 Institute for Conservation and the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. This program is being recorded and will be available for future reference in a few days. So we see we have, I believe I heard 250 registered, so welcome everyone. We're very excited to have you today. Our next webinar will be on the wet recovery of taxidermy and that will be on Thursday June 21st at 1 p.m. Eastern Time and we hope that all of you will join us for that. So before we begin our presentation today just a couple of quick tech notes. On your screen you'll see several boxes including one that's labeled chat on the left hand side. You can use that chat box to say hello and many of you are and welcome. I see we have people from all over so it's very exciting. You can use that to ask questions, share information. If you post a question I'll keep track of that and ask it to Karen our presenter at a good time. At the bottom of your screen you'll also see a box labeled web links. You can click on the title it'll be highlighted in blue and if you look at the URL will appear in the browse to you can click on the browse to and it'll take you directly to that site. So today I am very pleased to introduce you to our presenter Karen Valka. Karen Valka is a senior lecturer for preventative conservation in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to the iSchool she was head of the paper conservation laboratory at the Henry Ranson Center. She served as director for education and professional development for the AIC from 2005 through 2011 and she is a founding member of the AIC Collection Care Network and serves as program chair. So Karen is taught and consulted at the National Library in Prague, the National Archives in Slovakia, the University of Buenos Aires, the Castillo, Dave Vissaro, the adult in Barcelona, Sun Yatsen University in the People's Republic of China. She's also a member of the National Heritage Responders. She has been deployed in several venues including Texas, Haiti and Puerto Rico and I have the fortune to work with Karen on her last deployment in San Juan. So without further ado I'd like to turn things over to Karen so she can start on today's wet recovery of book and paper. Hello, this webinar is intended for people with personal collections or small archival historic museum collections. It's not intended for people with a lot of experience or people who have large institutions with well-organized conservation departments and administrative staff. I'm sort of assuming that the people I'm talking to don't have any background in salvaging material and don't have a disaster plan in place and don't have any experience doing this sort of thing. Feel free to interrupt me whenever you like. I won't be reading the questions but Jason will and he can interrupt me at any time because I'd rather that you understood what I'm saying. I'll try to talk like a human rather than a conservator but if I throw out any terms that don't make sense please let me know right away. Excuse me. I was talking to a friend last night and telling them that I was going to do this and they said that's not how you do webinars so I hope this works. I'm going to start with some materials that I've gotten wet, a variety of different things. I have a lot of books and paper and some other objects and I have them in all sorts of states of disrepair and damage. I'll start with the books because they're the most straightforward in a lot of ways. So this is what happens. You come into a room where a pipe has burst or someone has left a tap on or there's been a leak in the roof or something happens and all of a sudden you have a bunch of materials that have gotten wet and you're not expecting it. The first step, the first step always is completely counterintuitive but it's to do nothing, to do absolutely nothing. Take a couple of minutes to look things over, see what's in front of you and get yourself a little calm before you dive into this. Excuse me. So step back, assess what's in front of you and then when you have a good idea of what it is go ahead and start working rationally, not in a frenzy. So here I have some books that have been soaking in a little bit of water for about 24 hours so they're not too badly damaged to hold that one aside. These are both paper backs and you can see the water has soaked up to about here so they're pretty wet on the bottom but not completely soaked. So what I'm going to do with them is to dry off the outside and put them on a towel and soak up any moisture that I can at which I'm just going to do one, at which point they're probably going to be damp rather than wet and then I'm going to start interleaving them. Right now I'm using paper towels that I've torn into sheets. If you don't have paper towels you can use newsprint or something else, paper towels are probably the best. I'm going to insert these oh every 10 to 20 pages if I can if I have enough time and enough paper towels or every quarter inch or so. This is, I'm trying to give very practical information and feel free to substitute materials, feel free to make this work for you. You're going to find lots of things that I'm not telling you that just you happen to think up on your own. It's very odd to be talking to someone and not getting any feedback so I apologize if I sound a little odd. I'm going to go through and finish interleaving these and after I've done that I'll go ahead and stand the book up on edge. So I'll press it out a little bit more and then stand it up on edge and fan it out. Now ideally if I can put this somewhere where I have a fan or some sort of air circulation or just good airflow coming through that'll help things dry out a lot more quickly. I don't want to put them all in a corner where they're not going to get any air circulation or they probably won't dry out. After it's sat like this for an hour or two or you know whatever works with my working schedule in this case only the bottom of it is wet so I'm going to either flip either flip each of these towels over. Actually I'm not going to do that sorry. I'm going to move them up to the dry part and have them sticking out the top and after I do that assuming I've gotten them all through I'm going to turn it around the other way and if it was drying from the bottom before I'll have it sitting on its head this time just so that I can make sure it gets dried out overall. Jason did that make sense? I'm only going to do that before. Absolutely. In this case this is a pamphlet. It's about the same level of dampness but it's I can't really stand this one up because it's too flimsy. It won't let me do it. What I'll do with this one is I might stick some more paper towels in between the leaves and they're probably going to fall out but I'm going to stick them in at first and then I'll take it and I have a clothesline behind me over here. Just take this in the center of the pamphlet and again try to fan off leaves a little bit and try to put it somewhere where I think it's going to get a little bit of airflow and let it hang out that way. You might not want to do it outside it might be too windy but that's going to depend on your situation. This is another very common situation where when I first put these books into the bin and put some water in the bottom they were much more narrow than they are now but they've soaked up a lot of water and the water has made them fan out and get a lot bigger. It's going to be a little bit difficult to get these books out because they're really tightly wedged in now so you're going to work on the strongest part of the book in this case I'm going for the hardbacks and then lift them out and go through the same procedures. I'm not going to bother to go through interleaving all of these books because you've probably got it from the first one but one point to make is I think you can probably see how this book is bent out of shape it's winging out over here and over here it's coming up over here it's not shaped like the book anymore. If I let it dry in this configuration it's going to be forever in that configuration what I need to do is shape it gently back into shape and get it as close to a rectangular block as I can and after I've done that you can see it's a little more even now after I've done that after I've gotten it back to be shaped as much like a book as I can then in fact I can go through and start interleaving again. If I don't do that if I leave it curled up this is a book this is a book on how to grow your own mold you liked for our disaster demos um it's dry it was very wet and we intentionally we intentionally curved all of the pages and let them dry like this and you can see they're going to stay like that I mean I can get it wet again and get that curling out but however you put things however you dry things that's the configuration they're going to be in when they're finally dried so and the same thing with this one we intentionally dried it misshapen so that you could see what happens it's completely misshapen you can still read it you can still leaf through and read the book but it's um not very booklike at this point on the other hand these are two that we interleaved and dried and they're fine I mean they're a little bit distorted on the bottom but they can go back on your shelf they can be red and in fact if you have them packed tightly on your shelf over time they're going to flatten out and become even better than they were when you first dried them so Jason were there any questions about any of that no questions so far I think everything's going well you could speak up a little bit but I think so far things great oh okay um I didn't put very many resources on the bottom of the screen for you because this is a hands-on demonstration and so I didn't do much about disaster planning that's been covered in lots of other places there are three resources that are really useful to have around one is this field guide there to emergency response this is available on the AIC website and it gives excellent hands-on information at the same place you can find this disaster wheel and everyone should have a copy of this it's just quick and fast and easy to use gives you very good solid practical information and I gave you a link to this disaster salvage chart on salvage at a glance that was done by the restaurant arts alliance can I forget why WAA seeks um and I think it's still available for free all three of those are excellent resources I have another tray of stuff over here that's the best camera angle for it I've got some books and some videotapes and some paper what you can't see on camera it just doesn't come across on camera is there are some pink and blue and yellow fragments floating around in the bottom there this is a much different situation than simply drying out a book in this case I don't really know what I have in front of me right now if that's the case it means safety becomes an issue because I don't know that there's not something strange in the bottom of this tray that could in fact be harmful a good indication is if you walk into a disaster situation and it really stinks you probably won't put on gloves for most books and paper you're probably okay without it if you have any reservations about what you're doing at all we're personal protective equipment and I'll go through that later when I show you how to take mode um but again this is where you're going to stand back and do nothing and just assess what's in front of you you're going to go through and decide which things are the most valuable which things you absolutely can't live without um and you're going to go through and decide you know maybe I can throw that one away maybe that one doesn't really matter to me so that's going to be individual for all of you for anyone who has a disaster plan in place you've already thought about that but most people with personal connections happened okay so this is a book I'm going to put that aside because we've talked about books already now I've got some paper documents that are very fragile but don't be afraid of it this paper is completely saturated and I can still pick it up and handle it so if I have stacks of paper like this I'm going to pick it up and squeeze some of the moisture out or put it down on a towel and blot some of the moisture out and then I'm going to lift it up again and lay it out in a cool dry place with air circulation if I have enough space to separate these pieces of paper and lay them out one leaf at a time I'll do that but you're very rarely going to have that much space so it's okay to go ahead and dry them in stacks of 10 or 20 leaves um if it has to be more than 10 or 20 leaves go with it wait nice sorry my computer shut off for a minute um okay so in the tray you can see I have some sort of photographs over here I guess you it's hard to see that on camera but in person it's obvious that this is the back of photographs over here these are cds um this I can tell is a stereo card and this is an envelope with some stuff in it if it's stuff in my personal collections I probably have a pretty good idea of what it is and how important it is to me if I go back to my disaster wheel it's going to tell me that if I have cds I can just pull them out of the water and I can rinse them off and I can let them dry I'm putting them down on this piece of paper with the media side up um this shiny plastic side doesn't have the media this flat side that might have a label or some writing or something on it that in fact has all of your media encoded in it and at this point it's fairly fragile I can show you that this is not collection material these are all things that have been discarded um so if I take this and scrape it you can see that I can scrape the data right off the disc that's why you want to dry it with this side up and the shiny side down don't scrape your own materials like that um okay then I'm gonna go through and I've decided that this vcr tape is the next most important thing to me so it's a vcr tape that's in a cardboard box if I can pull it out in this case I can pull it out of the cardboard box and it's coming out just fine I'm going to take the cardboard box and just blot it with a towel and again I'm gonna stand it up and let it air dry or lay it on its side and let it air dry and just put it in the place with good ventilation the vcr tape you can look on the disaster reel or salvage chart and see that they'll tell you to rinse it with clean water assuming you have clean water so you can run it it's probably better to dip it it's probably better to dip it in a bucket of clean water and then let it drain this one was pretty wet to begin with and then just let it dry like that if it's not really really wet if it's just a little bit damp I'm not going to go ahead and dip it in a bucket of water but this one is already saturated we've had pretty good success with these we've done that and taken them out and dried them like this and actually gotten them to play again you can't be guaranteed that you're going to have a success rate but it's a pretty good shot that you're going to okay at this point I'm going to get rid of all this stuff and again none of this is collection material this is all stuff that is being thrown out if it were collection material I wouldn't be throwing it out um here and I have this is Jason I have one question for you would you recommend using paper towels for wet documents like you did with the books yes if I have paper towels I'm going to use paper towels if I don't have paper towels I'm going to use cherry cloth towels I'm going to use old sheets I'm going to use use newsprint I would rather have newsprint that doesn't have print on it if newsprint with print on it is the only thing that I have I'm going to go ahead and use that I'm I'm going to use anything that's made out of cellulose so that cotton or paper I'm not going to use polyester towels or nylon towels because they're not going to absorb any moisture but anything that's going to absorb moisture is going to be fine I'd like it to be clean and white but I'll take what I can get in disaster and Karen before we move away from books can you rewet um this shape and book to straighten it back out yes we can and I was going to get to that later but we'll do it now I'll show you okay I've got two more cases of books here types of books this one it's really hard to get a book this wet this is really wet I've had this thing soaking for four days it took that long to get it this wet um it's not often that you get books that are quite this wet if you do it's the first sort of thing first it's just like the others where you take it and put it down on a towel and now you're really going to have to work with it to get some moisture out of it and I will get to the bent up open just a minute but these two were in together um so you'll squeeze as much moisture out as you can you can put it in between towels with the weight on the top of it until you can get it damp you're not going to have great success with a book like this this is a big heavy book that's completely saturated and you can see how it's misshapen up here if I get it dry it's still going to be in a configuration like this if I can replace this book I will if I absolutely have to dry it I'll go ahead squeeze as much out of it as I can and until it gets damp and then I'll go ahead and interleave it if I can't if I have too many other things that I'm dealing with at one time I'll go ahead and take this book and keep it as flat as I can I don't know that I tore that large enough and I'll take a piece of wax paper or parchment or some other sort of interleaving paper and wrap the book in it I'll stack it flat like that with any other books I'll stack them all as flat as I can and then I'll freeze them if they're frozen they're stabilized and that doesn't really do a lot to draw them out but what it does is buys me some time and then I can go ahead and unfreeze it later okay this one I intentionally crunched up before I got it wet trying not to drip water all over my computer but this one is intentionally hunched up and you can see how the pages are folded in on each other it's a fairly fragile piece of paper and if I try to separate it like this I run the risk of tearing the paper if I this is better in a bigger bucket but it's harder to see on camera so if I take this paper and put it in a bucket of water it allows me to the paper becomes very very flexible and it allows me to open up those leaves which you can't really see because of the camera angle here um but it allows me to open it up and get it flat this is an inset that I'm just going to take out and then I can take this completely saturated pamphlet while it's all right while it's really wet like this in fact I can move the paper around and manipulate it um and then I take this and put it down on a sheet of towel or a blotter paper or a newsprint or whatever and again squeeze the moisture out of it um keep working it until it's damp and then I can go ahead and either hang it on the line or interleave it it's too wet to manipulate right now you'll be able to plan your space a little more efficiently if you don't have only this in your space that's what fits on camera so I'm a little limited I'm also trying to not flood my computer because our IT people will be really mad at me if I drown the computer okay so now I'm on to photographic materials and these are all snapshots these at this point I can see that they're envelopes with negative sticking out of them and this is a stereo card so at this point I'm going to assume that they're all of equal value and I'm just going to go ahead and lift up the one that's on top so again I want a towel or some blotter or something to work on for the table um I have this micro spatula it's a tool that I really like that works very very well you don't have one of those you might have an artist's palette knife and they work really well or you might have something that's just pretty much like a table knife and that'll work fine as well I'm not going to be able I'm going to make the decision to sacrifice this envelope it's got some information on the back of it which is probably the people in the negatives so I want to make sure that I keep that but I'm going to go ahead and carefully cut this envelope on the side and the reason I'm doing that is because the negatives are more important to me than the envelope you decide the envelope is more important to you you might want to make a different decision if I'm looking at these negatives I can now peel this back and actually see what's going on this is not going to be captured on camera but I can describe it to you one side of the negative is going to be very very shiny and the other side is going to have a little bit more texture to it the side with more texture to it is the emulsion side and that's the side that's a lot more vulnerable so I'm going to work on this with the shiny side up I'm going to deal with the shiny side here I'm going to peel this envelope away and now I'm going to lift this negative out of the envelope and put it down on the towel with the emulsion side up because if I put it down on the towel with the emulsion side down that very fragile emulsion is going to stick to the towel and I'm going to lose it if I dry it this way I you can have a lot of success I actually talked someone through that doing this she had about 400 of them over water and we couldn't get to her we actually talked her through it over the phone and I think she had about a 90 success rate so these things are a lot more resilient than you think and one of the reasons that I like talking to people about personal papers and small collections is anytime you go through a disaster situation in the aftermath of it you'll see tons and tons and tons of things that were thrown away that you know could have been saved if someone had just taken a little bit of time they didn't have to get rid of all those photographs all those documents so take it slowly and think about it at this point I'm going to be dealing with color materials color photograph materials and so at this point I'm going to go ahead and put gloves on you could argue that I should have had gloves on when I was treating the black and white photograph or negative and probably would have been good to have them on you don't always have gloves and you're not don't think it's quite as big a deal when they're wet here it's color materials and I'm putting gloves on more for my own safety than what I think I'm going to do to the photographs because the other thing you don't get over video is these color materials get really stinky when they're wet and if they're stinky they're probably not good for me they're not that bad but I feel like I need to have a respirator on but I don't think I really want to be sticking my hands in those chemicals so I'm going to I'm going to take this group of photographs out as one unit and this is fairly typical and you see how this is white all of the photographic emulsion is gone at this point but this has been soaking in the bath for about four days so I'm not really surprised and you can see that photographic emulsion is just completely coming off that's gone there is nothing anyone can do about that photograph it's gone but if I peel this away the part that was covered up by another photograph is still there and in fact is still intact it's really really fragile at this point but if I pull these apart very carefully and let them dry on a towel like this I'm going to let them dry face up with the image side up and you can see where they weren't protected from anything all of the emulsion is gone um but the image area where it was in contact with another photograph it's still there it's the variation that you get in these situations is truly amazing sometimes you'll get things that have no damage and sometimes they'll be completely gone they would have appeared to be exactly the same thing at first but they just act differently um so again go through slowly and carefully and save what you can we had success in limberly with saving photographs that have been underwater for a month that's where that doesn't often happen but sometimes you'll get lucky um okay jason are there any questions about this okay I'm going to get rid of all this stuff and go on to something else um so another envelope of acetate negatimer this one came through just fine I was hoping this one would completely melt sometimes they just completely melt and there's nothing you can do these are stereo cards and again you can just lay these out take as much moisture as you can with photographs in general don't touch the photographic image touch the back let the front air dry it might be a good idea to rinse them off if you have clean water you might also lose them completely and audio tape in that a cassette tape in that thing and it's just like the video tape in fact in this case it doesn't have very much water in it at all and so I'm just going to try it out flat let it dry it'll probably be just fine in fact we actually burned some of these we put a bunch of them through a fire and then put fire out with water and we're able to save those and we still played I'm surprised but it was um here's another tray full of stuff actually I want to show you a different one first sorry this is very very fragile newsprint that's floating around in water if I lift this up normally it tears it when it started if I lift it up it's going to tear very very easily and I'm not going to be able to deal with it but this is incredibly brittle and incredibly fragile paper so I'm going to make it even worse just to show you that there's a way to lift it out this is a piece of holotex it's um spun bond polyester and if I lift this out if I just get it started adhering in the corner it's going to stick to the polyester I can lift it out very safely that way and I can lay it down on the table I happen to use holotex spun bond polyester when I'm doing this because I'm in a lab and I have a lot of it around you can do the same thing with a pillowcase or a dish towel or anything else it's just when paper is really wet like that it'll stick to another surface you put one last thing in okay in this case I'm going to make the executive decision that this cigar catalog can get thrown away however now I've got manuscript material this is modern paper again I can pick it up if I work very very gently it's a little distorted and wrinkled now I can throw it back in that tray of water and lift it out with a sheet of polyester and get it flat if I want to do that if I put it down in this wrinkled configuration it's going to fly like that and it's going to be forever creased so I do want to put this back in about and flatten it out again and then you have things like this okay um this is going to be a little hard to see on camera there's some writing over here there was a whole bunch of writing over here but it's completely gone there was a little bit of it still left yesterday and I took it out of the water but it's disappeared now um these inks there were three different inks on this piece of paper and before they were wet they all looked like exactly the same ink but in fact when they're wet they act a lot differently and one of them just lost the information completely so again then you're going to decide if it's worth it to save this part of the information or if you just want to discard the whole thing if there were any there's a little bit of writing left here the seven two four if I take this piece of paper it's a little distorted you know and wrinkled but if I take this and throw it back in the bath to flatten it out again I'm going to lose those last couple of numbers so that's up to you whether or not you think that's worth it and last wet object I'm going to show you is a painting if the painting were in a frame I would take it out of the grain it's not it's just on a strainer I'm going to very carefully turn it over I want to dry it face up on blocks I don't want to dry it face down this painting has an interesting history I found it in trash one day on the way to work and I think this is about the 12th disaster it's been in so this is just acrylic on canvas you can see sometimes they come through remarkably well it has a lot of tide lines on the back because this is about its 12th disaster exercise but the paint layer is still in relatively good condition I want to put this up on blocks dry it flat I don't think I want to blot moisture off the surface of that because I don't know enough about paintings and frankly it scares me I might if I'm feeling really really brave you can see there's water puddled on the surface of this if I'm feeling really really brave I might go in from the side and use the least pressure I possibly can and try to blot up some of the moisture but paintings can flake and all sorts of things can happen to them so if I have the option I'm more inclined to let it air dry even though this one has went over and over and over again and you're not going to have blocks you're probably not going to have blocks but you might have these plastic boxes you might have bricks you might have two hands or something that you can turn over just try to put it up on something okay one thing it's really disheartening and upsetting when you come in and find that your collection is underwater and a large part of it is probably going to be destroyed there are a couple of things to think about it's a natural inclination to think that you can go ahead and work for 12 hours straight without a break because if you work for 12 hours straight you're not you're going to get more stuff done wrong you need to take a break you absolutely need to take a break you need to make yourself take a break meet the people around you take a break have a glass of water have a cup of coffee have a cookie and sit and rest for a while if you're working when you're really tired you're going to do damage to the materials that you're working on and you're going to hurt yourself um and I can tell you that from experience because I've worked way past when I should have been working time and time again but don't do it all right Jason I'm going to move on to mold back to get some other stuff hey Jason okay if it can air dry photographs even partially can you rewet them in order to aid in some yes ish um you risk catastrophic loss you might be able to get away with it you might not photographs are really funny beasts and they do unpredictable things um I've done that experimentally I've you know tried to rewet them and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and I would consult a real photo conservator I'm not a photo conservator um I've just had I've been thrown into dealing with this stuff after disasters but the photos I tend to want to keep what's in front of me rather than pushing it any further but you can try it just recognize that you may lose it okay sounds good on okay I'm going to go on to how to deal with mold I have a molding pamphlet over here I'm not going to take that out yet I'm going to set up a working space and I'm going to put on personal protective equipment before I deal with this mold is a huge problem in the south because it's warm and humid down here um it's a problem other places as well not all molds are damaging not all molds are toxic or even allergens but some of them are and you can't test for every kind of mold that you have so I just make the assumption that they're all toxic and I go ahead and um assume that I need to use protection anytime I'm working with mold the other thing is the more you work with mold the more sensitive you're likely to become to it so you want to protect yourself so the first thing I'm going to do is prepare a working surface I've taken a piece of newsprint or any other cheap paper I folded three sides of it and I'm going to tape them together so that I have a nice little tray here and all of the dirt and debris is going to be contained in this tray and then I'm going to use what's called a soot sponge to remove the mold there um you can buy these things from conservation suppliers you can buy them from pet stores they're called pet hair removal sponges makeup sponges can be very similar it's just a vulcanized rubber sponge but they work really really well for taking stuff off and the advantage is any mold and soot that I take off is going to be contained in these fragments of the sponge itself and isn't going to fly all over and get into the air and I'm not going to breathe it in so for personal protective equipment I have a whole lot of it here for mold the first thing I'm going to do is get rid of my hair because it does nothing but get in the way um so we'll put that up in a rubber band going to put on a shirt a big old shirt that I can button all the way up I'm going to button this all the way the next thing I'm going to do is to take a minute the next thing I'm going to do is to cover my hair going back to my slavic roots here this is the glamour part of the job um after I do that I'm going to put on something to filter out the mold I have a couple of choices what I use when I'm working in areas that have a whole lot of mold is a half mask respirator and these are great I love working in these they're comfortable they're easy to wear when you're used to them but they do have to be fitted to your face so it's not likely that people outside collections are going to have them and if they're not properly fitted to your face they're not really very effective I'm going to use this n95 mask um I don't know that's focusing you do have to specify that it's n like Nancy 95 and that way you know you're going to be filtering out most things that are going to be harmful to you and I'll show you how to put that on in a minute what you don't want to use is one of these dust masks these are totally useless because they don't fit to your face they go over your nose and they leave big gaps all over if this is the only thing that you have if you absolutely have to use this go ahead and get surgical tape or some other tape and tape it to your face and that way at least it'll be sealed to your face it's not comfortable but it works um after I have all this on I'm going to go ahead and put the mask on so I have to put that over my head and you do start a run out of face landscape here so I'm going to take the bottom string and pull it up or yeah and then the upper string and pull it around the back of my head I'm going to take two fingers and press this metal strip to my face and conform it to my face as much as I can and then I'm going to try to fit my glasses on and then I'm going to put goggles on not pretty but safe and finally I'm going to take gloves now that I'm all suited up I'm going to take my moldy pamphlet I've had it sealed up in this envelope plastic is better but I've had it sealed up in this paper envelope and I'm just going to do a very small demonstration to show you how to take the mold off here I'm going to open it up to an opening that has lots of nice mold staining I'm going to take my soot sponge I have scissors but I can't find them now I'm going to cut off a piece of the soot sponge the thinner ones are easier to cut the reason I'm going to cut it into small fragments is it's going to be way more efficient and way more useful because I have a lot of different surface areas exposed if I use this one big block then I'm just going to soil the entire soot sponge and have to throw it away but here I can just use small pieces of it and I think I'll do it right here because that'll be easy to see if you look on this side where that finger is you can see that it's dark there's a lot of mold accretion on it I'm going to take this sponge and work in gentle circles working from the inside of the page to the outside of the page and the reason I'm working from the inside of the page to the outside of the page is I'm likely to do less damage doing it that way you can see I've got a lot of the mold on the sponge itself and here where my finger is pointing you can see I think you can see on one side it's white and on the other side there's still quite a bit of mold you don't always get all of the mold stain off with this but you get a lot of it off yeah well you don't get the stain off you get the mold off so that it's not going to circulate and get into the air but you don't get the stains off if I've completely cleaned that then I'm going to put it into a good housing right now I'm putting it back to into its moldy pamphlet and and I'll put it in a plastic bag later and then I want to take off all of this equipment and get rid of it okay so the way I'm going to do it I'm going to take my gloves off first and turn them inside out and anything that I'm going to discard I'm going to put in here I'll take my goggles off and put them over to the side I'll wash those later I'm going to take this mask off and I can reuse this mask in fact the more I use it the more this sort of gets clogged up and it gets a little bit more efficient as you use it I do tend to take it outside and brush it off a little bit but I can reuse it I'm going to take the scarf off I'm going to take the shirt off and turn it inside out and with this stuff I'll turn this inside out I'll put this I'll wrap all of this stuff up together and I'll put it into a big plastic trash bag until I can get it into the laundry and then I'll take this and fold it up and it's all contained and now I can throw it right in the trash I'll take the trash out right away but there aren't any special procedures that you need to follow for getting rid of mold um then lastly I have a damp washcloth and I'll use that just to wipe off my face and neck and you know arms and anything I think might have gotten exposed to the mold okay any questions about that so one question that came up was about um after you use them do they impact reused so the sponges you were just using I couldn't hear you sorry do they do they come apart when you're using them or could they be washed and reused um I do sometimes wash them and reuse them because I'm cheap um or if I have a hepa vac I'll use that to um clean them out but yeah they can be so another question on that came up can you talk a little bit about drying of items and also about unfreezing process like how long it takes for something to thaw before you would start working on it again how long it takes to thaw is it depends on how big the book is if it's a thin pamphlet it's probably going to take oh seven hours to a day if it's a thick book it's probably going to take a couple of days and you probably want to put it in a thermos and let it thaw gently that way you just have to keep checking them you might be able to you're probably going to be able to dry out the outside of the book before you get to the inside of the book it's something that you just have to play by feel I didn't talk about freeze drying and I didn't do that intentionally because that's not something that's going to be available to personal collections or for the most part just for small institutions if you want to have something freeze dried you're going to have to go through one of the vendors um polygon bms cat one of those places and contract with them and it's generally not worthwhile for two or three books um if you have a couple of hundred books that's probably worthwhile yes that makes sense so a lot of I know a lot of webinar a lot of information is about you know as soon as you can freeze your stuff so you can get the later but as you know and I know that's not practical for a lot of places that don't have power afterwards so can you talk a little bit about if that's just not an option how you would try to attack a larger collection with powers not available yeah um the rule of thumb with mold the reason you want to get things dried quickly is you want to avoid growing mold the rule of thumb with mold is three days at 70 r h or above that's not strictly true I had some paper in here all semester I had it in the humidity chamber for 10 weeks before I got any mold um and sometimes you get it within 24 hours such as you just don't know but the rule of thumb is three days so you want to get things as dry as you possibly can before that three day period your options are to take your interleaving and keep changing it to um put the you know if I have these things if this part has gotten wet I want to move to a dry part over there if I've been using this paper towel I can take this one and put it in the sun and pull this one out you know and put a dry place in I'm just going to keep changing things as much as I can and using ventilation as much as I can and separating things as much as I can introduce as much airflow and I'm gonna take my chances um you can't always freeze everything because you don't have as you said you don't always have electricity so all you can do is try to get it as dry as you can as quickly as you can I know that's not a great answer but Karen thank you very much we've we have filled up our hour and I think we've answered most questions we really appreciate it and hopefully we will be hearing more from you in the future and of course this webinar will be available and all of the participants who registered whether you weren't able to to make it today or not will be sent the recording will be sent to everyone who registered it'll also be on the internet so we look forward to being able to rewatch it and see any tip we might have missed and thank you everyone for joining us today and especially thank you to Karen we ask that you just take a few minutes now before you log off complete the brief survey link on the screen and that's actually at the bottom to your right says participation evaluation and also there's links below it you can find out more information about FAIC and NCPTT if you want but you know tune in for our next webinar and by all means check out our the survey evaluation if you can and thank you again thanks Jason