 Welcome back. My name is Amber Forester and I'm the Archival Training Coordinator for Research Services. This is session number two of the 2019 Virtual Genealogy Fair. It's for all skill levels and entitled Preserving Personal Collections. Our speaker is Sarah Holmes. She will discuss guilt-free ways to preserve your own family's collections by improving environment and housing of papers, photos, and other materials. Miss Holmes works as a Management and Program Analyst at the National Archives in St. Louis. Welcome to the broadcast, Sarah Holmes. St. Louis, this presentation is intended to help you with decision-making processes of taking care of your family's own physical history. If it moves to slide two, please. The first thing you're going to do is to take a look at what you have. You may have photographs, muses, letters, newspaper clippings, memory books, scrapbooks, much more than that even. These are things that may have been passed on to you. They may have been things that you have kept yourself out because of sentimental reasons. These are items that are shown here that are in my own collection. I have some damaged and re-rated photographs. I even have an envelope to keep my fragments in. I have different kinds of paper that you see here. There are all sorts of different kinds of things. The oversized photographs can really be a challenge to store at your home. These are things that I haven't gotten around to really dealing with properly. These are kind of some of my oddballs here. If any time you've got something that's in odd shape, it makes it difficult. Slide three, please. Now, I'm trained as a book and paper conservator. I've been interested in my family history ever since I was a kid. You might think my entire collection looks something like these pictures. The box on the left has photographs and polyester sleeves. They're great for letting people handle and view the photos without getting fingerprints or scratches on the images. And my box of slides here, it's a wonderful set of boxes that fits into a larger box so that I can keep hundreds of slides all together. Now, one thing you might notice if you take a closer look here is that I don't even have labels inside these. They're just stacked in there. What I've done so far with this is to get things pretty much by size and type. My slides have dividers as I've sorted them by date when they have dates at least. And fortunately for me, a lot of the photographs have been identified on the back. But at this point, what you see here is that basically I'm getting things held more by size and type. And we're trying to get them held nicely. And these boxes are, as we call them, new archival boxes, archival housings. But I really need more time to get them organized. Slide four, please. And that's really the harsh reality for all of us. Organizing and housing to preserve collections can take a lot of time. And it can get pricey if your goal is to house everything in archival storage boxes. And that's especially true when you have all sorts of different sizes and different materials. Now, this is some more of my personal collection of family things. And there at the top is a fruit of the month club box. And then I've got some of my dad's old cigar boxes. And I've even got this cute little keepsake box down in the bottom corner. It's cute, but it's not made of archival materials. I don't even know for sure what it's made of as far as quality. What is important at this point is that the boxes are clean, they've never gotten wet, and they provide good structural support to what they're holding. And even that fruit of the month box meets those standards that may have held fruit once, but it's clean, it's odorless. And all the other boxes are the same. They've been used to hold photos and family things for a long time, to be honest. Though I'm gradually working to move them into better containers. You can't even see a stack of the photos, please, in that cigar box from when I was working with them. Now, here is the number one rule to know you want to keep your collections in a stable environment. Quality containers like you saw on the previous slide will add to longevity. But don't feel guilty if you haven't overcome the need for more time and more money to buy archival quality containers. The truth is, NARA and all of our colleagues in other institutions struggle with this at our workplaces as well. Those boxes are a lot bigger in the number and a lot larger. So let's start with some top tips in caring for your collection so you can understand what I mean. Now, of course, here's the first one. Control your environment. Temperature and humidity are the big important factors. The wrong environment can cause mold to grow and damage your air looms. That's high in temperature, high in humidity and low air circulation. Make sure that you're keeping your most precious items out of basements and attics, garages or burns. Places where temperature and humidity tend to fluctuate drastically. You want to avoid areas that are near showers, bathrooms, near your kitchen, near your central heating and cooling appliances. And ideally, you stick to an internal wall rather than an external wall because, again, fluctuations are going to occur when you've got an external wall nearby. We don't recommend sealing things into the airtight plastic containers. You'll be sealing in whatever environment they have. And they may not even be as airtight as you think. Do take note of where your pipes run. Pipe breaks, leaks, even simply condensation from pipes can cause bad problems and create bad environments very quickly. And do you have mold that is a common problem? If you open a box and see splotches on things that look fuzzy, something that looks like that picture on the left side, and that mold has actually even made it turn polky because it's been there colonizing for so long. If you smell mildew, even if you don't see mold, then you may want to be contacting the conservator for help. Now, when mold grows and full bloom, it does tend to follow areas where water has dripped. So it's not unusual to see like you see in that second picture there that shows the mold growing in kind of lines that's where the water had created channels. And a slide six, please. Do try and make sure that you're keeping everything off of the floor. The floor is going to be vulnerable to water puddling when things go wrong. Ideally, you will have shelving that is metal powder coated shelving brace as well. And that you're not overhanging boxes over the edge in any way that also helps protect if there's a shelving over it in case something happens above to bring water in. Now, at home, I know it's often common that you're using wood shelves. You can find liners for wood shelving in your conservation supply from conservation suppliers that will provide something of a buffer. You want to do that because the wood is going to be off gassing things that will actually cause chemical reactions within your collections. Slide seven, please. And another top fit for a potential problem, pests. Pests can do permanent damage to your records. Just look at what the termites did here to these papers. You want to be sure that you're stealing possible entryways to your home, definitely to your storage area. Keep your storage area clean so that it will help you monitor it for any potential problems. You can use sticky traps to help monitor. We don't recommend using using we don't recommend using pesticides. They can be damaging to your health as well, potentially. And remember that warning about keeping records away from humid wet areas to simply control the environment preventable. That can be a huge help with pest control as well, because we're going to be attracted to those areas. And just as an example, I want to use closet shelves for books in an old apartment that I had. And they this wall that they shelves were backed up to a bathroom. That was a big mistake. There was a higher humidity there. And it drew silverfish. So my books gave them wonderful times and feeding grounds until I realized what was happening. And remember not all pest damage comes from insects. There can be rodents. You can have mice nesting. And our pets can potentially damage things as well. You may have antique furniture that you inherited that you want to be sure that your dog and cat understands not to destroy. And you may also need to be aware that there are materials like photos and book coverings that can actually have sparkles and gelatin and that's actually attractive to pets. So make sure that they don't get a chance to sample them because they may decide they taste wonderful. Now, if you have a lot of pests, then you do want to isolate the affected boxes and contact conservator for guidance and treatment. Slide eight, please. Now, light. Light is another problem. You want to keep your objects out of light. Light damage comes from the rays of the sun as well as from the heat that it generates. Avoid direct light such as across from a window where you're getting a lot of sunlight. So recent lighting can have harmful light and heat waves as well. Any light can be damaging. Even if you're using modern LED lights, you're not going to be safe from light damage. It is prominent. Do consider making copies of any photographs or documents that you would like to have out on display so you can have a display copy that you don't have to worry about what the original is safely storage. Slide nine, please. And dust is also a big problem. It holds moisture and it attracts pests and it's also acidic. And all of these things can be degradation of any object. So you want to avoid throwing items that are near events or other places that accumulate quickly. You can brush away dust with a lint-free cloth. We don't recommend using commercial cleaners or waxes or oils. If anything, just use a little bit of water only. If you have things inside containers that will certainly help prevent dust build up on the objects that you're saving. You can see in this picture there was a photograph that had glass broken and where dust settled within those cracks damaged the surface of the photograph. Slide 10, please. Now storage, this is a big one. Now in the conservation world, we tend to call storage housing. And we've got enclosures and folders and boxes and a whole variety of different things. Now most boxes that you just simply obtain from various sources have an unknown content team that would definitely include my for the month blocks. The worry in using those is the possibility of acids and oxidants that will off gas and damage your treasures. This is where the term acid free comes from. Now it's important to understand that pH levels don't stay static all the time. They know they over the years, things will tend to become more acidic. And this is just one of the things that you need to be concerned about in housing. Learning about materials do try and replace with something that you feel is more trustworthy. But at the same time, do be aware that there's no standard for what is archival or acid free. So when you're purchasing things, do look closely at the vendors and how they present themselves. It may not be something that you just simply want to buy cheap because it's as free and there's nothing else that the vendor provides for information. If you're looking online, you can look for keywords like archival supplies, archival products, acid free. And you will find things that are described as having an alkaline reserve or being offered. And this in particular is what's referred to as acid free. They're often referring to a calcium content. And they may even state what content that is, that is going to have some whatever alkaline reserve to counter assets. Now for photo storage, you can look for enclosures that pass the PAT, the photographic activity test. Now this is an international standard test for evaluating specifically the interactions between photo images and the enclosures in which they're stored. There is a standard PAT for black and white photos and then there's a different one for color. Now using materials that pass the standard one doesn't necessarily mean that it's appropriate for color. So do be aware of that little catch. Now here is a big hint. If you can't simply go out and buy a bunch of archival supplies and have things all at once, you can buy a ring of alkaline acid free paper, just get regular size. You can get legal size if you want or even larger. Maybe get some folders as well. If you're not, if you have more money to spend, but you're not ready to do all the boxes, you can use that paper to line boxes that aren't archival. Now don't tape them to the side or anything just lay them in place. You can also use the paper to leave items and the folders to let you start grouping things. Do understand that, you know, as I said, pH doesn't stay static over the years that just having a piece of paper in there for using it for years, you might actually want to swap out that paper with new paper because paper you left in there as a absorbing essence potentially from both the box as well as the materials within it. Now if you have all of your materials in a archival box with an alkaline reserve and archival folders and any extra enclosures that you've got, then you've got more of a full cocoon for all of your contents than you do if you're just simply lining a box with the paper. But again, if you have a poor environment, there's no box, there's no enclosure that's going to protect your contents from a bad environment and the damage that temperature and humidity will bring. Slide 11, please. You want to be sure that your housings fully support what they contain. So be sure when you're using folders that they fit inside, don't cut or trim documents. Now, if something was already folded, you may be able to reuse that fold. Ideally, you would keep things flat because folds do indicate that fibers have been broken and that can lead to loss and tearing there. Now if something's oversized, be sure that you roll it onto an archival safe tube and you can wrap it with the alkaline buffer paper. You do want a tube that is about two inches longer on both sides than what the item is that's rolled. And you can do that for paper and textiles as well, anything that can roll. Slide 12, please. Another thing to remember is not to overstuff your boxes either. If you've got overstuffed boxes and any time that you're reaching in or refiling a box, you're going to be causing damage and wear and tear. So if it's swollen and the lid doesn't quite fit, you're overstuffing the box. You need another box or a bigger box. Slide 13, please. Now do watch out for problem material because even if you're storing your paper with other papers and your photos with other photos, you may notice that some things are farther along the path of degradation than others. Their acid content can potentially cause chemical transfer. News clippings are a big culprit of this. And you do want to try and you can interleave paper in between newspaper clippings. And definitely if you've got like a newspaper clipping and a letter, you might want a buffer of a sheet of paper in between them. And photographs can also create something similar where you can have mirror images, like in this example, where the content of the photo emulsion is actually what is chemically reacted over time. So you do want to be careful what you're putting up against next to each other when you don't have interleaving material. And again, if it happens to be a photograph that you're concerned about to use materials from past the PAT, slide 14, please. Now books, books, you want to be sure that you're storing so that you're not stressing their structures. If you've got a large volume like an atlas or a big plat book or possibly even one of those huge county biography collections, you want to consider whether you need to store them horizontally. If when it stands at poles, the text block down like you see in this picture, then you're stressing the structure of the book and you want to house it horizontally. Now smaller books, small meeting ones can easily be showed. It's best to store with the same size together so they're supporting each other. We want to avoid is having a volume that means and that will cause distortion and the covers will lose their shape. And you can see in this picture here, there's a line that is showing how most of the volumes are nice and parallel to that line. But that last one is leaning a bit and that one is vulnerable. Slide 15, please. Now handling. We want to be sure that we're handling our materials well, not just storing them. The number one thing is to make sure that you have nice clean hands and a nice clean work area. Avoid using lotions or hand sanitizers. If you really do have to use them to make sure that you've given enough time for them to be fully absorbed into your skin so that you're not going to be handling things and rubbing off the, what the lotion to contaminate the surface. Now for paper materials, we don't recommend gloves. The gloves will actually prevent you from handling things well, you know, especially picking up a single page, turning a page in a book. And cotton gloves in particular will have fibers that will cast on the paper and it will actually be more likely to tear than if you're not using gloves. Now for photographs and metals, you could very well want to use gloves because you don't want to use fingerprints on those materials. Nitro gloves just like those that your doctor's office can be used for that. Slide 16, please. So how are you going to prevent things like getting scratches like on this photograph from hand what's happening when we handle our materials? One very important thing to consider is the area that you use in handling a material. Be sure that you're not stinting yourself on space. You need a lot of room to work to work with one item at a time. And be sure to remember that your most important tool is to work with that nice clean flat surface. It's not ideal to be working in midair if you're putting things into enclosures. Just please, you want to use that flat surface. Slide 17, please. Now, photograph systems are going to be particularly susceptible to handling. So you can use polyester sleeves. They're excellent in being able to let you view the photograph while you're handling There are also other types of envelopes, paper envelopes, glycine that RPAT approved and can be used. They might be good choices for heavier things like things on cabinet cards. You can see here that you can also put slides. I personally chose the box as you saw in the earlier slide in the presentation, but you can certainly find other ways to store slides using sleeves and binders. Again, be sure that the binder you use is of known content and archival material and not something questionable. If you can avoid that. So there are a lot of different options for being able to store materials. Slide 18, please. Now, if you're working with old albums, especially these magnetic albums, my family was big on magnetic albums. And you know, they have that adhesive that holds the photos in place. And know that you can look online for suggestions on removing photos from these albums, but I really do suggest contacting your conservator if you've got this kind of album or anything that is adhered with some kind of adhesive. It's very easy to damage photos when they get removed from these pages. You can see the discoloration of the lines of adhesive in here. I'm kind of lucky that some of what we use magnetic albums were actually just prints of copied photographs. So these are the only ones we have left in my own collection. Slide 19, please. Now, objects can certainly be more more difficult to decide how to handle. Now, for things that are metal, you want to be sure that you're storing them in some way so that they don't touch each other. But there's some kind of space you might choose separating them into cloth bags. I know these examples here are narrow forward so that they're done by somebody who has had a lot of experience and has access to to foam and other materials to use and making enclosures. You could very well consider getting a conservator to help you to make enclosures and housings like these. But you can find materials that will also help you do your own at home from archival suppliers. Now, silver in particularly is a tricky item a lot very likely tarnish. You don't want to polish the silver. You know, anytime that you're polishing that silver, you're actually removing silver from the object. So do avoid bringing silver into any long term contact with protein based materials. And that's going to be materials like wool or soap or leather. So you want to make sure that you've got something that's safe for using with the silver. You can get sulfur absorbing materials that will do the opposite of what those protonaceous materials do. And you can find these from vendors. They come in varieties such as charcoal cloth, silver safe. There are also plastic stones that are copper and pregnant that you can get. And that they're all vendors that will actually provide different sizes of those. So there are there are a lot of things that you can potentially find to look at. So you know, if you've got silver or other metals, get them out. Get an idea of how much and what size you've got and take a look at what's available to archival in these zine supply catalogs. Slide 20, please. No textiles. It is best for new textiles from those heirloom feeder chests, as well as making sure that you're not keeping them in this plastic cover even if your wedding dress came with that. It's not the long term storage material. You want to hang items with cotton padded hangers and place them in a textile cloth garment bag. You can store most textiles and boxes as well easily. You will keep them flat but pad them with cotton batting wherever there are folds or creases because you don't want those to stay flat. If you don't have those folds, the creases will eventually become tears and you may see that that's where the most rare is, where things were folded. And you can certainly place clothes and cover some boxes with some padding as well. Slide 21, please. Now, electronic and magnetic devices. Of course, these are increasingly more a part of our lives and so many different varieties. Now these come with hard plastic cases. Typically, if the cases are broken, then just replace them with whatever plastic cases are available online or in stores. Maybe you've got some extras in the house. But do be sure that you're keeping these stored in their own boxes away from paper or textiles or metals. It is best ideally to store all of these things separately. Slide 22, please. Now when you're working with string and housing, this is a good time to remind you not to attach things together. You can use folders to keep things together. But you do not want to be using tape or rubber bands or metal fasteners of any kind. These are things that will degrade over time. At the same time, don't try and remove fasteners or tape on your own. If you remove the plastic carrier on tape, then you're actually going to speed up the degradation that can occur because you are bringing it up into the air. When you're using scrapbooks or photo albums, don't use clues or tapes of any kind. You can find photo corners that you can use. Now you can see in these pictures that tape itself will potentially degrade in various different ways. Sometimes it will discolor and yellow. Sometimes it will desiccate. If it's fallen off, then you can let it fall off but don't force off a carrier that's not already totally desiccated off. Now in that lower picture, you see an example where the tape has actually become stickier and oozed out. And that is a particular sticky mess that you might want to leave better to a conservator to work with. Slide 23, please. Now, here's the other part of working with modern electronic information. How are we going to keep all this stuff where we have it year after year after year? Now you can take a tip from locks. Locks of copies keep stuff safe, which started at Stanford University. Now, you want to have multiple copies, spread them around, give them to cousins, aunts, uncles, whoever you can find you to take copies. The other part of this is that you're going to want to be converting to new forms of media often. You're likely going to be different forms of media. It's very common to see these flash drives now, but will they be around in five years the way there are now, maybe not. So at least every 10 years, make copies of the media and again, spread copies around. Just because you have something digitized doesn't mean that you need to get rid of your original. So be sure that you have those originals in case you ever go back to them. And file naming as well. You have a organization plan for file naming and include metadata from who, what, when, where, basically. Yeah, I mean, just a date at a minimum is going to be so helpful. Slide 24, please. Now, for things that you want to digitize yourself, photographs, letters, it's best to photograph these facing up rather than having them faced down on a flatbed scanner. Definitely avoid any kind of machinery that has the key parts to it. And don't use auto feeders. They will jam. Slide 25, please. Now, when it comes to audio visual material, whether it's magnetic tape, audio, video, DVDs, CDs, whatever you've got old home film, then these are things that you may want simply need to go to a professional because of the equipment that is involved in transferring them. There will likely be problems with sound with the film, something that needs to be addressed as they are being transferred. So this can get technical very quickly. You want to be sure that you work with a vendor that is willing to talk with you, answer questions. And we'll go at length about what you want. What you want to do first is to get a pilot test done, get a sample done. And that's going to be a way for you to know that the end result is what you were expecting. And that the vendor knows that you understand what they're expecting to do. You want to ask them where they're doing the digitization? Is it in-house? Are they sourcing it out? Where does it go? How is it stored? You want me to think in terms of the fact that you're getting a file, not so much about this. You need to ask about file types in particular. Some are good for archiving, but others are good for sharing. You probably want to get both. If you get one copy with the highest possible resolution, that's going to get a lot of digital space requirements. And then you can get a compressed one for file sharing. So you may be doing something like getting an mp3 for sharing and a way for archiving. So do talk with your vendor about what they offer and how they get used and make sure you understand the different file types that they're talking about. Now, again, things can get really technical quickly. You may be talking with your vendor about whether you need an azimuth adjustment for audio tapes and reels. Do you need different sized needles for vinyl records? Do you have old record recordings out there? Things that are born digital can be particularly difficult to determine what you want to do with. Now, things like emails, electronic journals, you can easily print those out. But you will need to remember that if you're keeping the electronic files that you're going to have to transfer them to new digital formats. If you've got a disk somewhere that has a WordPress file, you're not going to be able to pop it into your current laptop that runs MS Word. Slide 26, please. Now, we've covered a lot of territory here. And now you may be beginning to get an idea of how you can set your own priorities. Number one, as always, the environment. Be sure that you have the best possible environment. A good place to be storing them and preventing insects and other pests from damaging them. Now, once you have that, you can move on to step two and work to improve housing as much as you possibly can. Now, you're going to be determining a lot of personal priorities. No one's plan for preservation is going to be the same. There are factors that you'll need to be thinking about that may pertain personally to your own. Now, one thing that I'm thinking about more of my own collection is that different parts of what I have may be passed on to different people. And that makes a huge difference in housing and organization. And that is one reason that I'm looking more at the enclosure level like you saw getting photographs into enclosure, and I'm actually going more by size. My next big step will be organizing it into segments. And for me, working with the enclosures first is helping determine how many boxes I'm going to need. And do also consider getting in touch with coverings. You leave them very distant ones. And that can help determine priorities. You may have a photographic area special like I've got a copy of here that's shown. And this is a photograph, just as an example here, it's an ad condition. It's got a big crease across the front. It's missing a corner. And this is a copy of a picture of my great grandfather, his parents and 17 siblings back in Norfolk, England. Now, it's not the only copies that exist. But to find the other copies, you actually do have to contact cousins that stayed in England. We also have events in Australia and New Zealand. So you do have to reach out if you want to see if there are duplicates. And of course, the joy of finding pictures you never knew existed will happen at the same time. So of course, I have my copy. I'm never going to part with it. It has a lot of intrinsic value to me. It's the copy that immigrated with him and he came to make a new home in Iowa and it's been also family since then. But for digital reproduction to have it available to even more people that had original copies, a different copy is actually a better choice. And of course, if you're working with siblings and cousins, and you've got things like old home phones, there is that possibility that you can pull resources and work with a vendor together and get multiple copies since that everyone has a current copy that is a great access copy. And then you've also got copies that you can preserve as master copies. So there are going to be a lot of different things to potentially think about in looking at your collection. Slide 27, please. So there will be question and answer period here after I'm done talking. But if you're like me, your best questions come well after the time that you're talking about it. So one thing that you can do is to take a look at the National Archives website preservation pages, and you can reach those at www.archives.gov slash preservation. You can also look at the website www.cultural heritage.org and get all sorts of information about conservation and how to locate conservators. There is a tremendous amount of information online that is available to you. And of course, you can certainly email us and the preservation services department at preservation at www.nara.gov. So when you're home facing all these piles of photos and letters and phone phones, do seek these out to get answers questions. Now slide 28, please. Well, thank you very much for your time today. Do you have any questions? Thank you so much for your presentation, Sarah. We have a lot of questions. So we're going to dive right in. First, can you clarify what's the difference between acetic and acidic? They're basically two very synonymous terms there. The aesthetic will probably be seen in more technical versions, while you'll see more of the acid and referred to in more consumer friendly versions. Okay, thank you for that. What is a safe place to keep photos and paper documents that does have good air circulation as you recommended? Could we see that? What's a safe place to keep records that has good air circulation? But you want everything to be in this kind of environment as you possibly can. Now, it is going to vary from house to house as far as where you have it if you're trying to keep it at your residence. But basically, you're going to be trying to do as I had said, something that won't fluctuate. And by fluctuate, I do mean that within a day's time that it's not going to fluctuate from having the air conditioner go off in the middle of July, and go from cool 70 degree to 90 degree seasonal fluctuations are milder. And that's okay to have. But the the physical storage is basically the primary issue getting that temperature and humidity and why space If we are scanning documents to preserve them, what's the most stable file format to save those scanned images? Now, that's a tough one because that's going to vary. And again, if you're doing it for yourself, digital storage is also part of the equation. You may want to try and do uncompressed test files. But again, if you have a lot and you have a lot of uncompressed tips, you're going to find pretty quickly that it actually takes a tremendous amount of space. So that you can be potentially looking at, you know, are you using your computer space, what kind of backup do you have to it? Do you have space on the cloud that you consider safe? So I would really say that digital storage will have a lot to do with what you use as what you consider your archival master. It may not be as the ideal, full uncompressed, large institutions use. We have a couple specific questions about conservation and preservation. How do you remediate cigarette smoke smell on old paper documents? Remediate what? Cigarette smoke smell. Oh, now an elder. You can deal with that by creating the foot be one time that you can use one of those plastic containers that have the tight lid. What you would do when that case is to set up something you can get you can get kitty litter. There are other materials carbon based typically that are odor absorbers. You can even use baking soda potentially and put that at the bottom of the container and then use some kind of creating something that lifts it up so that you're not putting in a direct contact and then put the letters, the books, whatever you've got above that and close it and give it time. It may take days or weeks to be able to to remove odor in this manner. But you can do that and it can be something done at home. Just be sure that you're monitoring it and that you don't forget that you put this in in a field container and find out after the fact that something happened. Thank you so much. Another one of our viewers has some 100 year old newspapers that are rolled tightly. How can they unroll them? Can you repeat that? Yeah, we have someone who has 100 year old newspapers that are rolled very tightly. How can they unroll them and relax the paper? Say, we likely have something that's brittle. It's paper can really have tremendous differences, even something that was made the same day, depending on how it was manufactured. I'm assuming that this is something brittle that that's why it's more of a concern. You can humidify the paper. Now, humidification for things that are printed is typically almost always fine. I would be concerned if you've got my annotations, letters or something because humidification can cause problems with some media. But you can use the humidification setup that would allow you to relax the paper before you unroll it so that you inject some humidity into that. Now, if you've got something rolled and it's going to be long, you may be looking to get a container, even a garbage can. There will be some places that you can find online and there should even be some links from from our website that will give you some some diagrams of this. But you would be placing some water or even wet water at the bottom of the container. And then, like I was suggesting with the odor reduction, have something like chicken crate, you know, go to the hardware store and get the cube like cravings that they use or for light or for rustle lighting, something like that to be sure that you've got it above the water area because when you're humidifying, the thing that you've got to do is make sure that you're not getting the paper wet. You want it humid, not wet. And you if you be able to get a container that's right fires and do this and close it to cover it for and it may it may take as little as half an hour and we take an hour and see that it's got the flexible and then you'd be able to take it out onto and have a big surface ready where you can roll it out on. Several people asked about the best pack practice for documenting people, dates and places in photographs. Can they write that information on the back? Myself, but of course, some surfaces from even take that there are pens that you can get that are stable archival ink pretty much this carbon black that you can use to to write on the back. I know the picture that I showed in the first slide actually had Henry written down there and that's something I wrote when I was young as ballpoint pen and I kind of regret doing that. But at the same time, it's identified him. And if no one else would know it's identified. So do look for for margins for places that that in do tests and be sure that you're not using too much pressure because if you are using writing on something that's been it's going to be very easy to imprint on that. We had another question about storing and preserving fragile glass negatives. Do you have advice for that? For negatives, there are a variety of different storage ways that you can handle it. And if you do look online, and there are quite a few archival suppliers and again, you can be looking for things that are custom for negatives. And of course, they can be different sizes. Glass negatives are going to be the most difficult to work with. And there are custom enclosures that you can get for those. And there are definitely a variety of sizes for all the different kinds of negatives that you can find available. And that might be something that you would give a higher priority and storing because those are master copies. And negatives can even have information that even if you've got the print, it wasn't printed out at a high enough density to see. But you've got it in the negative. So that that would be a good, good ideal thing for a high priority is to seek out those sleeves or enclosures that fit those sizes. And then look from dealing with that with how much you've got and what kind of box you need. And you can use that with the photographs and negatives, there are going to be a whole lot of different options, or maybe portfolio style boxes as well that you like. One of our viewers has heard that storing silver items in a vacuum bag or container will keep it from tarnishing. Is that a good practice? That's basically storing anything that is that protection is going to be a good practice. You just as I've shown, it's my own thing to do your work as possible. If you've got something that you don't know how it was made or where it came from as being a reliable vendor or manufacturer, then do look for something different. But as far as having, you know, there are some things, as I mentioned, with the books that you want to store horizontally rather than vertically. But for smaller collections, as long as you're getting the support, it's typically just a personal choice and how you want to store it. So you can use the folio style or something that horizontal. Okay. Thanks. We also have some questions about cleaning slides and photographs dusting them. They've heard that they can use air puffs or microfiber cloths. But what do you recommend? I personally try and avoid cleaning unless there's actually something that's genuinely a problem in the first place, to be honest. Photographs can be extremely difficult because of the whole variety of different development types that are out there. And so if you really do want to do to clean it, then I would make sure that you're using something that comes from an archival supplier. Or if you're lucky to still have a bit camera store nearby, they would also have those in spots that you can find some weights that are there. But if there's something that is especially bad with a photograph, I really would recommend working with a conservator. I know it can be expensive, but you have such a potential to lose the image. And importantly, Okay, I think we have time for one more question. What about laminating paper documents? Laminating is a big note that is using adhesive and adhesive things that find things together in the first place tends to be where the biggest problems come. Do not laminate things that you want to save as family heirlooms by any means. You can use it for temporary ID cards and such, but you don't want to do it at all for your collection. Lamination has been the cause of a lot of big grant funded projects have put conservators to work for years. So don't laminate. Thank you so much, Sarah. We have a lot of questions. And unfortunately, we didn't have time to get to all of them. So if Sarah did not get to your question, please send an email to preservation at nara.gov. 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