 Good afternoon everyone who is starting to join us my name is Erica I am staff at AIC and I welcome you to this session this afternoon. I'm just going to go over a few technical notes before our moderators take over. If you would like to see subtitles please see below. There is a live transcript CC button. You can click and you can see a pop out of the entire transcript or you can see the subtitles on your screen as they're happening. And with that, I will let Rachel Aaron Stein take it away. Enjoy. Thanks Erica. I am going to share my screen. And I'm going to then pass the baton to Becky. Good afternoon and welcome to the material selection and specification working groups pre session of the 2021 AIC spinach joint virtual annual meeting. For today's session, Rachel Aaron Stein, Lisa Elkin and I will be serving as your tour guides to explore the many resources and new navigation tools that MWG has been working on to assist in material selection for heritage stewardship applications. Although Rachel, Lisa and I will be guiding you through the session, we will be meeting up with many colleagues along the way whose contributions form the framework of this new initiative. We plan to then have a live panel discussion after the presentation with all of these colleagues. We welcome you to put your questions into the Q&A box so we can answer them at the end. Hi everyone. As an incentive to stay the course, we will be raffling off a copy of the award winning preventive conservation collection storage book at the end of our panel Q&A. A number of chapters have information directly relevant to this topic. There's a particularly innovative section that presents specific materials and collection types and evaluates risk. I'll drop a link in the chat to the book's wiki pages where you can find abstracts for all chapters. You have to be present to claim the prize. So stick with the tour. Before we begin our session, we recognize that our MWG participants are widespread. We gratefully acknowledge the diverse and vibrant native and indigenous communities around our nation and around the world on whose ancestral lands we gather and live. We honor with gratitude the land and waterways and the people who have stewarded them throughout the generations. We respect the memory and history of the people who came before us and the land upon which we live. Welcome to the MWG travel agency. We have your reservation confirmed to tour each of the incredible sites that are part of our new initiative. I'd like to share with you as the MWG chair, a bit of our journey, providing context to the sites that you will see. So there are many case studies that reinforce what is a universal challenge in collection stewardship to store to exhibit or to move our collections. We need to use materials that don't harm our collection. This intervention into a complex system can result in unanticipated and sometimes undesirable consequences. The material selection and specification working group, known as the MWG for short, formed as a community within the AIC to address this universal challenge. Since our initial meeting at the Smithsonian in February of 2018, the group has met each November and is planning a virtual meeting in 2021. The group gathering of about 25 conservators, scientists, preparators, fabricators, vendors and administrators. Our group has since grown to be more than 125 participants representing a wider community of stakeholders, both nationally and internationally. The MWG recognizes that many colleagues have contributed high quality resources to the wide field of heritage preservation that address aspects of our universal challenge. Our group seeks to identify these resources, evaluate their usability and develop additional tools for utilizing the information with the broadest user group possible. We aim to serve all stakeholders in the process, conservators, collection managers, exhibit designers, fabricators and manufacturers and more. Our structure has three subgroups, testing and standards, selection and specification and resources and dissemination. We are presently utilizing the AIC Wiki to create networks and linkages to both new and familiar content and to turn data into information that can be more readily used. So like it was for every other part of personal and professional life over the past 15 months, COVID was the great disruptor to the MWG and its established processes. We initially met in person over the course of two days once per year. We held bimonthly conference calls to keep tabs on the individual initiatives, but a lot of the work occurred in person. When COVID made this impossible last fall, the MWG steering committee sought us an opportunity to adapt our annual meeting to a series of mini workshops where participants could contribute several consecutive hours together, building out their projects. And then we met over two mornings via Zoom in November to report out to the whole group. While this adaptation has certain limitations, such as working groups siloed within their own Zoom calls, the great benefit has been significant retooling and development of the AIC Wiki content related to material selection and testing at a more accelerated pace than we initially anticipated. Many of the groups that we'll be visiting today have standing monthly meetings. At the end of our presentation, we'll give you a Google form link to let us know if you'd like to get involved. So, let's begin our tour. Here comes Rachel, MWG steering committee member to pick us up for the journey to our first destination. Thanks Becky. Every journey starts somewhere, and we knew that we needed a home base for our new content. Our first stop is going to be the choosing materials page on AIC Wiki site where we'll meet Joelle Wickens and her student, Marguelite Schindler. This page holds the building blocks for the MWG's content. Let me give you a roadmap for how to get there yourself after this presentation. As AIC's e-editor, I hope by now you know that the AIC Wiki site holds a wealth of information related to almost every aspect of our field. It is a flexible platform for collaborative editing, and you'll see over the course of this presentation the many ways we're using it to link content together. You can Google Conservation Wiki and find the site easily. It's also linked from AIC's website. On the top navigation bar, you can click on content areas and navigate to the preventive care section, or you can scroll down to the center of the Wiki's homepage and look for the choosing materials for storage, exhibition, and transport page in the preventive care section there. The Wiki also has a robust search mechanism in the top right corner if you ever lose your way. There's introductory content here that you might need to read only once, but it will be the most efficient way to branch off to the other content created by the MWG, so it's the portal to much of what you'll hear about today. It also links to a page with details on the history structure and participants of the MWG. Joelle and Marguelite will introduce the content and philosophy behind the page. Let's hear from them. Hi, I'm Joelle Wickens. I use she, her pronouns. I am an assistant professor of preventive conservation at the University of Delaware. My name is Marguelite. I use they, them pronouns. I am a second year preventive conservation graduate fellow in the Woodpeck program. So we're going to try and just kind of casually take you through the why and the what of the Wiki page, right? And so let's start with the why. I think one of the, one of the things that really excited me when Rachel asked if I would help to spearhead the development and improvement of the page is that one of the main goals of the page is really to empower many, many, many different people to make the right choices for their particular situation about choosing materials for storage, exhibition and transport. And so it was really spoke to my interests in empowering not just the, what we define as the conservation community, but really the historic preservation community, lots of small institutions, big institutions, individuals to, to, to provide a resource for them so that they could make wise decisions. So that's, that was one of my main reasons for really being excited about participating and I, and I hope that what you see is a resource that you feel is heading us in that direction. And then I guess the other thing that's really been a goal is, is to develop the wiki page as a resource to easily connect people to all of the hard work that has been going on with the materials working group and all of the great resources that they're developing, and also linking, directing them to other strong resources that have been developed by heritage preservation professionals and organizations. And so that's my motivation for really wanting to be involved and how I see the development of the page but Marguerite, I don't know if you have anything you want to add to that. I don't think I have anything to add but I can, I can play interviewer and coach you forward. Sure. Which is, so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the idea of sustainable preventive conservation and the idea of balancing different decision making factors and how this page kind of connects with that philosophy and approach. Sure. So Marguerite mentioned sustainable preventive conservation right which is something that we've been really focusing on in the preventive conservation curriculum at Woodpack, really thinking about the fact that preventive conservation. If we can, if we can focus our efforts based on context and location and institution and really thinking about what the fact that there's no one right way for the whole world but there are many right ways depending on the context and the place that you're at in terms of achieving preventive conservation that works for individuals and institutions. That that's really where we're headed and so we're using that same philosophy, as we developed this wiki page to, to hopefully give people resources where they can, they can truly make the right decisions for them, rather than having one thing that they think they can do to achieve but never really being able to get there. And so actually I pulled out one paragraph that I do want to read for you and it's on a screen above my camera so I'm going to look like I'm looking into the heavens but And so the paragraph is these pages do not provide a single list of recommended products, because there is not a single correct answer to the question what should I use. There are materials that are more or less likely to damage collection objects. There are objects that are more or less likely to be damaged. There are materials that are more earth friendly, more human friendly, and or more budget friendly. You have to consider all of these things in order to make the best decision for you. We hope the resources mentioned here guide you to making smarter decisions about what to use and where to use it. I think that's a really concise summary that the whole team that's been working on this wiki page carefully edited together. But I think it explains really what we're hoping the resource will do for people and really where we're hoping the practice of preventive conservation will head. What I'd like to do now is show you a couple of ways that the wiki is designed to work for a variety of people and connect you to many different resources. The exhibition at is the top of the choosing materials for storage, exhibition and transport page. And you see right away, two of the ways that we're hoping to reach two different groups of people. You see right here, three buttons that are designed, we hope for people who are coming to the page with a very specific thing that in mind that they're looking for, and you can see in the text what we think that people might be looking for they might be coming looking specifically for materials, info on materials for use in collections, or to learn more about material interactions, or to review results of materials testing. And so these buttons are at the top of the page to capture people who we think have arrived here and are looking for a very specific thing underneath these buttons. You see the beginning of a series of questions that we hope will guide people who are coming really looking for more information on about on on the process of choosing materials for storage display and transport. And so these questions why is the choice of materials important. What are the factors to consider when choosing materials. How do I prioritize these factors. And how do I choose what to use are the questions that we have provided some text and information. In terms of helping people work through those those questions. Another place that we believe we've targeted two different groups of people is right here in this question about how do you choose what to use. First, you see some options for select from lists of already tested materials right so those are people who know what they're looking for they're looking for specific materials for a specific reason and they just want to see lists of approved materials for the next one is the next section is for people who know that what they're looking for is information on specifics of how to do their own testing. Whereas the the third entry here is really for people who are coming to say, you know, I don't really know exactly what I'm looking for or how to go about figuring it out but what I'd like to do is connect with a collections care professional who could help me. So we're really hoping to target people who are coming looking for very specific information and people who are also coming looking for more general guidance. And then in terms of the resources that we're hoping to connect them with, we are definitely hoping to connect them with the hard work that the materials working group has been spending lots of their time on and you can see actually right here on in this section of the page a few different areas where you'll find more information that's being generated by the materials working group. One of those is right here where it says cameos material working group reference collection. You're going to hear about this more later but there's this whole section that's being produced on specific materials and lots of information on very specific materials. We also have a set of materials testing pages with results. And those are also being generated by the materials working group. And one of the other links that's here is this image gallery that the materials working group has been working on in terms of pulling together lots of images of how materials are, how objects are damaged by incompatible materials. So those are some of the materials working group resources that we're hoping to connect people to but there are also, also lots of really good resources out there that are not produced by the materials or working group. And we've used those in strategic places as well so here for instance the technical bulletin 32, which is produced by the Canadian Conservation Institute is a great resource around which some of this text for this wiki is, is designed. Here is a link to recent preventive conservation collection storage book that is a great resource again not produced directly by the materials working group. And then the other the last section, which is still under development is this resources section. And I am going to turn it back over to Margoliet to tell you more about the resources section. So the resources section, we have been working to curate a specific list of, of resources that are directly helpful and relevant to this page and the people who might end up here. We've opted to step away from specialty specific resources and have linked back to other spaces in the wiki to connect with specific material information. But what we've done for this specific list of resources is kind of come up with a format for each entry that we hope can be taken and used in other spaces, because we think it's, it's working pretty well in capturing the information and presenting it in a in a clear way. And yeah, we're trying to, again, the list is going to be curated so it's not all resources, because that can be so overwhelming it's specific resources with kind of an intro paragraph to explain how it got there why we decided to put it there maybe a sentence about how to use it. Our thought behind why it ended up on the list, and then a link out to it. Great. Thank you. And so actually that might be a perfect place to say one of the things that we need our people to volunteer to write the entries for the materials that are for the resources that we've decided need to be on the page we have a very specific structure that each entry needs to be in and if you'd be interested in writing one or two or three of those we would love to hear from you. Another thing that Marguerite mentioned is that we decided that it would be too many materials, or too many entries on our page to have like all the specific photographic materials resources for storage of photographic materials on, you know, on the materials working group page so we're hoping that every specialty group will have a page on their specialty group page and so if you're a member of the specialty group who would love to help develop that for your specialty group we'd love to hear from you as well. And I'm going to give you one more ask. We have been trying to develop Marguerite and I have been trying to develop a graphic that we could have at the top of the page that helps communicate the interconnectedness and the complicated decision making process that goes into really making a sustainable choice for preventive conservation and if anybody is really interested in in graphic design and visually communicating concepts that will be the third thing that we'd love to hear from you about and I think I hope that that gives you a good idea of why we've developed things the way we have we'd love to hear from you if you've got ideas that you think we should take on Marguerite and anything that you can think of that we should say that we haven't already. I don't think so just that we are open to feedback at questions so feel free to reach out and we're looking forward to continuing this effort. So Joel has a few requests for the help we need to advance this page. Lisa, would you pop into the chat again the link to our Google form for anyone wanting to join the nwg community to indicate their area of interest. I'll pull over to the side of the road for a sec as we have a couple of poll questions for you. Erica, can you pull up poll number one and two. So we'd like to ask which information pathway are you most interested in or would use the most out of the buttons that Joel showed before. And which factor do you rate most highly when choosing materials, you know you probably consider them all, but just pick one. Give everybody a few seconds to answer about 50% voted so far, guys are fast on your triggers. Okay, pulling seems to have slowed down a little bit. And the poll and share the results. So it seems that most of you will be most interested in finding information on materials, and that you first examine the physical characteristics and working properties before you consider some of these other issues. Well, thank you for sharing. Becky, do you want to take us to the next stop on the tour. Sure. So when delving into a new topic, it is easy to get lost in the woods. We don't want you to forget how much important research has already been done on the topic of choosing testing and evaluating materials and developing safe protocols for storage exhibition and transport. And the WHO group aims to make it easy for you to find a pathway to access the relevant literature. So here we'll meet with Warner Han, Lauren fly and Jessica pace, who will demonstrate how to access this resource and how we are hoping to crowdsource more contributions to this online bibliography. Other groups in a IC have already been curious about how the MWG is using Zotero. So they'll explain their process as well. My name is Warner Han, and I'm part of the sub subcommittee, if you will, of the Zotero bibliographic database project. We're really hoping you'll find this to be a valuable tool in your decision making process and evaluating materials. I'm going to share my screen. Here's just a snapshot of what the bibliographic database looks like. On the left you'll find folders and tags. We're really looking forward to your feedback about them and any suggestions, contributions with you. What you'll find in the database is our articles, all with abstracts. I'd really like to thank Hunter Romick for contributions to the subcommittee and all of our students who submitted abstracts as well. Take it away, Lauren. Thanks Warner and hi everyone. In addition to the content of the Zotero bibliography, the process by which it was developed turned out to be a valuable resource in and of itself. Although we inherited the choice of Zotero as the platform hosted in the bibliography, we did have the opportunity to explore alternatives. After a quick review of leading competitors, we decided to stick with Zotero and as it wasn't significantly better or worse than other products. Our primary criteria were ease of use and cost. The learning curve for navigation and administration has been reasonably manageable. And we found that regular use and written internal notes on how to do what has been tremendously helpful. The most significant drawback has been that as an open source platform, Zotero's features and processes can suddenly change without notice or explanation. This is mostly a problem on the administrative side. And again, regular use has helped ameliorate its effect. The free group account includes a very small amount of internal storage within the bibliography. We have concerns about copyright, so decided not to include stored resources for now, but this could be a possibility for the future. Because the group is public and here I'm going to go to my slides. So because the group is public but closed, anyone can find and use the bibliography, while only administrators can add, edit or delete entries. People can join the group as members, which allows the group library to show up in their personal Zotero library, making it readily accessible and easier to incorporate into their existing workflow. For instance, here's how the MWG library looks in my personal Zotero library. Having the group be publicly discoverable and searchable means that it's also incredibly easy to link to on other sites. We've been able to add it to the MWG pages on the AIC Wiki with a minimum of us and know the link can be reliably cut and pasted. On the back end, we set up a Gmail account to use as an administrative account for Zotero and the subcommittee generally. And that is mwgbibliot at gmail.com. The admin admins for the bibliography and Gmail address are subcommittee members. And anytime someone emails the Gmail address, we all get copies in our personal inboxes and then Gmail account itself serves as a centralized record for all incoming and outgoing emails. This way, as subcommittee members cycle in and out, we can just change the admin permissions for the Gmail account and make sure the new members have a password. The Google account specifically for the bibliography comes with other advantages, namely the full suite of Google apps. Significantly, because Google accounts are free and outside an institutional umbrella, we also didn't have to seek specific permissions, find budget from somewhere, etc. And now we'll turn this over to Jessica. We'll talk more about our use of Google forms in developing a workflow for the bibliography. In addition, we wanted a system that was easy to use by both the abstract submitter and the administrator. Lauren created this PDF form, which distilled the many fields in Zotero down to some key ones that were pretty consistent across resource types. The information was arranged in the correct order for copying and pasting into Zotero. The user would copy and paste this form into their email, fill it out and email it to our Google account. So we soon started using Google forms because the centralized abstract submissions shortened the submission process, reduced user error and generated useful data. Having that initial submission form was really helpful, though, because I could easily recreate those fields in Google forms. The software uses logic branching, which lets you ask conditional questions that jumped to certain sections based on the respondents answer. For example, any abstract that had an ISSN, ISBN, or DOI in our form was skipped to the last section, which really shortens the submission process. All submissions are fed into a spreadsheet, where each field generates a column. Subcommittee members use the spreadsheet to review abstracts and to copy and paste the information into Zotero. The software also graphs the data from each field. This provides a clear overview of what types of resources are being represented or overlooked in the Zotero library. Google forms also makes it easy to find duplicate submissions, record contact information, and reorganize the spreadsheet without changing the submission form. It can be confusing to navigate between the editor version of the document and the public-facing one. This is what the page looks like when you are building or editing the form. I have circled the various options that allow you to interact with the form. Here is the form that gets distributed to the public. The only way to interact with this form is to answer the questions. To distribute the submission form to the public, click on the send button in the top right corner. A pop-up window will open that lets you choose how you like to share the form. You can enter email addresses, copy a link to the form, or embed the HTML. You can also distribute the form by clicking on the I icon. This will open the public-facing submission form in a new page. You can test drive your form here or share it by copying the link in the address bar. As a shortcut, we save the link in a Google document to make it easier to find. Make sure you don't accidentally share the editor document when you are trying to distribute the submission form. Restrict access to the document by clicking on the three dots in the upper right, then select add collaborators in the drop-down menu. A window will pop-up that lets you restrict access to only the people you invite as collaborators. Some other tips for using Google Forms. There can be a learning curve to using the logic branching capability, so plan accordingly. Try to limit the number of questions in a form so that you can have a manageable spreadsheet. Record the submitter's contact information so that you can follow up with questions. This concludes our presentation on the Zotero Library. Thank you so much for your attention. Well, great. That was a whirlwind tour. So let's take a quick break to check your pulse. I'd love to hear which abstracts and topics would be most useful to you. I want to tell you about this resource on the AIC Wiki called the Image Gallery of Damages, DIG, for short. All right. Erica, could you please launch the poll? Great. So we'd like to know which topics of abstracts would be most useful to you. So we'll give you a couple minutes to respond here. You know, it's hard to only select one. Many of you have voted. We'll give it just another five or 10 seconds here. Okay. Great. So it looks like storage and housing wins it, but wow, it looks like we've also got a lot of work to do in our additional abstracts. So we hope that many of you will be willing to contribute more to our bibliography. So with that, Rachel, where are we off to next? Well, Becky, a survey of our field by the MWG indicated that we needed good tools to explain this topic to colleagues, vendors, and fabricators who might not be so familiar with the issues. We know that a picture is worth a thousand words. So our next stop on the tour gives us a visual way to understand the repercussions when interactions between materials and our collections go wrong. Justine Wiebold, who will explain how to use the Image Gallery of Damages page on the Wiki and how you can contribute to building this resource. Thank you for short. Just to give a little bit of history about the gallery and how it was created. Back in 2019, the Resources and Dissemination Committee was looking for a way to convey information about damage and decided images were the best visual representation. So we figured with the assumption that the source of the image would have an idea about the environment in which the object was housed, or what material it was in contact with. So we started developing a structure for this information to be arranged into captions for each image or set of images in the gallery. Then we built the image gallery on the Wiki and collected images. The images categorized and proper coding to upload images and captions to the Wiki page required some extra sets of hands. So we organized a virtual session last September to help write the captions. So let me now share my screen to show you the gallery. Here's the page for the MWG Image Gallery of Damages. You can Google AIC Wiki Image Gallery and it comes right up on the search page. Now you see the damages represented in the images are intended to illustrate known issues of deterioration and environmental-related pollution. These could have many causes including contact with inappropriate or incompatible materials, elapsed in climate control, or inherent properties of the media. Examples of all these kinds of damage include accretions, powdering, and corrosion. The way the gallery is organized is in two sections, which can be toggled between using the table of contents links. The newest entries are at the top and then below the images are organized by the dominant material damage. So for instance, ceramics and glass, ivory, metals, etc. The current images on the page were sourced from Matura's working group members, literature, and some online resources where the damage has been indicated and explained in the text so we can translate this into a caption. Permission was given to use the images so they're essentially free of copyright for their use as an educational resource. If you click on the discussion link right here, it will send you to this page. On the discussion page, we welcome submission of new images for this gallery, and you have two options for doing this. If you prefer the old school way of email, use this submission form as a template to submit images. Those can be emailed to me, the image gallery coordinator, or Rachel Aronstein, the AICE coordinator, or editor, and our profiles are linked on this page. Feel free to submit multiple images of the same damage. We have also developed a Google form that can link up to four images in one submission. The link for the Google form is located right here on this discussion page. And here's what it looks like. So there's some directions here for how to do that. You stop sharing. We identified some practical applications for this resource, including classroom learning workshops and webinar presentations. Many students at Buffalo State found it useful in their preventive conservation program for studying the audit test. Also, Rachel Aronstein found it helpful in putting together a recent talk given for the ARCS community, and Karen Wilson used images for an art handling and condition assessment talk. The images have been very helpful to visualize the circumstances and apply proper terminology. We are thrilled to see the resource already in use, but there is so much potential to expand the image gallery as we receive more submissions. If you or your institution have images of damaged collection materials with a known cause and environmental conditions, please consider sending us your images to provide a more robust resource, along with your permission to post them to the gallery for educational use. Thank you. Instrumental analysis testing protocols and results. We know there must be a ton of images on your hard drive from pieces you've treated or seen on exhibit. This is a great way to contribute and we hope to hear from you. We'd love to hear how you think these images might be useful to you. If you have feedback that isn't represented by our next quick poll question, we hope you'll let us know using the Google form link Lisa want to pop that link back in the chat. Erica, can you share poll number four. Okay, we would like to hear how you think you might be inclined to use these images. Not everyone's voted yet, but it seems that we're sort of at a pretty consistent ratio of with education and training for colleagues for students being the top result here. So, please keep contributing. Becky, let's visit a few colleagues to see what's going on in their labs. Great. So there are a number of ways that we evaluate the chemical composition of potential products to consider whether they are compatible for their intended use and how they will age or perform over time. Each technique has its benefits and its drawbacks. The investing in standards group in the MWG is doing foundational research in this area. Their efforts inform the content on two important sections of the wiki. So, during our time with them will hear how they are assessing describing instrumental techniques and explaining how to evaluate the data we are presenting. Everyone would like easy answers or a list of products to use or not to use, but it isn't always so simple, and our colleagues will explain how to get the most out of this data. So, let's look up with Julia Sebalski, Chris Mayniz, Eric Reitung, Samantha Springer and Catherine Stevens for a tour through the materials testing protocols results and instrumental analysis wiki pages. And results tables. That's the title of our section, take it away Julia. Okay, so I'm going to share a recent case study from the AM and H that I think can help to show how the online resources that are being developed by the materials testing and standard subgroup can be used by people to make better informed material selections. So recently the AM and H undertook a major renovation of our Hall of Minerals and Gems, which is home to many small mineral specimens, as well as jewelry objects and carvings there are large minerals on open display, and the renovation also includes a small gallery for temporary exhibits. And one aspect of our role as conservators during the renovation process has been to guide the selection of materials used in the construction and the outfitting of the new showcases. So we want to make sure that those materials won't cause damage to the objects that we exhibit over the many, many years that they're going to be on display. In this particular hall most of those objects have a relatively low sensitivity to gaseous pollutants but there's some really important exceptions among certain mineral classes. Also, the jewelry objects and the showcases that are intended for the rotating display of loan objects in the temporary gallery. So early on we decided that we did not want to rely only on anecdotal information from our colleagues, or on product information in our approval of the materials to be used. So the result that conducting our own in-house adi testing was going to be the best way for us to make informed choices for the display of our collection. Of course there are numerous adi testing protocols in use by different institutions. So right away once we made that decision, we had to choose a test protocol that would give us the confidence in the reliability and the repeatability of our results that we needed. We elected to adopt the testing protocol developed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And then over the course of the project we found that we had to make some small modifications and adaptations to that protocol in order to accommodate the details of our own situation. So aspects of the space that we had available or the equipment that we were able to use. And then it was important for us to be able to document those changes so that any test results that we share will come with the context of our own particular testing procedure. Then as our adi testing got underway, we were quickly reminded just how time consuming adi testing can be, particularly for a major project with numerous materials to consider. And our timelines were tight. So one thing that was really important for us was being able to provide our contractors with some recommendations as a way of focusing our testing on materials that already had a good chance of meeting our requirements. Similarly, when a material that they had proposed failed in our testing, we needed to be able to suggest appropriate mitigations and alternatives. I think solid panel materials are one good example. Board materials are so essential to case construction, but they can be really problematic. For example, MDF wood products are easy to shape, paint, and otherwise work with, but they performed really terribly in our adi test. And we needed to go back to our case manufacturer and give that results and further consideration was our testing consistent with others past results. We have some success mitigating some of the problems of MDF with the application of sealants or other coatings. What about other board materials that we could ask them to consider? Could we generate a list of materials that have been adi tested in the past and offer promise? And are there other analyses that exist that would tell us more about the suitability of those alternatives? We know that testing procedures differ and that formulations can change. So we weren't going to rely on past results alone, but they do offer a solid starting point for testing going forward. And the test results tables on the AIC Wiki were very useful in facilitating that conversation. So we could see that our testing was generally consistent with the results that others have shared and that this was true regardless of differing protocols used in that testing. We could also see that there are some alternatives that have been tested as sealants, but generally that those that have been reported have not produced a sample that passes the adi test. And we were able to generate a really rich list of promising alternative non-wood panel materials that could be evaluated further in our own adi testing and then also by the manufacturer for their handling and working properties. So things like Albumodulin, Forex, Marine Grade HDPE sheet, ComaCel, etc. So approaching it this way really allowed us to be more strategic in our testing and direct our efforts toward these instructive comparisons that could inform our role in making good decisions in the renovation project. Julia, this is a great example of one way to use materials testing result pages, formerly known as the adi test pages. We are currently changing the name to better reflect that there are more than just adi test results there, although they do make up the majority. For someone who is approaching a similar project, I can show how this resource can be used in information that's available. So before we dive into specific results, I just want to point out that at the top of every page is a link to the adi test which was recently updated with the overview summary. History of the test, current practices, and at the bottom is the bibliography that was mentioned by Lauren. Also is a link to the testing protocols. So Julia mentioned needing to decide which procedures to use at AM&H and every contributor has shared their own protocol which you can find here. And this may be helpful for choosing your own or assessing the results. Going back to Julia's example of the wood boards and alternatives, here on the case construction materials, that's where you'll find that. You can see in the table that any column with a double arrow is sortable and the most useful is probably the date tested. So if I click on this, it'll sort by year and the boldest are now at the top, clicking again, I'll get the most recent at the top. And due to minor variations in how data is entered, it can mix up the sorting. So I recommend using the shortcut control F or command F, which will bring up this search field at the top, you enter for and here I am finding this entry for Cintra. And if I want to know more about what is Cintra, I can click on this link and it will take me to cameo. And scrolling down to the collection risks, conversely, any of these links will take you back to the material testing page. To find out more about how this test was carried out, you click on the link for the testers protocol, which would take me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Protocol. And you can read as that to understand how they decided to give this a temporary or decide it was useful for temporary use. You can look at the results images on the far right column. And here there's also a link to their GCMS results for that test. So everyone should understand that the results here are shared by a wide number of contributors internationally, and they are not vetted by a committee or group that they are simply shared here for your information. And I know it can be confusing or frustrating that materials are listed more than once. And the common question is how I know which test result to trust. And also, there are tests from the 90s so when would we consider a test to be outdated. Those are good questions, Samantha, especially given how many different Audi tester on the wiki. There's at least 15 tests listed. And each one of them, while it follows Andrew Audi's basic principles of being a sealed vessel with reactive metals and material and some water added. They are fundamentally well similar, they are different tests. And so where do they vary. The big big variation is how well the vessels are sealed. The purity of the metals and then how those metals are prepared, as well as the water amount per volume in the vessel, those can have significant effects on the outcomes of the tests. And then beyond that it's, you know, where the material itself was collected from how it was sampled and where it was stored. They also have a big effect on the outcome of the test. So if we look a little deeper at what's on the wiki pages. Here's an example where there are different results for the same material. This is tested tape 51 575 tested by the met and also tested by the British Museum. So there's two different tests. And this we can see these differences on the wiki, either with the same institution same test testing at different times, or different institutions. So different tests testing at different times, or the same time doesn't really matter you find these differences. So the question is why and is there enough information here to differentiate. You can see that the met claims it's a temporary material, British Museums is permanent. But you look closer and the Mets test was in 2018. The British Museums was 2006. This could be either, you know, the test being different or maybe it was actually a different material from the manufacturer based on just consistencies or supply of their source materials. So the question is, do we really have enough information know which rating to trust or believe based on what we have on the wiki and Chris will talk about what the materials working group is doing to sort of address this question. Yeah, and so the reason for the existence of the testing and standard subcommittee is, we're here to identify and refine methods for evaluating materials and improve means for their implementation for the end user, which is a good summation of the philosophy and purpose of our group. It's a good composition of contributors about half of us are scientists in the other half are conservators. And we're focusing on directly on this question of how do we trust test results. So our first task was to decide which tests would give the most useful results. And then after that, our goals now are to standardize protocols. We want to consistently make reproducible results so that we can share them with our larger community via the AC wiki. And we have organized ourselves into three focus groups. The Audi test group, which has the largest number of results on the wiki now. And to which our group will be adding from our standardized protocols hopefully will be improving those results. Overall, we also have a microchemical testing group. These tests are much simpler, low cost. They're more accessible methods and require less training. And then we have a group on the other side, which is looking into instrumental methods for testing materials, which first of all requires lots of money for the instrumentation, as well as lots of training and expertise. But the results and greater consistency or results and more comprehensive information. So in order to do all of this, we set up a round Robin. We did one in 2019 and in 2020 after refining our protocols, we started a second round Robin. There are currently 12 museums for university programs, one library, and one independent testing agency. And the ultimate plan for all of this data will be to add it to the AC wiki, which will include links to our instrumental data such as our GCMS data here. That's gas chromatography mass spectrometry. And in order to explain that I will turn it now over to Catherine. Hi everyone, I'm Catherine Stevenson that and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the instrumental analysis and techniques of the materials working group has been using to that materials for their safety for their safeties and cultural heritage collections. And in order to talk with all of you about that I'm going to share my screen. So in general as a reminder when you want to go to the AC wiki, you would just go to search engine and type in AC wiki and you'll get to this main page. Once you're here, if you want to get to the analytical instrumentation pages you come here to research and analysis. And then once you get to research analysis you can see there are four tabs the first tab I'm going to talk with you about is the instrumental analysis tab which is the highlight of this. I'm going to talk with you. So the instrumental analysis page is comprised of a series of different techniques, and they have been defined and written about by conservators and scientists for, you know, people that work inside our community. I'm going to focus my talk today with all of you on the chromatography and spectrometry section. And tell you that the materials working group has been focusing on using a gas chromatography techniques to analyze materials to see if they're safe for use inside cultural heritage institutions. The techniques specifically that our group has been using is something called solid phase micro extraction or speed me and or the direct thermal distortion method, the DTD. And both these techniques are sample introduction methods or how you get your sample into the gas chromatograph. And what these techniques do is capture volatile organic compounds, and then they take those and they introduce them in the gas chromatograph and the grass chromatograph tells you what those compounds are. And from there we can hopefully decide if materials are safe for use or not. So if I come on here and click on DTD. This is a template that all the different analytical techniques follow where in described to you what this technique is, what it does, how it works, if it's quantitative. How do you prepare samples for this technique, you know, and like also like other risks associated with this technique like you know how is this technique used within our cultural heritage community. Is this technique very expensive, is it a cheaper technique. And another aspect that the materials working group is been working on as you can see here is to write specific protocols for analyzing materials for use. So if I come inside here that this technique describes you if you have a direct thermal distortion accessory for your gas chromatograph. So that's how you would prepare and analyze samples. And the goal here is to make sure that the results across any so any person that runs this technique at any institution can compare their results to anyone who runs this technique at another institution. So if you come down here to the round robin materials tested over the last several years by the groups that have been volunteering to work on this. You can see to the materials that Julia was thinking about when she was talking about the gems and narrow hall. And they are both material that are recommended for use in constructing cases, but one of them is turns out it's good for use near and one of them it turns out is not good for you. And this materials working group helped to determine that information. In general, the, the point of the round robin I think has been gone over by Chris and Eric, and then these materials were picked by the materials working group. And you can learn more about these materials on other pages on the camera page. The other thing I want to talk to you about if I come back here. I see wiki homepage, and I come back to research analysis wanted to talk with all of you about the case studies link. So in here, you can see the materials working group has been summarizing more of its work with more links like what we're doing how we're doing it. And if you scroll down a little bit. You can see here, there are nearing institutions all across the world, working on betting materials for use near different types of collections and different kinds of cultural heritage institutions. The presentations highlight the different ways that people are working on that. And if I come back again to the homepage for research analysis. The last aspect of the materials working group tests that have been run is found here inside materials testing age. These micro matte graph techniques are quite expensive and very few institutions have them. These micro chemical techniques by contrast are relatively cheap and easy to run. And if I click on here you can see the different tests that have been developed by them as well they have been an existence but chosen by materials working group as useful. So there's pH measurements. There's different kinds of pH measurements. Then there's other tests for looking for chemicals that are dangerous for our like sulfur, like chlorine. And if you click on any of these, it'll take you further down the page and it'll tell you how to run those tests, and how the results are useful for you. So now I'm going to stop sharing. She says, and thank you for your time. So we hope you enjoyed touring the pages that are fast becoming some of the most visited on our wiki. This video clip starts to demonstrate how the tables are linking to other resources like cameo to make it easier to get the information you need. It's also important to emphasize that our European colleagues are working on some exciting initiatives in the same area, and some of those will link off the choosing materials pages presented earlier by Joelle. So our group would love to hear how you evaluate materials. So please take a look at these poll questions. Erica, if you could launch our next questions. Thank you. And I'll give you a minute here to to noodle through them. There are three. I'm going to give you just a couple more seconds here. I know it's a lot to feed through. All right. So, um, these results are actually really great and useful. Thank you. Audi tests are still big and important and the microchemical of course. And yes, I think a lot of us do tend to rely on our colleagues and peer organizations to help us with our decision making. This is great. Thanks everyone for participating. So, um, thank you for your feedback. And Rachel, I see that there's a tall peak off in the distance. What's out there. So traveling a long road to a distant goal that you can just glimpse off on the horizon is tough. There are so many materials to choose from and data to research it can feel exhausting. The journey is easier when you break the trip into manageable legs and travel together materials fact sheet collaboration makes this less overwhelming and the journey more fun. I'm Jamie Gleason and Jen Bosworth who have invited colleagues Ashley McGrew Eric Dixon and Ryan Scorch to discuss how the MWG is creating a reference collection on cameo, a core resource for our field. Michelle Derek the scientist and driving force behind cameo will join the panel discussion a bit later. The fact sheet groups monthly meetings provide a mechanism for recording the kind of practical information that many of us gain when we work with materials, but it's frequently not found in the published literature. The group builds on a format begun by the preparation art handling collections care information network known as packin and adds information useful to multiple stakeholders who choose and use materials with collections. We implore you to reach out to your preparators fabricators mountain makers and vendors, inviting them to participate and contribute their critical knowledge while making great connections with colleagues along the way. Lisa want to remind people that they can fill out the Google form link. The fact sheets are quick reference guides with information about materials used for collection storage display or transport. The fact sheet working group uses Google docs to collaborate virtually on developing material database built off of this template. It was designed to capture information relevant to anyone involved in the material selection process. The material is broken down into 10 sections starting with a general description of the material in question and including synonyms and related terms applications personal collection and environmental risks physical chemical and working properties. The material is various forms and sizes and finally resources and citations which might include links to supplier or manufacturer websites or links to scientific papers relevant to that material. Google docs is a great tool for working remotely or working with a group spread all over the country, but it's not the best place to store information that you want to share with a wider audience. We needed to find a platform that would make our growing database more accessible. For us, there was already a well established online database of artists and conservation materials. MFA Boston's Cameo website. For those of you not familiar, the website is cameo.mfa.org. Michelle Derrick, who's been the driving force behind Cameo for over 20 years, works closely with us to make sure that all the material fact sheets we develop get integrated into Cameo. The material's working group has its own reference collection within Cameo that includes over 100 products with more being added every month. We hope this will become the go-to resource for anyone looking for materials to use in close contact with museum collections. Now that you've heard a little bit about the background of our project, let me walk you through the material working groups section in Cameo. The first thing you'll notice when you arrive on the MWG landing page is that there are several links to other websites that can help with the material selection process. We have a link to the MWG's homepage on the AIC Wiki. There's a link to the Collection Care Network. There's a link to the Pack-In website, which is a useful resource. Pack-In is a professional organization for preparators, art handlers, and other collection care professionals. And the website has tutorials and practical information about building materials. We also have a link to the AIC Wiki's Aditas database, which is a great resource for identifying materials that are safe to use with collections and a resource that we reference often in the Cameo website. No matter where you are on the Cameo website, at the top of the screen you'll find a search tool. This is really handy if you're looking for a particular product, but it's also capable of pulling up entries based on keywords. For example, if you search for PVC, you'll be shown a variety of entries related to that class of materials. Back on the material working group landing page, you'll see that all of the materials are organized according to categories. For example, we have adhesives, tapes, plastic boards, glazing. If you scroll down a little bit further, you'll see that all of the material entries are listed alphabetically. The organization of the website is pretty intuitive, so let's move on to one of the individual entries to take a closer look. This is the Cameo entry for ComaCel, a PVC board that's commonly used in museum settings. You'll see that the contents of the page are pulled directly from our fact sheet template. We start with a basic description of the product and include a list of synonyms and related terms, some of which have their own Cameo entries. There's also a list of applications to give people an idea of how others are using the material. Under personal risks we have a link to the safety data sheet for a quick reference. Collection risks are obviously very important, and in this case we have some general information about the safety of PVC boards. And more specifically we have links to adi tests for ComaCel. You can see that there are several tests dating back to 2012 and that the product has routinely passed the adi test. When available we have information about the environmental risks associated with the product, including whether or not it's recyclable. We have a number of mountmakers and fabricators in our group and with their help we are trying to highlight the physical, chemical and working properties of materials. Part of that also includes the materials available forms and sizes. Finally, in resources and citation, in this case we have links to product sheets from the manufacturer. There's a link to CCI's technical bulletin where you can learn more about the risks associated with PVC products. And there's a link to a recent scientific study assessing the suitability of PVC in museum showcases. Back to Cameo quickly. In addition to individual product pages, we also have broad entries that cover a range of similar products for quick comparison. For example, on this page we've grouped seven hot melt glue sticks featuring their working properties and adi testing results in a convenient table format. All of this was done with the goal of helping people make quick and informed decisions. This is still a work in progress but please check out the materials working group section in Cameo and let us know what you think. Contact us if you have any suggestions or if you'd like to join our monthly meetings. We also want to acknowledge a group of Buffalo students that contributed fact sheets over the summer and helped us develop the format for how we are continuing to work. So Cameo is a great destination for your research needs. We'd like to hear what you think about these efforts with Cameo. Rebecca, can you bring up polls number eight and nine? So we want to know if you've previously used Cameo to research materials. And we'd love to know if the addition of collection personal environmental risk information and the working property information makes Cameo more valuable to you now. Ooh, that's exciting. I think I'm going to end this poll quickly because the results are pretty conclusive. Cameo had a good bit of name recognition beforehand, but people seem to be really excited about this additional information. Thanks. Our last stop on the grand tour is like rediscovering a lost treasure. In the past year, the National Park Service's 1999 exhibition conservation guidelines have been rediscovered, placed now on the wiki where they're being updated by an active group of NPS and MWG contributors. We're from Teresa Volinger and Carolyn Lucky about the utility of this content and how its placement on the wiki is starting to tie together the resources we've been hearing about today to be accessible for a range of users interested in promoting safe exhibition practices. There's still a lot of work to do, but the progress in the last 15 months has been inspiring. I apologize, but I cut off the previous group's video and there was a critical portion that we missed. So I'm going to let that video run so that we hear the remaining content from Jenner, Ashley and Ryan. I apologize to all for my technical snafu. And then I'll let it run straight into the exhibition guidelines content. Hi, I'm Jennifer Bosworth. I'm the exhibitions conservator at the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian. We're going to be talking about how the fact sheets are made. And I'm here with three colleagues who are participating in the fact sheet group. You can just introduce yourselves. Eric. Hi, I'm Eric Dixon. I am the fabrication supervisor at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Ashley. Yeah, my name is Ashley McGrew. I'm a preparator at the Cantor Arc Center at Stanford University and also a liaison between Pac and and AIC. Ryan. Hi, I'm Ryan Scorch. I'm vice president of Click Another Field Incorporated International Museum Showcase Experts. So when we first started doing the fact sheets, we were actually trying to recruit individuals who can write their own fact sheet about a specific material, and then try to teach them how to use wiki and upload it into cameo themselves and we got a few fact sheets. Very slowly because it was a lot of work within this last year with the pandemic and despite the fact that we were very isolated and away from each other actually provided us with the opportunity to get together with a much larger group virtually which has in fact really spent things up with our fact sheet work and we are now meeting as a group to discuss materials and create fact sheets together. We started having a standing meeting, a Zoom meeting that happens every month, the second Tuesday of each month. We started these in December. And we've met now, I guess about five times more or less. And we decided to focus on specific materials for each meeting. We have a distribution list of about 65 people made up of fabricators, designers, conservators, scientists, collection specialists and more. Out of that group we usually get anywhere from 10 to 20 participants who join us for our meetings each month. We have our meeting theme and we talk about that material. And we try if we can to have a special guests come on who are really experienced using the materials so that we have something to go on to begin with. And so that might encourage other people to come and join to learn something as well, realizing they don't have to contribute something if they don't know about the material they'll still perhaps come so that they can, they can contribute as well we've talked so far about PVC boards, where Greg Smith from Butler University and Indianapolis Museum of Art, talked about MDF boards, barrier films with Bill Smith from Heritage Packaging. We talked about high density polyethylene boards, which was really, really great. Hoyt Wood from Small Court and Drew Watt and Brian Sentman from National Gallery of Art came and really gave us a lot of great information about how to use those materials. And we last spoke about gaskets which drew in about 24 people to talk about it and we had Hoyt back. Brian was there to give his expertise. Eric Brighton from the Met was there and Bruno Gopien and we had a lot of really interesting information about gaskets and we completely geeked out over it and got a lot of, I learned a lot of that from that too. We meet up and we have kind of an informal discussion about materials to people. Lisa Imonmora and Megan Salas act as our scribes to capture all the information. Megan writes our information into templates which are then used by Michelle to make the fact sheets on cameo and Lisa will capture what we're talking about with running notes so that we can refer back to what we've been saying and kind of because we have a lot of information we actually capture during that meeting that doesn't really fit easily into the fact sheets. So I just wanted to talk about the whole process with our colleagues here. For instance, Ryan I was wanting you to talk a little bit about the biggest challenge you have when you try to find materials that you're using with collections. The biggest challenge specifically as a as an independent contractor as a kind of an outsider to the to the conservation field itself is the fact that we become involved quite late in the process. And so becoming involved in materials working group and speaking to a lot of the conservators involved in in the, you know, the background and gathering of information has been really, really helpful in understanding that we're all after the same goal. So working together and finding substitutions alternatives, and just maybe even brainstorming and solving the common problems in the industry. That's that's really been the key to the process for us. Yeah, I was going to sort of echo a bunch of that I'm a museum preparator so that means where I am, I am a fabricator I'm also a mountain maker I'm the lighting, you know all that stuff and we have a relatively small museum, small budget, which is really useful for fact sheets to include stuff that really matters on to to your average person. And lots of times it's like it doesn't do any good to know the material and about it if you can't get it, or if the size doesn't work, or, you know, if you are going to use it how do you use it and so that's one of the really cool things about the meetings we have as we get to touch base on all kinds of levels and get different perspectives to try and have the fact sheets and therefore the cameo entries be as meaty as possible. And so that's something that happened we've really focused on it's like doesn't do me any good if it costs too much, or if I can't get it, and stuff like that. I think we're putting together a real good combination of factors, and the fact that we're doing it as a group back in this had materials, you know pages for a long time but there's like four of us. You know that have been doing it in the past anyway, as well as running a website unless there's no that stuff and having conferences and workshops and this is awesome to work with people and just see the progress we're making. So that's, I find this whole process very exciting and useful. Right. Any other thoughts about the process Eric how do you how do you think this is working to to be with other people on on this. I think it works great, you know one of the, like one of the reasons I sort of got involved in this anyways. Like Ryan and Ashley both said, this idea of knowing what products are out there, and what, what other people have found that is useful, or, you know, passes audio tests or, or even going one step further what stuff has not passed. You know, and, and having that that sort of catalog of stuff to be able to pull from is really useful and really great. But even, you know, going off what Ashley said some, one of the other things that I think the fact sheets that have been drawn up and the way we've talked about is talking about alternative products as well. So it might be like this is the ideal products but you know sometimes you can't afford it or it's hard to get. So what else works well, it's in that same sort of realm and that same, those same properties and does the same thing that might also be, you know, conservation friendly or other people at least have used it and can give you the. And advice about it and the meetings but the fact sheets as well have been really helpful to me in that, in that vein, but I think they're going to be helpful to a lot of people as this develops bigger and gets that catalog expands and we can get it out there people. Yeah, I think the fact sheets themselves are going to be a really great resource. But in a way I think what's become the best thing for me is having these meetups every month because I really learned so much from all of you. And only one of the nice things is that you're not just stuck in your own museum this way because usually, you know, in your own space your museum or where you work, you do things a certain way, you have people who are used to certain materials, and that's where they want to go. But when you mix it up and you're talking with people from, you know, a lot of institutions and all over the country and different industry experience, you get so much more, so much more information you're more willing to maybe give me something to try that kind of scared you beforehand and I think one one really great example of that was the HDPE board, which I think a lot of people are like, ah, but you know, a few people who've used it a lot, like, like Hoyt and and and drew, gave us some great information that maybe will convince someone else to try it. And that's the world of difference when, especially on listeners you see people talking about like the PVC board and how do you work with it. And, and there can be really easy ways in it like in the case of when we had Mike Mitchell from the Getty they've been using center type products for decades and have years of tests on it. And so they have a product that's like a epoxy that also passes out a test that makes using them to make risers and decks super super easy. But if you don't know that, and you're trying to use like the solvent you use to join acrylic. It's like no I'm not so good. I'm going to be a material you're going to be happy with. So it's cool. I would just add to that and what I was going to say is knowing a product's individual limitations, whether it's mechanical or fastening or finishing is sometimes enlightening into itself. So I'm going to go into a discussion and say this is what the product can do. You've specified this museum x and this is what we can do with it safely and using past experience in this collaborative process really helps inform that whole thing. So sometimes a bad answer isn't always the final answer. It's one way to say it. And then one that as a conservator for me getting that information because that's not part of my training, right. And understanding that as I'm trying to help to work with our designers and our fabricators to make decisions about what to use I have to understand why it's such a problem. So having this, this opportunity to meet with all of you and learn from you has been just invaluable for me, and what I have to do and trying to kind of work as a team because that's really what this whole thing is all about. So I want to thank you all for being here and I'm glad you keep coming back to the meetups and hopefully we can get more people to join us. And just continue to promote discussions between colleagues from all different backgrounds. We want more fabricators we want more designers we want more scientists, we have conservators we want more if you want to join us I hope you do. And thanks for listening. So I apologize to our presenters that I titled things incorrectly on the screen. And now let's hear from Teresa. The exhibit conservation guidelines were created back in the late 1990s, inspired by the vision of US National Park Service objects conservator Tobey Raphael. They were one of a kind, and really still are today. They employed one of the great technological wonders of that time. The CD ROM. Although CD ROMs are now on the list of obsolete media are sometimes used as coffee or tea coasters. Many of the working concepts and other information from this project remain relevant. One of the overarching reasons these guidelines were created was to foster collaboration while working on exhibits, bringing the eye of the conservator into the mix from start to finish. Interestingly enough, it is this collaboration that is giving them new life. The exhibit conservation guidelines provide the nuts and bolts for exhibitions, everything but the kitchen sink really from exhibit planning to design fabrication and installation. It was really the first time conservation issues were so woven into the whole exhibit process. What was so wonderful about them is that they're so very practical. They're presented in organized lists and tables and the secret sauce that really melds them all together are the drawings. The drawings help foster discussion between very visual people. The CD ROM concept allowed for searchability, so they didn't have to be used like a reading a book. Quick connections could be made within the text that we take for granted today considering the internet. In the end of the day, this was powerful stuff. It allowed all exhibit team members to clearly and thoughtfully understand the perspective of others on the team. But alas, things changed from 1999 and the NPS was looking for a way to keep the basic ideals of the guidelines alive, but in a more current and updated way. We wanted to broaden the audience for these guidelines as well. We needed a realistic way to make this a more living document that could be updated as times changed. Nowadays it seems crowdsourcing and wikis are the modern answer to this. We also knew we couldn't do this alone. The National Park Service needed a relationship. We needed a partnership to see this through. AIC seemed the perfect choice for this connection. The path to partnership took a little time, but it was well worth the wait. AIC and the materials working group proved to have the right focus and expertise to bring some new life into some already well established material. It has been a happy marriage as the NPS is still actively involved in the endeavor and will remain so as we move forward. So at this point, I'd want to share a bit about how we how we are updating the guidelines. First, let me say this has been a huge undertaking. After about a year, we are only one third of the way through the first big revision. If you look online, however, you can see the way the new wiki format is taking shape. Our approach to updating the original guidelines is to build upon its strengths. Right. There are already a lot of great things about it. Why change that? The topics were wide ranging. Let's keep that the information very practical, the approach very interdisciplinary. We also wanted to keep the original collaborative approach to preservation issues. Interestingly, this approach mirrors the materials working group itself. All that being said, we also want to broaden the content and expand the original artifact focus to include a wide range of three dimensional and two dimensional objects. We hope to continue develop to develop the range and scope of decision making tools involved in the guidelines. We want to add contemporary themes such as risk assessment and sustainability issues. Finally, the biggest change to the guidelines is in fact moving them into a wiki editing platform. As we all know, the wiki world enables crowdsourcing of information, provides effortless interactivity and linking, you know, really both within a wiki and to the broader worldwide web. And wiki documents are also designed to be living documents, which can easily be updated and allow for discussion and revisions to be tracked in the documents history. Basically, it takes the original interactivity of the NPSCD ROM and puts it on steroids. As to be expected, the interactivity of the wiki provides a tremendous opportunity for updating the exhibit guidelines. In a minute, Carolyn will take you on a little tour of the guidelines to show you how we are updating this unique content on the wiki, as well as how we're using the interactivity of the wiki to provide the original information guidelines exhibit information within the broader materials working group, using those resources, using the WMG resources, and ensuring that the detailed information about specific materials can be kept updated as we move into the future. Thank you so much. So, Teresa, that was a great introduction to the history of the exhibition guidelines and how we're trying to update them. It's a group of about 12 of us, 12 of us all working together on this project. I'm going to show you a little bit what's actually on the wiki and give you an idea how it's changing over time. So let me just share my screen with you here. So here's the range of content that's on the exhibition standards and guidelines. As Teresa said, there's four main parts. It's everything from planning and design, which we've been working on updating the last year. To now we're moving on to the more materials-focused content, the case design, and the fabrication. Just to give you an idea, within exhibit case design, what we love about this resource is its comprehensive content, which we're working on updating. It covers everything. You know, you go from your basic conservation grade case to every issue you can imagine discussing with the designer, security, lighting, humidity control, pollution, every key issue. Here's an example about sealed display cases. And I just put this up to explain how exhaustive it is. It goes from air exchanges to measuring air exchanges to cocks and gaskets and convection forces, every issue that you can imagine. I will say, as we're editing this content, we are making it more reader-friendly for a computer screen. Within exhibit fabrication, it applies to case construction materials and the design and fabrication amounts. Another thing I love about these guidelines is they don't just discuss the ideal of stable materials. They also discuss a lot how to deal with less than stable materials or materials we might routinely have to deal with in a museum. So again, this is just by way of example. Under case construction materials and materials to seal less than stable materials, the content is exhaustive, but it really explains the underlying concepts in great detail. So you're well versed on the issues. But then there's the age or practical issue. How do you incorporate these materials into the design and fabrication? Well, this is extremely helpful. There's another section called the case details and illustrations. I'd like to think of them as a secret sauce. And in here, there's a lot of drawings that really appeal to all of us who tend to be very visual, which show you the integration of the design of the case and the application of the materials. This is talking about putting spray finishes or ironing on a composite film as a barrier sealer. So now I know how it's going to go into the design. But again, I'm stuck with the age old question of which specific material. To address that, there are the ones of tons of tremendous technical notes and many of them apply to materials. You can see highlighted a wide range of materials here. I'd like to think of it as everything but the kitchen sink. If you follow that link, here's an example from interior paints. And by the end of this, you would be very versed in all the key concepts to be concerned about when evaluating a paint product for a case. But again, the details, it's always in the details. But in the original CD-ROM, which is 20 years old, the details about the materials were either too general that it really wouldn't get you to a decision. Or sometimes they were the opposite and they were too specific and it was impossible to keep current. Here's an example of a list of low VOC paints. This is a hard list to keep up to date. So how do we address this fundamental problem? The solution was to place the exhibition guidelines on the AIC Wiki. So I hope this gives you an idea of how the exhibition standard and guidelines, the potential in them, the depth of knowledge in them, how they're being revamped and how working with them, putting them on the AIC Wiki, we can keep them up to date with the latest information. And this will result in a really, really powerful tool. Thank you very much. One of the other things just to note about the exhibit guidelines group is that they're documenting their thought process as they work. This is one of the things that's also another benefit to working on the Wiki. So what you're seeing here on the screen is, for every page, there's also a discussion page, which begins with this talk colon. And on the discussion page, this is the one for degree of case seal that Carolyn showed in the video. You can sort of see what the original content was there's discussion about why things changed, and how the group, you know, decided to update and revise the content. We've seen so many sites today and our poor home and tour can feel overwhelming, but I hope that one of the takeaways is that we now have a critical mass of practical, useful information that is freely accessible to you. Pages like the exhibition guidelines will continue to be linked to resources across the Wiki and externally to sites like cameo and package, but you'll always be able to find them from the choosing materials portal page. So instead of those overly specific links that Carolyn mentioned, you'll have them linking back into things like the materials testing results pages. We hope that your preparators, designers and Mount Makers will be interested in contributing to this group, please spread the word. We also want to recognize the contributions of click Netherfield and go beyond to the material working group and as meeting sponsors, as we need to work together with our vendors and suppliers to ensure that we have products and supplies that meet our needs. Erika we're ready to launch poll number 10 and 11. So we're curious to know from our more established colleagues have you ever used the exhibit conservation guidelines when they were on the CD wrong. And we're just curious to know as we continue to promote these resources if you knew that this information is available on the wiki now. Another few seconds for people to vote, but it seems like our results are a little consistent. It seems that maybe our audience as cues young that people didn't know about their haven't used the CD wrong before so hopefully you'll be excited to see it and it's new incarnation. And it makes us feel good that we did the work for this presentation to get the knowledge out and we hope you'll spread the word. Thanks everyone for engaging with our polls. I must emphasize that there have been hundreds of people who have contributed in ways big and small to the material working group and to the sites that you've seen today. We're grateful for all of your time and talents as we continue this journey together. I am truly humbled and heartened by the amazing collaboration of this group and I'm so excited to see how we continue to work from here. For now though, this concludes our tour through the MWG sections of the AIC wiki, but we're not quite done. We'd like to share the link to the Google form again, and we hope that you'll use this to indicate your interest in participating in one of our initiatives and provide some feedback to us to suggest colleagues that you think would also be good additions to our group. I'd now like to ask Lisa Elkin MWG steering committee member and one of our leaders of the resources and dissemination subgroup to take the wheel for our Q&A session. So Lisa bring us home. Thanks Rachel and Becky and all our tour guides for an amazing trip. The choosing materials wiki is an incredible resource as I'm sure everybody who's hung there with us can agree. Quick reminder. If you haven't been following the chat with reminders, don't forget the raffle for the preventive conservation collection storage volume will happen immediately at the close of the Q&A so hang in there. Today just might be your lucky day. Okay, before we journey off into the sunset of our session. We'd like the chance to answer your questions or receive comments. If you haven't already please turn on your videos. Participants, please add any questions you may have in the Q&A box. Some have come in already, but as the newer ones filter in, I'll start the discussion off by asking some questions that came in during the tours. So, let's see. Let's see what we've got. This is a question that came in during the testing and standards discussion. So I think any of you guys could speak to this maybe even a couple of you. Here goes. Can you speak a bit more on how you are evaluating testing methods in your round robin particularly Audi. Will you wind up recommending a specific article outside of how reliable or precise the test will be will practicalities come into play like how difficult it is, how time consuming or complicated it is how pricey it is. So does someone from the testing and standards want to kick this off. I can maybe just start that to talk about around Robin a little bit. There were a lot of questions in that question. And the general idea behind doing around Robin is to vet the tests to figure out which tests provide the most information, and which tests are reproducible. And because of the way the wiki is set up, and with the intention of sharing all the information, the protocols that are used will be shared on wiki. Any variations to this protocols will also be shared on the wiki. And the idea is that as we go forward, any tests that are conducted and contributed to the materials working group will have along with them. There will be a certificate of approval meaning only it's been done by a specific method. This is the result that we got. Here's the date. And consequently, as we collect more and more of that you'll have a hopefully consistency of results, and therefore you'll be able to, over time, trust the results that you see. Thanks, Chris. So, so really, nobody would ever be able to go to the wiki the adi wiki and, and see a statement that says we recommend this material, but just to be very clear for our audience. It's more along the lines of we recommend this protocol and folks would indicate that they had followed that. Did anyone else in testing materials want to speak to some of the other questions there are some of the other sub questions there was one that I thought was interesting about. Will you evaluate practicalities like the adi tests are time consuming complicated somewhat pricey will any does any of this come into play in your evaluations. I'll answer part of that. Not about the audio tests I don't do the audio tests, but that's one of the considerations we made when selecting instrumental methods for use for evaluation. We didn't want to go so high tech and go with something that only one or two museums in the world have made no sense. We needed to select some things such as gas chromatography mass the commentary that a number of museums have so that we can contribute to a group collection of results. But maybe Eric would want to say something about the adi tests and specifics about materials and supplies for that. Yeah, I think in our initial round robins we've chosen the tests that seem to be used most often in the United States. But I think our intention is, once we figure out whether these are consistent reliable tests to then try and figure out how to personally test but get materials to other institutions that are using other tests that are on the wiki so that they can see where their tests line up in reliability to the ones that we've tested a lot. And then because there are some less expensive and there are some that are even more expensive than the ones that we're using. Yeah, we reckon is that and then we are also doing microchemical testing which is all fairly inexpensive. So we're really running the gamut of what institutions might be able to afford. Thank you guys. Amazing work that you've accomplished even over COVID makes it even more amazing so thank you to testing the testing team for everything and there was a lot of discussion in the chat during the material fact sheet session specifically during the discussion with Jen and Ryan and Eric and Ashley, people were really excited about that collaboration seeing that that specific kind of a group collaborate. So the question came in during Joel's Joel and Marguerite's presentation. This may, this could be fielded by Marguerite or potentially Rachel Rachel and Becky, specifically, how are you ensuring this resource hits the right audiences designers preparators collection managers. So who would like to take that question. I hit the nail on the head that we are trying to reach many, many people from many different avenues but Rachel I wonder if you could talk about the tech behind some of that. I don't know that there's, you know, tech, you know, Marguerite I think you you hit it that we're, we really are trying to make these resources useful to as many people and the key to that is having those voices in on these panels and on these monthly meetings and having your feedback from these presentations. And so, so that's where you know that Google form link is the best way to filter that information to all of us here on the panel. I wish I had a, you know, a magic answer that we knew we got it right but that's the magic of the wiki these pages are constant works in progress and the ability to edit them is is key and will continue to improve them as we hear from them. I think one of the things that we're trying to do with the choosing materials as a new landing page is to enhance that spider web of connections of what the wiki is trying to do and outside of the wiki pulling in and making stronger connections with cameo with them and some of the other resources that are out there just hopefully we can pull more people in from just myriad sources and shoot them off in all kinds of new and different ways. Great, thank you guys. Eric and Chris you thought you were off the hook but you're not a question just came in for you guys, following up on our earlier conversation. Would it help if there were more scientists in the field to research new technologies that would be more effective for institutions, public or private if so, what would you like to see in the future. A lot of money for positions. I mean, I feel like what there may be 80 scientists in the country doing conservation science work. And the percentage of those that are working in this area is maybe two or 3% or maybe that's not generous enough but it's low. So I feel like it's much more about just getting people working on it and for me to dictate what the project should be. There's a million projects, not enough people. I would agree. It's, it's also a question of, because the number of people who are involved and the amount of time it takes in some cases to get this instrument up and running and to learn how to use it. So most of us don't have time to experiment with many, many different types of methods. So, the accessibility having having access to other researchers and other fields might also spark some discussion and testing and experimentation with other methods that might be as useful or more useful than the ones we've selected. Lisa, you know, just one more plug that in a related way. This is sort of an area where the Europeans are also working. And there are these initiatives that we've heard about through the interactions with the material working group. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to present on them as well, but, but we see the group as a way for building those bridges and some of the products we use here are different from in Europe and vice versa. So it's important that, that we're all doing our own things but keeping those signs of communication open between the scientists is really key. Absolutely. That's the strength of the group is the sort of interdisciplinary nature of it, but also it's, it's international nature. Another question just came in about producers being producers of materials being engaged at all. Yes, we would like as many of that population to engage with us as well and we have some representatives from some materials, manufacturing companies as part of our group I can't remember all hand which ones they are maybe back here Rachel remembers but if anybody knows of point people or contacts we'd be happy to reach out to them to see if they'd be interested in working with us. Okay. But we should also mention that there are people like, you know, John Duffy University products who have, you know, he's more supplier vendor, but, but, you know, he has contacts with a lot of the producers and manufacturers that you know we don't as individuals or you know even in an institution. So, we've been trying to work those contacts using using them to convey that information. Great. So that's a really good point. Thank you for for pointing that out. Shifting gears a little bit. This one's for just Dean and it concerns the image gallery of damages. Justine, have you considered organizing the page by agent of deterioration like contaminants or photo oxidation. Is there a way to search images from this perspective. I don't currently have a way to search images that perspective but I think that's a great idea. I will definitely take that into consideration. Trying to arrange the gallery that way too. Thank you. Thanks Justine. And sort of an overarching question, probably for Rachel and Becky. What's the greatest need or challenge the group faces. Currently I'm looking ahead what are some next steps for the group. You want me to take that Rachel. I think I think our challenges are large but not insurmountable and you know some of the very practical challenges are still, you know where we are with the pandemic that has slowed down some of our physical work that has to happen as physical work, such as the round things and other things. I think some of our other challenges just happen to be that, you know, this is, this is a community come together, you know, volunteering or time for collective gain, and you know there's never enough time in the day. And so, you know, it takes continued dedication and continued momentum and, you know, people continuing to keep each other accountable to it and I'm really heartened by what we've achieved and I'm hoping that we continue to push that fall forward. Rachel, do you want to add to that or anybody else on the panel as well. I want to say again that I'm really grateful to all the colleagues that are participating in the fact sheet group. Because it is so hard to to move things forward as you're saying, taking the time to do it is hard getting the people who want to, I mean, I think everybody wants to try to contribute but it's hard to actually carve out the time aside from the job that you're being paid to do, which is not this. So when we have people coming together with the fact sheets the way we have it now it's it's so helpful because it's almost like a little happy hour in a way you get to talk with people and meet with people even during this crazy time. Whereas before we were, you know, having to learn how to to to upload things on wiki which takes a long time and it's hard to do we streamlined it because there are some people who are dedicated doing that like Michelle has been awesome and giving her time to do that specifically so that more people will feel comfortable with coming in and building so as we're developing this we're finding better ways to engage people that is more streamlined. So it's fun, you make more connections and we hopefully produce more material because we're not just building what we're building now we have to continue to update this like you know, all the stuff on the fact sheets. That's going to be out of date, you know, more or less within a fairly short period of time so we have to kind of keep going back and even if you can't come to the meetings you could go to those fact sheets on cameo and look at them and if you see something maybe different now or you want to add to you can bring that to our attention and we can see about updating that. So you can even contribute that way and that's that's a very small amount of time for you, but we beneficial for many, many people. Absolutely. I think Jennifer's point is so important and while the wiki is easy to update, knowing that there is now so much material that's going to require, you know, we can see what happened in 20 years like you know with the exhibition guidelines that we have like a time capsule and we don't want that to happen again. So, you know, the, the Google form link was a way for us to sort of capture. Those of you are interested so we feed everything off to the group will also be looking for ways and this will probably be easiest to access from the choosing materials, you know that portal page to, you know, have a vehicle for providing a talk of, you know, this is this, you know, needs to be updated here, you know, and, you know, give people ways to point out specific things on pages that that they see need updating and we can talk with Michelle about, you know, something similar for, you know, how we set up a vehicle for that for for cameos so that we make sure that we capture that knowledge. We see so much of this coming through on things like the listeners and but then it sort of disappears. So, so having this information, capturing it on these talk and discussion pages associated with the content page is is so important. Okay, Rachel. So, we've really learned a lot in the past year. It's been a challenging year because of COVID but in other ways. It's been a really enriching year and we've learned a lot and we've, we've actually benefited from some of our new virtual ways of meeting people I just wanted to read off a comment we got it's been a great from one of our attendees it's been great to have a community during COVID and the experience of working in a group has been so much fun Jennifer is hitting it. So I think, you know, they're we're looking at new ways of engaging and if it's not possible or easy for you to engage with us in there's plenty of opportunity virtually so again please fill out that form we'd love to see you we're running out of time we only have two minutes left. Thank you again to all of our tour guides. You guys are awesome and thank you everybody for attending and I think we're going to we're going to get to our raffle. Do you want to pull up the PowerPoint rage. Okay. So this is the moment we've all been waiting for raffling off a copy of preventive conservation collection storage. Erica is going to announce our winner so if you're here. Please respond immediately in the chat if your name is called out because you have won the book, and it's quite a prize. If you don't respond to us quickly. We're going to proceed to the next name on the list so listen closely Erica, do we have a winner. Okay, and the winner is Morgan Carbone. Morgan Carbone are you here, please write to us in the chat if you're here. Yay Morgan, congratulations. Morgan if you could type me directly with your mailing address will send you off a copy of the of the book this week so we hope Morgan is based stateside because that thing is a breath right it's quite a weight. That's for sure. So thank you again everybody. This was a really great afternoon. And we look forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks everyone. Bye everybody.