yeah this is it um you know the most probably the most complex or technical of the topics covered by by C2C but it is a good really basic um overview and so that's what I was trying to to accomplish for folks and that's what you need sometimes is just an overview because I mean there's so many people out there with diverse collections that you just never know what you come across so I'm going to add real quick before we get into Q&A I just put a link in the chat for our resource page so Maggie put together fabulous resources for this webinar they're all linked on that page and then eventually there'll be the recording for this webinar on there as well and there's also the survey link that do that at the end of the presentation so just so you guys know um all right so let's start looking at the question and a lot of the questions are people asking for recommendations on materials so where to get them where to buy them I know you had built something like that in your resource sheets as well so let's start looking at some of those and maybe we can kind of get those out of the way first um someone says what adhesive do you recommend to join corrugated paper board to form cross corrugated board um usually we've used um just hot melt glue um when you're doing really big sheets you have the problem of making sure that as you're putting it on it doesn't it doesn't cool so much that it's not sticking so that can be a little bit of a challenge um you may want to in that case go to one of the other materials um like we'd search paste it's going to be a longer process it's going to take a lot longer to to dry but you you have a little more working time so you you have choices you can you can use any of those materials that that I talked about really perfect um the gasketed polyethylene boxes I've been able to find are fairly small are larger ones available anywhere there have been I know we um at at WAC where we were doing this project there was um a lot of inconsistency of the supply um of what we could get and where but there were some bigger containers available not giant um they weren't they weren't big enough to you know store huge objects but we could get we could get some fairly large ones and then if you can't switching to the s-cow um or marvel seal material can be really useful and again those are going to be better vapor barriers um the s-cow I was just looking the other day and the supplier we used to get it from didn't didn't look like they had it as readily available so I am concerned that it might not be um as readily available I don't know if it's a pandemic thing or and it's temporary or what but marvel seal I think still is widely available you just have that issue where you can't you can't see through it um which is problematic um we did do some testing um with like bag seals and I know that art the Mitsubishi product the RP they they sell the s-cow um but there we didn't buy s-cow from them and I don't know if that's because they had stopped supplying it in the US or if we were just able to get it cheaper but um they actually sell that uh bag seal specifically for s-cow packages so but I think we were buying just commercially available kind of the really nice chip bag seal things so that we did have some that were sealed uh I think that as long as it's a pretty flat seal it works really well if you have like folds going into there or like rolling the sides and if it's a more dimensional package it doesn't seal as well but again just keeping those humidity indicator cards in there and keeping track of them getting some kind of schedule to check can be really useful. Yeah someone actually did say can you please spell or explain a s-cow? It is on the glossary sheet so if you look at the glossary sheet I did try to put a lot of these more unusual materials on there but s-cow is e-s-c-a-l Okay um there's a couple questions talking about hot melts and if a type of adhesive you recommend both low temp and high temp do you have any? Yeah there oh um I think that's on the glossary sheet as well um that has the types there um I am blanking just a tiny bit on the the material off the top of my head let me let me see if I can get there really quickly I'm sorry that's fine and I put the link again for the resource page on there if you guys scroll down to the end you should be able to pull pds in the presentation. I've got too many windows now you can help tearing your screen too if you want to just oh it's a little easier thank you no no worries let me help you okay thank you okay um yeah I'm sorry I don't want to like waste time trying to look for this right now but yeah but I'm pretty sure I do have that in the glossary the materials of the of the high melt and low melts they are also at the very least I think university products carries them um and so you can look at them them on there um this is I think probably a question that a lot of us are in this is I am with a very small museum with a small budget so I find the archival company solutions are just beyond our resources is making one's own boxes a more affordable solution that's been buying ready-made boxes and would a cost-effective measure be to buy more commercially available storage containers and use the unbuffered unbuffered board and tissue to line them so if you can get stuff yeah yeah and that's exactly the thing is just figuring out what's what is most realistic for you in your budget and yes lining um lining poorer materials with good materials is probably going to be your cheapest way to go um and then in terms of making your own boxes you really have to factor in the time the staff time it takes because that's a real cost too and um so yes you can save money by building your own boxes and you can also have really great effects by being able to having have really custom boxes that really fit within your spaces that can be really useful but the staff time that it takes to make them can be really a challenge if you get volunteers in and have them doing it that could be a really great way to go so yeah well i know and like i know the people who i know who are good at box making like i am a novice like i can do basic ones but like i do some people who are very good at it you know what i mean so the fact that they knew how to and you had a measure and all that kind of stuff it's again that was always the skill set but i was like man i wish i had a better doing that because i would watch them do it and i was like this is magic because like some people love box making and some people don't and i am not one who loves box making i can make a decent box i guess but um it's it's not my favorite thing to do yeah um but i know people who love boxes and make beautiful beautiful boxes and can do it so much more quickly than me to oh yeah totally and i like what you said too is like you i always think about this that you know you walk around places you you sit there and you try to do the best you can what you write you try to be pragmatic about your approach and sometimes you can have all acid free everything looks great all chloroplasts sometimes you can't so you just do your best and you kind of work within your budget and you you know what you want but you have to be yeah never i i don't want anyone to take away from this that they're never gonna do well enough they are never gonna be able to afford all the best materials and so therefore you know throw up your hands it's gonna there's always something little that you can do to make your storage better and just kind of understanding how to make those best decisions that you can make given your very real circumstances is what i want people to take away from this and i i hope that that's useful yeah no it is and i also have that when you said about the cotton tool tape i literally wrote down my heart cotton tool so it's like literally the first thing if ever i walk into places and they don't have any i'm like what's my huge full of cotton tool thing because you can use it for so many things so i think that you can um are there any precautions that need to be taken when storing paper in plastic that you know well i would say the the biggest issues to worry about with paper in plastic is um is worrying about humidity um and creating a mold situation um because trapping humidity in with your paper is going to be dangerous um so i yeah i think that that's probably the the biggest issue also if you have old um old acidic papers you're kind of trapping them in there with that um so having some sort of other material in there to both buffer the acids and buffer the humidity could be useful um but also just not fully sealing the plastic if you have a an enclosure and it's it's only sealed on you know two or three sides or even just as a holder is is a nice way to go too that's good as someone mentioned in the chat that mountain plains museum association has a great purchasing discount for its members to buy archival supplies from the big suppliers and that other associations often have similar discount programs so it's always good to check in and just yeah so thank you for sharing that yeah um some of those powers zeolite materials for natural history specimens we have marine collections that tend to smell in exhibit cases i live in the key so i get that smell i don't i don't know of any real downsides of zeolites so i would say go for it if you can store a small amount of zeolites in with the cabinet and you can you can buy zeolites commercially um there's a product that we've gotten recently at um at like home depot and ace and things it's like gonzo i think it comes in a plastic bag and it looks like just a bunch of rocks in a bag and um that can be hung in an area um there's there's actually a ton of commercially available ones and i i think as long as they're not giving off an odor like that there haven't been perfumes added to it you're probably going to be pretty safe because they're not they're sucking stuff in they're not putting it out so um so this is i work in a hospital archives with a large collection of approximately 2019 to 20th century surgical instruments some metal most in original cases i'm not sure gasketed boxes are in our budget but would silica gel or escal be helpful to use in regular archival boxes to lower the humidity unfortunately no unless you're creating that um enclosed environment where you're not getting a vapor exchange you're just gonna be throwing that silica gel away basically it's just gonna get exhausted and you're gonna start over um sometimes your cabinets are well enough gasketed that um if you have if you have good metal cabinets with gaskets sometimes those are enough to to hold a little bit of an environment and keep that a little lower um but um yeah unfortunately um it's kind of either getting a um a good environment in your whole building or in your whole storage area or dealing with those micro environments now i would say not not every metal needs a micro environment not every metal needs that you you want those environments for things that are actively corroding um metals that are showing very active um active corrosion like powdery flaking metals are are what you need to worry about and a lot of the time those um are gonna be like archaeological metals um things that have been in um environment where they've been subjected to like chlorides and other things that have gotten in there and are are making that driving that corrosion reaction um so i would say don't don't try to do everything but if you do have some specific materials that you're concerned about trying to get all those stored together in a limited number of containers is where you want to probably focus whatever money that you you do have that you can put towards that yeah when i'll say i they went on to say that they're using eco home and foam sheeting to create enclosures within the archival boxes to reduce movement and objects touching each other which i think is super smart right that needs more i can understand the corrosion being hurt but just them banging into each other i think you have more immediate damage so that was a good yes on prioritizing those physical forces right and that's like that's where your individual storage is most is like the biggest powerhouse is dealing with those physical forces so yes stabilizing them in a container so that they're not bumping into each other is where you want to focus your your energy yep exactly um in order to create a non oxygen bag plastic do you recommend some extra information or a bibliography and they would also like to know more about the pink the blue oxygen indicators um yeah those are usually those those oxygen indicators are usually sold where you can buy the oxygen scavengers they usually sell it's um i think it's usually called either an oxygen indicator or i've seen it called an ageless i when it's sold with with ageless um and usually i know with ageless when you buy it there's there's one that comes with the container of ageless so you can reuse that too and then you can buy additional ones to put in with things and yes there there is a lot of material out there on creating anoxic environments i think that there is some in the resources list that i gave you um and they're um on the resource list it has where you can get some of those materials as well so hopefully you'll find all that in there perfect um someone says an art handler we work with recently recommended dartech film for wrapping a ceramic vessel for packing it is a cast nylon film that is clear and this is in quotation marks softer and more comforting conforming comforting would be funny conforming than my law the description on callus says it can absorb 10 percent of its weight in moisture with something that absorbs water be bad to use for long-term wrapping slash dust well if you're thinking about um like wrapping in dartech versus wrapping in tissue your your tissue absorbs i i don't know the percentage but any sort of cellulosic material is going to absorb some water as well so i would say as long as you're not using it in contact with with metal and now i've lost i lost the question but um for i think was lauren asking about using it for ceramics um i think let me check ceramic vessel for packing yeah um i don't i don't know that there's a reason not to use it um for packing for like moves and things i really like for ceramics um wrapping in a layer of tissue and then in a bag um i think that dartech would be a more expensive thing to use than than that that particular way i don't know if it's for a longer term situation if you'd be gaining much i'm not as familiar with dartech um i haven't used it in years and when i used it it was in um in the context of painting treatment a million years ago so um uh i can't speak to that one so clearly but somebody was just talking about it yesterday so i wish i had um gotten more information then so we can follow up later but thank you for that um someone asked will hot melt glue work for adhering chloroplast boards as well yes yes and you can get away with the higher temp one for chloroplast it's not going to melt with the high temp um in the same way that foam foam well excellent this one i think is super interesting because i i think one of the biggest challenges we're going to see over the next probably 25 years is all this weird plastic stuff that emerged right so someone has we have inflatable pool toys last mattress pdc what would be the best way to store that object they say inflated question oh yeah what a good question i know and i i don't know i i guess i would be tempted to say yes and i think i've seen some some conservators working with flexible plastics like that and actually filling them with inert materials um unfortunately what i think i've seen before maybe hasn't been with pvc but um they i think they were using like um polyethylene beads i wonder if there's a different kind of small bead or something like that that could be used for the inside i wouldn't want to use the polyethylene because of the issue i discussed earlier where you're potentially drawing out some of those plasticizers in the pvc um but definitely i would consider inflated because it will embrittle over time and you'll get hard creases um but thinking that it would be nice to fill it with something other than air so it won't deflate um so i'd have to think on that i would be happy to follow up with you i i'm pretty sure i've seen some references to that to to something very similar in the in the conservation literature so i could maybe find that track that down and figure out what was used and if it was pvc that just seems like such a challenge so i mean i'm thinking like how would you get it in there like if it's like a true you know blow up mat like things i've always dealt with it's like it's going to have like a little you know the valves you know what i mean with the thing so just because they're like usually those valves if it's the kind that you like blow up there is a space so you can get stuff in there but it would have to be a small enough bead to get through there and you have to like i mean that that does seem to fall within the realm of conservation treatment almost more than more than just storage so you might want to get a local conservator um on board to to kind of help out with that you know to figure out the solution and kind of help with with implementing it um but yeah then once once you decide how the shape that it's going to be in i think definitely in closing it in in mylar would be a good way to go yeah and then the issue too is just once you blow it up like let's say you find figure out a way to safely do that then you're gonna have this giant thing yeah like yeah and then use the challenge of taking up space and making sure that you you have it in a safe space yeah so that's something i'm gonna be thinking about like in the middle of the night i'm gonna wake up at 2 a.m be like i don't know why you would do that um someone did say in the chat too you might ask the folks the boston children's museum they might have something similar which that's a good idea it's just to reach out to children's museums see how they deal with that if they have a collection you know to meet which some might um you might reach out to them yeah the um the birdskins poly tubing sealed on all sides um yes here's a little example um there it's just tubing and sealed on one end and then for those we actually had a label that was then sealed on the other side um so that would have all of the materials i did a bunch of rehousing at zion national park with their bird skin collection and they sent me a little gift after nice and i love it and it's a great little example to show but yeah um someone's asking about humidity problems on a budget so they're a small 100 plus year old building store a number of objects from swords and surgical tools to old books how can we improve the current humidity problems on a budget is 95 i feel your pain i'm saying it's 90 degrees outside and 61 in here and i'm at 50 yeah it's it is the struggle is real um yeah uh coming from the desert southwest where i worked before where our we were always um dealing with having usually lower than museum ideal um humidity to kind of being in other parts of the country in the world where the humidity is way higher a lot of the time is is a real challenge and i would say that just really triaging your collection um because what you can't do with with your overall environment um through the mechanical side you can look at your most vulnerable materials the things that you're most worried about starting with anything that you're seeing actively deteriorate in ways that are are linked to problems of high humidity or fluctuations in humidity taking those things and addressing them first and if that is a micro environment um i should also say that one thing that that is a really um good thing to do for some things this doesn't i wouldn't i wouldn't recommend this from metals so much but other things that are sensitive to environmental fluctuations having them stored in in like layers of a cellulosic material so wrapped in tissue enclosed in a cardboard box in a cabinet those things are all going to kind of slow those changes so at least you're not going to be seeing problems of rapidly changing shape due to humidific humidifying and dehumidifying um kind of getting that that curve of that up and down humidity to kind of like slow down a little bit the more um hygroscopic materials so um paper-based materials largely that are around your object the more that's going to slow down um metals that you're not just trying to slow the change you want to get it down so that's where you really want to go to the micro environment um but for other materials that are sensitive to those changes but aren't damaged by the higher humidity in the same way as metals having more cellulose materials around um might be one way to address it that helps yeah i was going to say that fluctuation question is always the thing that i struggle with because oftentimes i feel like especially with some objects all of a sudden you took them if you're in a situation like they're in and you also put them in the perfect temperature and humidity that the object can almost get damaged because of that change right so i'm always more thinking of okay how do we just make it steady so we don't feel fluctuation for that particular object that'll probably help overall more than anything yeah and and in the desert southwest where we had the consistent lower humidity um we were dealing with a lot of archaeological materials um organic archaeological materials that were used to very low humidity right they'd been in a cave for hundreds of years and that's why they survived this low humidity now it may not be um the perfect environment for you know paper or other cellulosic materials because a lot of that tends to lose that bound water when you're in a low humidity so it's not flexible anymore but it's stable and you're never going to get that humidity back in there right and so because we were dealing largely with materials that had been in that low humidity environment for most of their existence that was acceptable um now our other storage space that had archives that was a little higher um priority to keep that humidity a little bit higher um but the most of the objects were pretty happy being a little lower than the you know ideal music museum environment and so that may be the same for you especially um in other parts of the country and other parts of the world if you're dealing with collections that are from your area that may be the case that whole area question yeah no well exactly and just this will leave the topical and I always thought about that because again I work in the southeast right so if I would also take my stuff out to the desert I'd be like whole just watching it like dry become us like in like five seconds so it's yeah it's the same yeah um so we'll do a couple more because it is 230 so 230 eastern excuse me um we are planning on building our own storage boxes with corrugated polypropylene will hot melt blue work or should we buy the metal buttons to join the sides of the boxes hot melt will work yep hot melt will work you can if they're really big um so that you're having a lot of force pulling those corners apart then the metal might be good or the twill tape have a lot of twill tape um but yeah for the most part hot glue will work make sure you're gonna clamp those corners when the when it's cooling just so that you're not having it already trying to pull apart while it's cooling so for our last one and I'm gonna pull all these questions and send them to Maggie and we'll figure out a way of following up with people because there's still some good questions floating around in here um if you do not know the types of plastics your objects are made of how would you recommend storing them taking inspiration they could be yeah um it is a challenge and um um we at the the at WAC the park service facility I was at for so long we did big plastic surveys and there were still a lot that we didn't know we had specific tests that we could do for pvc and for cellulose nitrate um and then we looked at certain characteristics if they're smelling if they smell like vinegar you you pretty much know you've got cellulose acetate um if they smell really bad and kind of look like the cellulose acetate but don't smell like vinegar that's probably cellulose nitrate um but you can also have newer or or less degraded versions of those that aren't necessarily off-gassing yet and so it can be really challenging and it's challenging for conservators to identify all those different plastics um so I don't have really good overall um stored recommendations for you except that in general I would say having increased air circulation is better um but it's not true across the board because um with with rubber that's not going to be the case and rubber's not a synthetic plastic but it um it sometimes it can be really hard to tell all of the things that you may have um but but rubber is going to do better with low oxygen so that's the opposite but I don't think if you have um a lot of those other plastics increased air circulation is still going to be okay I would just be careful about light exposure yeah that makes sense well it is two afters it's 232 so I'm going to have to wrap it up for today um thank you Maggie that was great and someone actually said in the chat it's one of the best C2C care webinars they've been in recently good job I could really appreciate it I'm going to remind everyone that there is the link to the resource page which is where you guys registered for this webinar and there's the survey link for this webinar as well both in the chat so please take those if you have a few minutes I want to say a huge thank you to Maggie again a huge thank you to Learning Times who are technical producers IMLS, FAIC, all those fabulous people um we are skipping August for our free webinar series just because there's a lot of a lot of other stuff happening right now we'll leave you back in September and for the rest of the fall and we have a course hopefully watching at the end of September on Native American Collaboration so we're looking forward to that one as well so keep an eye on our website and thank you all for joining us so if you have a safe August and we'll see you here back in September thanks so thanks again Maggie thank you