 So you're ready. Great. Thanks so much, Mike. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Jessica Unger with Heritage Preservation, and we're so glad that you're joining us here today. Let me start by giving a quick introduction to the community and these webinars, and then we'll move on to our topic. The Connecting to Collections online community was originally created in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. And it's moderated by Heritage Preservation. Learning Times produces both the website and the webinars. The goal of the online community has always been to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. To help you do that, we have compiled an extensive list of online resources that are broken up by the topic on the online community. You will see those resources under the menu Topics on the top of the page. We also host drop-in webinars, like the one today, that do not require pre-registration on topics we hope our members will find useful. A recording of all of our webinars can be found under Webinar Archives. And as you'll note, today's program is part two of the series on pests. So you can view a recording of last week's webinar with Patrick Kelly in the archives. And of course, a recording of today's webinar will also be added to the archives soon. Today, I'm pleased to welcome back our speaker, Rachel Perkins Arnstein. Rachel is currently the conservator at the Bible Land Museum in Jerusalem, but remains an active partner in AMR conservation, the private conservation treatment and preservation consulting practice that she co-founded in 2009. She became involved in IPM while managing conservation treatments for the National Museum of the American Indian Move Project. She's a founding member of the Integrated Pest Management Working Group that created the museum pest.net website. And for the past five years, the group's co-chair. Unlike her colleague, Patrick Kelly, who gave last week's webinar, Rachel hates bugs. So with that, I'll turn it over to Rachel for her presentation. Thank you, Jessica. And welcome, everyone, to the second webinar in this short series on pest management for cultural collections. OK, here we go. So since this webinar is a heritage preservation presentation, I thought it was appropriate to start with some data from HP's 2005 Heritage Health Index survey. This is the first comprehensive survey to assess the condition and preservation needs of US collections. And it revealed that the most urgent preservation need at US collecting institutions is environmental control, which, for the purposes of this project, encompass temperature, relative humidity, light, pollutants, and pest control. In a breakdown that examined the needs of museum and historical societies that together account for 22% of the 4.8 billion collection items in the United States, approximately 75% of these institutions required an integrated pest management program, and 20% of those institutions indicated that this was an urgent need. HP is now gearing up for a 10-year follow-up of the Heritage Health Index, and it will be interesting to see what progress has been made in the past decade. And I hope many of your institutions will be participating in this important project. The web address at the bottom of the slide there is a link to the full survey results on the Heritage Preservation website. So the great need for information and assistance in this area of collection care is no surprise to anyone who has dealt with an infestation. Museum professionals, including conservators, collection managers, and curators increasingly know that insect and rodent pests can cause major damage to collections of all types. And it's gross. Thus, when time, staff, and resources are in short supply, pest management becomes a really easy project to defer. That is, until you can't avoid it anymore, and that's what we're going to talk about today. Just to give you a quick overview of these pest damage items, the coat on the top left has been almost entirely denuded of its round fur that would have covered all the areas that are now sort of beige. The top right, you have some pest damage on the back of a peeping stretcher. The bottom left is obviously some eggs that holes in the wood furniture. And the right is incredibly extensive pest damage on the book. In the past, collections were commonly treated with pesticides and poisons. Over time, though, we've realized the damage that this has caused to the collections, and the danger it poses to the environment and to us. So the arsenal of chemicals we've been able to use has gotten smaller. Sadly, this isn't the case everywhere, as I found after moving here to Israel this past year, where in the fall there was a tragedy where two children were killed, and several were hospitalized and gravely injured by an inappropriately applied pesticide treatment in a home. So it would say, sort of, cautionary tale for why we've been moving in the direction we have. So as a result, over this past decade, we've begun to shift from remedial chemical treatments to focusing on a range of prevention techniques that utilize knowledge of insect biology, behavior, and ecology that put together a form of strategy called integrated pest management. So for the purposes of cultural heritage institutions, I can't say that pesticides or fumigants are never used anymore. But IPM is basically a strategy that emphasizes prevention and minimizes the use of toxic chemicals to manage and eliminate pests. So what are the components of an IPM program? A functional IPM plan works to reduce the possibility of testing collections by preventing access, monitoring for activity, identifying fines so that you know what you're dealing with, remediating or treating infestations as necessary, and continuing to evaluate your results and educate your staff. This is all stuff that Pat covered in last week's webinar. So some of the other things that Pat discussed last week are setting up an IPM team in your institution. Depending on the size of your institution, your team may be larger or smaller. But you have to think sort of broadly about who's involved. He talked about prevention tips for excluding pests, both rodent and insect from your building. He talked about how to use various types of sticky traps and pheromones to monitor for activity and the importance of identification of some of the most damaging museum pests. Pat or I could easily give a one hour webinar on each of these topics, but instead of panicking that we didn't address all of your questions, what we want you to know is that there's a lot of useful information out there to help you. The reason I'm here today is because of my involvement in founding the Integrated Pest Management Working Group, which is an ad hoc group of museum and pest professionals who have been meeting for the past 11 years, initially to collaborate and dealing with our own institutional pest problems and eventually evolving into creating resources to help others identify and manage their pest issues. So we've created a free pest list listserv, which allows for communication on IPM concerns between over 600 museum staff and tomologists and pest management professionals worldwide. And of course, the museum pest website with extensive information and resources for each element of a sound IPM program. So while we can only put a small amount of information into a one hour webinar, our collective knowledge base is online. And so I'd just like to show you a few resources so you'll know where to go for them should you have the need. We have information on prevention techniques, both physical and procedural. Last week there were several questions on how to design buildings or spaces with IPM in mind. And we have a whole section on the building envelope, their information on understanding the nature and vulnerability of your collection and more. We have tips for monitoring, including trap selection, which Pat covered last week and the use of pheromones and lists of what pheromones are available and more detailed information on how to use them that Pat himself wrote. We also have some information and products that you can download to help collect and analyze your data. Pat's in charge also of the identification subgroup. And so we have created fact sheets which are geared towards what you need to know in a museum library or a historic home environment. And we also have an image library that doesn't have just pretty pictures of these pests but has pictures of what they look like when they've been stuck on a sticky track for a week or a month or so. But today our topic is remediation. And of course, on the website, we continue to build up our information on choosing and carrying out remedial treatments when they're necessary. So first we have to talk about how do we know a treatment is necessary? In the past 10 years in private practice, my business partner Eugenie and I have worked with a large number of small to mid-sized museums and we found that virtually everyone has some sort of pest issue, whether insects or rodents. What took us some time in the beginning of our careers in private practice to realize though, was that most institutions didn't even recognize the extent of their problem or how extensive the damage was. For instance, the holes in the fabric of this flag were thought to be age or even life damage, not gracing from pests. And the debris here on the shelf in the red box was thought just to be dust and some loose hair rather than frass and substantial hair loss from an extensive infestation that ran across the entire shelf. Many of these institutions that we deal with have shared some basic challenges. They are understaffed, they're understaffed. Very often the staff is elderly, which makes them sometimes more susceptible to some residual pesticide treatments like the use of naphthalene or paradise benzene mothball. These institutions are often under-resourced. Their storage is overcrowded and generally people are just grossed out in dealing with these infestations. And so as a result, we see some basic mistakes. Even the institutions that are doing okay in basic preservation categories and know that managing pests is important are making these. So this is not meant to be critical, it's just sort of a recognition that many people are getting bad information online. For instance, they're using sprays meant for personal use on collection items. We see a lot of use of inappropriate products, sometimes thinking that natural products with lavender or various oils are safer for collections than staff. And we see situations where people don't always recognize the dangers of products used in the past or why they shouldn't be using those pesticides now. So ahead of online information, just like with anything else, you need to be evaluating the websites you're visiting critically, same even for natural products and making sure that even products that you may have used in the past are not necessarily appropriate in an institutional setting or going forward. Okay, so let's talk about how we identify an infestation. We know from analyzing the museum pest website statistics that most of our new visitors are jumping immediately to the identification and solutions pages suggesting to us that they tackle this problem out of an immediate need. So signs that you have some sort of infestation would include finding live insects or larvae, then you certainly know that it's active. Finding grass, which is bug excrement and often looks like grains of sand and what you're seeing in this picture here on the top left, all of these sort of granules are frass. Exit holes, round or oval holes seen mostly on wood artifacts are signs of infestation. Larval casings that look like larvae but are actually the shed skins as seen down here on the bottom right. Webbing, sticky moth webbing that you've probably seen and here the webbing of these moths is actually covered in frass. And then grazing where pests eat the surface of the collections as you're seeing here on this Native American artifact, the textile and the feather. So some of these, anything live is obviously an act of infestation. Others are clearly signs that something has been going on and then the question is what do you do? Well, no need to panic. Ideally, if you have an IPM coordinator, someone who finds a pest or in the building will contact your coordinator and either your pest control professional and or a conservator. You will need to ask the following questions. Can you identify the pest, what is it? Is it something that just sort of happened to make its way into the building or is it something that seems to be breeding and entrenched within the building? How many are there? We hear a lot of questions about sort of what is the action threshold level. If you've got a textile collection and you discover one or two webbing clothes moths that might be enough to prompt action. If you are in an archeological collection like I am right now, a couple of moths on a shelf is not going to be as great of a warning sign. So you have to sort of think about everyone has a population of pests in their building and part of the reason why you have to monitor is to know when something has gone out of whack or when that population actively threatens your collections. So if there's evidence of activity for ass webbing grazing, is it new or leftover from a prior infestation? When I worked on the National Museum of the American Indian Move Project, we were going and moving the entire collection of 800,000 objects from the New York storage facility down to a new clean storage facility in Suitland, Maryland. And we knew that even though everything was being cleaned and going through some sort of test treatment so that we didn't bring infestations with us, that we wouldn't always be able to remove every bit of frass or webbing or sign. And so in that case, we actually attached labels to the tags of these artifacts that said, you know, cleaned but still frassy or some other indication. And it was also included in the object database so that people would know that any activity would be sort of new from that point going forward. You'll need to ask, you know, how many objects are affected? Is this, you know, limited to one thing or are you seeing, like in that previous picture, activity running the entire length of a shelf or cabinet? Is the problem in the fabric of the building itself or is it confined to a contained area? All of these questions, the answers are going to be important for determining what your next steps will be. Okay, so here is an overview of what our treatment options are. Isolation, obviously, isn't really a treatment but it's sort of the first step. It would be impossible in one hour to teach how to conduct these treatments. What I hope you will take away from today's presentation is really an understanding of some of the pros and cons of these solutions and how they are used in a collection setting and, you know, who you might go to or what you might consider for your own collection should the need arise. And just like with the other areas of IPM, we do have on the museum test website a section on solutions. And while information is always being updated and adjusted, we have information on most of these treatments and we are still developing some case studies for next step. It's going to be some sort of more step-by-step PowerPoint presentations with more images. So we're constantly working to increase the usefulness of these presentations and this information for you. Okay, so why isolate? If you have a question whether an infestation is active, it's prudent to isolate the items. Many collecting institutions actually routinely quarantine inspect and clean items entering the museum to avoid introducing insect pests to the rest of the collection. Some items are relatively easy to inspect and may not need quarantining. Others such as those with complex structures or hidden areas are difficult to thoroughly inspect. And for those cases, isolation by bagging and monitoring is a useful procedure. So generally what you'll want to do is place your item on a white sheet of bladder paper or paper board tissue or foam and then seal it into a polyethylene bag. Ceiling can be done by knotting, by taping, zip lock and you're gonna want to set it in a sort of dim if possible and quiet a place where it can rest undisturbed over a period of several weeks or even longer where you can monitor for signs of infestation which will be made more visible by its placement on the white sheet or underlayer. Again, the signs of activity would include the presence of live adults, cast off larva skins, deposits of frass, webbing or casing. And if the type of insect is known, you'll also want to refer to the literature on pest to determine the life cycle and ensure that the amount of isolation time covers the needs for adults to hatch. The other thing I should say about isolation is that if you have, if you discover something that you think is potentially infested, you'll want to isolate to do that. And then the next step is for the probably the most common form of pest treatment that we see in cultural institutions at the moment is what we call low temperature treatment or otherwise known as freezing. So freezing is obviously non-toxic to humans and it's safe for almost all organic and composite materials. On the website we have a list of a few things that people still feel somewhat leery about, but there has been research such as Ellen Carley's article published in the Journal for the American Institute of Conservation that shows that a lot of material that conservators have been very cautious about freezing can generally be safely frozen. Freezing is relatively time efficient. Treatment can take anyway from two days to a week depending on the temperature that you're freezing at. And other than the sort of generally low cost of the initial investment for the freezer, you don't have a lot of ongoing costs for smaller freezers although there are sometimes for larger walk-in freezers. And freezing is a procedure that can be done in-house. It does not involve extensive training or licensing or staff time to maintain or check on the treatment while it's in progress. So if you're dealing with the smaller kinds of freezers like the chest freezers, sometimes they're not large enough to handle all the kinds of objects that you may need so that can be a con. Whereas walk-in freezers require a more considerable investment and planning for space and setup. Again, there are some things that should never be frozen, certain things like electronic materials and things like that. So again, I encourage you to check the list which has a discussion on the recent things like that. And the one caveat is you have to make sure that you're using a freezer that allow temperatures to fall fast enough and low enough that they will achieve a good kill, otherwise the treatment can be. So the temperature for freezing and the length of time is based on research that has been done by scientists most notably Tom String of the Canadian Conservation Institute. And so at minus four degrees Fahrenheit or minus 20 Celsius, one week is recommended for the length of freezing cycle. Whereas if you have a freezer that can get down to minus 20 Fahrenheit or minus 29 Celsius, then you can be assured of a good kill of all life stages with 48 to 72 hours. And there has been a lot of discussion and I think it came up in last week's question chat about the protocol for double freezing. And Tom String's most recent contributions to the pest list indicate that if you're following these protocols that a double freeze is not necessary. The things that you do need to know is that your freezer must rapidly reach the freeze temperature within six hours and it has to stay at that temperature for the amount of time needed to kill the insects at all life stages such as the larva and pupa. And you have to think carefully about the time needed is dependent on the time of the material, the type of material being frozen and it's packaging. So for example, a few herbaria sheets is going to need considerably less time than you would for a large rolled carpet. So just to give you a glimpse at a couple of the different kinds of freezers, there's household deep freezers. They generally operate between minus four degrees of Fahrenheit or minus 20 degrees Celsius and minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit. They can be very effective and they're usually less expensive than commercial freezers. Most household freezers are frost free, which is acceptable. Although there's been some anecdotal concern about the defrost warming cycles, these are of relatively short duration and the general response time of bagged material commonly frozen is comparatively longer than the warming phase. So the target insects will generally be kept cold through the cycle by the cooling or cold objects and will experience the lowest temperatures the freezers offer. So the household deep freezers are one option and then there's commercial freezers and chest freezers. These top of the line sort of household chest freezers and commercial freezers can usually achieve the necessary temperature to ensure kill rates. One thing you can look for is the commercial ice cream hardening freezers in either vertical or horizontal configuration which are designed to operate at minus 44 degrees Fahrenheit. They may not be much more expensive than the standard commercial freezers. It is recommended that you monitor the performance of your freezer with a separate thermometer. You have to ensure that your freezer is well insulated and you have to provide inside the freezer for adequate air circulation for the collections being placed inside. So what you're seeing here on the right is objects are generally wrapped in acid free tissue and then sealed into a polyethylene bag before being placed in the freezer. You may want to place delicate or flexible items on a handling board or within a box. And the bagging is very important because that's going to protect against condensation. So here's an image of a walk-in freezer and you can see things were being bagged and wheeled in on pallets and boxes. And when they came out here, they're wrapped in plastic on their pallets and they're allowed to sit for 24 hours without being touched which gives the objects a chance to acclimate back up to room temperature and ensures that any condensation like you see here in this bottom right image are going to wind up on the plastic and not affecting your object directly. Once you take your objects out, you may want to also isolate them for a short period of time. So I have no personal experience with any of these products, but these are things that have been brought up on the list or people have been researching over the last year or two. And well, freezer trucks have been commonly used, but there are some of these portable items, these mobile flex cool systems and the frost line flat pack system. And people are beginning to experiment to see whether these will work. The truck option is of course something that is great when you have a large amount of material and you don't have a stable walk-in freezer. These can be brought to a parking lot near you. They can be park loaded up and at the appropriate temperature for a week and unloaded. And then, you know, so the next treatment is much less frequently used than freezing. Conservators gravitate back towards freezing because heat promotes the deterioration and aging of materials. And so it seems that, you know, sort of baking our objects is sort of antithetical to, you know, to what we want to be doing. But increasingly, there have been areas and institutions that are experimenting more with heat treatments. And these are two examples here of solar bagging. So solar bagging has become increasingly popular in areas which are under-resourced. You're seeing a treatment running in South America on the left and on the right of program in Africa where there is not access to some higher tech options. So this method of treatment, the solar bagging, was also, you know, really developed by Tom Strang at the Canadian Conservation Institute. It uses sunlight to produce temperatures lethal to insects. The artifacts are wrapped in cotton to buffer the moisture fluctuation and then they're sealed in generally black plastic bags which prevents moisture loss, UV, and visible light harm and helps gain energy. Stamps can be added inside the bag to ensure that hot air circulates within the chamber. And in this case, an exposure of 55 degrees Celsius, sorry, 130 degrees Fahrenheit for about three hours is sufficient to eradicate all life stages of insects. So in the US, this kind of treatment is increasingly being attempted in some places like the Southwest or in places which have large objects that are even too big for large walk-in for each of the freezers. So places that have carriage collections where the carriage cushions are commonly stuffed with horse hair, which is particularly yummy. Heat treatments are inexpensive and low-tech. They're often easy to conduct. They're effective over a short period of time. There's very little equipment to maintain. But again, the Museum Pest website has a list of materials that definitely should not be treated that way. That includes anything that has any kind of wax or resin that may be affected by high heat. These are some examples of other kinds of heat treatments that are increasingly used by pest management professionals. This is a popular treatment for treating bed bug infestations at a room or building level. And what you're seeing over here are examples of thermolignum, which is a proprietary heat treatment which maintains a stable relative humidity during the course of treatment with the hope of that there will be less damage from that change in temperature. Thermolignum, I don't believe, is available yet in the US. But it is increasingly being experimented with in Europe. And there have been a number of papers from the 2011 Pestatasy conference that looked at the pros and cons. And we do have some. So the next group of treatments are the anoxic treatments. And these are sort of a number of different kinds of anoxic treatments, some of which you can do more easily in your institution and others, which you need sort of a larger setup. Anoxia can be relatively simple and inexpensive after an initial investment in materials. It's appropriate for a wide variety of collection materials. And at least the oxygen scavenger, the real anoxia, are not registered pesticide, so no licensing is required. But these treatments take a while. And they can be somewhat finicky because getting the enclosures can sometimes take some time and experience. And you must get your oxygen scavenger levels calculated correctly. There are a couple of materials, such as Prussian blue pigment, that should not be treated with this. They tend to change color in low oxygen environments. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this slide. But if you're really curious, this was an exercise that we included on how to calculate the amount of ageless sachets, the little packets that you would need. And there's an excellent conservogram part of the National Park Service Conservogram eclips that is available also free online that helps walk you through these calculations. So the answer will be in the presentation if you download it online. There's a relatively new product out on the market that I've used successfully a couple of times. And it's put out by Hanwell, which is a company that has a long history of doing temperature and relative humidity monitoring. So they've developed the 0.2 monitor. It's also sometimes called the anoxabug system. They have a range of these pre-made chambers. What you're seeing here on the left is the bottom. And this is a 5 meter cube. And you can pile as much as you can on this footprint. And what you're seeing, the silver is the places where we've left to put the scavenger. Unlike ageless or the RP systems where the scavenger is quite small, these are our larger packets. And you place the ready-made top on and seal around with an iron. And you seal all the way around, leaving just a little bit of space for your vacuum, where you suck out all of, or at least as much air as you can. And this is the actual 0.2 monitor. And there's a little window here so you can see the light. And it generally will take anywhere from 48 to 72 hours, depending on the size of the chamber, for the scavengers to take effect and remove the remaining oxygen from the bag. So this is what that whole group of furniture looks like undergoing treatment. This also takes about 21 days, sometimes a little more, depending on how warm the space is for every two degrees of heat difference you have to add on another day of treatment. So the anoxic treatments, you're desticating the insects by removing oxygen. In these other controlled atmospheric treatments, you are fleshing out oxygen and then replacing it with another gas. So these are images of the set up, the carbon dioxide gas bubble that is in use at Historic New England and their collection manager, Adam Osgood, here. They have both a fixed chamber and a softwalled flexible chamber. So you'll see it's the same sort of principle everything's put in, the chamber's sealed, oxygen is sucked out with a vacuum. Now, the thing that separates the CO2 from the small scale anoxic procedures is the amount of monitoring that you need to do. You'll see here, Adam has a lot of equipment to monitor the CO2 levels, the oxygen levels, the temperature and relative humidity. I went backwards there for a moment. And as well as the temperature and RH inside, testing to make sure there's no leaks. And here again, these are the CO2 canisters. So in certain states, this is something that certain states designate CO2 as a pesticide, in which case you actually need a license to be able to run these treatments. So again, you need to distinguish whether there's enough need to have a setup of this type or whether you're more into a sort of one-off solution. It is good to note though that Historic New England does offer pest remedial treatments for a spore fee. And so if you're in the New England area, that might be the option. Other forms of controlled atmospheric treatments like nitrogen and argon have similar setups that you're seeing here. And they too require a lot more monitoring during the course of treatment. So I'm just going to quickly sort of catch on pesticides and fume against. Catch up on my notes. Pesticides have generally been phased out for museum collections as they damage and contaminate museum objects and can affect the DNA of natural history specimens. However, there are some cases where they can be applied by a licensed pest management professional and used at a room or building level infestation. Some examples of this would include boric acid against silverfish, diatomaceous earth used as a desiccant, or dry-owned in a combination of silica gel and pyresons that can be effective if applied safely and properly in conjunction with a professional. And then there's fumigation. Fumigants are a gaseous application of chemical pesticides. Sometimes they're also called fogging treatments. Fumigants can damage or contaminate museum objects. On rare occasions, it may be appropriate to fumigate a museum space or object to ensure the pests are removed. Most chemical fumigation, or really all chemical fumigation, requires a licensed pesticide applicator, specialized equipment, and proper skills. Viking, or sulfuro fluoride, is one product used for fumigating structures and sometimes large items like totem poles. Or however, it's important to remember that fumigation has no residual effect, and it's not going to prevent future infestations. A lot of other fumigants that were used in museum spaces in the past are now prohibited. So what you're seeing here is the fumigation of this diorama, which is sort of an example of the general process where you're creating a fumigation and releasing the fumigant into the space. You have to wait for it to disperse through space and act on any infestation. And then the space would be no vented. Again, I would like to emphasize that any of these kinds of treatments requires a licensed operator. So for most of us, working with a pest management professional, or a PMP, is a really important element of our IPM plan. And we found, though, that it's sometimes difficult to get started properly with a PMP. And so we've developed over the last couple of years a number of resources on the website. One on the right here is tips for hiring a pest management professional. And on the left is one of two PowerPoints that were developed for the museum to use to help educate the pest professional. So for instance, in terms of hiring a professional, many institutions aren't aware that a current pest contract will cover things like roaches, rodents, and maybe ants. But the things that we're mostly interested in, well, we don't want those things as well, but we may also be interested in moths or domestic beetles. And those wouldn't fall under a standard contract. So when you're discussing your needs with a professional, you may need to discuss it in terms of the kinds of levels of monitoring that they would need for stored product pests. We need to be very specific, and it may cost more. On the part of the pest management professional, they are probably used to primarily working with offices or restaurants, maybe schools or hospitals. And so for them, understanding the security that concerns about working in collection areas, what you can touch, what you can't touch, and how they may not have full run of your building and would have to be accompanied, how they work in a museum is generally very different from how they work with their other clients. And so this resource is there for you to begin a conversation with them about how it may be necessary to work in your building. Again, this is a really fast breeze through. There's a lot of information out there, local entomologists, a lot of the ag and agricultural extension schools have excellent information on their website. There's some excellent published literature and our museum, Pest.net, and a similar website run by a UK working group called whatseatingyourcollections.com. So none of this is easy. It's a little icky. I hope that you won't get frustrated and sort of chuck it all, but that you'll follow the basic steps of your IPM plan. And part of that is just having a plan of action, knowing who do you call if a problem should arise. So being prepared just like with any kind of disaster preparedness or response. So I think we have enough time, just for questions. Great, thank you so much, Rachel, very informative. Before we jump over to questions, I just wanted to go ahead and post a link to a short survey here. Sorry if it's blocking part of the presentation. If you could just please go ahead and take some time to fill this out. We look at all of your responses very carefully and they help us to shape future events. Also, if you have any ideas for topics or speakers, we'd love to hear them. So please go ahead and keep any questions that you have coming in our chat box on the left hand window and we'll try to get to them in what time remains. Rachel, you see we have a couple of questions already from this session and I know we had a few that were lingering from last week. So we'll get to them once from today first and then if we have a chance, we'll address those. Okay, so Jan is asking, is the Hanwell-Axenberg system a one-use product or can the cube be opened and resealed multiple times? That's a good question. So there are a couple different components to this system. And again, it's generally the same as any kind of other anoxic chamber that you would set up on your own. The advantage is here, you're getting this ready-made chamber, which for a five meter cube, it really cuts down on a lot of work because if you don't have all your edges properly sealed, you'll never get down to the low levels that you need. So there's the chamber itself. There's also this oxygen monitor that's purchased separately and then the scavenger, which is their proprietary scavenger, it's sort of bigger and supposedly more cost-effective for a larger chamber treatment like this. But to answer your question directly, yes, you can reuse the chamber, providing that it's been used carefully and there's no punctures or damage to it. Basically, you'd be cutting up your sealed edges and so every time you use it, it's going to get a little smaller that bottom sheet, your footprint, is going to get a bit smaller and the height that you have as you cut down. But the chamber itself can be reused several times. Of course, the oxygen meter can be reused indefinitely, although every once in a while, you might need to change the sensor and the scavenger is a one-time use. Great, and then we had a question from Alex asking, is there any information on the effectiveness of the Nuven Pro Strip? So this is a little outside of my particular area of experience and I know that we have someone working on a fact sheet on this for the future. My understanding is that in fact, these are effective if they are used properly. I think what happens very often though is they are not necessarily used in the way that they're recommended. So people will sort of throw a strip into let's say an exhibition between and hope that it does its thing. And I believe it only works within a contained sort of certain amounts of air and all of that. So that's something that I'm going to defer, Alex, and I hope that you will check back on our website after our next meeting in March and hopefully we'll have some more information there. Great, thanks. And then Vicki is wondering if vacuum sealing is necessary or helpful before freezing? No, it is not necessary. And I'm assuming that she's talking about sort of like just general vacuum sealing rather than what you would see after, let's say, a water event where you're talking about about a vacuum there before freezing. So in this case, the more oxygen you remove, you might have less condensation. But you're not going to get the reason why you're bagging is so that the condensation is on the outside of the bag. And so there's no need for the bagging. Okay, Linda is wondering if you have any advice for persistent powder post beetle infestations? Powder post beetle infestations, I guess I'd have a lot more questions for Linda in terms of what kind of object are we talking about? Are we talking about within an entire room? Are we talking about within a single artifact? And what kind of treatments have been done in the past? So Linda, I encourage you to, you're welcome to contact me off-list. And maybe with a little bit more information, powder post beetles are tough. They are extremely robust and it's hard to, without more information, I don't figure out how to, I'm sorry, if that's sort of punting on that question. Not at all. We actually had a couple of questions that were coming in from last week. And I see that a few of the askers of these questions have joined us again this week. So thank you to those come for both parts of this. Katie from Salt Lake City had asked last week, if you have any ideas about how to get non-collection staff to start to adhere to IPM policies? She's noting that they have orientations that discuss IPM but people just don't frequently adhere to the rules and wondering if you have a good way to create staff buy-in. Yeah, so this is a persistent problem. And I have to say that I get brought in as a consultant to help institutions deal with this. And now that I'm back in an institutional setting, I'm facing the same exact thing. And it's, knowing what I'm doing doesn't necessarily make it any easier when you're dealing with people who they want to eat at their desk and they want to throw their trash away where they want to throw it away. So the two things that seem to be essential in the institutions that feel like they have really good buy-in is, one, having support from your administration so that it's coming from the top down and that your administrators are part of, that they're setting a good example, leading by example. And that makes it easier to implement the second part, which is making sure that everybody understands that this isn't just a suggestion, that this is part of how their behavior at work is seen and evaluated by their colleagues and by their superiors. So things like including in an annual performance evaluation adherence to collection policies and procedures. And once people understand that they're being watched and graded on that and that it influences what kind of raise or bonus or advancements might be open to them, then things start to change sort of quickly. The other thing that I have to say also is that ultimately there's a lot of stuff that we do to protect our collections. And sometimes you just have to use your political capital wisely. There are certain battles you're never going to win. Institutions are going to have events. And so you're not going to be able to say, no, we can't have food in here, maybe. That's a battle you won't win, but maybe the battle you can win is saying that garbage must be taken out at the end of the evening. So you, for your own sanity and effectiveness, have to think strategically about where are you willing to draw the line. And Karen, last week, had kind of a somewhat related question. She's wondering about how you stop carpet beetle infestation in a historic house museum with the staff and museum professionals that are somewhat resistant perhaps to changing their methods for cleaning. Yeah. Like the other question, this is a really tough one. So what was really interesting in a few years ago was at the Pestotasy conference is that every institution and historic home there has, let's say, a moth infestation or a carpet beetle infestation. These are just sort of endemic in these institutions. So part of it is making sure that you're really understanding where it is that you're cleaning and what you're doing. So for instance, in places that have these reoccurrent infestations, what they found was, let's say, that things were coming from like underneath the floorboards. And so there were things that they weren't even able to clean so easily. It involves taking up the floor and really, really digging down and clearing things out. Having a persistent infestation like this is something that you really have to tackle at all levels. And all I can say is that there's a couple of presentations between this Pestotasy volume and from our last conference this past year, which is available on the website, you'll see two 2014 conference proceedings. There are a couple of papers there that talk about persistent infestations. And there are a couple of tips in there, but I'm also happy to talk offline. Great. So we're almost out of time. One final quick question that we had a couple of people asking it towards the end of today's session. They're just wondering what you can put inside boxes of books to discourage bugs. Any tips? I'm not really. I think, again, this is the kind of thing where I'd say, where are those boxes of books being held? Are they on the floor? Are they on shelves? Are they cleaned regularly? I think you have to go back to some of these prevention techniques. The fact that the books are boxed in the first place may add another layer of protection, as long as things are being monitored maybe inside, just to make sure that nothing starts brewing in there while you're not realizing it. But it's not like there's anything that you can say to dump in there in the way that people so often use things like mothballs that would discourage pest activities. That's not going to work in this kind of circumstance. So I'd say making sure that your boxes are not in a high-humidity environment, that they're clean, going back again to the proper prevention techniques is going to be what you need to rely on. Great. Well, thank you so much, Rachel, for answering those fantastic questions. And thanks to last week's presenter, Patrick Kelly, for also jumping in in our chat box and addressing some of them as we went along. I'm afraid that our time is up, but I want to say thank you so much to Rachel, and thank you to everyone who joined us here today. A recording of the webinar and related resources will be available shortly in the community. So please feel free to continue this discussion on the discussion board there.