 our host Robin Bauer-Kilgo from FAIC. Go ahead Robin. Hi everyone, welcome to another Connecting to Collections Care webinar. Let me start by acknowledging that this webinar is being moderated on the traditional lands of the Mikosuke and Seminole people and their ancestors and I pay my respect to elders both past and present. So I'm going to go through some introductory slides very quickly and then we're going to go ahead and hand this over to our presenter. You are here today for the webinar Collections Intake in a Remote Work Environment. We're running from about one o'clock to two thirty-ish eastern so we hope you enjoy the program today. Again my name is Robin Bauer-Kilgo and I am the CDC Care Coordinator and you just saw Mike Morneau, our senior producer at Learning Times. We're here to help with any kind of tech issues you might have so if you have any comments feel free to put them in the chat. For anyone who hasn't done one of our programs before I wanted to refer you to our website ConnectingToCollections.org. On that website you will find links to all of the webinars, the archive webinars of our program. We've been doing CDC care for the 10 years now so there's quite a library of webinars found on there. You'll also see an archive of our courses and links to our curated resources which I encourage you to go look at as well and also our community. The community is a moderated forum where you can go and ask Collections Care questions that we have some fabulous folks who volunteer for us who moderate it and make sure you're getting good information. We're also currently looking for new monitors so if you happen to be a conservator or a conservator in training and you are interested in becoming a monitor for the CDC care community I encourage you to go to our website and there's some information on how you can sign up to do that on there. I did want to talk a couple quick notes about some upcoming webinars we had planned. As many of you might know at FAIC they do a program every May called May Day Prep about how you can do small things around your community or your institution to prepare yourself for disasters and emergency. Well as part of that program we have two webinars planned for May. May 5th we have tools for emergency planning. You will be able to find out about some new tools that are being developed by AIC and the Northeast Document Conservation Center that can help you with emergency planning and disaster planning. Plus we're going to talk generally about tools that people like to use for that subject so I encourage you to sign up for that webinar. At the end of the month on May 31st we're going to be talking about sustainability as disaster preparation. So for that topic we're going to be talking to some folks who are dealing with emergencies and disaster planning and are trying to incorporate sustainability practices within what they do at their institutions. So again encourage you to go register for both of those webinars. We're pretty soon going to have announcements on our June and July webinars as well. You can find out all about those on our website. We also have two places online that you can go to to find out other information on social media which are Facebook and Twitter. So I encourage you to follow those as well if you haven't already. As Mike said we have two ways you can communicate with our speaker and myself today. You have the chat box and the Q&A box. The chat box is there for people to say hello so we can see where they're at. They can also tell us what the weather is like because people always like to do that. I'm currently still in Florida so it continues to be hot but I've always encouraged to see what people talk about the weather around the country. The Q&A box is there for questions. So if you have a question for our presenter at any point please put it in the Q&A box and we will try to get to it at the end of the presentation. Please direct the questions to the Q&A box. It makes it easier for us to track them throughout the actual presentation itself. So without further ado I'm going to go ahead and hand this over to our speaker Sarah Coppolis. She is an instructor of the Northern States Conservation Centers Museum classes online and registered at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum and today she's going to be talking to us about all the fabulous new ways we've learned how to do intake and processing in this still digital world we continue to live in. So I'm going to go hand this over to Sarah and we will see you at the end during the Q&A. Sarah, feel free to go ahead. Thank you Robin. I'm just going to switch over here to my presentation. All right everybody, welcome to Collections Intake in a Remote Work Environment. Robin said I'm Sarah Coppolis. I'm really excited to be here today just to talk to you a little bit about all of the things I've been going through at work as we are learning to work in this whole new reality. Pretty exciting and definitely a lot to think about. Just getting started a little bit about me. I have been working in the museum field since around 2006. I'm the registered at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum which is a department of the Wisconsin Veterans Affairs so I do in fact work for the government. I have been there for almost 10 years. There'll be 10 years in June and I've also been teaching for the Northern Conservation Center's online museum program for around eight years. I started around 2015 and with them I teach a class on database saying we talk about founded collections and we also talk about legal issues in collection management. Those are one month classes that happen generally once a year. I've got a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in public history from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and I've also worked in a couple other museums. I'm the history museum at the castle. I worked for the Kenosha Public Museums. One people may have heard of. I've worked for the Harley Davidson Museum and my first stint was with the Rutherford Behave Presidential Center. In my free time I volunteered for the AASLH nomenclature task force and I helped on the addition nomenclature 4.0 and I also served as the President of the Wisconsin Federation of Museums. I'm not doing as much volunteer work these days as you can see in this picture. This is me and my munchkin from a vacation in Hawaii this past spring so I've stepped away from a lot of that. I'm just focusing on teaching in my normal day job right now. So without further ado here's what we are going to be chatting about today more or less in order. First we're going to start off talking a little bit about shifting to remote work. Then we're going to talk about working with collection donors, assessing collections for potential donation, paperwork and processes and we'll wrap it up with some final thoughts in Q&A. It's kind of interesting so these are things that you wouldn't think we'd need to still talk about but as we had shifted into this whole new work environment a lot of things have changed just the way we do our everyday work. So I hope that what we can provide is at least helpful and get you thinking and I'd also really love to hear what other people are doing. Like I said we'll have plenty of time for questions, comments, concerns at the end so please make sure to put those in the correct boxes. Also if you want to go back to a slide if there's something specific you want to cover it may be helpful if you make mention of which slide you'd like us to return to later. So before we get started I was hoping Robin could run the first poll. I want to try to get some idea as to what everyone has been going through and shifting to remote work environment. So I'm going to go ahead and end the poll we can take a look at those results. Great so the question was how did COVID-19 affect your work environment? I'm assuming for everybody that this was the main change that affected our work. So it looks like a majority of us 57% were sent home to work our normal duties. 13% had no change to my work duties or work location that's great. Let's see we've got 10% I was sent home and assigned to projects outside my normal scope. Some people were displaced temporarily we've got a couple people that stayed at work well many of their colleagues were re-assigned or displaced and just a couple of people that were permanently displaced. So that's great that's really helpful for me to understand sort of where everyone is coming from. Let's switch back here. So here you see the various iterations of my remote workspaces and my co-worker Bubba the cat. As you can probably tell my journey started in the dining room at the table and I slowly sort of moved to the couch in the kitchen and eventually we ended up turning a toy room into an office. I was one of those naysayers every week I thought I was going to be going back to work so it took me about a year a little over a year to get to the place where I actually had a set office space in my house. So the first few days for me and this is you know my personal story I remember exactly where I was when things started to close so probably not the best move but I was on my way to a water park with friends and family I had taken a long weekend and we're driving in a car to get there it's about an hour drive and we hear that the schools are closing like oh wow okay we're taking this really seriously. So we enjoyed our weekend at the water park and then that following Wednesday I went back to work we had a staff meeting and for the very first time nobody was sitting next to each other at the table. So we weren't wearing masks yet none of that had happened but we're all kind of spaced out staring at each other and if somebody coughed we were suspicious. So this is the meeting where we were told okay we're going to gather our stuff and we're going to go work from home for two weeks. Okay cool I have about an hour commute each way from my home in Wales, Wisconsin to Madison so I grabbed my laptop I already had a VPN or a virtual private network set up I grabbed it I skipped out the door as fast as I possibly could but this is going to be great. We were really lucky working for the government we had an IT section that was dedicated to making sure we were up and running. I got home and pretty quickly realized that on my super duper old laptop the VPN was not working well they moved to some new technology and what they did is they used horizon so then we could very easily remote in but we had a lot of challenges with just equipment and figuring out what to bring home and we also had some problems with our databases. For the collection we had been using past perfect five which once you remote it in generally worked okay but we were trying to figure out ways to be more efficient. I also found myself sort of as the overseer of the collections database a couple months in people were running out of stuff to do so every week we'd be told oh another week another two weeks and nobody really knew what was going on so for us in Wisconsin this started you know mid-march by about May June nobody had things to do so I was all of a sudden getting calls from people hey do you have any projects we can work on and things we were assigning people were people database cleanup you know we didn't have things like dates and biographical information so we put a lot of people on those types of work and it ended up being great. A lot of our staff we were lucky with this too I'm working for the government they decided really early on that they understood that our workers may now be supporting families and they did not want to let anybody go so while it was optional for most of us our staff did have some optional opportunities for short-term reassignment a lot of people took on pass for the Department of Health and Human Services some people work for the Department of Workforce Development for a little while I helped for a few months with the Election Commission actually and then come July we were starting to be let in the office again and things sort of slowly started going back to normal normal-ish by July August we were allowed in the office maybe one or two days a week and we had to be spaced out I work in a storage facility with just two other co-workers so for us it wasn't a huge deal but our main museum facility to stay closed like probably a lot of you did and we really had to space out our time in the office and that continued for a really long time which sort of led to you having to develop these work spaces and come up with your new normal so tasks have been assigned people are doing all sorts of things they've never done before but lucky for us our database had never looked better in the resources section that I believe it's posted online there's an article from the American Lions of Museums where they give some tips for remote work and I thought some of these tips were really helpful I don't know how many of you are still working from home I think we asked that in a little while but a couple of the key points that I found really helpful maybe some of you might find this helpful as well the first tip they give is just to set aside a designated workspace this is probably not your bed in my instance it was not the couch and it took a while to figure it out I worked all over the house but eventually when we realized that we're gonna be home for a while and I am still home we needed I needed a space it was really set aside for me and it's still not perfect my husband works from home and I can still hear him and I've learned all about his business I've sat here trying to do my own another tip that the alliance gives us is to keep set hours like you wouldn't work a lot of people I think found it super easy working from home to put in way too many hours and we don't need to do that you end up working all day long because we always have stuff we can do don't do that keep track of it make sure you're working you know your eight or your eight and a half hours and then you're done and also I think it's really important to take a lunch break one of the ones that I giggled about one of their tips but I actually think it's pretty useful as well with just to get dressed every day I don't know about you but how many of us have gone to work in our pajamas before I've definitely done it once or twice they suggest that you'd be comfortable but definitely get dressed for your day a couple others that they give us learn how to use your new tools like zoom and Skype and teams or whatever work is thrust upon you so that you're really comfortable using these new platforms they suggest doing some virtual check-ins with colleagues I think this is really important so you don't lose touch with the other people in your office but you also have to be considerate of people who may not be super comfortable or struggling with zoom fatigue and there is an article about zoom fatigue in the resources as well that you might find useful it's a real thing some people are just not comfortable with it so we need to learn new ways of communicating with our co-workers and lastly use the commute time saved for yourself for me this was almost two hours a day I like to walk I might take a class I might take a nap at the end of my day just do something for you all right so if we could do the second pull Robin please what has collecting looked like over the last two years at your institution all right great thanks everybody so kind of an interesting thread it looks like 39% halted during COVID-19 shutdowns then returned to normal intake rates so you're collecting staff for a little bit and then you can return return to normal no change in intake rates was 28% we've got 23% at halted during COVID-19 shutdown then intake rate increased that is neat and then a few people said that they halted during COVID-19 shutdowns and intake never picked back up again so thank you for that again that just sort of helps me understand where everyone is coming from so we're working from home the donors have not stopped knocking on the door right and now we have to sort of figure out what to do with it so initially we shut down collecting so from March to July for sure we did not take anything in the owners kept calling and we needed to eventually figure out a way to meet with them and to take in collections again we had no idea when we were going back to the office so this was something we really needed to figure out and we had a lot of challenges with scheduling I told you we had limited onsite time where staff were only allowed onsite maybe two days a week and it was really important to keep all of our staff safe as well as the donors safe so we tried to figure out okay what can we do and the collection committee met and we made some decisions so one of the things we did was to shift to a single staff member who is going to do all of our intake for us at least initially and it wasn't a staff member you'd probably think it was it was actually one of our archivists decided to take it on so before COVID started most of our collection committee which is made up of our director our assistant director our collection spoke our curator folk and a couple of archivists anybody could take stuff in but anybody could take stuff in but things predominantly came in through our curator and then our archivist so what we decided was just to keep things straight we would have one staff member handle all of the donor visits all of the calls all of everything everything that came into any of our staff members went directly to this person and we had to sort of rethink things like what do we do with the meeting um a lot of donors still wanted to meet with us to talk with us they weren't as afraid of us as we were so what we decided is we had to have scheduled planned meetings only um in part this was because we were closed so people could not do drop-ins but also because we wanted to make sure that this one person was available that we had a large enough space available where people could keep their six feet of distance and still look at the collections we added sign in for contact tracing um we had done sign in before when people were entering and building to look at collection areas but we opened that up to anybody who was coming in and meeting with staff um we did a better job of communicating time frames with donors this was something we sort of had to switch our way of thinking I had always returned collections you know about a month we do a collection committee meeting once a month or so I'd have answers to donors right away and we had to do a really good job of communicating with them how long things were really taking us we also did things like trying to limit what we took in for review so before somebody showed up at the museum we take a look at a large lot as long as it met our mission yes it talks about Wisconsin veteran it tells a story we would take it all in for review and we wouldn't worry about you know having them pick it up or send it back but that was taking up a bunch of time and again we only had this one person working on it so one of the things that we did was to try to do more review by email at least initial reviews so if the person who was meeting with the donors or talking to the donors might have email conversations and phone call conversations first and if he wasn't sure if we wanted to bring something in then what he would do is he would get them to send us some pictures and we would review things that way we also had it to be had to be more flexible with the way we did returns so we still never took everything that came in even when we were trying to be a little bit more selective with the collections that we were looking at we turned from a donor pickup situation where we started shipping everything back so now we ship everything back via FedEx we don't really we weren't letting donors come into pick things up we just shipped it to like a no non-essential onsite visit so a donor may still come in to meet with meet with us to talk about their collection to do the handoff it's fine one big space but then after that we would do things via FedEx and all this way on our agency is pushing us to move as many things to virtual platform as we could from programs to collections again we shifted to more of an email phone call system with our donors um we didn't have a choice we were closed trying to do a lot of things with pictures um collection committee we decided that things could be decided by email and certain instances and overall this has been really good for us I think it's improved our communication overall both as a staff talking about collections um trying to decide what we wanted to take in but also working with donors it taught us to just be a little bit more open and upfront um we have an easier time staying know to things than we used to because I think we have a better understanding of how much work really go within to taking in collections and not just the initial meeting but the entirety of the process including returning things to donors which cost us quite a bit of money and shipping and also takes a lot of time so we're going to move on to talk about the actual um process of assessing collections for donations to our museum um for this one we're going to do the third pool right if you have collection committee meetings to review donor offers what do those look like right now are you meeting in person are you meeting only virtually you have some kind of hybrid based on scheduling other fact in other factors or do you not hold collection committee meetings all right great it looks like a lot of you are doing still doing virtual collection committee meetings only that's great but I would love to hear about how everyone else does these um we've got some hybrid meetings 29% are not holding collection committee meetings I'd be curious to know if you held them before COVID if this is a new process to not do them then we do have a few people 8% that are doing their collection committee meetings always in person okay great so a lot of us are doing at least some form of virtual meeting so to kind of talk about how we have shifted from our old version of the collection committee meeting to the new one um I have to explain our general process so before COVID hit the way we took things into our museum is everything comes in for potential review on this temporary custody receipt form that's what you're seeing in the picture any staff member and even the gift store could take things in on this form we still use this form today it's got the donor's name it's got a number so that we can track it it's got all of the contact information it tells me what the donor wants us to do with the material it gives us permission to accept it for donation to review it um if somebody wants it back or if they want it disposed or transferred we can do all of those things with this form now this form for us is a one year loan agreement is the way the technical language on the back reads um what that does for us is that just starts a date so for some reason we can't get the material back to an owner we've got a date to start an abandoned property law so that's how this form works is that anything can come in on this form so once we receive material and it's on it's all listed and inventoryed on the form we've got the signatures the material would come to me and I would take the material I would inventory it and I would enter it into our past perfect five database that's what we used to use I would generate from the database a very basic report that listed the story behind the pieces and the donation in general if we knew it and then what would happen is our staff would basically do a show and tell type meeting we would all gather in a small little temporary storage room and we would one by one look at all the things the goal would always be to look at things ahead of time but often that didn't happen and this led to kind of long meetings that were very drawn out a lot of things we had to discuss after the fact because nobody was coming to the meetings really ready for decisions but that was okay that's the way we did stuff once everything would be approved I would send out donation paperwork our certificate of donation in a thank you letter and then anything that we didn't want we would call them to come and pick up or if they were a distant you might shift the material back to them you know those things that were declined now our collection committee is made up of nine people so it's a pretty big group again smooshing in a tiny little room to play show and tell this was a bit challenging before COVID and it became impossible to do after so we went from March to about July not bringing anything in not meeting not having collection committee meetings then what we realized is we've been sitting on the material since February or March we've been telling the donors hand sorry we can't go into community and even to look at the staff but they wanted answers and we needed to move the material along by July we were allowed in the office a couple days a week spaced out not with anybody else but only virtual meetings were allowed with our agency so we had to kind of quickly figure out the best way to get through at least this old batch of material that we needed to move on right so right here what you're seeing is our very first version of the virtual collection committee meeting I had the picture of me and my co-workers hadn't seen me for several months though I was being silly but what you got we had to create instructions that's the agenda we asked everybody to review the items makes some initial votes I wanted people to really think about it because I'm trying to figure out the best way to hold the zoom meeting and we really wanted to only have to talk about the things where there were questions or we weren't sure we didn't want to have to spend a whole bunch of time talking about every individual piece so my solution to this was to create just a basic this is a PDF document I had some instructions on there we kind of treated it sort of similar to the way we had been doing the list before but we added pictures I also had comments from our collection manager so she would look at this after I didn't be like oh we already have some where we don't so we sort of could compare it to what might already be in the collection I squeezed in this little chart where people could make their votes make comments make notes and this was our very first collection committee all in all it worked pretty well it took a lot of time to create so I had to take the TR form and take in all the material I had to copy and paste from different reports that people gave me take all the pictures do the data analysis to figure out what we still needed to talk about and then I still had to do all of the accessioning and everything after the fact but for the first meeting this really worked quite well by the end of summer 2020 we had started collecting again we predominantly focused on those donors that did not want to wait anymore we had been putting people off since spring and people were getting very anxious to give us their stuff so we did start collecting and this is the second version of our virtual collection committee meeting it's not a lot different but the big change that we did was to move the spreadsheet from the review list into a separate Excel spreadsheet the spreadsheet initially lived in a couple of different places it lived in our network drive and then also in SharePoint our review list still had some notes from our collection manager still had the pictures in general this worked a little bit better for staff predominantly I think it just gave them more room for notes but again it was a lot of duplicate work for me I had to create these and then also accession everything and it became a little bit hard to track because I had one sheet with all these numbers and then I had a basic entry in our database and then I also had all these spreadsheets that I had to reconcile so it ended up being quite a bit of work so after going through this process of prepping virtual collection committee meetings I really tried to assess how things were working um try to come up with some challenges and areas where we might be able to improve the process and also talk about things that were working well so some of the challenges I came across were just this duplication of work I felt like I was doing the exact same thing three times because I had to create the Excel spreadsheet I had to create the review list I had to eventually put everything in the database when I accessioned it and created the basic catalog records so the process just wasn't that efficient um turnaround time took quite a while um also we noticed that when staff weren't like coming in to look at things they were not getting a good assessment of the condition and we found that staff just in general were not as invested in the collections when they didn't see them in person and because I was trying to keep this as easy and efficient as possible I was generally only taking maybe one picture of things just to give people an idea and my thought was well you can still come and make an appointment and see the material if you want to but that wasn't really happening so they just didn't really know what they were looking at we also found that when they did not see the piece that sort of spread out in this one little room we were inclined to possibly take more than we otherwise would have both things that were maybe not in the best condition but also duplicate items just because we couldn't visualize our staff couldn't visualize how much we were taking in so there were definitely some challenge with this new process some things that we did find were working though um in general staff were much better prepared for meetings than they had ever been in the past this is great so again even when we were in the same building before we moved to a separate storage facility um with the collection the expectation was that our staff on the committee would come down to the basement and look at everything before the meeting they got the spreadsheet to review a week or two in advance so everybody had plenty of time to come down and look at things or ask questions but they never did that now that they had to fill out a spreadsheet and actually make notes and make a vote I found that they were really looking at things they also had a lot more time to really think about how we might use potential donations other good things that sort of came out of it we had more time to ask follow-up questions if the donor or other family members if we had questions about something um for example recently we came across a flight food and there was a patch that was associated with it but it wasn't attached I had plenty of time to go back to the donor and say hey what's the story on this it's like oh that was my main thing and it went with it so we had a lot of time to do that kind of follow-up which I think has added a lot of value to our collection um we also found that the virtual meeting have allowed us to have a lot more flexibility um now we have moved to a hybrid work environment so for the most part as long as COVID is not raging we are allowed to be in the office as much as we want to um we do have to be in the office at least two days a week or 16 hours or so a week so for me I am on site two days a week and I work from home the rest of the week and a lot of people do a schedule like that so it's very rare that we are all together and being able to do these virtual meetings has allowed us to keep moving in the collections along so ultimately we can be in the office together we don't have to be it's also better for the collection because we're not doing the show and tell I'm the only one touching the material I know where everything is stuff isn't getting moved around and it's just spent much easier to work with so we have decided um at least for now keep this virtual meeting format so since we decided several months ago now that we wanted to keep the format I'm still continuing to work on trying to improve the process right so I some of the things that we've done to make the meetings run a little bit better um is that I have more power over over deciding what we're going to do um I get to decide how many items we can handle in a month or in a meeting how many items staff can get through so one thing we found is virtual meetings are hard um we can handle even a two-hour meeting but anything past that and people's eyes start to glaze over so I've started to limit our collection committee meetings to about a hundred pieces um I found that any more than that and honestly people sort of stop caring a little bit especially if it's a lot of duplicative material and Sydney is hard to look at when there's you know 300 pieces um one of the other things we did during the school work from home phase was we converted from path perfect five to path perfect web edition um which was really really helpful for us because it allowed everyone to be able to work from home and access the database a little bit easier without having to be dependent on all of our networks um so one of the things I really tried to figure out how to do was to best get everything in one place so that's something that I've been working on continually we've also had some space challenges so I know some people said that they're collecting got a boost our collecting have gone up almost 50 um a lot of years we were taking in maybe 168 to 250 pieces we are over 450 pieces um for this fiscal year so we still have a couple months left and that runs from July to the end of June that we have seen a huge increase and we are sort of trying to figure out how to handle storage of all of these pieces because it still takes quite a bit of time to make the reports do the review and get things back to people and get the material out so this is what we are using now for our collection committee meetings um this has been in place for a little while um at least several months I think um and you can kind of see what we have we get there's an agenda um and folks can add to it I usually try to send this out a week or two you know about two weeks in advance so people can add things to it that they need to they can also review everything pretty quickly and here's another look at just what you get for the review and then also the new staff spreadsheet um using this format we found that the biggest change is really just to try to encourage discussion so we were finding a lot of people they'd look through the material they'd read the bios and then what they would do is they would just mark discuss but they wouldn't put any notes on it so we started to enforce the notes idea we've also tried to get people to understand that it is totally okay to abstain from voting on something and that's okay if you don't feel strongly about a piece we don't have to talk about it it's okay to just say no or if an objects person wants to abstain and defer to our archive staff about things that really pertain to their collection I think that's totally fine so those are some of the things we've struggled with just a little bit so now what I have done is I use the past perfect web edition database to do everything um our current review list includes a bio that you see right kind of at the top there's a temporary catalog ID number that I use for tracking everything and that goes back to the temporary custody form there's an object name a title a description I add condition notes and I do add photographs and that goes right into the database so that when I create this report it comes right out it goes with it it also makes it easier to add multiple pictures um with this all originating from our collection management system it just goes much faster um the spreadsheet I can view from that system as well it may not be exactly ideal but it has been much faster so fully track the donation from receipt to return or accession without having to do any additional or duplicative work um and the basic cataloging information is already here we have also added some quicker faster ways to review and approve certain logs using google sheets so what happened was several months ago now we realized that there are certain collections that we pretty much always say yes to um and we needed ways to try to keep up with our hugely increased intake so one of the things I decided to try is we had always allowed for voting by email so I'm like okay but people need the information what's the best way to do that and gather the votes and keep track of everything so we just wanted a fast way to review certain types of collections by email and I decided to use google sheets found it it's not quite as efficient but it does allow people to easily and quickly vote in general my staff actually prefers the google sheets to any of the other formats it just doesn't work as well for me so this is what our email vote using google sheets look like I try to limit this to about 10 items or archival lots you get almost the same information as the review sheet except rather than having to vote and make notes you just have to answer a question so you read through the bio you see the description of the collection and then whoever is in charge of that collection what they do is they make some recommendations so my staff basically just votes yes we agree to the recommendation no we don't we'd like to discuss it further in a future collection committee meeting or I abstain it in knowledge that my sense will be taken as consensus so if somebody says I would like to discuss it further what we'll do is we'll pull it out and I will add it to a collection committee I also really like that for each of the questions it asks I just get my results right away so I don't have to count anything up and it just quickly shows me yep everybody wanted this and I will prepare the certificate of donation paperwork so we don't use this for everything it's a lot of copying and pasting since the material and the content is already in the database it's relatively quick to create this but it still takes more time than just downloading the spreadsheets and the review list from the database so we use this for things like archival apps which we know meet our mission and we generally always accept um dog pegs is part of our collection policy we always accept at least one dog peg and then things like engraved purple heart metals so now that you've seen how we are reviewing collections virtually we can chat just a little bit about the paperwork and process that has gone into this when reviewing our collection intake paperwork and processes we had some main points we really wanted to consider so first was the organizational desire to move everything to virtual we were thinking about the technical limitations associated with the hybrid schedules just for example I do not at home have access to a printer and also mailing supplies for our donation paperwork we're looking for improved process efficiency and consistency in our data entry in our paperwork standards we were thinking about changing donor expectations and then new types of collections such as donations of digital material so this was kind of interesting while all of these things were happening in the background we also started to see an influx of digital collections things coming in on thumb drives or CDs or even just emailed photographs so we decided a while ago to catalog foreign digital collections just like any other collections that we would take in and we had already worked through sort of the storage and space issues with like holding that material but we also as we're reviewing things wanted to make sure that our paperwork was online with everything we needed to make sure that we owned and could use this type of material so one of the first things I did was try to figure out how to make the process if the paperwork is efficient as possible so we switched over to password web edition I'm like what can I do so I moved all of my donation and loan paperwork into password effect it was easy for me it was better to have just one place for everything it allows you to code the document so that they auto fill things like donor information and the collections and the addresses phone numbers all that just auto fills now and with password perfect web edition we can work from anywhere where there is Wi-Fi so what I found is I was able to do a lot of my paperwork off site or just in storage I could take pictures with my iPad and also send out paperwork right from there it was really easy to prepare an email or print paperwork directly from the database using the existing data that was already in there anyway so this pic shows the setup page and has perfect web edition for our certificate of donation it took several days to get everything set up and loaded but now it works really really fast same thing with our thank you letter we were able to code this and you can kind of see the coding in here so that it auto fills my agency really wanted kind of a form letter for all of these things so this has worked out really well for us and I can still again prepare all the paperwork from password perfect it gave me a chance to really review everything and we're now able to offer donors more ways to sign so now they can sign by mail or email and it's really made things easy so now we follow this paperwork we can send things by email everything's really easy now so now we're like okay well we want the donors to potentially be able to sign electronically if they want to right we've opened up all of our platforms everything's virtual so our outreach is now connecting us to people all over the country and even internationally so we need really good ways to work with them so how can we now move into signing electronically so I have been thinking about shifting to digital signatures or at least making that an option for our collection donors for quite a while I was just hoping that if we could do something like that it would improve my paperwork turnaround time it wasn't that unusual for it to take three months in multiple attempts to get people to send back signed certificate of donation paperwork now not everybody but there was always a handful of people that it would take forever and sometimes it would be a year and I'd have to send it back per the requirements of our temporary test video receipt form and it was only then that they're like oh you can't need to sign paperwork like yes yes you do so I'm trying to think of ways to make this easy to connect with those donors so working with our legal section we were able to add just some text to our standard certificate of donation form so that we could start to accept these electronic signatures if we wanted to so the language we added is highlighted but it basically just says consistent with the staff and statute I agree and understand that if I elect to sign this form electronically my electronic signature is the legal equivalent is my manual or handwritten signature has the same legal validity and enforceability of my manual handwritten signature and I consent to be legally bound to this agreement further if I elect to sign this form electronically I affirm that my electronic signature was signed by myself with full knowledge and consent and I am legally bound to these terms and conditions I work for the government so this is a mouthful if you work for the government you may want to check and see what kind of statutes you have regarding electronic signatures if you don't you can probably work with a number of your board to come up with something a little more basic than this just to make sure that you're covered so in general this has worked really really well for us in reviewing our documentation and rewriting our certificate of donation form we were able to make sure we were covering all types of collections and meeting our donor needs coverage for digital collections where we may not be the only user most for a language for that anyway a lot of that was just staff training this has also allowed us to work with sort of a new generation of more tech savvy donors they're used to doing things a lot of people are used to doing things virtually so this just was in flow with what a lot of people were already doing anyway and it also created an option for increased speed of getting peep work returned and closing out temporary receipt so that we could keep the intake process moving along with so much coming in it was really important to me that we kind of kept moving just some things to keep in mind with electronic signatures though it is not for everyone at a great conversation with a co-worker yesterday and she had adamantly against virtual signatures because she worked for a different agency and she found that the tech support she had to provide to make people understand how to do a virtual signature was really really difficult that's why I say this is probably not for all of your donors this is probably for a handful of donors right now but what I like to do is I send out the mail form first and if I don't get that back or if I have email contact information on the form I try to send an email version that they can sign electronically back if my second option unless they've already gave me permission to do it and then it works great but oftentimes when I'm able to send out a form that they can sign virtually I may get it back within a day or two where otherwise it takes at least two weeks but oftentimes it's more than a month which is a long time to kind of keep track and sit on other people's material so pretty quick we're going to open it up for just some questions and I'd also be interested in hearing comments or if anybody wants to share some of the things they've been doing but it was really cool that a lot of you are viewing sort of these virtual collection committee meetings um but what I will say is something I've learned is that we've really learned a lot and have gone through a lot just these past few years things have changed an awful lot um our director has this great thing um he likes to say embrace the suck I always roll my eyes when he says embrace the suck but I think that's what a lot of us did and we made some really good progress um for example work flexibility like we've never seen before it's fantastic with my little one I probably would have had to quit my job by now if I wasn't able to work from home at least a little bit so being able to see that it's amazing and I don't know about you guys but when I work from home I get so much done um our database is also in the vast shape it's ever been you were able to spend almost a good solid year just doing database cleanup something we would have never ever had time for so that's been great um work is now more efficient we've really had to think through a lot of ways that we did stuff and we're in a field where we've been doing things the same way for I mean quite a long time so rethinking all of those processes I think has been really good for us and we're also now able to provide good different better customer service to all of our donors through these new ways of working them the new forms in the tech I'm going to turn it over to Robin and we can go over some questions you sure can and actually while we're doing that um I just put links in the chat for um how to get the copy of this presentation and the resources that Sarah put together and also a survey link I like to throw that up there at some point as well just so people know you know they can do a answer some survey about c2c care which is always appreciated um okay well to start with questions and I want to say thank you for it was really interesting hearing you talk about and I was thinking about how just what you said about how you know like we saw this change in the field and I know when I came into the field around the same time you did like an 05 that was right when um digital programs like past perfect and these content management collections management systems were taking but I still a lot of places I worked at still had the paper registers like it was we were seeing that transition from like paper to a digital asset management system for all these things and I keep thinking now that you know as time goes on we're going to be like this is the other big shift right that happened in the world like this is going to be another big like wow like that really changed things I think that's a great point even in the database class I've been teaching when I first started teaching it people were still trying to figure out what database they wanted to use like people knew they needed one but we're still sort of shifting into one maybe they were using Excel or something like that before and now what I'm seeing is they're in a database and they don't like it they want to do yeah and like and just all the like and I know it's been interesting and this is off-subject a little bit but watching people go from like databases and like I when I started it was really custom databases right like everyone had their own little custom databases and then you saw this shift into no by the big databases that's when you saw like that past perfect the embarks the you know like the big guys and now you're seeing people go oh sometimes the customs better now they're all web based which was a really crazy thing for a while too so it is like really I feel like a lot of our world now has sped up with these big shifts and how we do things lately and it's just been I'm at the point again we're around the same time period that like you've been in this field for 15 16 years and you're kind of like wow yeah like changing right now so it's very interesting all right so I'm going to go ahead and start hitting some of these questions you guys have been great about putting them in the q&a box so I do appreciate it um someone asked when it came to the shipping like when you were talking about shipping things back and forth the donors do you have a shipping budget enough or what has been your shipping budget to be able to support the return of unselected artifacts to donors is that something you had to add to your budget did you already have it sitting here like what was your experience with that sure so I'm fortunate again because I work for the government I actually do have a pretty significant collection budget that I oversee it's a shared budget amongst me our collection manager and a couple of archivists but it's big enough to cover this I usually end up spending maybe a couple hundred dollars a year on FedEx shipping it used to be less because we'd have more people that would come pick up the material and I would sit on it for longer it wasn't a big deal but yeah I've had to definitely pay attention to that line in my budget but for us it has not been significant again because I'm very lucky to have a budget but yeah it's probably been I'd say yes set aside two maybe three hundred dollars a year but I'm also shipping an awful lot back Gotcha that's useful for everyone um another question I had because I you know it was interesting when you did that first poll that popped up about how some folks didn't have collections committees can you talk a little bit about who makes up the collections committee at your institution for those folks just so they kind of know what the makeup is sure so our collection committee um has been part of our collection policy since they started it's chaired by the registrar so that's me um and then our director and our assistant director are both on it we've got a curator of history in a curator of exhibits we're both on it and then we have our oral historian our processing archivist our reference archivist in our collection manager so it is almost the entirety of the full-time staff it's not quite everybody but it's really close um also the way we are set up by statute ultimately our director gets all of the authority to decide what comes in and what doesn't but luckily we have this committee to at least sort of guide those directions and while it's not a democracy it often runs that way yeah and I would just say from my experience like I've worked at places where it was the registrar and the collections people who made that decision and I've also worked with ones who are with committees the thing I do like about committees is sometimes you if you work with organizations that only have a few people making those decisions their personal likes can start creeping into your collection makeup so sometimes having more people have a say can give you a wider view of what's happening within the acquisitions of your yeah it definitely helps in the discussions and it also helps just to have our content people really know what's coming in otherwise it comes in and nobody ever sees it again because nobody knows what's there and exactly exactly um someone was asking could we talk a little bit more about what past perfect is is it a dam a digital asset management system and can you speak a little bit about the difference between collections management systems and dams oh I think archivists would be very upset with us with what the difference between yeah that's probably true so um in our museum our archivists we're sort of forced into using that's perfect um they had been using something called in magic for a long time and what we sort of internally decided was that we needed to do a better job of linking collections across all of our section so we might have a photograph of a veteran wearing a hat and we might have the hat and we might have the oral history with the guy talking about wearing the hat but up until we were in the same database none of that information linked so you'd never be able to find it unless somebody who had been there 20 years remembered so we sort of forced everybody to go into I think it's this is the collection management system is the correct use of um the term for past perfect and it's been great it does have some searching limitations but it allows us to accession everything we track all of our loans through past perfect um we have a past perfect online portal where the public can see our collections I think I included that in the link for the resources too if anybody just wanted to take a look at that it's been a useful tool that took a little while to get up and running but the public seemed to like it and then we manage all of our object collection all of our archives are oral historian is in there too now oral history and archives they also send their information out to other link serves and things like that where the object collection sort of stays in one database I think that's one of like the differences in the profession but we all do use it I don't know if that helps to answer the question that's what I would say it to me a past perfect is more of a collection management system yeah it's really a tool that has tried to be useful to everybody it's got the biggest thing I hear from our archivist is that it's got too many fields yeah because they're trying to be a one-stop shop for for all different types of collections so at least that's been my experience with it yeah so that's it's more of a holistic view of your collections while digital asset management is really more focused in the correct me audience if I'm wrong but it's our focus on like archival side of the house and like actually managing the pieces of digital yeah yeah out there that's my very basic registrar understanding of it too when I look at them someone asked how many folks you know or you can you estimate still use a paper accession book to record and track assignment of accession numbers in maintaining paper records do you guys maintain any kind of so you all do okay can you talk a little bit about that so when I started at the Veterans Museum they had actually moved away from the paper ledger and I moved us back because what I found we ended up with a bunch of different spreadsheets and numbers weren't consistent and it was a little bit of a jumbled mass and I also just in the back of my mind still worry about the database crashing something crashing and losing the data so I do still use the paper accession record our agency also wants us to have paper copies of everything so we would keep paper copies regardless but I still keep the donation paperwork and just the basic information about the donation in a hard copy file and put it in the drawer just in case I will probably never need it I don't use it for anything but it does help me just to keep track of numbers I think a lot of museums do still use the ledger I'd be curious to hear what other people are doing uh someone in the chat says they're using paper ledgers and accession records and what we did at the last uh full-time museum job I had which was a while ago now we started with we would have past perfect but then we would print out copies and then on acid-free paper and then put them in like the fire you know yeah basically with the accession paperwork so we didn't use ledgers but we had a paper record of everything kind of sat somewhere to be on the back side so yeah someone saying our accession log is created in excel and then printed it put in a binder I've heard people doing that um yeah I think it's hard you know I look at the the medical field sometimes how they have gone completely digital I don't think we're there yet I think most of us still want that paper record especially because like I live in Hurricane Alley so I'm always nervous that like again our stuff's gonna get blown out and we still need those paper records out there um someone says ledger and word yeah so yeah for me it's just help to like actually see it and write it in the book though yeah I honestly I barely need it and everything is backed up now um past perfect backs everything up internally so I'm not I'm not really that worried about losing it anymore I could see us switching back in the future but like I said our staff has just never been great about consistently keeping all of these things running so just having something written down in paper where you know if somebody's come in and crust it out has been really helpful yeah I can totally see that um there was some discussion in the Q&A which I'm summing up a couple questions about people talking about just the meetings and how we have used to have in-person and they've been suspended and so what do you think the future is for your guys meetings you guys are still virtual meetings correct or yeah um our director has said and I tend to agree I think we're probably going to stick with the virtual meetings at least um as far as I can see into the future when we were all allowed back in the office we kind of tentatively switched back to more of a hybrid where we viewed everything virtually but we were in the room together and there's just not any real need for it and I think it's better for the collections to not have people touching them and moving them around it makes it easier for me to track I don't have the storage space for the amount of material that I'm taking in so it's much easier for me to like keep it stored in boxes where it's safe and just in general unless we get to a place where we're not taking in very much at all and it's not worth my time to do these sheets I think we're going to stay virtual it's for quite a while how often do you guys meet just out of curiosity it's been sporadic with COVID we had been meeting once a month once every six weeks um I've been having problems scheduling meetings like with nine people it's very difficult and our meetings have been about two hours long even the virtual meeting so it's been challenging um probably on average every six to eight weeks so we are right now starting to shift to an every four week format just to try to get through the backlog of material we're reviewing excellent um let me see what else we have in here someone's asking if you could possibly share your temporary custody receipt template um rather than a direct question like that do we know of any places where people can get examples of stuff I know if you're a certain member of AAM there's usually some sample forms um try to think of where else I know in some of the MRM books they have sample forms in the back which are quite useful can you think of any other places where people can get sample forms from yeah I would probably direct them to AAM if anybody really desperately wants to see mine I work for the government so it is all open record I have no problem sharing um there's a lot of language on the back of the form um google me and shoot me an email and I'd be happy to share it thank you but yeah AAM's great for those resources I think or yeah I think it used to be going to be a certain level to access their library that could be that's still true but I could be wrong oh someone said googling that's a good idea googling temporary custody receipt brings up a lot of examples thank you for the power of google um it's interesting when you were also talking about the intake rate because I mean one of the things I was thinking of was you know I know I did it and I'm still doing it but like at the beginning of shutdown I was like time to clean out the house you know what I mean and just seeing the kind of stuff that we pulled out now most of myself did not go to museums because I know better than to send some of my stuff to museums but have you seen that intake rate continuing or is it slowed down or what's been your experience with the intake rate so far in general it has been continuing at an uptick um we're not entirely sure what's going on we just did a 60 day check-in because this has been a constant conversation for our team um we are spending so much time working on collections intake that other things are starting to fall behind we're back in the day when we had time we weren't taking that much a lot of people started to do other things we wrote journal articles we did more research things like that all of a sudden all of those people are now focused back on cataloging and that's all we have time to do so it's definitely continued um we maybe saw just a little bit of a glimmer of hope like over Christmas but then the intake rate shot right back up so we do not see an end in sight as of right now I'm sure at some point it will slow back down but we're not sure when yeah it's super it is like I said it's interesting to kind of see like I know well I'm personally I'm cleaning out some stuff for personal reasons but it's I you know I think a lot of that happened and I also think you know in my experiences as well we had family members who passed away and we ended up with a lot of their stuff and it's I also live in Florida which is like I call the grandma's attic of this nation so we end up with all sorts of crazy stuff from all across the country um that you that you just end up with and a lot of people still think museums are the places where everything needs to go and we have to be the ones who have to say not always it just kind of depends on the items I think that's interesting to bring up someone is asking um does anyone else so are you part are you guys part of a series of museums and you said you're part of a government are there other ones within the state organization that you passed perfect or are you guys the only ones or how does that work for you all so for us for the state of Wisconsin there are two main museum cultural institutions that are under the branch of the government so it's us which is part of the Department of Veterans Affairs and then the Wisconsin State Historical Society is their own government agency they use I believe they use a web-based version of Argus and then they have a bunch of small museums that are like under their umbrella where they get some government assistance and some protection but it's through the historical society and not directly through the state for example I believe Circus World Museum is one of those and they do at least they were using past perfect we have a lot of small museums throughout our state though I will say that use it um the state historical society through grants and training has done a lot to kind of support that program and it's it's inexpensive and we can use it for anything so it's been a little bit of a push around here to get people to digitize the collections and to track things this way and past perfect has gotten a lot of attention from us that way thank you um someone put that in there that thank you so much for doing on this they were like if this is a topic that we've all kind of like been thinking about and that was kind of needed to talk on so thank you for doing the presentation today uh going back to the paper records it is someone put just put in the chat that my institution is over 60 years old in the distant past there was at least one database that became defunct and lost I've experienced those I have a copy of the paper printout from that database our paper records have been invaluable yeah I have you experienced that with databases that people can't access anymore because I know I have dealt with that um I have done just a little bit of training um on past perfect and a lot of the people that have switched over had said things like this where they have lost data I have not experienced it myself um before I started at the veterans museum though they had been using a program called snap I don't I think that's defunct now I haven't ever seen it never heard anything else about it but when they moved the data from snap into past perfect the way the information imported they used excel and excel cut off a bunch of content so there were fields where a complete bit of information were lost so having those paper records to go back to were really helpful that institution is just interesting because it's like they were ahead of the game and they really tried to back away from all these paper records and all these things but they really needed them yeah I've had that too where it's people it was um a couple old custom either ms access or ones where computers like I've lived a couple places where we've kept like one computer alive because one version of this old computer that they were like that has the old database on it never shut it off or oh yeah it'll go away so it's interesting because then those paper records are like because you know at some point you're gonna get that power surge where that thing goes up in smoke and then you're gonna be like I can't access it anymore so it's that way and I think those of us in the field like we are very aware of like possible disasters so we've just got it ingrained in us at least our generation that we need to have those duplicative copies yes duplicate copies are always your friend okay it looks like we've caught up with all the questions in the q and a I'm going to give it just another minute or so for people to ask anymore if they want to someone else in the chat says I've experienced that too data cut off yeah it's there used to be a session at am um they might still do it but it would you would tell horror stories basically of fun different collections issues and you would hear data cut off you'd hear you know obviously the multiple number and you'd hear all this kind of crazy stuff but I think I think we're still going to experience that and I think having the paper records around they're still good you know what I mean because you can get that information from them for sure well I'm going to slowly start wrapping up things do you have any final thoughts for um what you are presenting today or anything you'd like to tell the audience um just that I would like to say thanks for listening this was very therapeutic for me to kind of go over what I've been experiencing every day for the last couple years so this was great all right thank you Sarah I'm going to for you for the last time I'm going to put the links to our presentation resources and survey in the chat um thank you again Sarah thank you again IMLS and FAIC for supporting this program thank you our folks at learning times for providing technical support and I hope to see you all next week for our first in our Mayday prep series again we're doing one at the beginning of the month one at the end so feel free to join us for those webinars I hope you all stay safe and thanks again Sarah and we'll talk to you guys soon thanks