 Hello, everybody, and welcome to this afternoon's webinar. This is Mike Warner from Learning Times. I will be your producer today. And if you require any tech support, please feel free to recommend it with me in the chat window. Just a quick note for those of you who are coming in from residential networks. That's the majority of us are, I suppose, at this point in time due to the global situation. If you are coming in on a residential Wi-Fi network and finding that occasionally the slides do not exactly correspond to the audio, it could be a bandwidth issue. And so feel free to refresh your browser and that will often result in the issue. Today's webcast is being recorded, and the recording will become available as well on the two collections care website in the coming days. So without further delay, I'm going to go ahead and pass things off to our host, Robyn O'Rourke. Go ahead, Robyn. I want to be ready. Hi, everyone. Welcome again to another Connecting to Collections Care webinar. Before I start, I would like to acknowledge that this webinar is being moderated on the traditional lands of the Nicosuque and Seminole people and their ancestors. I pay my respect to elders those past and present. Well, again, welcome. I hope everyone stays safe during this very active hurricane flash fire week that seems to be happening around the country. Again, introductions. My name is Robyn O'Rourke-Hilgo. I am the Community Coordinator for C2C Care, and you just heard Mike, our senior producer over at Learning Time. Like he said, if you guys have any questions or issues, please feel free to put them in the chat. Mike and I will be here the entire time, so we're going to be happy to answer any questions you might have when it comes to anything that's going on with the system. As a quick reminder, this is our home on the web. This is connectingtocollections.org. Here you're going to find not only this webinar, which after it's done and recorded, we're going to pop up there so people can view. You'll find a slew of other great recordings we have from the Connecting to Collection program. So please feel free to go and dig around. You'll find subjects from all under the fun of the world of C2C Collections Care, so go ahead and dig around in there when you have a chance. This is actually the archives page. As you can see, we've had webinars going back to 2010. So there's a lot of information there, and we really encourage people to go check it out when they have a chance. We also have a member-only community, which is under the Discussions tab. It's part of the community found on culturalheritage.org. On there, if you click on that link, you'll go to an area that, while you can view it, if you become a member, you can go ahead and post a question to our community. We have a group of fabulous conservator monitors who will take a look at your question. Either give you a good chance of an answer, or we'll even go out to our slew of experts that we have within the conservation field. So it's a really great space to get information on any kind of question you might have when it comes to care of your collection. You can also find us online. We have a Facebook page, which is facebook.com, C2C Community, also on Twitter, at C2C Care. On both of those pages, we will go ahead and do announcements of upcoming webinars. We will talk a bit about what's going on, and we'll pass along any kind of fun programming or news items that might be in the world happening at that time. Wanted to recap a couple of quick events that have recently occurred within C2C Care. Back on August 5th, we had a really fun livestream that occurred originally on Facebook. It was called Reopening Cultural Institutions. The livestream is archived on Facebook, and it's also now on the AIC YouTube stream. So if you wanna go ahead and take a look at those, we pulled together five different people from different representations of cultural institutions and how they are dealing with the fun of reopening and this weird time that we're living in right now. So I would encourage people to go out and take a look at that. We also have an upcoming webinar. This is a free webinar on September 9th, called Basics of Collection Photography, happening between 2 and 3.30 p.m. If you go to our website, connectingtocollectionscare.org, you can register for that free website. And the other exciting bit of news we have is upcoming in October, November, we have a course coming up. Now the courses are a little different. We do have to charge for the courses per our IMLS grant, but it's gonna be a really great course. It's gonna be a series of five webinars. The name of it is Physical Media to Digital Storage, Migrating Audio-Visual Files. So it's gonna be all about how many of us have to deal with these fun random bits of media within the back of our collection. And we have some great experts who are here to walk us through the process of getting them onto proper storage so they can be around in your institutions for years to come. So keep an eye out for any of our website and any of our social media. We'll announce the registration is open for that and we're really excited to have you all join us for that. Quick note on our platform. Here I'm pointing out the fact of our chat box that you guys are doing great at. So I feel like I'm pretty... I can kind of skip this part. But when you enter things in the chat box, please do click Send, just hit Return. That will actually allow the message to pop through. If you also look on the side, you'll see a links box. There you'll see a resource list that our presenter was kind enough to put together. A copy of the webinar slide, which I know is always a really important thing for everyone to have. And finally, the evaluation link at the end of the webinar, and I'll remind you guys of this at that time, you can go ahead and click on the evaluation. Let us know how we're doing in our series. So now I'm gonna go ahead and introduce our speaker, again, for our session called Care and Curation of Archaeological Collections for Museum. Nicolette Meister is the James E. Lockwood Jr. Director of the Logan Museum of Anthropology at Delay College, where she is also the instructor in the Museum Studies Program. In addition, she serves as faculty director of the Center for Collections Care, a professional development training program focused on providing intensive experiential learning and preventative care for emerging and practicing museum, library, and archives professionals. And without further ado, I'm gonna hand the mic over to Nicolette. Great, thank you so much, Robin. It's a real honor to be invited to present this webinar today. And just looking at the chat box, also to be in the company of such a diverse and really international group. So thank you so much. I also noticed that there are at least a couple of Beloit College alums. So go Beloit, thanks for being here. I really appreciate that. So before I dig into the content, I wanted to make clear that the perspective that I'm gonna share today is really based on archeological curation in the US. I've got over 25 years of experience working with archeological collections, but I also wanna make clear I'm not a conservator and nor am I an archeologist. So this webinar takes as its focus preventive care and collections management at a more basic level geared toward the non-expert who is in the situation where they're caring for and managing archeological collections. So in addition, my perspective is largely based on my years of experience at the Logan Museum of Anthropology. The Logan is one of two academic museums that are part of Beloit College, which is a small liberal arts college located in Southern Wisconsin. And for our international audience, we are about an hour and a half north of Chicago just to kinda give you a context of where we're located. Beloit is also home to over 20 Native American mounds, some of which you can see in the lower right hand photo. So I wanna begin acknowledging that Beloit is located on the traditional territory of indigenous peoples and that we respectfully acknowledge the Ho-Chunk, Autotomy, and Sac and Fox people who stewarded this land. We recognize the legacies of violence, displacement, and settlement they faced. We are always on indigenous land and on our campus we have a constant reminder in the form of the mounds. The Logan Museum of Anthropology was founded as a teaching museum and it's based on collections that were exhibited at the Chicago World Columbian Exhibition in 1893. So the map that you see in the lower left hand corner provides just a glimpse of the scope and scale of the museum's archeological holdings. Many of these collections were systematically collected through Beloit College sponsored excavations, but many of the others came through private collections or entered the museum through the art market and as a result, they lack good provenance information. Beloit College is also home to a museum studies program. The campus museums are used as teaching laboratories and as a result, a lot of the work that we do to care for and curate archeological collection is accomplished with students. To provide some context, I'd like to begin with a really brief history of archeological curation in the US. When people talk about the care and curation of archeological collection, they will inevitably refer to the curation crisis. So this crisis is defined by inaccessible and inadequately cared for and managed archeological collections and associated records. And this crisis took decades to unfold and it really began when archeology started to move out of museums and into academia or universities and this began happening in the early 20th century. This resulted in a focus on field work and research and a small kind of neglect of archeological collections care and management. The Antiquity Act of 1906, it did provide good site protection, it established the permitting process but it didn't address standards for care. Federal Works Program, beginning in the 1930s, ushered in the era of large-scale federal salvage archeology projects but again resulted in this massive influx of archeological collections. With the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 and then the development of cultural resource management or contract archeology, the flood of archeological collections just continued. With the passage of ARPA, the Archeological Resources Protection Act in 1979, this did help to prioritize curation but we didn't see actual standards for the curation of federally owned archeological collections until 1990 when 36 CFR79 was codified. Another factor that contributed to the crisis is the lack of cross-training. Although this was changing, archeologists are generally not taught about collections care and management and vice versa, most curators and collections managers going through a museum studies program they're not trained as archeologists. Lack of cross-training and understanding of the disciplines contributes to the problems that we face in the curation crisis today. This is what the curation crisis looked like at the Lodi Museum when I began in 1999, over a long time ago, I know. Archeological collections were uninventoryed, they were housed and overcrowded, you can see often dirty and moldy, housed in non-archival cardboard boxes. On the far right, you can see associated maps that were tightly rolled, stacked up heavily on shelves and what this meant was that for all practical purposes, this collection was impenetrable for research and teaching. We've rectified this situation but it took years of work. Starting with the conservation assessments which led to grant writing and then multiple grant-funded collection rehousing and computerization projects. The real goal of archeological collections care and curation is to ensure that collections and their associated documentation is accessible over the long term. Proper curation will ensure that the convenience information remains linked to the artifacts with both physical and electronic management systems. These systems make it possible for us to ask research questions, retrieve data sets, share data and physically locate collections and storage. And the management of archeological collections is particularly important because of course, archeological collections are non-renewable resources. The kind of curation of archeological collections is a huge topic. Lots of books have been written about this topic which I'll share with you later. So this is a lot to cover in one hour of time. So what I've opted to do is sort of begin with basic background information on the causes of deterioration and I'll address how best to organize, store and manage archeological collections. And I'll also share some specific storage techniques and I'll talk a little bit about computerization of archeological collections and data. Preventive conservation or preventive care, people use those terms interchangeably, is a methodology that works to mitigate deterioration and damage of objects by formulating and implementing holistic policies, plans and procedures. Preventive care requires an understanding of what causes deterioration and the ability to determine the probability of damage occurring. So in short, preventive care really works to mitigate the impact of these agents of deterioration. The agents of deterioration are the 10 factors that contribute to deterioration of objects. They can affect the physical and chemical integrity of an object and they can compromise its value for research, education and exhibition. It's important to remember, and this may seem like an obvious fact, that when we're talking about archeological objects, we're talking about objects that come from an archeological context, so they were once buried. And as a result of this burial context, they face issues related to their environment both during burial and after excavation. So the first agents of deterioration I wanna briefly touch on is physical force. And this includes things like shock and vibrations, ablations, gravity and then also improper handling. Mishandling is really the primary cause of physical damage, but it's important not to overlook the impact of overcrowding of archeological collections, especially lipids and storage. This can result in edge damage, as you can see in the photo on the far left. Archeologists study edgands stone tools to understand how they were used, but if they're piled together in storage and there's subject to movement from drawers when they're opening and closing, this will cause objects to smack against one another and will cause them to abrade and chip, which of course compromises due to research value. Water can come from natural sources, Robin was mentioning the hurricane, mechanical malfunctions or accidents. Because most archeological ceramics are low fired, they're porous or more porous and will absorb water. Flasks and buried often show signs of iridescence which you can see in the image in the lower right sort of manifests as this rainbow color, kind of shiny, flaky layers on the surface and this will result in exposure to moisture in the burial environment that leaches away certain components of the glass. Unlike organic materials, archeological materials like ceramic and stone and metal are typically not sensitive to light. For the majority of cultural materials, a set point in the range of 45 to 55% relative humidity with an allowable drip of plus or minus 5% and a temperature range between 59 and 77%, 77 degrees Fahrenheit is generally considered accessible. This has changed from the more rigid 50, 70 standards that we used to have with the sort of greening movement that has happened in museums. Physical damage occurs when the environment fluctuates rapidly and this causes organic materials to shrink and swell resulting in physical damage like the sort that you see in the flybomb right. High humidity can cause metals to corrode and sudden drops in relative humidity can cause salt crystals to develop on ceramic surfaces and spalling surfaces. Most inorganic materials will be damaged by the presence of soluble salt in the burial environment which migrate inside ceramic stone and bones. So because most archeological items in museums haven't gone undergone treatment to remove these salts, they're going to be more vulnerable to fluctuations in the story of the environment. Fluctuations in relative humidity can move those soluble salts in and out of solution which draws the salts up through the pores of the artifacts and at a high RH, they'll be dissolved. When the RH drops, they will crystallize and the force of those growing crystals can break apart surfaces as you can see in the spalling ceramic molasses. Soluble salts on the surface often look like a soft white fog. Don't mistake this for mold. You can see an example of this on the slide on the right. So to limit salt movements, the objective is to really keep your relative humidity stable in your storage or exhibition environment. Are any living organisms that's able to damage or destroy material culture and includes mold, insects, and rodents? Generally speaking, inorganic materials are not attractive to pests. But of course, archaeological collections also contain organic components, most notably in the form of associated documentation. So what you see here in the two pictures on the screen is a sort of absolute worst case scenario of what can happen when pest infestations go unmonitored. And we need to keep in mind too that mice, urine, and feces can carry nasty diseases like hand virus. Sorting through these files, which of course we did outside, we did not bring them into the museum like this, was probably one of the most disgusting things I've ever undertaken at the museum, but can be a reality when we're dealing with old records that may not have been or artifacts, for that matter, that may not have been stored in the impoverished environment. Contaminants can be in the form of gases, liquids, or solids, and they come from a whole range of different sources. And they can cause chemical reactions that result in things like disintegrations, its coloration, and corrosion. In the past, archeological ceramics were often reconstructed and glued together with things like ducal cement or other glues that have really poor aging characteristics. These bonds, yellow with age, they shrink and they lose adhesion, and as a result, they can frequently fail. For this reason, reconstructed vessels need additional support and they need to be handled with extreme care. Also not uncommon, was the use of clear fingernail polish as a numbering lacquer, especially in the field. Fingernail polish also has poor aging properties primarily because its main ingredient is cellular nitrate. It yellows over time and as you can see from the photo in the far right corner, it eventually peels off. And if you lose that site information, you're losing the important context and relationship between that artifact and the archeological site. So it's essential that that information remains associated with the object. Fire is usually catastrophic, as we saw recently with the National Museum of Brazill Fire, more portable archeological objects like coins and jewelry are often the target of theft. And unfortunately, since the 1990s, archeological sites and museums in conflict zones have increasingly become the target of systematic and deliberate attacks. In addition, we now see archeological sites being needed to fund extremist groups and terrorism in the Middle East. This association or displacement refers to artifacts and records placed in the wrong location or just since we lost due to negligence. This association is one example of curatorial neglect which can also include abandonment of collections, ignorance of staff, and lack of adequate policy and procedures regarding handling and use. Due to time, I'm not really able to address collections management policies and plans in this webinar, but I do wanna make clear that these are core documents that are vital to collection stewardship and our ability to adhere to professional standards and best practice. Mitigation of all of these agents of deterioration happens at multiple levels, including the building, hardware, and policy and procedural levels. This diagram offers a good visual of what this multi-layered approach to preservation looks like. It also reinforces what I said earlier about preventative care being a holistic process who all of these levels have to work together to ensure good care and curation. Our best to physically organize archaeological collections can be very challenging, primarily because they include so many components which we can roughly break into organic and inorganic elements. So the organic elements include things like field notes, photographs, correspondence, maps, and sometimes we have organic or theological materials like basketry and textile fragments. The inorganic components include volume, stone, ceramic, metal, and glass objects, as well as film negatives. And increasingly today, this commonly includes born digital elements. All of these elements have different storage needs and shouldn't be stored together all in one place. Here you can see a variety of different organizational formats. So we've got storage cabinets for artifacts, flat file cabinets, and record storage boxes for documents and photographs, flat file storage for field maps, and cold storage for color photos, slides, and acetate and nitrate film negatives, all of which are more stable stored in a cold storage environment. In terms of the artifacts themselves, we prioritize organizations by site and in the absence of site by locality, states, and then at the county level. Because we're an active teaching museum, visual accessibility via drawer storage has been prioritized in our institution over boxed storage. There's absolutely nothing wrong with storing archeological collections and archeological banker's boxes. The banker's box is the kind of box that you see in the lower right-hand corner. But for us, being able to pull open drawers and see the content laid out before you is really important for teaching and instruction. We began by rehousing our archeological collections, and we found that many of the objects in our collection were still in the original packaging from the field. And I don't think this is uncommon occurrence at a lot of institutions. So we found moldy brown paper bags, cigarette boxes, glue, and fishing lure boxes. Basically, whatever was available in the field. And we also found that pink toilet paper was a favorite packing material in the 1960s. So we rehoused these artifacts in four new polyethylene whip bags and investment trades, and then we placed those within museum quality cabinets. Bag storage of archeological collections is really common primarily because individualized storage is rarely feasible. Nobody has the space for that, and nor is it cost-effective. The thicker bags are recommended, the steel mill bags are recommended, because lipids and ceramics often have sharp edges, and they can easily pierce or tear through the two mill bags. The cabinets that we use, and you can see on the photo on the left, they've got glides along the edge, and those glides allow them to pull out smoothly and allow them to stop at a certain point, which ensures that they can't accidentally be pulled out of the cabinet. We can pull them out by pressing a little lever if we want to take the whole drawer out for study, but it prevents them from being accidentally pulled out. So this was the lesson that we learned the hard way. The cabinets below these, and you can kind of see on the photo, they're darker in color, they're just older, and those cabinets have drawers that were not equipped with drawers on glides. And unfortunately, due to the different weights of different drawers, sometimes those drawers have accidentally been pulled out too fast, too far, and dropped to the floor, which obviously causes damage to the artifacts, but could potentially cause damage to the user as well, that's where we'll just fall on ground. Not all archaeological objects fit neatly into the cabinets that you see here. So for example, whole ceramics, obviously take up more room. We store those separately on glass shelves in our visible storage cube, and because metal objects require storage in a lower-humidity environment, we store those separately in our low-humidity storage room. The inclusion of things like pollen, soil, and charcoal samples in archaeological collections is common. Soil samples may be floated in the field, but often this isn't feasible due to time or the quantity of samples. This means that you may find yourself allocating storage space for samples that take up a lot of time, and this is important because at a future date, it's hopeful that there would be resources available to process those samples. So even if you have samples that have that analyzed, they're often or portions are often kept for re-analysis using new techniques in the future. Lots of lipstick debitage and ceramic sherds are also commonly stored in large, formal, polyethylene zip bags, like you see here in the middle photo. So finally, housing different material types were sometimes grouped together in a drawer, and we separated them by scraps of as a foam sheeting. Well, this made good use of our as a foam scrap. We found that these scraps didn't stay in place when the drawers were opened and closed. This is something that we're slowly fixing by placing objects in custom boxes or an individual bag to ensure that they don't hit against one another, again, when those drawers are opened and closed. So sometimes the storage techniques that we fix are going to work turn out to be problematic in practice. So we always have to be willing to adjust, of course. Lipstick tools, ground, polished stone, and diagnostic sherds are bagged individually or placed in recent resource mounts, carved from Epofoam Plank or Velua. Both of these products are polyethylene foam products, but Velua has an extremely soft surface compared to Epofoam, especially when it's cut. If cavities are carved from Epofoam, they should be lined with a soft, non-abrasive material like Tyvek softwrap or teflon to prevent abrasions. The staffed images on the right illustrate the carved cavity. And you can see in the bottom photo that there's a shallow slit around the edge of the cavity, and this is where the Tyvek lining is tucked into place. And if you have a hard time carving out that cavity, sometimes it can end up being kind of rough. You can actually line that cavity, and you can see that here, with a little bit of polyester batting just to soften the recess, and that's underneath the Tyvek. And trays, like the ones you see on the left here, these can be customized to accommodate small archeological objects by fitting them with fragments of tri of your deal-shaped Epofoam rod. So, I have a vessel, of course, often has round bottoms, which means that ring mounts are necessary to keep them stable on shelves. Custom ring mounts are really quick and easy to create using polyester-linked backer rod, and can be adhered using a heat gun, so you don't need to use hot glue outs to keep these together. However, this is definitely a two-person job when you're using the heat gun if you want to avoid burning yourself. And if you use a thicker rod, and particularly the one-inch rod, it's a good idea to miter the ends first. The next series of slides that I'm going to show are going to demonstrate how to create your own storage boxes and trays using four-ply matte board. What's great about this technique is that it requires no measurements. The sides of the box are held together either by metal edging or archival tape. If you're using metal edging, you'll need a mallet and an anvil to pound the edging into place. Both methods are fast and cheap, and as you can see from the cost comparison, making your own custom boxes is a big cost savings, but I realize that it does take time and time of money, and with a short amount of skill involved in doing this, it takes some practice. And if you really want to fancy up your boxes, you can add windows to the lid. You can line that window with Mellonex, which is a clear polyester film. The images on the top right show you a couple of boxes that have lids with these clear polyester film windows. And that Mellonex is held in place on the inside of the lid, and it's held in place with a double-sided archival polyester archival double-sided tape, which is the 3M415 tape. And this box-making technique can be used with four-ply matte board, as I mentioned, but it also works really well with the fin-coordinated blue board, so things like the E-flute or the B-flute-coordinated boards. If you've worked with those before, they work really well. The constructive, no-measure boxes. The most important tool that you're going to need is a divider. This is a drafting tool, and it has sharp points at both ends, and it's used to gauge and mark the height of the box. So you begin by sizing your artifact, and in this case, this is a pipe from our teaching collection, in the lower right-hand corner of your matte board. And then use the divider to gauge the height of your artifact, so you're not touching the artifact because obviously you could scratch, and damage the artifact with these sharp points. So you're just putting it near the artifact to just gauge the height and being generous enough so that there's space above the artifact in the box. So you're not looking for a tight, compact fit. And we want to make sure that once you get that measurement of the divider, you don't want to push the divider together because that dimension is actually going to be used for the height of the sides of the box. The sharp tips of the divider are then used to poke two sets of holes to account for the sides of the box. This step is then repeated on two sides of the artifact. So you can see it's repeated on the first image on the top and then put the rest of the object. We've got two sets of holes. The divider is then used again to score all four sides of the board. And you want to keep the tip of the divider on the outer edge of the board. And then the center slide and the center image, you actually want to cut off the excess matte board using those outer holes that you've put into the board with the divider as your guide. The inside of the box is then scored and cut away, and the corners are cut away with a snap knife. At this point, if you fold it up the sides, you would have a lovely little box. But if you wanted to create a lid for your box, then there's a few more steps. For the lid, the box base you just made is then placed on top of another piece of matte board. Two pieces cut from the corner are then added to the dimension to make the lid just slightly larger than the box so that the lid will slide over the top of the box. The previous steps are then repeated, but for the lid, we want to add the addition of finger holes cut from the two sides of the lid to make it easy to remove the lid from the base of the box. Two sides of the box are then taped closed, and we used filmoplast SH, which is an archival quality men and tape, and the box is lined with epiphone. So I'm hopeful that these step-by-step photos will make it possible for you to experiment with this technique after the webinar, and hopefully you can make yourself some quick and easy and expensive custom boxes for archaeological artifacts. Likewise, you can make custom mounts for fragile textile and basketry fragments. These are sink mats, and basically they recess the fragments and mats can be made from a variety of materials. You can use spin core, blueboard, coreplast, or matte board. All of these mats have these recessed mats have see-through covers made of melanox. And ideally, when you're constructing these, you want to think about where you're going to place them in storage so that you can make them in such a way so that they can be stacked and make the most of limited storage space. Because archaeological metals are especially vulnerable to moisture, you might consider creating custom enclosures using moisture-absorbing silica gel to eliminate or reduce fluctuation of relative humidity. Regular density desocating silica gel holds moisture, and it can purchase the indicating type, which is the type that you see here, it's orange, or a changed color when exposed to moisture. It's most cost-effective to buy the silica gel loose and to package it yourself in custom fabricated sachets. You can make these from cotton stockinettes or polypropylene fabric. Just make sure that the silica gel never comes into direct contact with the artifacts. Small metal objects can be stored in clear polypropylene boxes with snap fitting links, like you see here, or in custom enclosures made from vapor barrier films. Reconstructed sachets the size of the internal dimension of the base of the box. We monitor the RH by adding a paper humidity indicator card that's placed inside the box so it's visible from the outside and can be checked regularly. You can also create some flat enclosures from FIMPAC 1193 and Marvel Seal 360 for small archeological metals. Both of these materials are barrier materials, and they're impenetrable to gasses or liquids. Before the edges are sealed with a shoe sealer, the artifacts of small sachets of silica gel and the humidity indicator card are added to the packet. And if your artifact is flat, you can recess it in a small piece of ballara mounted to a piece of blueboard or corecloth, and this will keep the artifact from bumping into other elements inside of the enclosure. So at this point, I'm really going to begin transitioning from the cares of archeological collections to the curations of archeological collections. Curation is generally understood to mean the long-term process of managing and preserving objects and associated records according to professional standards. Collections management is sort of the umbrella process that includes curation. For the non-archaeologists, the question of how to curate archeological collections is often the most complex. And it really depends on ownership and whether what's in your museum collection are isolated artifacts or site assemblages with associated documentation or more likely a combination of both. Ownership is going to dictate if any laws and regulations apply to the collection. So for instance, if your museum curates archeological collections excavated on federal land, 36 CFR 79, that curation of federally-owned and administrated administered collections code, outlines how federal collections should be curated. So for collections recovered from state land, it's the state archeologists who are typically responsible for determining how state collections are managed. Archeological resources from private land, and of course, this applies to the United States only, belong to the landowner, but human remains are typically the exception to this. In Wisconsin, all burial sites, no matter how old they are or who is buried in them, and no matter if they are marked or unmarked, are protected by state law. And archeological resources on Indian land are owned by individual Indians or tribes, not the U.S. government. The books that you see here, especially the first two on the left, are excellent resources on this topic. In addition, the recently released sixth edition of the museum registration method has an updated chapter on archeological repositories. The case study that I'm going to share with you today is based on a large archeological project on private land that spanned multiple years and generated thousands of artifacts and volumes of associated documents. It's also a good example of knowing when you need to work with an archeologist to understand really complex intracite premiums. The Northern Lights project collections were virtually untouched in excavation by bullet college faculty and students in the 1960s. In addition to upgrading preservation by rehousing an archival quality enclosures, our goal was really to make this collection intellectually accessible by entering the collections data into our collections management software system. Due to the number of sites, the sheer volume of artifacts and the hierarchy of intracite premiums, which you can see a glimpse of here from one particular site, it quickly became clear that neither the expertise of an archeologist helped us understand how this site was excavated and how all of the documentation-based resources connected to the artifacts. One of the biggest challenges we faced was the fact that each of these 88 sites was to find a single museum catalog number. The use of one catalog number per site prevented data entry that would facilitate incorrectional access by intracite provenient or material. For this reason, we decided to recaddle on the site by expanding the existing catalog number to a tripart number that indicates the site's original museum catalog number the material class and the highest level or gross intracite provenient. Due to trying constraints, we did not physically remember these thousands of artifacts, but what we did do was to record that expanded catalog number on the exterior of the polyethylene bag and because those numbers can easily rub off as a result of handling or wear, we also put that number on little tags with additional information inside of each bag. So this case study that I'm sharing isn't meant to be a sort of one-size-fits-all solution, but is rather meant to demonstrate one approach to a complex legacy collection. Most level data was then entered into our collections management system, but the very, very fine level of provenience was recorded in Excel spreadsheets that were organized by materials. We created curation summaries for each site to document this process and to make clear for future efforts what our rationale was, what the decision-making process was behind this. In addition, we created a comprehensive finding aid which points users to all the associated documentation for each site, so extensive field notes, photographs, maps, correspondence and publications, which was really important because, again, these scores spread throughout the museum in different rooms and different cabinets and organized in different formats. How and what data is entered into a collections management software system largely depends on what system you're using and how and by whom that data is being used. So most museums have mixed collections, and if you have a collections management system, it was likely selected or maybe your institution wrote a database in-house. But the idea here is that it was likely created to accommodate different types of collections and wasn't specifically created with archaeological collections as its focus. In unlike history of art collections, there's no standard nomenclature or lexicon for anthropological collections. For this reason, we opted to create our own nomenclature which was then added to our collections management system and moving to rediscovery proficient. Because we curate both ethnographic and archaeological collections, our object lexicon is divided into two branches. The ethnographic lexicon is based on function, whereas our archaeological object lexicon is based on material, primarily because the function of archaeological objects is often unknown or ambiguous. In addition to the lexicon, we built controlled vocabulary. Sometimes people refer to these as look-up lists or drop-down lists to ensure standardization of data entity fields like location, manufacturing technique, material, archaeological type name, periods, just to name a few. We also recognize that there are inherent limits to controlled vocabulary. Controlled vocabulary really privilege the dominant white perspective that is inherent, again, to the establishment of most museums. So we do have other fields that enable us to capture different kinds of cultural data and data that we can then restrict to make sure that it's not shared with individuals that don't have the right to see that data. Object locality and cultural-based information is primarily captured in the main info tab, which is the screenshot that you see here. Rediscovery of Proficio does have kind of a standalone archaeological model, module, excuse me. We didn't purchase this. Instead, we manage our archaeological data through customized archaeology and NAGPRA tabs. These tabs record the site name, site number, inter-site provenience, and information relevant to NAGPRA compliance. And I should say for our international participants, NAGPRA is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. There's also a site module, which isn't shown here, and that module provides fields into which we can enter site-level information, images, and there's a multimedia tab as well for really anything. The archaeology and site tabs are only useful when we actually have site information. For those items not collected systematically, which of course represents a big chunk of our collection, we only have basic state or county-level provenience. And then there are those artifacts for which we have no information. The majority of these were either found in collections with no catalog or site number. So we have no way of connecting them to a particular collection or to a particular site. These unprevenient archaeological collections have actually long contributed to the curation crisis and are a drain on sparse resources because they're not really viable for research. While some of these objects can become valuable for hands-on teaching, there's only so many examples of different tool types of raw materials that are really needed for this purpose. How to ethically dispose of this material then becomes a serious challenge. But the one thing that is for sure is that we absolutely don't want to perpetuate the market for non-renewable archaeological resources by offering them for sale. We've instead prioritized placing these unprevenient artifacts in our anthropology department's hands-on teaching collection, and many others have been transferred to other colleges and universities, often through our alumni connections, so that they can be used in their teaching collection. In addition to my Logan Museum responsibility, as Robert mentioned, I also direct a professional development program called the Center for Collections Care at Boyd College. If you're interested in learning more about the preservation of inorganic archaeological materials and storage methods and some of the box-making techniques that I talked about today, the two classes that are circled here provide extensive knowledge on these topics and hands-on practice. Due to the pandemic, we were unable to offer in-person classes this summer, so we'll begin building out the schedule for next summer, and hopefully we will be able to expand our course offerings so check the website for updates. So I just want to wrap up by reminding you all about the resource list, which is available for download, and the PowerPoint deck of slides is also available for download, and of course, don't forget the evaluation. And I think at this point, I am more than happy to open up the conversation to questions. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you, Nicolette. That was great. And we already have a couple questions floating in, so I'm going to start looking at those. Again, for our participants, feel free to put some questions in the chat box while we're chatting, and we will get to them as many as we can during the time period we have left. Actually, since we're on this slide, could you go back to slides to your unprovenant collections real quick, because someone had a question especially for that slide. Okay, so someone was asking, is there are arrowheads in that box? Was that the question? Yeah, that was the question. And I wanted to say, I thought they were, I know that I've worked in Florida for most of my professional career, or it's going to be a little bit too. And it wasn't that unusual for nice people to come in with a giant bag of arrowheads that either they had collected or their grandparents had collected for years. So, or projected up points, as someone is saying. So I just wanted to kind of acknowledge that, yeah, that's a problem, to see if you had any more thoughts on when you received kind of a baggy full of that kind of material, essentially. Yeah, unfortunately, that happens far too often. And I say, I mean, so I guess there's a sort of positive way to think about this in a less fortunate way to think about this. The less fortunate way is that many people who consider themselves educational archaeologists, or I should say this is probably the positive way to think about it, is that many folks who consider themselves educational archaeologists know enough about archaeology to know that the findest spot is important and also not disturbing is important. So many of those people who do collect do a pretty good job of recording and interviewing family members and trying to find out what the history of their family collections are. But for as many people who understand the importance of intersite provenience and preserving sites, there are those folks who collect just simply for the fetishism of collecting. And those are the ones that we sort of struggle with, because they're often coming into the museum wanting us to provide a value on these objects. And so we try to approach those conversations from an educational perspective and to really talk about why it isn't ethical for us to provide a monetary valuation and why the sale and exchange of archaeological collections is very, very problematic. So that idea of them being non-renewable resources and that we're, by removing them from their context and not preserving that, we're losing pieces of our past. Whether it's historic past or prehistoric past, what have you, it's gone. All you have left is this thing. So it is very challenging. Yeah, and even when you brought up the thing about valuation, I mean, in normal museum collections, we have that issue. As soon as someone wants to donate anything, and if you need anything predominantly, they want to know how much is it worth. And as museum collections people, our answer is we can't give you that number. We can let you know, hey, you know, let's go refer you to an appraiser or something specializes in that, but that's not really our concern. Our concern is more, you know, I mean care of that object and trying to make sure that's for everything that you just said. So that's good. I did think it was good, because I, oh, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just like, we talk. I want to hear what you have to say. Oh, I was just going to add that it was, someone just probably, they probably called me out on this. So someone was asking for a clarification on provenance, right? And I came from, actually, originally, I worked in archaeology and now I work in museums. I still, I think they're basically the exact same concept personally. Just, it depends on what, you know, situation you're working in, but it's that same idea. But I didn't know if you wanted to speak a little bit more to that concept. Sure, sure. Yeah, that's the distinction that I think in many ways is disciplinarily bound. So when we talk about the word provenance, which is spelled differently so it's a different word than provenance, so when we talk about provenance, that's the term that's generally associated with art history. And when used is often referring specifically to the history of ownership. So the different hands, collectors, museums that, you know, primarily works of art have passed through. We do use that term generally to talk about collection history in general in any kind of museum-based collection. But when we're talking about provenance, the other word, we're specifically talking, I mean the actual definition of that term comes from the specific intracite provenance. So it's an archaeological term that refers to the particular layer in the ground, in the burial situation that that object was excavated from, which is part of the collection history. So that's why people tend to use those terms interchangeably, but they do have different meanings that are interrelated. So hopefully that makes sense. Yeah, so it does. Like I always say, that's what I show in my archaeology showing, is when I mess up those terms and say provenance for the museum situation. But you're right, there is a slight different nuance as to what each term uses. Some people, there's an interesting discussion on the types of bags people use within collections. Someone reflected the fact that some of their four middle bags are deteriorating. Have you ever noticed that happening with the bags that you've worked with, or do they seem to be holding up pretty well? I know it's hard sometimes, because especially if you're storing pretty bulky items within them, especially stuff with rough edges, there can be a difference. Yeah, that is a really interesting observation. And honestly, I don't know that it has anything to do with the... So milk refers to the thickness of the bag. So I don't know that it has anything to do with whether it's a thin bag or a thick bag, because I have noticed that we used to use two middle bags until we started having the kinds of problems that I was talking about, them carrying and artifacts poking through them, that sort of thing. But I noticed that some of those older bags have started to dwell. So what I think it is, is a problem with the plastic itself that it may not be an archival quality... It's not even polyethylene, I don't know. And a lot of those bags sort of pre-bated me, so I have no idea what vendor they purchased them from. But I've always been told, and again, I'm not a conservator, and we have not actually subjected our bags to OD tests. So any kind of material can be subjected to an accelerated imaging test to determine if it is inherently stable. So if it's going to have any propensity to off gas, if it's got good aging characteristics, so on and so forth. So we don't do that in-house. We don't have the capacity to do that, or really the time. But what I've been told by conservators is that generally speaking, food-grade polyethylene plastic will be safe and have good aging characteristics. That being said, I think it's all together possible that various vendors that we're buying from may be, especially if they're not vetted through the museum community, they haven't been through these tests, could very well be showing undesirable characteristics. And I have seen that myself. You also mentioned, and I think this is a very good practice, of writing on the outside of the bag, plus including a tag on the inside of the bag, just because it can rub off after a certain amount of time, and it's just on the outside part. When you use those tags, would you all print the tags on out of curiosity? We print them on archival, like a comic-bomb paper. And we use a laser printer. So you don't want to use an ink. Yeah, you don't want to use an inkjet printer. And it's just the site number, what the object's name is, account, because oftentimes, especially with mythics and ceramics, you can have multiple objects under one number. And then there's usually a weight and then whatever the inter-site convenience is. And it just makes it so much easier when you're physically trying to retrieve things from a drawer to not have to – you can see that white tag so much more easily. Yeah, I completely agree. I'm going to transition the conversation a little bit into content management systems because I feel like that's a topic that people like to talk about. Quite a lot. I know I find it interesting. Someone was asking just your thoughts on the program, you guys. It was Rediscovery, correct? Was it what you all used? Correct. What your thoughts were on it? I mean, I said that with a caveat that no CMS is perfect, right? You always want to reach in and tinker with it, I feel like in some way, shape, or form. But people were kind of interested to find out what you think of it and have used other systems like PassPerfect or other systems or have had experience with them. Sure. Yeah, that's a great question. So I've worked with the kind of systems that build your own in-house. So previous to Rediscovery's proficio, I had built an in-house system using Microsoft Access because if anybody who has ever purchased the collections management system knows, this could be expensive, especially the more robust program. So we needed to wait until we were in a position to apply for grant funding in order to buy a collections management software system. And the reason why we opted for Rediscovery's proficio is that they have a lot of experience working with Anthemological Collection's bloggerly speaking. My understanding is that it remains the software being used by the National Park Service. That may have changed. Maybe some of you from the Park Service can chime in on that. But my understanding is that it's being used by Park Service museums and sites, which lent a level of credibility and longevity to the program, so not a fly-by-night outfit. And our version in particular is not the out-of-the-box version. So whenever people ask us about our software, I'm always wanting to be clear that our system is highly customized. But because of that grant funding to enable us to purchase it, we also used that funding to spend a year before we converted to create the lexicon that I talked about to be incredibly thoughtful about our fields and how we wanted to structure them, how data would be entered into them, how we would control the data being entered into that field. So it was sort of like the one opportunity we had to assert some control over the system was at the very start of the process. And so our system is not the same as the out-of-the-box. And overall, it has worked very well for us and we continue to be happy with it. And it looks like I'm seeing in the chat that National Park Service is still using it. Yeah, it says that they're developing a cloud-based version for NTS and Department of Interior, which is great to know that that's moving in that direction as well. So that's exciting. Yeah, and unfortunately, I can't say much about the archeology module in Perficio. I think, you know, for us, we didn't really need it. It was sort of, you know, more than we needed. But it would be interesting, you know, if anybody out there is using that module and had feedback on it. But unfortunately, I am unable to comment on that. Yeah, my experience, I've used past Perficio, but an older version. I think I was still on five when I was working actively within the museum. I haven't seen six yet. It was all right, you know what I mean. We used a lot of user-defined fields, I guess, to make it work better for our collection. But again, it was you kind of doing what you talked about, the customization of it, right? Like figuring out what are really your needs of this and then kind of making sure it matches your needs for what you need to do. I think it was incredibly important. Yeah, and then it was important to pick a software program that allows you to do that, that has that inherent flexibility. Yeah, exactly. There was also some discussion about nomenclatures used. It's funny because I, while I have a background in archaeology way back in the day, like back in the 90s, I've been museum since grad school. And, you know, you talked about nomenclature, but it's hard because not everyone uses the same nomenclature, especially when you're moving amongst disciplines in the museum field, between like art and history and all that kind of stuff. I wanted to talk a little bit more about just how you all developed your nomenclature, and I really like the idea about how you guys kind of acknowledged the fact that there's a, I don't know, inherent kind of sidedness to traditional nomenclatures. So could you talk a little bit more about how you guys developed yours and what you're using? Sure, sure. And, I mean, the longer I'm in the field and the more I reflect on a lot of these issues, unfortunately, I just begin to sort of problematize it more and more. And, I mean, there's a big movement, right, maybe I shouldn't say big, but there is a movement afoot right now to sort of decolonize the catalogs in and of themselves. So I think that, you know, we can expect to see a lot of changes in the future in the way in which we think about constructing, controlling, and providing access to the data that is equally as important as the artifacts themselves. So that's sort of my caveat to this. But we created our lexicon, like I said, very slowly and intentionally, and began by doing an assessment of what other museums were doing. So we reached out to other museums with significant anthropology collections, some of which they were able to share their lexicon. So these were all institutions that had basically done what we were proposing to do. They built their own in-house. And so before we reinvested the wheel, we wanted to sort of see, well, okay, how have other people sort of solved this same problem? And can we use what they use? Can we adapt and pick and choose pieces of what works well and create something for us? And that's ultimately what we ended up doing. And so we took those, examined those, adapted the approaches that we felt worked well for us, and that's sort of why we decided to create the two separate branches, one for the ethnographic and one for the archeological. But the same issues that we have with the archeological being that, you know, function is often ambiguous, I would say the same applies to ethnographic objects. So, you know, even though we did find a solution that I would say in retrospect, it's not at this point always the most satisfying solution knowing how complex objects are. You know, the idea that there's one term that can represent and encompass that item in some ways is really unreasonable. But on the other hand, our job is to manage the collections and create intellectual points of access. That's the whole goal of nomenclature, is to create ways that you can ask questions of data. So in order to do that, you have to standardize it. So it's this sort of like catch-22 scenario that we find ourselves in. But once we decided our structure, we then went back to our catalog cards and literally made lists of all of the terms that were used and decided on, you know, we had weekly meetings that we would decide on which of the terms we're going to use and these will be all of the non-preferred terms that will be subsumed under this one term. So we literally did that at the term level and it took a long time and it was mind-numbing. But it was also in a lexicon that works for us and it's flexible so we can add to it. So as the collections grow, you know, different objects that we didn't previously have, we can update it. Yeah. I mean, I agree. I think sometimes it's just that data crunching at the beginning is just trying to figure out what are the terms that are being used. And I really like how you, someone in the chat just said they're currently cross-training their graduate work with anthropology slash archaeology in your work, and I'm like, yes. But my BA is in anthropology and I think that's always helped me a lot when I look at museums, at collections in particular, because that's where my career has been. And having that background has been incredibly helpful when it comes to considering all these types of things. I totally agree. I think it's that like, relative to this approach that's ingrained in you in anthropology. My background's in anthropology too. Yeah. So you look at things a little differently, I think, than people who come from other backgrounds. So get some more nuts and bolts and things. We have a question. Someone's asking for any tips for storing ivory art objects. I'm not sure if you have anything to that, but I believe there is a webinar in our CDC archives dealing with ivory and like the storage of those items. Did you have any thoughts on that, or I could also dig up that webinar to send us a lot. Not particularly, you know, I think, yeah, without knowing what it is, yeah, it's probably better to reference resources specific to ivory. You know, it doesn't have a lot of components. You know, fragile appendages. Is it archaeological? Yeah, so kind of, is it a condition? Yeah, all sorts of issues. Yeah, exactly. So here's an interesting question, because I've run into this too. So thinking of historic site archaeological collections in North America from the 1700s and 1800s, frequently there are large volumes of sherds of broken window glass, rusty nails, bricks, sherds of British made ceramics, and other objects that are largely non-diagnostic. Are any museums or collection repositories de-accessioning these types of objects, returning them to the earth? Or what have you come with, have you come across these types of things? I know I have working in Tennessee. We came across a lot of the stuff caused by our cracked rock. That was just like tons of it, right? And there are big chunks of rock. So it was always like, how do we handle all these? Repository speaking. Yeah, no, that's an excellent question. I personally do not have firsthand experience. So we don't curate a lot of historical archaeological material at the Logan Museum. I do, however, have a really good reference for you. So one of the books that I mentioned was using and curating archaeological collections. It's also on the resource list. So one of the chapters from that book, and I've got it sitting in front of me, I'm going to read it to you, is called, Every Artifact Is Not Acred, a call to rethink historical archaeology, collections, management, assumptions, and practices. So this is an article that I've actually used in my teaching, so I'm familiar with it, but it does exactly... It problematizes exactly what the individual who asked the question is talking about. And my understanding is that we don't have space in museums and repositories to save everything. So like the chapter is called, Not Every Artifact Is Acred. The challenge lies in identifying what are representative samples. So basically you're sampling the collection and preserving a representative sample and then disposing of the rest. What physically happens to the things that aren't kept, that I don't really know. But this idea of being selective and not keeping everything is really growing in acceptance, especially in reference to historical archaeology. So I would check out that chapter. I think that might be really helpful. There's also the concept, and you mentioned it, that they're sampling, right? When you go to an archaeological site, I remember learning this as a young undergrad of being like, oh, wait, we don't dig everything up. It looks like you only take a portion of it with the idea that people, in the future, they will have something cooler to work with this stuff with, either diagnostically or curationalized or whatever. So there's a big question of that. I also like how you brought up the fact that you're right from a museum standpoint. At some point you do have to start... There's that not-bad concept of deaccessioning. But when it comes to items pulled from archaeological sites, I think there's a hesitancy from the collection standpoint of getting rid of those, just because you're not really sure what you have. So the fact that having those around, I think, for what you're talking about, having those article references, rather, are really important to look at. There's a bunch of really good news. People are trading articles like crazy right now in the chat, which is crazy. Yeah. And I just want to call out. It's already looped up in the chat, but somebody referenced the active collections website, and that's awesome. And they've actually just... There's now a book in conjunction with that as well. But it's taking that concept of the need to be more selective about what museums are acquiring and how that applies across disciplines and across different types of museums. And that's a really great approach and really challenging us to think differently about this need to collect everything. And that if those resources aren't sort of earning their keep, it's one of the ways that they talk about that, then... And if they're not helping people and helping to preserve community knowledge and so forth, maybe they're not worth keeping. So it sort of is in conflict with a lot of traditional ways of thinking about collections, but it is definitely more challenging to apply that way of thinking to archaeological collections. So it's not quite the same. And there are other... Because they are non-renewable resources, it isn't an apples-to-apples kind of situation. And of course, if you're dealing with federal collections, you can't de-accession them. So there's that issue. And then even if they are privately owned by your museum or what have you, and you do de-accession them, the question of what do you do with them? How do you dispose of them, practically? I think that's a big problem too. Yeah, no, I completely agree. It's hard to come across that. I always say that when it comes to de-accessioning, part of that process is the well thought out. Okay, so we can say we want to get rid of all this stuff but how do you get rid of it? Like no one's going to have the great mythical bonfire out behind their museum. There has to be a place that you're sending it to or doing with it that's ethically incorrect. So both to any discipline you're following, right? So you have to make sure that you're thinking out that process when you're doing it. I like the... You mentioned repositories. I'll add that the MRM6, which has come out, has some great information. And I believe I saw the author of the chapter with Repository in the chat, her name's Elisa Komp. So if anyone has questions concerning that, please reach out to her because she is great. So I'm going to talk... I'm going to switch a little bit to a question that was asked about the archival aspects of archeological collections. It says someone posted up, so happy that you touched on the archival aspects. Have you or do you know of any other institution that has specifically consulted with archivists when curating the archives? Also, do your finding aids follow, and she has the acronym DACS, Describing Archives of Content Standards? Or are they more general listing of the archival material and storage location? Not being trained as an archivist, I am not positive whether they follow the DACS standard, but we did make a point of... So there is a lot of process information. It's not just the list of file folders, it's what I'm trying to say. There is summited information at the beginning of the finding guide. It talks about why it was created, it's size. So it's been a while since I've looked at it. But we previously, right now, we don't have an archivist on campus, but when we were going through this process, Boyd College actually had both a paper-based archivist and we were fortunate enough to have a digital archivist. So we definitely do... This is one of the benefits of working in an academic museum is that we've got folks across campus with lots of great expertise that we don't have in health. So we definitely have taken advantage of that that we don't have that right now. That's the only answer to the question. So you basically did. I think that that's the thing is when you're dealing with those, you reached out to the people you were able to, you know what I mean, to talk to them, and I think that's the important aspect of it, for sure. Well, I'm looking at the chat. I think that's caught up with most of the questions. If I miss yours, I do apologize. We are going to capture the chat now. What we've been doing for the past couple of these webinars is loading it up on the website along with our other resources. So if you want to take a look at it a little slower, you are more than welcome to. I'm also going to remind everyone about that fun evaluation link sitting over on the left-hand side along with the slides in the resource list. So if you could go ahead and access those when you have a chance, please do so. I want to say a huge shout and thank you to our presenter today, Nicolette Meister. She was great. It made me look back affectionately on my archeology days, even though, as I always jokingly say, I enjoy air conditioning, so I moved to New Zealand when I got older. So I enjoy a good climate. Nicolette, do you have anything else you'd like to wrap up today with the talk? No, no. I just appreciate the interest and the co-mediality, and all the great questions. Thank you so much. And if anybody who wants to follow up my contact information is here, don't hesitate. Great, thank you. Thanks to IMLS for this program, Learning Times for doing the excellent production and FAIC for hosting this program. We will see you all in a few weeks, September 9th, for the photography basics course, and again, keep an eye out for that course information that's going to be happening later this fall. Thanks, everyone. Stay safe, and we will see you soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.