 to you, our speaker, Susan Barger from the FAIC. Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. Nice to have you. And we'll get started, as usual, have a few slides. The very best way to keep informed about connecting to Collections Care is to join the server. And it's only for announcements, never more than two or three messages a month. And you can get to it if you're not on it by going to this website. And you can like us on Facebook. You can follow us on Twitter. And if you have questions, you can always go to the online discussion forum. We have a whole army of, thank you, guru. I'll tell you how hard it is. We have a whole army of monitors that make sure that questions are answered in a timely way. And most of our webinars have closed captions. But we don't do them along with the actual webinars because we get better captions if we do them afterwards. So if you see a closed caption symbol or you see something that says for closed captions, please ask us this link. It will take you to the place where we have our closed captions. And you can always contact me. This is my email address. I'm happy to hear from people. And coming up, at the end of this month, we have a webinar on the care of ivory. We have one on caring for medical specimens in March, one on industrial objects in April, another one on contracting for emergency response, one on global May, and one on evaluating your emergency plan in June. And we have more coming up. So that's it. I'm now going to turn you over to our speaker for today, who is Walter Prym, and we will start. Well, good afternoon, everyone. You seem to be scattered across the globe here and looking at everybody logging in. So my background, just as a way of introduction, is I am trained as an architect and I practiced for 30 years. And in that process, I inherited an awful lot of very bad collections storage projects that have been planned prior to my beginning of the work. So about 10 or 12 years ago, I started doing more of the early planning for collections. And what I'm going to try to offer today is some recommendations for you as you're contemplating any project having to do with collections, is how to go about that. Now, I have two options here. One is I can speak extremely fast for the next hour and try to cover everything. Or I'm going to try to speak a little more slowly and deliberately and hopefully give you the outlines of what you need to think about as you're contemplating some kind of a project to take care of your collections. I think these rules really apply anywhere that you might be in any kind of an institution. I've been working from Los Angeles to New York in big institutions and from Columbus, Georgia to Ulaanbaatar and very small collections. So I think the rules do apply quite well. And I think in many ways, if you take the time to do the work ahead of time, you will avoid the pitfalls that often lead people off into the quizzical directions that can happen as you go through this. So what I'm going to try to do is break down what you need to do at each phase and urge you to think about following through and completing each phase before you begin. So if your director or somebody that you're working with comes in and says, I need a budget for the board meeting next week, I urge you, urge you, urge you to avoid making those kind of rushed decisions. Because in a way, whatever you do and whatever a board hears, as many of you know, the board will remember. And so when you come back with a real budget or with a defined scope, you'll find out that the board is going to push you back and be very uncomfortable with this scope creep. So my first piece of advice is try to avoid the reactive mode and do the planning well in advance so that you're prepared and engaged and able to respond in a way that's thoughtful and sets the table for the board to approve your project and have confidence in the work that you do as you move forward. So the agenda for today is really the title of the session. However, it's not in the same order. I'm going to start with collection storage projects and a few definitions and terminology changes, which I think might help. I'm going to talk about managing resources and talk about what those resources are that you need to manage. And the third part of it is I'm going to talk about what you need to do between strategic planning and completion in order to make it an orderly, pleasant process. When I mean pleasant, I mean a process without the glitches, without the embarrassing moments in front of the board. And where your alignment in the first two pieces in terms of the collection storage project definition and managing the resources means that you get through the completion in the manner with the funds that you thought you had. So first, I'm going to urge you to stop using the word collection storage. Up in the right-hand corner of your screen, you'll see what's called an n-gram. It came off of Google Analytics. And it looks at the usage of words defined over time. And if you take a look at that, you'll see that the word storage is in decline. And I'm not saying this is because a lot of museums are no longer using the word storage, but I am saying that the word storage is really in decline. And it should be in decline as you talk about your project. What I'm going to urge you to think about when you think about storage is that somebody in your board, when you say the word collection storage, is probably a developer or is probably somebody who builds buildings and thinks about a storage building as being a building that is cheap, simple, and does not have any specific criteria, which is the complete opposite of what you're going to be doing as you contemplate a collection project. So when you think about the words that you use, the word storage is the wrong word for many reasons. Now, if you look at the same kinds of use of words for these n-grams, you're going to see that the word preservation is in decline, which is a frightening idea. But the words access and risk reduction are being used much more extensively than they were 20 years ago. Now, my guess about the decline of the use of the word preservation probably has to do more with food, canning, and things like that that it does with collections. But the notion of access is gaining and risk reduction are certainly part of the lexicon and are much more important to think about when you're thinking about a collection project. So what I'm going to suggest you do as you think about these projects is to move away from the notion that you're going to build a building, that you're going to be storing collections. And to move into the mindset that the goal of the project is preservation of collections, improving access, and risk reduction. And by using preservation, access, and risk reduction, you're going to have the proper guides for doing a successful project. So the perfect model for collections was invented right here in Philadelphia where I'm sitting today. This is Charles Wilson Peale, who is a Philadelphia portraitist in the late 1700s, who found out who was quite a well-known painter. He was a portrait painter. And he was painting a portrait of somebody with an astadon bone. And he found that people were not coming to his studio to create quite a buzz in Philadelphia in the late 1700s. And so he found that people started coming to his studio to see the mastadon bone. So he became one of the first collectors in America. And he developed a collection, which he's shown himself in a self-portrait showing here, which became one of the first museums in America in 1786. And it was really the classic cabinet of wonders. It was the perfect combination of collections of access for a fee, of course. He was no fool. And as it developed preservation, in the 1790s, he offered it to the United States government for the first part of the permanent collection of the United States of America. The government, of course, declined. And he then sold it to P.T. Barnum, which is really sort of an ignominious end to the first collection in America. That collection today resides in the Maryland Historical Society, because P.T. Barnum found it too fussy to deal with and, of course, gotten to a slightly different business. But as you go back to the topic that we are at hand here, preservation and access are really the fundamental values. What it is not is a building project. What it is is a preservation access project. And what it is is an institution-wide project that is going to impact you operationally for decades to come. So as you work through the project, keep reframing the conversation and going back to the notion of what it is. It is something that's really core to what your institution is about. It is definitely connected to the budgets. It's connected to lowering risks and creating the highest preservation outcome at the lowest possible cost to the institution. So as we all know, and somebody in your board may feel, the cheaper thing to do, depending upon where you are, is to build an off-site building or take it over and put everything in there. But in that, those kinds of arguments, by being prepared to discuss this as an access project, begins to rebut these kinds of discussions that are going to happen at a board level. So in urging you to think about the word storage and think about the terminology you use, you're setting the table for a more successful project and to define the resources that you need to make those projects work. So I see there that someone is agreeing with me in terms of those discussions of the use of storage. And I think this is really an important topic for everybody to think through before they get involved as they move forward. So what are the resources you need to manage during this project? People, of course. If it weren't for people, things would be a lot easier. Time, I'd like to see a raise of hand or a little bit of chatter. If anybody has extra time and is willing to say they have extra time for this kind of a project on top of their current schedule, please indicate that in the box, because I think everybody would be anxious to see who might volunteer to say they have too much time. And money. If anybody has too much money, they should also probably send a few messages out to everyone as well, because I'm sure there be a few who are jealous. So no one has extra time. No one has extra money. And the people part is, or often, the idea of one of the biggest challenges, navigating the people with the language and navigating the people for the process, because everybody who is involved is going to have a slightly different agenda. So we're going to start by talking about managing people. So since everybody has a day job, one of the question is who's going to lead the effort on planning for collections? There's a lot that's been written in various listservs and in various books. And there's a whole profession out there for people who are outside project managers. So what kinds of services are these people offering? In many ways, the outside project manager, who is sometimes called an owner's rep, or somebody who's hired, who's professional, who says they have professional skills in managing an institution to make a successful building project. For most institutions, that's not a possibility. And for many institutions, it's not even a good idea. Having someone inside the institution manage the project, the PM is a project manager, is going to be the critical aspect of being able to make informed decisions as you go along. Because in many ways, the process here will always require that someone understands the lay of the institutional land. Who are the people who are going to be cooperative? Who are the people who are not going to think collections, storage, and management of that process to turn it from storage into preservation and access is important? So in a way, having somebody internal to the organization suggests that if you are being tasked with this effort, that you should be talking to your colleagues or the director or whoever is managing your organization and asking for additional resources so somebody can help you with your day job. Because this is an effort that is going to take time away from your current tasks. And since no one seemed to say they had extra time, I think it's really important to understand that this is a lot of work to do properly. And it's not a lot of quick decisions or not a lot of easy answers. Because what I'm hoping to show here is this is an interconnected process of a lot of individuals who are going to have different agendas. For instance, the CFO of your organization is going to be concerned about the first costs, the operating costs, the impact on the budget, what your energy use is going to be, and all sorts of other issues that are related to the financial health of your institution. Whereas those of you who are conservators or those of you who are collections managers are going to be more concerned about the preservation aspects of the project. We're going to be concerned about the access to the collections. You're going to be concerned about if your collections need to be moved, how you're going to track the movement, whether you need to get a new database in order to make sure that the move goes smoothly, all the sorts of things that are relating to each other, which are going to be different agendas. So as you're managing the process, what you really want to be doing is beginning to think about each of the stakeholders. Make a list of each stakeholder in the project that they may be all internal to your organization. There may be some who are external. And what you want to think about is what is their level of interest at every step of the way? What is their power to influence outcomes? Or I'll say their power to impede the project because they have the ability to squash something based on somebody else's needs that you may not know anything about. So I'm going to suggest you use something like this little chart here in this PowerPoint and keep that in mind as you develop your plan for what you're going to do so that you can really decide, well, at this phase where I'm really heading towards the board, what I really need to do is get the CFO, the person who's in charge of the books, if you're a larger organization or a smaller organization, it might be the director or it might be a board member who's very interested in something else. And how you begin to pay attention to them, keep them informed, keep them satisfied, or in a way at this point in time when you're getting ready to make a certain decision, you don't have to spend the effort. So this is a time management issue for you, but it's also understanding that at certain points in time, some people are more equal than others and you do need to address their concerns in advance, sometimes offline, sometimes in a place that's safe so that when you're getting to that decision point, they are supporters and they're able to speak up and they're also able to vouch for you that you have done your job in terms of your scoping the project or understanding the resources that are going to be required to execute the work. So the second challenge, since nobody seemed to have extra time, is understanding what, how to manage your time as you go through the process. So I would offer two comments here. One is that in a way, a project such as this is almost like a sedimentary set of rocks. You are building levels of information upon a foundation, layer upon layer of information. So if you think about what you're a project right now, you may have an environmental conditions issue in your collections. So you've identified part of the problem, maybe all of the problem, but you've identified part of the problem. From there, you're trying to develop levels of information about what it's impacting, and you're trying to understand how to solve that problem and understand what the interconnection is between that identified issue and is, and the other issues which may underlay that issue. So the solution to the problem may be the mechanical systems, but it may also be the building envelope, or it may be the fact that you're working in the collections, which is presenting other issues and other risks. So what you're trying to do over time is work from the notion of the strategic plan, what are our goals and priorities, pre-design, before you hire anybody. What are we really trying to do here? What are we trying to accomplish? What are our specific goals? What elements are in this? So as you're thinking about a collections preservation project, the program may include space to place the collections, but it may also include spaces to work on the collections. So understanding during pre-design, before you've hired anybody to work with you, what are the program elements that are involved in that? That's going to help you begin to understand, well, all of these elements are part of this. And also in pre-design, as you think about it, in my view, is collections are generally a pop-up sponge. Collections are a pop-up sponge that most institutions, by the time they get around to a project, have been placing collections in every last possible location within their collections space or all over their museum or behind their dioramas or behind a wall they might have built in a gallery or wherever else they're placing them. And in a way, understanding that as you begin to develop your program, there's an impact that begins to radiate through the institution, which means that when you're bringing them all together or you're unpacking those shelves, one shelf today may require a shelf and a half of space tomorrow. One cabinet today may require two cabinets tomorrow because you're nesting baskets or whatever the issues may be. So that during pre-design, you're not just looking at what you currently have. You're looking at how you want to repack the collections, how you want to store them and house them. What is the best system to place them on? So this is a process of defining the scope of the project. So this idea of building levels of information, then going into cost, construction, move, and operations are all going to require certain kinds of information in order to be successful. So when you're talking about the early planning, you're talking about your goals and priorities during strategic plan. When you're talking about pre-design phase, you're talking about what's our program. When you get into design, the only thing that a lot of people, not you, but a lot of people into your institution are going to be concerned about is, are we within costs? When you get into construction for the contractor or the person who's going to build it or the person who's supplying the equipment, it's going to be about speed. Get in, get out. That's how they make their money. When it comes time for move, for you it's about logistics and safety of your collections. And eventually, when you get into operations, it's about the metrics. Did we succeed? Were we able to do this project within our budget? Did we do it within our time? Do we have 25 years of collections growth? All the criteria that you said there at the very beginning during your strategic plan, the pre-design, were we successful? And being able to show that will build confidence in your skills, in the institutional leadership, or in the donor community, or wherever you've applied for grants, and will help you in the future as you go forward. So from my perspective, quoting Stephen Hawking here, how one defines a problem determines your possibilities for solutions. So doing that work upfront will really determine what your solutions are and how you can be most successful going forward in your project. So with each project, as you think about it, there are challenges and problems with renovating things that are in place. There are problems and challenges if you do a space in another part of the building. There are problems and challenges if you build an off-site facility. But when you're thinking about a project at the very beginning, thinking through each of those options has implications. And how you work through those and understand the implications of that on your institution are going to be critical. Because for each of them, there's a first-cost impact. If you're doing renovations where your collections are going to go back into the same space, it means you have to have temporary space for collections and then move back. What does that mean operationally? What does that mean from a risk perspective of moving collections twice? What does that mean for impacting or taking a gallery, for instance, offline, if that's where you're going to place your collections while you're doing this kind of work? So each scenario that you develop as you think about that is going to have a different outcome and a different implication. So the great leveler eventually is going to be money. And when you start thinking about a project from an early conceptual perspective, people are concerned about the money, but they're concerned about getting the scope correct. And as I think I said before, the financial resources that you have are going to be a big determinant in terms of the scope of what is eventually built. So this is a diagram which is trying to address the questions of what your project budget is. And for all too often, most institutions look at that oval on the left and think only about the construction costs. So what are they thinking about? They're thinking about the building. They're thinking about the collections furniture that goes inside the building. They're thinking about the supplies that go into the workroom or the desks. They're thinking about everything that basically is more of a building project. What your real project costs are, whatever those costs might be, but I think more of it should be focused on the costs in the right-hand bubble. And those are the public program and collection costs, which here I have lumped together so this doesn't become an unwieldy diagram. But that would include things such as developing new housings for everything that you're going to be storing. It has to do with maybe improving the database or creating a new database. Maybe barcoding the things that you have so that you can be more efficient in terms of how you might store collections if you're willing to take collections out of their current order in order to be more space efficient or if you're required to. It includes all your internal costs, such as what a cost for your time when you are not working on your other job, and hopefully there is somebody to help you do that work. It includes the cost of moving the collections. It includes the cost of time that may be required for development, for grant writing, and all those other costs. So that as you begin to think about your project, you need to make sure that you look at all the costs that your institution has in order to accomplish this outcome that you would not have had any other way if you had not undergone it. So it's any cost associated with the project is really the total project budget that you need to develop. And I would suggest that, for the most part, listservs are a good way to get some of that information. But I would be cautious because moving in one institution versus making a move in another institution, for instance, where one might have a large freight elevator for art and another is a historic house museum, which is trying to move collections from an attic down a steep stairway into another space. There are completely different costs and there's completely different requirements. So be careful about the answers you get when you talk to your peers. So the best thing to do is put the question out, ask people if there's a good time to talk, and then have a conversation so you can compare your project and the criteria and what it was to other people and their project so that you're matching up your project process, the kinds of collections, whether you had to re-house, all of those issues that you know so well so that you make sure that the costs are similar and they're justified in using that information. This is not an easy process and this is why I urge you not to have that conversation with somebody, benchmark some costs, go to the board with three days notice and say, this project is going to cost us $100,000. This project is going to cost us $3 million because those numbers will stick and they will come back and challenge you later. So this is a diagram published by the Construction Industry Institute. So these are people who build things. This is the industry that will probably be involved in some part of your project if you're replacing an air handler, if you're installing some compactors, if you're buying new shelves, if you're building a new building, if you're renovating a space or if you're doing an addition. So their advice to you if you look at this diagram is your ability, if you look at the left-hand side, your ability to influence a project outcome is very high during strategic planning at the very beginning of the project. Your ability to say, we're going to do X or we're going to do Y is very high against the dotted line, which is at low, low cost at the very beginning. As you move into project design, your ability to change things, your ability to influence starts rapidly decreasing and your cost to make changes is higher. For instance, you have hired an architect to design a new space or whatever the effort might be. Once they start doing the drawings to make a change, you have to pay the architect or whoever the consultant might be to redo all the work they have done or a good chunk of the work, it's going to cost you more money than if you had done that work in pre-design or strategic planning at the very beginning. And it's obvious if you think about it from that perspective, once you get into construction and or if ordered new shelving and you start making changes, your cost to change something, say for instance, change from shelving that's already been ordered into cabinets is going to cost you a lot of money compared to having done it earlier and so on and so forth. So even the construction industry is recommending that you put your effort into the pre-design and your early planning work. Get your decisions made. It's the lowest cost time to do that. And then as you get into the project, you will have fewer changes and you will have more control and you're going to waste less money. So developing these solutions early will help you understand what the implications are and help you save money as you go through the project process. This is the same plea to all of you to think in the same mode in a slightly different diagram. So what's it all about? It's all about institutional alignment, consensus, and resource allocation. So we talk about institutional alignment. We're saying during early planning, what you're doing if you look at the core of that diagram on the top is strategic planning. You've set vision and goals. During the pre-design planning, you've tested the feasibility, which means that you're linking the scope of your project, which may be a building project along with a database project, along with a rehousing project, which may include other costs as well. So you're linking the scope of the project with the resources, meaning space, time, and money, to implement that project. And in a way, by the time you get to balancing all of those, it also brings in the diagram at the top is the audience and the community need, the fact that your collections are aligned with the community and things that are proper for your collections are being taken care of. It's the staff and financial resources to carry out the work, going counterclockwise. It's the institutional capacity to raise the money, whether it's $50,000, $10,000, or $10 million. It's the physical framework. It's the space in order to accommodate whatever you might need. And at the core of all that is your collections. And in this diagram, of course, if you've got a bigger building project, it might include exhibitions and programs and research. But doing all that work ahead of time is really going to lead you much more successfully towards the project design, construction, and the outcomes, which are an access and preservation facility, which function well for your community and for your collections and for visiting researchers. And whoever else may be coming there. So again, think through all the scope that gives you the access and intellectual control. And I forgot to mention photography for that. Think about your collection management protocols. It's not worth doing this if you're not thinking about how you might change the way you're working with collections, which might have a lot to do with the kinds of spaces that you work in. It's not unusual to see people struggling to have enough workspace to properly work with their collections in a risk-free manner. And all the criteria that will help you create a safer working environment for the staff who are there as well. So all of that is really going to be important in terms of the way you reach your final outcomes. Another thing I want to urge you to think about here as you go through this question is my perspective is that most people try to have a mechanical system, which they are working to have overcome a building envelope. And I think there's been, for all too long, too much guilt placed on not maintaining perfect environmental conditions. And I think this kind of process has really done a disservice in terms of creating building systems that are too complicated and much too difficult to operate, too difficult to maintain, and too expensive in use of energy. So I would urge you to get on more listservs and see that there are more institutions now that are steering away from some of the old rules and looking at more science-based conservation practice in order to determine the kinds of environmental conditions that are needed to be maintained for each specific collection typology. The second part of that is to take a low risk design perspective. And by that I mean, what kinds of risks can you shed at every step of the way in the planning process so that the design can use simpler modalities or simpler systems in order to maintain better conditions? For instance, there are very few collections. We can talk about nitrate film, but there are very few collections which spontaneously combust. So the fires in most spaces have to do with creating the proper envelope around collections, lessening the amount of work that goes on in collections spaces and having collections care spaces immediately adjacent, and minimizing the number of outlets, electrical devices, and equipment that might be in a collection space. So with reduction of each element as you go along, you can reduce risk inside your collection space, which means that the systems that you're using to maintain safe conditions inside the space can be simpler and less complicated. The same goes true for your building mechanical systems, that if you over insulate the building and the spaces inside and create a real tight environment in terms of sealing the environment off, if you keep the lights off, if you isolate it from the exterior wall, there is very little heating and cooling load on that space because it is decoupled from the environment surrounded. And the more you can do that, the less it's going to cost to operate the building systems, the less frequently they're going to operate, the longer they're last, the simpler they can be, the less costly it is to maintain. So as you think through your project, if you find your engineer, if you need an engineer for some of this, and they're very excited about a very complicated system, I'm going to tell you, you have the wrong engineer and you have the wrong solution. Design should be approached for every space where you have collections from a risk reduction perspective. How can I remove risk and end up with a simpler system, simpler design, and I will guarantee you lower operating costs as well as a lower first cost because you're using passive, simple systems as a way to reduce risk. So while that's not exactly the agenda for this, I think it's important that people look at these issues and try to find that kind of risk reduction approach. So this is here to identify what activities should you be undertaking at each phase. And let me describe a little bit. I probably wasn't quite clear before what each of these phases are. I think some of them might be self obvious, but I want to just repeat that if I wasn't clear. I think we all know what a strategic plan is. I mean, that is really, in a sense, the institution determining what their goals are over the next five years and how the resources are going to be allocated. So it may be that in 2020, your institution is determined that they want to address the collections preservation issues inside your building and that this has become a priority for the institution. So once your institution is set that as a priority, then what you need to begin to make sure you understand is your collection plan. What are we collecting in order to keep our institution engaged with the larger community? What do we need to do to make our collections relevant? How are we telling the stories that we use our collections for? What kinds of things are coming out of our community that's important to tell our story or from an art perspective, all of those issues? So putting your collections plan in place and making sure you understand your collections plan and understanding whether you're moving towards more three-dimensional objects that are large or paper-based collections, whatever it is, you have an understanding of what it is and you begin to understand how much your collections are going to grow so that during the strategic planning process, as you're nearing the end, you develop a collections plan because you know that you're going to be starting on a project. Before you start that project, you want to have your own collections plan completely understood so that you know where you're going to be heading. The next phase is predesign. So you've completed the strategic plan, your priority. Now before you start design, you're trying to define what your problem is, what your project is. So at that point, you're setting the criteria for the project. You're going to quantify how much space you need, which is going to come as an extension of the collection plan. You're going to determine the time horizon. This project is going to take care of our collections for 25 years. Define the time horizon so you know what your collections growth is and how long it's going to accommodate that. Access. We want to keep everything on site near our main museum or on site so that we can have easy access for any researcher that shows up and be able to provide access to them within an hour. Whether you're an archive, a library, a history museum, an art museum, a natural history museum, you have an access goal. You think about protocols. Many institutions, my experience is that institutions are working around their building space. They're working around their collections. They're not able to implement best practices. So you want to begin to think about what things do I want to do to preserve and take care of my collections? And how can I best do that in this new space? So you don't want to repeat what you've been doing. You want to improve your protocols and set new standards. And again, during pre-design, that's going to impact your design solution. You have your preservation goals, which may be zero loss over a certain period of time and define what that is. And again, begin to look at the risks and how to offload those risks. Again, in pre-design, how can we get rid of these risks? What can I think about in order to improve my preservation outcome? What does it mean in terms of the environment that I'm looking for in terms of environmental systems or smoke detection or any of the other things which might be risks to your collection? During pre-design, you want to determine a schedule. How does this fit in with our exhibit schedule, for instance? Because it may mean that we need to take over space in exhibit space. How does this fit into some other kinds of issues around the institution itself? From any institutions working around major yearly events in a small project, such as your GALA or community gathering, may mean you don't want to have something going on during that time period. And lastly, what is our budget? That really may come more from what is our institutional capacity on one side of the equation? And on the other side, does this mean we have to re-photograph everything that we have? How do we budget for that? Does this mean we're going to start using new database? How do we budget for that? So it is working backwards through some of this. What can we raise? How do we want to allocate those budgets across all of the needs that define this project? So by the completion of pre-design, you should have a lot of information developed. You may not have determined whether you're going to do option A, which may be an off-site facility, and you'll understand the implications. Or object B, you're going to renovate things where they are. Or C, you're going to take the collections and move them into an adjacent gallery. After that's been renovated for collection storage and turn your old storage area into a gallery, any of those things are possible options. But you've at least narrowed down the options into some ideas which are clear and enable you to communicate with whoever it is you're going to hire to help you design the solution. So this goes back to the Stephen Hawking of how you define the problem helps determine the solution. So in design, you're coming up with a solution. The space we need, you're designing, you're rehousing, you're testing rehousing options so that you begin to understand, OK, is this really going to increase our volume of space that we need 20% like we estimated? You're looking at software options for your database. You're doing that. Other digitization, photography, and you're developing a move plan while you're going through the design process for the space because you're going to be anticipating all of those and trying to understand the implications. So that as you come to the end of the design phase, you'll have designed the space, but you will also have a strategy for rehousing all the collections. You'll know which software you're going to use, what you're going to photograph or not, and you'll have a moving plan. All of those things are interconnected. And by the time you start construction, which may be that what you're doing is you're getting 25 new cabinets. That may be what your project scope is, but by the time you do that, you do know if you're rehousing. You know exactly where you're going to set them in the building. You'll be prepared with your collection in order to database the information. You'll be doing some of your photography and understand how long it's going to take and then where you're going to do the photography in the building. So while construction is going on, you're really preparing the collections for the next phase, which is the move. And during the move, you'll be thinking about your final staffing and changing the protocols so that after you've moved the collections, assuming you're moving them, or you've moved the new cabinets in, or you've taken care of the building mechanical systems and you're into operations, you're performing at the peak of what you can perform at. And you'll hopefully have succeeded as you brought collections over to meet the earlier criteria of improving their preservation, reducing the risk, improving access, being within your budget, and feeling like what you've done is created space that will make the collections a much more successful resource for learning in the community and the people that you're serving. So I'm going to wrap this up and hopefully have time, a lot of time, per questions by saying that your job is really to set the table. And you set the table during the pre-design phase. If I haven't set it 10 times, I can say it a couple more and see how many more chats I get. But thorough pre-design will set the proper table to a project's success. The board will remember the numbers, but not the scope of the project that you are recommending. So it doesn't matter if the scope changes. All they're going to remember is the numbers. They don't remember whether you said it was 25 cabinets or 60,000 square feet. What they will remember is you told them it was going to cost a certain amount of dollars. So I urge you to be prepared as you understand the strategic plan to do the work you need to do so that when the budget is asked for, you haven't been waiting for two years, you are prepared to give them a good answer. And while you may get some pushback from someone in your institution, the resources that will be spent on a project will eventually be spent no matter what. So if you are on a continuum of knowledge, this whole idea of a sedimentary layers of information, you eventually have to know all these answers anyway. The best time to do it is spend the money early. And like the construction council said, save the trouble and the resources for later. So I urge you to think through these issues as you're going through the project. And remember that these kinds of things will help you succeed all the way through the project. But projects do fail. This is a human process. There will be challenges. And the reasons they fail can be as varied as inadequate scope definition at the very beginning, improper cost development so you really don't know all the elements of the project or you just kind of miss something. This can happen. A change in leadership at the institution can have an enormous impact on a project because it may become less of a priority. But remember, the board will remember a number. But one of the other challenges is when you quote that number and the project has been delayed because you have a new leader, you have three years or four years of inflation, your costs may go up 12%. So you need to make sure that you are very clear as you communicate the number what those numbers mean and when the project is supposed to occur. So all of these things are interrelated. It's a very fine web of influence. But it's something that I think all of you can do successfully if you are in contact with others who've had success. If you're clear about your scope and you understand the differences between your project and their project, and then you develop all the information in enough detail that you have confidence that you understand what it is that you're doing and how you're going to go about it. And of course, since everybody on the chat seemed to have extra time, this is easily done. And all of you can do it. But I urge you that if you're not going to have the resources to do it and have the time to do it at the very beginning, then it's going to be very difficult to provide the information to the board or wherever it is your governing agency, whether it's a city agency or a university, in order to get the information clear. So I urge you to do your work carefully, avoid giving simple answers, and learn from the mistakes of those around you. So I don't want you to be a splat on the page, but I'm happy to entertain questions that you might have. And I tried to keep this relatively brief so that we had some time to answer some questions. OK. So do you want to read the questions, or do you want me to read them? Why don't you read them? Oh, I see them all on the side. I don't know where that was the order, so why don't you start? Well, the order is from this top. From the top, OK. So the first question was, very important comment that an access project will need extra help should be in scope. Don't leave resources out of the project plan. I think I can't agree more, and I think that access really implies a whole different relationship between the collections as they may have been used in the past and how you want them to be used in the future. And the more you provide that notion of access, which could be putting things online, having better photographs, having a better space for people to see the collections, which might be a space that is more like a collection study room or a space for an archive, which has space for individual researchers so that you have more control over some of the resources going out into a reading room. All of those issues around access will have a big impact on your scope, but will be critical in order to have a better outcome. Repeating what you're doing now and making it bigger is not going to be the greatest opportunity for success. So I agree completely with that comment. And Julia writes, is fault an OK term for storage? I think if you're talking about the space, a vault kind of implies a way and locked away. And I think it depends upon who you're talking to, whether you're talking to your peers or you're talking to a board member or a funder. I think if you call it a collections preservation facility, you're threading the needle more successfully threading the needle more successfully between the notion of a vault, meaning they're safe, and the notion of preservation. The goal is preservation, and the goal is reducing risk. So I think avoid the shorthand potential of the word vault or storage, and really talk about the fact that you're preserving these for the next generation. These were things that are collected and held in trust. And that by talking about reducing risk, you're also beginning to suggest that you're being the best possible steward possible. And you're providing things in the most safe environment, both for the people who are working on the collections and for the collections themselves. So that's agreeing now that I'm reading sequentially here. I finished the piece. Now I'm eating the potatoes. Angela's comment, I agree. The vault seems a little worse than storage. And again, think about the way the word storage is used in terms of the way a board member or somebody in the community views the word storage or vault. Those words have connotations that are larger than collections. And when you apply them to collections, it reduces collections into either a commodity, which is money in a vault, or storage, which might be pallets of salt that's going to be spread on a highway. So Pippa has another question, Walt. How do you measure time of resourcing to include in plan to take CFO executive? So they don't assume managing working on a project like this is business as usual. It may depend upon how much help they have. I think the best thing to do is to probably develop a small work plan. For the work that I do with institutions, I always give them a work plan. And it explains to them, and this is really you're doing the same thing, the steps that you're going to take in order to accomplish a certain outcome. So there's a period. So I think you need to break down all the tasks that we talked about here and then layer in the tasks that you know you need to do as well. If you need to do a collection inventory, you need to understand how many weeks it's going to take to do that or how many months, depending upon your collection. If you're going to test the notion, if you really want to test the notion of rehousing things and you have a particular kind of collection and now everything's jammed in there, you may want to unload a shelf or a cabinet and then take a few weeks and reload it with the proper housings and see the impact of that. So you want to break down all the aspects of your project and create a task list and sit down with whoever it is that you might be reporting to or working with at your institution and say, these are the things that I think are going to inform the project. I want to create a project that meets the budget that I give you and accomplishes the outcomes you asked. And to do that, these are the tasks that I think are necessary. And you want to be able to say, I talk with four institutions that you know of. Call the institutions who are your peers and have that conversation and go through the list with them so that by the time you're ready to sit down, you have confidence in the information. And they have confidence that you've done your homework. And once you've done your homework and they see that, it's going to be much harder for them to disagree. And if you go to your CFO or the executive officer of your organization and you say, I'm open to your help to understand the time implications of this, what do you think? Ask their opinion. People are much more likely to approve or help you than to say, nah, couldn't be. So I think making it a two-way street and that kind of communication. And again, this is going back to that quadrant chart of looking of their capacity to influence something and needing to pay close attention. If you know that person is your roadblock, explain to them phase one, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to talk to my colleagues at these four institutions, which are peer institutions. And I'm going to develop a work plan and I'll be back to you next month. That begins to set the stage at the very beginning that you're going to do your homework. So take that approach of constant communication, how you're being responsible, you're being thoughtful of the institution's money, and then you can come back and say, I believe now that I'm going to do this, I'm going to put time to all these tasks. Don't start with the time. Here's the task I've identified. Do you think I'm missing any tasks? Where do you want me to do budgeting? Then you go back and you apply the time to the tasks and you see whether or not the budgeting might need an outside estimator or you might need to do something else in order to get that information. You're asking that person what he or she needs to know at that moment of time when you come back. And by doing that, you're helping them be successful as well. So Maria Tucker, do you have any links or good examples of best practices in these new models for environmental conditions? So I saw some things over in the other box. I think there's been some great work done by IPI, of course, and there's great information. The Smithsonian had a sustainability environmental conditions forum, I think, in 2013. I think I saw something on that as well that was held in Washington. There's good information in those. And there's a new ASHRAE standard that's coming out. So I think there's information. There will be information in that. I've seen some of that information and it's going to be changing significantly. But look at the science of the organizations as well as the Getty Conservation Institute because, I'm sorry, I said IPIS, Image Permanence Institute. Because they do have information suggesting how to look at the science and make informed decisions about the kind of environmental conditions. But what I'm going to suggest is that the trending now is that a lot of the past practices are going to be revised. But it's going to be almost a little more complicated just to get through how they're going to eventually be simpler because there's a lot of practice that's been in place and there's going to be, you're going to need a more nuanced understanding of what kinds of challenges or risks there are to your collections and in terms of environmental controls. So there are people who are really good at the environmental conditions requirements that are much more attuned to that. I know that there's a Getty Conservation Institute has a summer program plan that they had last summer that is worth looking into. I spoke at that last summer. So I would look into some of these kinds of programs to see how you might see the options that are out there. I'll just suggest that. And again, if your engineer is really excited and it's really complicated, back away. So what is the recommended term or terms for what is now termed as storage areas? I would call the whole, I would treat the whole area as a preservation center. I think others might want to type in some other ideas. I think it depends upon your institution and what the terminology that's been used in the past and what kinds of collections you're talking about. But in the bigger sense of the word, I think we talk about preservation and access center or preservation and access area or collections care area. So all of these are options that you can think about. But I think you need to try on the hat and see what makes the most sense for you and what is going to be more compelling for your institution given the scale and the diversity of collections and how they're used. So reading down, Kate Swisher, theoretical question, is it more cost effective to create a collection space by retrofitting an existing building or by building something new from scratch? What factors would you consider? So this is a thorny question, which often you have to get pretty deeply in the project to understand. And in my experience, because construction, and by construction, I would include just replacing the lights or construction, I would include replacing an air handler. Or by construction, I would include adding new cabinets or compactors. Construction is the most dangerous time in the life of a building. And I believe that it's over 50% of the fires that are in buildings are in buildings when they're under construction. So this suggests that there is no way you're going to do almost any construction other than perhaps moving in cabinets or shelving into a space with collections in there. So you're not going to replace the sprinkler system overhead with the collections all there unless there's some way to minimize the overhead work. There's all sorts of dangers involved in the retrofitting. So I think the factors that you need to examine have to do with how complicated the project is going to be. But in most circumstances, if you end up moving the collections twice, which means you may have to take an exhibit gallery offline if you're going to keep things stored within your facility because it's safer in your facility than an offsite facility, can you tolerate that? Because you are tolerating taking an exhibit space offline. I don't know. Creating a building from scratch is often not that much less expensive if it is less expensive. They're both going to be more than you might like, is all I can suggest. So I think that if the building has a great envelope and it's thermally dead, meaning what's going on outside has little impact on the inside, and what you're really doing to renovate the space is densify it by adding compactors, then obviously your scope is relatively modest and it's more cost efficient. If you're gutting everything down to the exterior of the building and you're putting in a new vapor barrier because you need to keep relative humidity at 40% or 45% or whatever the number might be, if you're stripping the space down, you have to replace the mechanical system, the lights, this, that, and the other, then what may be more efficient is to build space, the perfect space for collections immediately adjacent, meaning a new space, and then use the old space as your collections management space, meaning the space where you work on collections and the space where you do your processing and your clean prep and your dirty prep and your offices for the collections manager and the people working with the collections. So it may be that the best thing to do is to build a perfect space immediately adjacent, move those collections, and then retrofit your old storage space. I'm using the word storage here in the way of the way it was probably built for other needs. So it's impossible to answer, but that's part of how you need to sort of think through the process. So thinking through it might make it easier to understand what the cost implications are. So the next question from Pippa is, how do you seek an architect that just doesn't want to build a storage shed that considers risk and access to collections? Your job as a museum professional is not to educate the design professional, the architect or the engineer. That's not your job. If your job is to educate them, then they're not bringing enough expertise to the table. You need someone who's going to do more than just put up a storage shed because there are a lot of approaches to doing a building. And if you take a risk reduction first approach to the design, you're going to end up with a very different building and a different way to use resources, both first costs and operating costs versus another solution. So if the person has not done this kind of work, I would recommend finding somebody who has. I just think it's bad form, and you're going to end up with something that's going to probably not suit your needs as much as finding the expertise. And it may mean you have to find somebody who is out of town, but at least hiring them to be a consultant through the project process will be of value. But to have somebody who has no experience to do this is really not going to serve your end goal. And it's honestly not going to save you money. The money spent upfront is going to save you money all the way through. Do it once and do it right. Because once the collections are in there and you start having challenges, you're going to be spending a lot more money because you're going to be working around those collections. So Pete's question, how can we over insulate? Is a foam insulation better than bats? I'm not quite sure if you're referring to a, if you're still on the line, if you want to type it in, if you're talking to an existing building or a new building. The tendency is that most architects will look to the code to explain what the requirements are. And if the code says you need a certain wall rating for energy, that's what they're going to provide. So Pete's just indicated it's a new building. My tendency is that I tend to think of this as I want to minimize the impact between the inside and the outside of the building. There's two ways to do this. One is to decouple the inside of the building from the outside. So it's actually like building a drywall box inside the envelope, the entire building. And then just using your environmental systems that are taking the airspace between those two. And you need to have enough space so somebody can walk on the floor so it needs to be a couple feet wide. Yes, you're wasting space. But then you're separating the two. You're decoupling them. And you're only providing major conditioning between a well-insulated outside box and a well-insulated inside box so that the system that's running 24-7 in the middle of the building where your collections are being held or decoupled from the outside require very little complicated building systems to operate. So outside the building, it may be 100 degrees of heat during the summer. You're conditioning the space between the outside and the inside, which is cheap. It's drywall, extra drywall, extra insulation, and extra studs. It's not that expensive. But for a larger project, you'll find that you can then condition that space in the intermediate space to say 8 degrees or 78 degrees. You don't have to take care of the relative humidity because you have a vapor barrier going. And then you condition the inside space that final few degrees. And I can assure you that your energy costs are going to drop significantly. So decoupling is the best. If you don't have the space to decouple the two, just all I can tell you is over-insulate the walls. Put in the walls what you would normally put in the ceiling, which is usually higher because the load is generally from the roof. So the more you can insulate, frankly, the lower you can drive down the energy costs. And frankly, the smaller your mechanical system. A smaller mechanical system is a lot cheaper, saves a lot more money than the cost you're going to spend improving the thermal envelope of the building. Is foam better than bats? Depends upon the project. I think it's better just to price it both ways and see what might be better. Can't really answer that because some foams have urea from aldehyde and some foams don't. So I think you need to understand the conservation issues around the foam. OK, hope I answered the questions as I'm going along here. Casey, let's see. Do you know any resources for learning different ways of storing collections more efficiently in terms of making the best use of our space? We currently have furniture stacked on other pieces of furniture. Boxes stacked three high and three deep. I imagine I must build higher, but I'm just not sure what kind of shelving I should use to avoid the collections being so difficult to get to. I imagine I must stack higher in the building. You have a universal problem. I'm going to take a sip of water here, sorry. Furniture and large objects are the most difficult to manage in terms of the volume they take up and how they're stored. And I think that some institutions, if they have the resources, try to standardize the furniture into boxes or onto standard size pallets. And which means you don't have the visual access to them, but it does enable you to stack them more efficiently because you try to begin to size everything the same. The challenge with going high is you need to have the right piece of access equipment. And there are plenty of lifts out there, which are large platform lifts that you can purchase, which can take care of that if you're a large enough institution. But I think, depending upon the kind of space it's in, if you're a large collection institution and you're having to go high, if your building cost is a big warehouse and you're not compacting it, then pallet racks are going to be the cheapest way to pack a building. You can put pallet racks onto compactors, but it's certainly a lot cheaper to buy, I'll say, an expensive piece of equipment, like a big platform lift to go up and get large things which can support two people and a large piece of furniture than it is to have a bigger building. And it's probably safer because in my perspective, once you're above head height, it doesn't matter if you have the right piece of equipment. It is less important whether you're eight feet in the air, 10 feet in the air, or 15 feet in the air. What's important is to have a safe means to move it from whatever level it is above the floor, whether it's six feet or 10 feet. It's more important to have the right piece of equipment to do it safely than whether you went up to 15 feet because you're mitigating the risk by having the right piece of equipment and you're taking the right approach. So yes, it'll be more efficient to stack them three deep if you have to. Is it desirable? No, from an access perspective. Is it the real world? I hate to put it this way. Yes, it is. So I wish it were less complicated and I could provide an easier answer, but I think you're taking the right approach and you're going to probably have to continue to stack high. And hopefully, the things that are being acquired are things that are important to your institution. So the next question or comment is, I like the concept of retrofitting as construction is a way to include moving collections out of the way. I'm not quite sure exactly what's intended by that comment and maybe you can clarify it. So you're taping right now. I think I'll wait for you to see what we have to say here. And if you're talking about the comment is, if you call it retrofit, they will think collections stay in place. And that's a good point. I think, again, it's a good point about the terminology here. As you begin to think about the project, it's being very clear that the risk is too great to have construction going on in your space, that you plan to move collections into an intermediate space or into a gallery or somewhere else. So I think it's incredibly important for you to think about that in the pre-design so that you're aware of how it will fit or not fit into your schedule for your exhibitions. And Julia has a point here. Can you expand on dirty prep versus clean prep? Is that like a quarantine space? How much can overlap safely in the same multipurpose space? So this depends upon the provenance and the kinds of collections you're talking about. And I look at a dirty prep space, and I think it depends upon what it is. If you're talking about art versus talking about natural history, like a biological collection, or you're talking about history collections or archives, which may be coming from somebody's basement or attic directly into your building, each one of them has the opportunity to bring something in which could become a problem, be they pests or mold or something else that's going to wreak havoc on your collections. And I've seen things spread across large warehouses because there was no separation. So the notion of dirty prep is really two pieces. One is yes. It should include a space that you bring something in, you unpack it, and it's quarantined and then either frozen or use an oxych chamber or something is a means to make sure that there are no pests writing on whatever has come in. At the same time, I would suggest that when you're doing your first level of work on something, for instance, you may be wanting to clean some furniture or do other kinds of work. That should be occurring in what I would call a dirty prep space so that whatever you might be releasing as you do some cleaning work, whether you're using some kinds of cleanser or there's things that are going to be made airborne, it's being done in a space that has very little or low chance of migrating into other parts of the building. When you get into clean prep, I look at that more as a space for doing rehousing, framing, the first time housing, or framing, or data basing, or photography, or all the collections management activities that have to do with taking an object, which at that point could be seen as clean, not requiring any additional cleaning. And it is heading towards either the collections preservation center or it is heading towards exhibition. So I think keeping those apart is important so that you're not introducing any opportunities for something to be contaminated. That being said, if you don't have that kind of space, my recommendation is that you try to arrange the time that you're going to get deliveries of materials that may not be clean. Make sure that I'll say whatever other collections might be in that space. They're put back into your collections preservation area or vault or storage area since we're among friends. And that you use a space, use part of the space where the collections come in. You do the work on it that may be, quote, dirty. And when you're finished, you take everything out and you just check your space as best you can. And that every institution has everything they want. And so it can be a challenge. And don't be hard on yourself if you don't have all the spaces you want. Just be the thoughtful professional you are and do what you can. There is no institution, and I can tell you I've worked in our national museums as well as in small institution. No one is perfect and everybody struggles to do the best they can. And I think you'll find success just by having that goes back to the idea of the protocol. Having good work habits as best you can, making do with whatever resources you have. OK, I think that's it. And as I've been listening to you, I've made a list of some more resources, including three of our past webinars. And I'll add them to the worksheet when I post the recording, which will happen in the next few days. So I'll post the PowerPoint. I'll post the worksheet. And I will augment it some. So there'll be all those things. So thank you. Well, this was great. Thank you so much. And I wish everybody great success. And I think the fact that you're here listening and talking to each other is really the great foundation that each of you will use to be successful as you proceed in your project. And don't go at it alone. Make sure you get the resources you need. Right. And don't be bullied by construction guys who know everything. Correct, or board members. Yes. So please fill out the evaluation. We'll see you in two weeks for the webinar on ivory and in a month for the webinar on caring for medical specimens and human remains. And thank you for joining us. And thank you, Mike and Walt. So we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.