 to our host, Susan Barger with the FAAIC. Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. I'm happy to see you all here. We have almost the entire classes here. And I'm sure everyone else will be hearing a few minutes. I just have a few slides. This is the interface. When you get to the education interface, this is what you'll see, although it will be your course, not the last course. And so in the contents, which is what's open here, there'll be the list of the webinars and the assignments. And then under the handouts is where you'll find all the handouts. And that's where I'll post the slides once the webinar is done. And when you sign into a live event with this yellow arrow here, that's what the contents will look like. When you have a recording, it looks like this. So you'll be able to see the difference. And if you need to communicate with Gretchen or any of the other instructors, you can use the discussion. If you have a problem, you can contact me. This is my email address. If you need to reset your course password, you should contact info at Cultural Heritage. If you have a problem about course mechanics or other problems, you can contact me. My email is c2cc at culturalheritage.org. If you have questions about course content, you can put a query in the discussions, as I just said. And if you're intending to get a credly badge, you need to participate in all of the webinars. You can listen to them live, or you can listen to them as a recording. And you need to complete the assignments. And there'll be plenty of time for you to do that, but don't worry. And if you have questions about care of your collections, you can contact the Connecting to Collections Care community. And the instructions for joining the community are on our website. And there are conservators and monitors that will make sure that you get your questions answered. And our next free webinar that's coming up is towards the end of this month. It's on facility planning. And so you can sign up for that at our website if you're interested. Now I'm going to turn this over to Gretchen. And Gretchen is the course coordinator, and she'll take care of everything. Bye-bye. Hello, everybody. I'm Gretchen Anderson. I'm the conservator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. And I have been working in the field of preventative conservation since 1980, in a way, that starts with my internship when I learned that in natural history museums, as well as a lot of historical societies, it's best to prevent the damage before it ever happens. So this course is designed to provide you with a better understanding of what to clean and how to clean it. Many of the images that you will see in the first couple of lectures are from my personal slide library, or are used with the permission of the museums I have worked for. That means, for the most part, you will be seeing a lot of examples from Natural History Museum. However, the philosophy and methodology behind cleaning in natural history is exactly the same as what you will be experiencing in your own museum, whether they're art, history centers, technology museums, or whatever. The same kind of thought process goes into that. We all use the same basic techniques and tools we're all looking to preserve our collections in the best way possible with the least amount of damage and the best outcome. So let's dive in. First of all, this is the general schedule. This week, we'll be looking mostly at philosophy and methodology to help you build strategy for cleaning in the future. And next week, we'll be looking at some basic methods and a couple of case studies. We'll also be looking at bold in collections. This will not be dealing with emergency management, but just generally what you might be finding in your collection and how to deal with that. And finally, Paul Storch, who's a longtime conservator at the Minnesota Historical Society, agreed to present on developing a cleaning plan. So in the museum, we do want things to look good. We want them to look clean for our public. We want our public to be comfortable when they come in. We want it to be comfortable and pleasant for us. We also want our objects and our environment, the physical environment, to look good. However, if we do not approach cleaning with the understanding of what we are doing, of what the dirt or dust is doing to the collection and what the process of cleaning might do to the collection, we can subject the objects under our care with higher risk and cause more damage itself. Cleaning too aggressively with the wrong tool or the wrong solvent will likely cause more damage than the dust or dirt does. Common household cleaning solutions oftentimes contain chemicals that can cause serious damage to the surface of our artifacts. For example, commonly used furniture cleaners often advertise that they polish and remove dust but do not cause a so-called waxy buildup. Frankly, this is not completely true. The substance in the bottle often contains things like silicone, NASA, butane, and other ingredients, chemicals which will leave a residue on the surface of the wood and could also react negatively to the coating. So what the spray is actually doing is changing the electrical charge. Don't think of your dusting cloth as having an electrical charge, but it does. It changes the electrical charge on the cloth to make it more attractive to the dust. There are much better ways of doing that. You can use swiffer dusters and microfiber cloths, which are actually designed to do that. They attract the dust to them and hold on to it. You can also do a very, very light spray of water on your dusting cloth. And this does exactly the same thing. It changes the electrical charge of the cloth and makes it more attractive. Our challenge in museum housekeeping is to eliminate or reduce dust. To do that, we need to know where it comes from. And I'll be talking more about that next week. OK, clean in the museum means that enough collected dirt has been removed so that deterioration will not take place. It does not mean spotless or white gloves or squeaky clean. This is from the National Park Service Museum Handbook, which is something that is online. And I highly recommend that you download it. It's a very good resource. So some of the damages that dirt can cause or dust, it's oftentimes very abrasive. It can also dust becomes a microclimate as it sits on top of an object. And if that object is metal or is paper or easily stained, it can be damaged. And next week, we'll talk more about the methods. The point here is that we simply cannot leave dust just sitting there. It is unsightly and can cause damage. So at home, we have a tendency. We all think we know how to clean. We may not like it, but we do know how to clean. However, at home, you can use a lot more aggressive techniques than you want to use in the museum aesthetic when you're dealing with collections or, in my case, specimens, which are also collections. You might use stronger chemicals at home than you would anywhere around the collection. And we'll be looking in a few slides. We'll be looking at some of the damage that can be caused by chemicals. So housekeeping is just a part of preventive conservation. It is the part that you can see that the public sees and is obvious. And so collections care and preventive conservation go hand in hand. So first of all, housekeeping requires as much looking as it does doing. Like with anything with collections, we want to look at the condition of the object before we do anything, whether we're picking it up or cleaning it or whatever and placing it on exhibit. All of the ongoing tasks to preserve museum objects, archives, and museum records, I didn't realize. That's not a full sentence. Oh, well. Housekeeping, what you want to do in housekeeping is plan and monitor as much as it is with hands on collections care. Housekeeping requires looking as much as doing, knowing when not to clean, as important as knowing when to clean. When we prepare to clean in the museum, we need to think first. We need to observe where the dust is, how much dust there is, where the dirt is, are the objects in danger. The first thing I tell my interns before I turn them loose in cleaning and after they've had training is to look at the condition, look for damage, look for frack. And for those of you who've never heard that word, it basically means bug poop. And you want to make note of where the worst dust is. Basic collections care methodology. In the same way that looking carefully before picking up an object is a must. We do not want to do anything to damage that object. And what do you look for? Well, you look for an accumulation of dust. You look around the building to see whether there are leaks. You look for cracks in both the object and the building. Any change of its appearance, you look for efflorescence. And efflorescence is crystalline crusty growth that appears on materials that are too wet, sort of a crusty surface. You also are looking for peps. In this situation, my collections manager is looking very closely at the condition of objects that are in an exhibit case that has been closed for approximately 30 years. There were dead flower beetles in the case. And we finally arranged with our exhibit department to remove the glass. It's a huge piece of glass. We had to bring in outside contractors. So we could remove the dead carcasses and determine if the infestation was active or there were any other problems. In my museum, the objects that are in cases stay cleaner. The objects in storage or cabinets or dust covers also remain cleaner. So it can be better to have your objects under glass than in the open air. Now that isn't always possible. Again, basic collections care points help with housekeeping. If you keep your storage areas neat and tidy, it's easier to see the damage. You wouldn't want this kind of clutter if possible. Now, we don't want to do any damage when we clean. I had an intern who ran some tests on coins. These are ancient coins that have no specific provenance. She ran through a series of tests that she found on the internet. How to clean ancient coins, how to clean metal. And yeah, the ones on the right look a whole lot better. But we found that with most of the home remedies that you find on the internet, there was a great deal of damage to the actual coin. They look better, but they've lost a great deal of value. So again, I know I'm being repetitive here, but looking is as much as doing. You want to be non-invasive, reversible. Do not over clean. If you over clean, you will be causing damage. And most importantly, do not rush. We all get familiar with our collection, and we tend to move too fast. Think before you do. Gloria will recognize this piece. You want to observe the high traffic areas of your museum. If you have carpeting in your gallery, take a look. See where there are build-ups of dust, piles of dust. Don't forget to look above at your environmental system at the filtration and vents. I find that a great deal, this piece is actually quite high, and it was underneath a vent that wasn't properly filtered. Now, preventive conservation. Many of you may have heard of the agents of deterioration and building up of strategy. The Canadian Conservation Institute is an organization that services all of Canadian National Museums that are located in Ottawa and are staffed by conservators as well as conservation scientists. They've been at the forefront of developing practical and useful preventive conservation techniques. For as long as I've been in the business, it's been fascinating. There are a lot of technical bulletins and conservation notes that are available online. It is worth perusing their holding for information that is applicable to your needs. Their URL is in the bibliography. They developed a methodology for coming up with strategies in both the housekeeping and the integrated test management that I use. So what is preventive conservation? Here are a couple of definitions. Basically, it comes down to preserving your collection and minimizing future deterioration. You want to be looking at environmental conditions at handling and maintenance procedures. And most importantly, you need to know when you should call a conservator and when you can do the work yourself. There are things that you will not be able to do. OK, your building is your first line of defense against the risk to collection. The building on the wall should provide one layer of protection from the outdoor environment, from theft and vandalism, all sorts of things. Then if you have it, and I know many historic houses will not have this, if you have a mechanical system, that works in with your building on the wall as a primary way to manage your collection. So in looking at some of this, you want to always keep in mind what your goal is, your preservation of your object. And the further down in this set of nested rectangles, the closer you get to the object, the more kinds of protection you can have. So apply practical and sensible actions. Do not over clean. Remember, if you are not a conservator, you don't have the training to do the more detailed and some of the more detailed and intricate pretence. You do know your collection, and you do know your building and your spaces. You can come up with excellent strategies for cleaning. You want to choose the methods that cause the least amount of damage. You want to document what you do. So we have 10 agents of deterioration. Some of these will be more involved in housekeeping than others. And this is where the CCI framework comes into really good use. They have developed this method of developing strategies using the 10 agents, looking at three different levels which to address the challenges and five actions that can be used within the three levels. Now the three levels are building, local, and procedures. The five actions that you would look to would be to avoid the block, to detect, to respond, and to recover. And we'll be getting into those in a few minutes. So here, direct physical forces is quite straightforward. There are two levels of that to type. One is catastrophic and sudden. The other is slow and gradual. With catastrophic, pretty obvious, an object falls off a shelf and shatters. That's about as direct as you can get. The gradual is oftentimes something in storage that is under too much pressure and slowly crushes. This could relate to cleaning. If you clean too often and too harshly, you can cause abrasion or scratches. Seeds and vandal came out of my lab one day, and this was on our back door at the storage facility. I rather like him. So this is one of the agents that, if you can prevent or deal with, the faster you can, the better. It's hard to recover from. Vandalism can be intentional like this is or not. It can be accidental. Somebody reaches out without thinking and grabs onto, say, the antlers of an Irish elk and pulls on it. Well, it breaks. That's not a surprise. But the visitor probably wasn't thinking about what they were doing. We had a situation where contractors came in to paint one of the galleries. It was a gallery where we couldn't move any of the collections because they're permanently mounted. We covered the specimens with plastic to keep the paint from dripping. Unfortunately, I was out sick most of the time these guys were painting. And it turns out that no one was really watching them. And they accidentally kicked one of the specimens, which was a paleontological skeleton, and broke it. That was completely preventable. Accidents do happen. But you try and prevent that as much as possible. If you're in a situation where contractors are cleaning, there are some situations where that happens. Then you want to spend a lot of time talking with them and explaining to them what they can and cannot touch. This association deals with mostly information. This is associating the information, the catalog information, the historic documentation from the object. And that is something that we don't really deal with much in cleaning. Fire is usually highly catastrophic. It destroys organic materials. And even when contained, it will cause scorching deposits of foot and ash on objects. Building materials such as insulation and plastics will release toxic fumes in other residues, which then settle onto your artifact. Also, water is usually involved in stocking the fire. All we have to do is look at the fires that have been raging the past few years. We've lost at least two major museums and serious damage to one major church in Paris, Notre Dame. The museums were in Brazil and in India. It's devastating. Now, the other concern with fire is that if there is fire in the area, the foot and ash will accumulate. And I think it was the gettys that have specific ways of closing their building off so that fire and ash or foot and ash don't get in because that area is prone to fire. I think it's the gettys. Now, water, I would rather recover from a water disaster than a fire disaster because I've got more chances of recovering. However, water can be particularly damaging to the collection. The timeline you see is actually dirt from the ground that has moved while the bottom of this piece was wet. It actually got sucked up and moved along the grains of the wood. And this particular piece was in a flood. Of course, the dangers include swelling and warping of materials. The books are from a disaster response workshop where books and things were wet. But you can see they wore the water absorbed and swelled all the pages. So water can cause all sorts of damage that can affect cleaning and make it more difficult to clean. Pest. Now I'm going to try and keep this really short because I can go on forever when it comes to pests, as Laurie knows. First of all, pests usually include a range of critters, insects, vermin, which are mice and rats, other vertebrates such as birds, mold, and fungus. In relation to cleaning, pets cause staining. For example, fly specks. You may have heard of fly specks. Are very acidic deposits left by flies when they land on objects or things, little black spots. They can stain, and if it's on metal, they can actually corrode little pits into the surface of the metal. Mice love to run around buildings. They tend to run around the edges of the rooms. And they mark their territory as they run. In other words, they pee as they're running. And that can cause all sorts of staining to objects. They might nest in your textiles. It's been known to happen. So interestingly, intensive housekeeping is the key factor for integrated pest management to try and reduce your pest problems. You want to control human food, and you want to provide some kind of environmental control if you can. Also, pest-damaged objects are extremely fragile. You want to look for, when you're looking at especially textiles, rugs, Native American clothing, ice clothing, anything like that, you want to look for webbing, for dead beetles, for dead larvae, and frass. This is a big one when it comes to housekeeping. Contamination. We're still in the age of deterioration here. So contamination can be particulate, such as putt and dust, concrete, salt. It tends to be extremely abrasive. You may have silver in your collection that somebody has attempted to clean with some kind of silver polish. And you'll see little white ridges in the decoration. That's residues of silver polish. You also have, yes, those are eggs in a collection. Oh, yes. And we have some really lovely peening in our main museum. The art conservator, when she cleaned these about 15 years ago, left a square on each floor that they were painting, showing people how much sort and contamination from air pollution had built up on the paintings. The paintings were done in the early 20th century and coated like everything else in Pittsburgh with heavy layers of air pollution. Now gas and liquid also caused a problem. The bowl on the right is a silver bowl that had a rubber band wrapped around it. The rubber band deteriorated and gave off bulk or dioxide, which combines very happily with the silver, creating that heavy, heavy layer of garbage. On the right, this is a mineral water fountain. And the mineral water has so many hard minerals in it, calcium, and irons, and the like that it has caused corrosion and staining on the bronze plaque on the back and on the fountain itself. Light, I'm not going to deal with very much. It does not relate to housekeeping that much. Briefly, there are three primary wavelengths of light that cause damage. It is ultraviolet, visible, and infrared. Light damage is irreversible. It can be painted or colored or else you can't do much else about it. You can't bring it back. The damage is ultraviolet damage causes structural damage. Visible light, we do need to see, so we can't totally eliminate it, but we can control it. And infrared, which borders on heat, causes other kinds of damage. But like I said, it's not so bad. It's not so related to housekeeping. Incorrect temperature. I come from Minnesota. In the middle of the winter, we have a big festival. They do ice sculptures. There's invariably a fall during January when the ice sculptures are outside and they melt, sometimes before they've been judged. So incorrect temperature. If you've got ice, you don't want it to get too warm. If you've got vinyl, like the record up on top, you don't want that to get too much heat. And this poor zebra was in an exhibit case that was right behind a nice big radiator. Not a good situation. Too hot, too cold, and fluctuating is actually the worst. This is the same as true with relative humidity. It can be too high, too low, or fluctuating. Now this does relate to housekeeping. Because if relative humidity is too high and there's a lot of dust in an area, you are going to have mold. And we'll be talking more about that in the third lecture. Dust and dirty surfaces may absorb moisture from the air at higher relative humidity. For example, the window glass that remains covered with a layer of grime may eventually grow mold. And the mold is actually growing on the ground. So we have 10 agents of deterioration. This is some of their relationships to cleaning. Things we have to think about. The danger that some agents pose are direct. So for example, contaminants are actually dust, air pollution, liquids, and that are causing damage. Fire, water, and pests are also in this category. And don't forget mandals. Other things such as incorrect temperature and relative humidity amplify potential damage and provide support for mold growth and some other test infestation. Oh, right. Here are the levels of action or the levels that we can act at. And here's the building. So at the building level, as I said earlier, this is the first line of defense. And this means that the actual building, as well as the environmental structures and infrastructure, can help you, hopefully, keep things a little more clean. And I would include the grounds if you have ground in this area. The local or portable fittings, as it's sometimes called, such as exhibit cases, storage cases, provides a way to block dust from getting to your object. Think back on the slide that had nested rectangles. The objects at your center, the local area with the room, the storage area, storage cabinet, and exhibition cabinet are at this fairly close. And that you can use. A good type cabinet will keep dust off. A good type case will keep dust off. However, you have to be careful. If you have a case or a cabinet that's made out of wood or materials that give off volatile, organic fumes, that might cause some internal air pollution. You have to be careful. So in procedures, we're all familiar with a lot of these. And I highly recommend that you develop some specific procedures on your cleaning methods. You need to know who's cleaning and who cleans what. I just finished a very long activity with our exhibits department and our facilities people, determining who cleaned what in the gallery, who cleans the outside of the exhibit cases, who cleans the objects, who cleans the platforms, that kind of thing. How close does your custodial staff get to an object? How close do you want them to get? These things you have to make clear. For historic houses, you have historic furniture sitting on the ground, on the ground level, on the floor level. Who is sleeping? How close do you get with that broom? And are you beginning to see where at the bottom of the chair leg, where the broom braids against it? So you develop housekeeping tasks, much like you would at home, and write them down. You put together a supply kit that is dedicated to collections cleaning. And that should be kept separate from your maintenance cleaning of restrooms, kitchens, and that kind of thing. You look at what needs to be discovered or what needs to be done. You think about why you do it and how it should be done. So here's an example. You want to look at how often you should do it. Are you going to do it on a daily basis, or a monthly, or an annual basis? So here, I'm cleaning an exhibit case. If your museum has a lot of visitors and you have a lot of exhibit cases, you're going to get fingerprints and nose prints on those cases. So you have to determine how often you do it. Here are your equipment and supplies. You want a soft, soft dry cloth, soft brushes, distilled water, glass cleaner. You can make your own glass cleaner. You don't have to buy this. Yes, do it 50% to alcohol and 50% water. That works on both glass and plexiglass. It will not damage the plexiglass. And this is quite important. This is the most expensive thing on this list, a HEPA vacuum cleaner. This is a high-efficiency particulate air-filtered vacuum. And it captures up to 2.5 micron particles that are in the air. Those are the ones that you don't want to be breathing. So you set your procedures. You get your equipment together, then you set your procedures. The first thing you do is you take off the ob- the treen or bonnet, open as a case. You inspect it. You clean only if necessary. First, you make sure that the object is clean. Then you clean the platform. And then you clean the interior of the treen and then go back through it to make sure everything is still clean. If you are going to clean the interior of the treen or the interior of the case, you're going to want to remove the objects if at all possible. Then you close it up after any fumes have been evacuated. And you dust the glass to get rid of any particulars. Then you clean the glass with a damp cloth and glass cleaner. Now, you always want to watch what you're doing. You want to avoid vibration and bumps and check the contents and lock the case after cleaning. It's easy to forget some of those steps. Not every level can be addressed at every state. You have to adapt this to your own situation and resources. A historic house cannot choose where it's located. You may or may not have an environmental system. If you have one, make sure it's in good working order. In many historic houses, there are limits to what you can do with the structure. So you may not be able to do much with the structure. For example, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History is on the historic registry. There are a number of full environmental systems, full HVACs, of different ages and sophistication. In one gallery, installed in the late 1980s, a room within a room was created because it was the most practical way to create a room that could maintain the required temperature and relative humidity. An environmentally managed environment was created on the local level. And it works pretty well. It protects the outer part of the building from the movement of moisture because there's a room that contains the higher relative humidity that we are trying to maintain in the winter. OK, the final step is action. These are the five actions. And you can apply this at every single level. You look at each level, you look at each action, and you think about what is the most effective way to deal with the challenge. And in this case, we have too much dust, and we need to clean. So you might not be able to deal with it on a building level. You might have to work with a lot of response on a local level. We'll see that in a moment. So the first one is avoid. The situation here would be the dust is coming through the doors and windows. On the building level, the best way to avoid is don't build in a polluted area. If you're in a big city, there's not much you can do about it. If you're out on the plane, you are probably having more problems with particulate and maybe gaseous pollution. But in the city, depending on what city you are in, you may have more gaseous or more particulate. Can you think of any way of reducing the gas, the dust, and dirt coming in by creating a sanitary perimeter? Now, this is what I would call a sanitary perimeter, a wide expanse of concrete with very little place for insects and mice to hide. It works pretty well. Can you improve your environmental filtration level? Can you protect from gas and from particulate? That will depend on your environmental system. On the local level, you want to build with as inert materials as possible. So you would want to build an exhibit case not out of wood. That makes it difficult, but you can also block the wood by painting it with certain types of paint so that the acids from the wood do not affect the objects inside of the exhibit case. Block. Your second level is block. So say you have a nice sanitary perimeter, but you're still getting some particulates being walked into the building, literally walked in, put out mats, have people wipe their feet. That is one of the easiest ways of doing it. That itself is a procedure. For blocking, if you seal the holes in your building, that helps. Again, look at your HVAC on local levels. You want to use that. And floor covering. If you're a historic house and you have historic floors or historic carpet, you might well want to use runners to keep people on a pathway so that they're not tracking all over the historic floor or the historic carpet. Here's another block. This case is an original storage unit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Like I said earlier, we have major air pollution issues. This is a collection of mollusks, which I prefer not having in wood, but at least they had a glass top on them that protected them from decades and decades of acidic foot air pollution. And it's so bad, you can actually see it on the card that's next to the fingerprint from the glass on the tag. The next one is detect, where we observe the condition of the objects and the amount of dust, dirt, or whatever the other problem is you need to clean up. You identify what needs to be cleaned and determine the frequency. This is where you can experiment with figuring out how often you need to clean something. You can put out actually a sticky trap would do just fine. Just don't form it into little tasks that they oftentimes do. And see how much dust accumulates in a specific spot over the period of a month, two months, three months. That can help you figure out how often you need to do something. And then there is response. This is where the majority of the rest of this class will be dealing with. This is where you have written down your housekeeping tasks, how you clean. You work with building maintenance if you are lucky enough to have them. And you work as a team. You've got your collections care staff who can be trained beautifully into cleaning the collections that they are responsible for, your exhibit staff, your education staff, food service. That is one of the hardest ones to deal with is food service. Also your outside contractors. Food service is where a lot of the issues with pests come. And in this situation, my intern is cleaning fake plants. We have a dinosaur gallery that is all open. It's really hard to put full-size tyrannosaurus rex and diplodocus inside of a gallery or inside of an exhibit case. So it's open. And we have all these wonderful trees and bushes and plants replicating the environment that the dinosaurs would have been living in. Everything needs to be hand dusted. And that is what my assistant is doing. The final step is the most expensive. If you have to repair an object for whatever reason, because it was knocked over or whatever, that is going to be much more expensive and intensive. And you're probably going to need a specialist. So the whole thing here is to develop priority. What you want to do is ask, where does the dust accumulate? How quickly does the dust accumulate? At what level do you want to address it? Can you address it at the building level, at the local level, at the procedures level, or a combination of the three? Can you avoid it? Can you block the dust from coming in? Have you monitored it? And what is your response? And what is your response is the detecting and what is your response? Is really your housekeeping plan. Schedules can be complicated depending on how complicated your facility is. What things you need to think about, what needs to be done on a daily basis? What needs to be done on a weekly basis? This is just a sample of what can be done. How often can you look at your insect trap? If it's a huge building and you have one person who has five other jobs, you're not going to look at it every 14 days. How often do you want to have your offices clean? How often do you want your galleries clean? Do you want them done in January? If it's a quarterly situation, you can stagger the work to make it workable. That is something that is really important. If you want to make this a manageable system. We haven't talked about this at all. Think about the health and safety both of the objects and of your staff. With the object, you're thinking about the safety physical damage. And you can put together a list of procedures to help with that. For example, handling. How do you handle things? How do you move objects through the museum? Are they being contaminated by cleaning chemicals? That's something you can control. Do any of your collections have poison? Or are they poisonous? With natural history, a lot of collections have been poisoned. Older tax gardening, almost always. If it was done before the 1980s, there's a good chance that there is arsenic inside of the specimen. A lot of our buildings were built when asbestos was used ubiquitously. So even doing a renovation in an older building. You might very well have asbestos. There are also collections that are inherently poisonous. Natural history has collections such as raw arsenic, raw asbestos, or ethnographic material that are poisonous. So we have to think about these things. And you want to protect your staff and your public from the poisonous collections, and yet also from the chemicals being used in the galleries for cleaning. So with the staff, you look at the ergonomics. You can go to OSHA to find out what the regulations are. You look at chemical safety. Again, your poisons and poisonous collections. Also, your cleaning chemicals. Some people are very sensitive to these. I am, for example. So personal protective equipment, PPE. We have a colleague here who is doing some research on curare. She's taking samples of it to send off to see if it's still an active nerve toxin. Even in the fume hood, she's wearing a mask, gloves, and a lab coat to protect yourself from this material. So that's personal protective equipment. You've got goggles. You've got face masks, this kind of thing. Now, you can get information. In fact, it's required that you have safety data sheet available for any of the chemicals you have in the building. That includes cleaning chemicals that you buy over the counter. You can get that information off the web. And I believe I have a resource in the bibliography for that. The MSDS, Material Safety Data Sheet, or the SDS, those are the same thing, provides information on health and safety. So it'll tell you if it's flammable, if it's highly toxic, whatever. It should give you the majority of the ingredients, its flammability, and how to dispose of it. It also provides information on what to do if it gets into, what was I going to say? It provides information on how to dispose of it and how to immediately recover or what you're supposed to do if you splash a chemical into your face, if you breathe it, or get it on your hand. It'll tell you if you need to immediately wash or just go straight to the doctor. SDS are mandatory by law. You need to have these available in your building. And they are available on the web. We're at the end of today. So I want to give thanks to all of these people and institutions. The best photographs are usually taken by a late colleague of mine, Kim Reddy. And again, I want to remind you that all the photographs here are used by permission of the Science Museum and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh or from my personal library. The artwork is done by Bern Anderson. I guess it's time to take questions. Is that how we approach this, Susan? Yeah. Are there any questions? If you have questions, please put them in the chat box. And, Gretchen, I wanted you to just say something about your assignment for this week. Oh, yeah. So it's clear. Yeah. The assignment is... Oh, my. I'm getting a feed back here. I will mute. Okay. Thank you. The assignment is simply, I want to know what... It's a short, short couple of paragraphs on what your priorities... What you think your priorities are in cleaning. Keep it brief. You can use photographs. Think about some of the things that we've talked about that I've been talking about this past hour. And, yeah, it's pretty straightforward. And I think you can... If you put photographs into your document, you probably can...you can upload those. I made the assignment before I asked Susan. But, yeah, just keep it brief. I want to know... It's sort of the... Yeah, you can post a PDF, JPEGs, a Word doc, any of those things. Try to consolidate what you're posting into one document. That'll make it much easier. If you don't do that, then there'll be trouble and you should contact me and I will try to straighten it out. And you'll see in this section where it says assignment, you'll be able to... There'll be something that will allow you to read the instructions. There'll be a place to submit the assignment. And that's how we get them. Okay? Yeah, so if there aren't any questions, I guess we're done. Wow. Yeah, let's see. Yeah. How do you clean silver? Yes, I'll be talking about that next week. So next week we will be really looking more closely at the specific cleaning methods. And I'm going to be wanting you to get into the habit of testing before you actually do. And we'll talk about that next week. Yeah, any other questions? Yeah, I'm seeing the stuff from Lexi and several others. Yeah, there are... There's a lot of resources online, and the bibliography should be giving you a bunch of resources for care of various kinds of objects. And also you can look in the Connecting to Collections Care website. We have about 1,000 resources, and they're really meant for people in smaller institutions. And Gretchen's bibliography is in the handout. You can download that there. There are a lot of handouts, so be sure to check them out. Yeah, I try and... I think both myself and my colleagues that are presenting like to give people as much resources as many resources as we can. I come from natural history. All comes from a historical society background. And I'm not sure where it's from. Care comes from archives. From archives. Awesome. Yeah. So there's a broad range of resources that will be giving you? Yeah. So if there are any more... Right, and you can always post a question in the discussion, and Gretchen or Paul or Cara will respond for me. I think that's it. Let me know if you have any trouble. You can contact me at my email address, which is C2CC at culturalheritage.org. And I think that's it. If you have any questions about what's going on with the assignment, please post them in the discussion. And we'll see you next week, same time, same place. And I will also post a message as soon as the recording is... it has gone so you can listen to the recording again. And also I will post this slide. So I think that's it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Gretchen.