 Susan. Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. Today, as Mike just said, it's our last webinar for this course. And so, we'll go over the requirements. But first, I just want to say if you want to keep track of what we're doing, join the C2C Announce List or look for us on Facebook or Twitter. And if you have any questions about the course in any way, please send me email and I will try to answer them. And we have coming up this month, next week we have, is that right? Yeah, next week we have a webinar on planning for natural disasters in botanical collections. So that could mean anything from a botanic garden to a historic garden in a historic house or even an iconic tree or something for an institution. And then, we're going to have this another course beginning the end of this month and going periodically through June on the Reorg program, which is an international program that was set up by Ikram and UNESCO and has been used all over the world. And this is the first time that's being offered in the U.S. So plan on joining that, particularly if you're a small institution that has... I think we have lost Susan. I believe so. Okay, well, we will just close this off. Yeah, and we'll pass things off to John. Go ahead, please. All right, welcome to week four of collections management for smaller institutions. Thank you very much for the essays that you've been sending about your collection management systems. I've enjoyed reading them all and I appreciate how carefully many of you are assessing your institutions systems and we will talk a little bit more about this at the very end today. When we talk about the final assignment, there are several readings available on the webpage for this class and rather than list them out here, I will just mention those as we go along that they are all posted already. And of course, this will be the final assignment. And what I want you to do briefly is to take the essays you wrote the first three weeks looking at strengths and weaknesses of your museum system and identify the areas in which you think improvements can be made and what it would take to make those improvements and then write those up. And as I say, we'll talk about that more at the very end today. So the topics that we're going to discuss today in webinar four include collection management policies and some of the key resources for improving collections management and we will wrap up with some thoughts as well about the future of museums. So we'll start in with policy. A collections management policy is actually a set of policies that clarify who was responsible for managing the collections and how the collections are to be managed. And collection management policies should be approved by your museum's governing authority. And who your museum's governing authority is, of course, depends on how you're organized. If you are an independent museum, you probably have a board of directors or a board of trustees but you might be a museum that's part of a municipal or county or state government or federal government or you might be within a university. So your governing authority in those cases would be different. But they should be approved by whoever is in charge, whoever you report to. And these policies define the principles of the governing collections, the practices, the operations and ideally collections management policies should be also supported by a collections plan. We're not going to talk about collections plans today because that's a topic all by itself of a webinar but there is information out there about that. So collections management policies should be written to meet the needs of each individual museum, its collections and how those collections are used, which means the policies that are good for one museum are not very likely to be good for another. You really need to write those policies specifically for your own museum. And a policy should be created to accomplish a specific goal or to address a particular issue or solve a problem. So you don't want to just write policies because you think they might be needed. You want to write them when you see that they are necessary for the way that you operate. And the set of policies included in the collection management policy is going to vary from one museum to another. So each museum should develop its own copying policies from a sister institution is usually not a good idea. It's usually not a very good bet. Now policies are influenced by the institutional history and traditions of your particular institution. They are also influenced by the community that the museum is part of, by the way the institutional government structure is set up, and of course by internal and external politics. And collections management policies should be accompanied by procedures. The procedures are the detailed instructions that specify how the staff should apply the policies in their day to day activities. So it's important to keep policies and procedures separate. These are very distinct things. Probably the most common mistake I see in my consulting work and looking at collection management policies is people include procedures in the policy document. And those should be separate. So let's talk a minute about these differences. Policy is established standards that regulate the museum's activities. The policies identify what needs to be done and they provide a framework to help the staff make decisions. And they provide continuity in the collections management operation by establishing these standards. And of course, as I mentioned before, the policies are approved by the governing authority. By contrast, procedures tell the staff how to implement the policies in everyday practice. And so they provide the mechanism and the details for implementing the policy. So procedures should be a set of distinct and unambiguous action steps that are developed at the staff level. Because the policies have already been approved by the governing authority, the procedures do not have to be approved. They should be a separate document to make it clear what is policy and what is procedures. And by having them not approved by the governing authority, procedures can be revised as often as you need to make sure they work. Without having to go back up the chain of command for approval because you're working with an approved policy. So those are important distinctions to keep in mind. What's policy and what's a procedure? There are four basic ways of developing collection management policies. So as I mentioned before, the worst way is just to copy policies from another institution and apply them to your own. Because another institution's policies are probably not really going to address your particular issues, certainly not all of them. Another way to do it is to have an administrator write the policies and just hand them to the staff and say follow these. These have a very high failure rate though because frequently the administrators do not understand what the issues are in addressing management issues. And of course, no one likes to have things handed down to them from above without having to have a chance for input. A third way to do it is you can hire an outside consultant to work with the staff and write the policies. This can work out okay as long as the consultant does meet with the staff. And this is something that I have done in my business, but I still don't think it's a very good way to do policies. By far the best way is number four, which is organize a staff writing team to develop a good set of policies for your institution. So we're going to focus on number four because I think this does give you by far the best product. So what you want to do is a similar writing team that represents a variety of perspectives from the museum staff. And this should get really good input from all sectors of the staff, particularly the people that care for the collections. As with anything done as a team approach, it can be very time consuming. But getting that variety of perspectives is going to give you better results. And it may be that you're in a museum that is so small you really don't have a lot of staff, not enough people to participate, in which case there's other things you can do. You can recruit volunteers, for example, maybe a colleague from a sister institution nearby or a board member or a volunteer who's very familiar with the museum could help you be part of that team just to bring in another set of perspectives on what you're doing. So that writing team, once assembled, needs to start policy development. And this means they should discuss the policies that are needed from a variety of viewpoints and come to a consensus about what they think is necessary. They should, of course, use the museum's mission statement to provide a focus and a direction for the policies, identify the issues that the institution faces, particularly problems that you think need to be solved, and then write policies specifically for these issues and problems. While you're doing that, it's a good idea to review the literature on the topics that are covered by the policies. And this is the time to consult with your colleagues at other institutions to see how they address particular problems and issues. Another part of policy development is a standards review. So you want to make sure that your policies are based on current legal standards, ethical standards, and professional best practices. And you can do this by looking in the literature form that relates to your museum to see what's out there. And the policy should also conform to your museum's institutional code of ethics. If your institution does not have a code of ethics, this would be a good time to put one together. There are museum codes of ethics available from places like the American Alliance of Museums and ICOM, but those are very general. You really need the code of ethics that addresses the issues in your particular institution. Once you have the drafts of the policies, you've looked at the issues and you think you've got a pretty good approach to them. Circulate those drafts throughout the entire staff for input. And this is another failure I see quite a bit is people don't circulate the policies wide enough. Remember that the policies will affect everyone in the museum, so everyone in the museum should get a chance to weigh in on what they think about them. So this feedback is critical to making good policies, plus in the end it's going to get you much better buy-in when you have the policies official. The staff is going to be far more inclined to use policies they have had in hand in developing than things that they were just told to do. And as I said, no one likes rules that are handed down from above. So you get help from that and you also might want to look for an external reviewer, send your policies to a colleague or two at similar institutions and see if they notice anything that needs to be changed. And particularly if you have a small staff, it would be a good idea to get some outside eyeballs looking at your policies. With this step, then once you have feedback and have incorporated that as you polish the policies up and you present these to your governing authority for approval. And when you do this, you should be particularly if you're going to a board, be prepared to explain and defend the policies. And also listen closely because often your board members or whoever is your governing authority will have suggestions that should be incorporated. But bear in mind these people are not likely to be museum professionals and they may not understand why some of the policies say what they do. So you need to be ready to explain them, but at the same time stay open minded for any suggestions they might offer. So once the policies are approved by your governing authority, you then want to develop procedures and only at that point, only once the policies are approved. And remember the procedures provide direct guidance to the staff for how to carry out the policies. So this is a point where you want to work with the staff members who will be implementing and using the policies in their day-to-day work to make sure you come up with good, usable procedures. Finally, the seventh step after doing all this is you've got your policies and now you've got your procedures so it's time to implement them and see how they work. And let them run for a while and see what happens. Both policies and procedures will need to be reviewed and revised from time to time. And there's many reasons for this. Professional standards may change. Most museums grow and evolve over time. New issues arise that need to be addressed. And of course, sometimes the policies just don't do what they're supposed to do, that there's a flaw that needs to be corrected. So you shouldn't be afraid to review and revise these. Most institutions have a schedule for reviewing policies. It's typical as once every three years or once every five years, but anytime you see that a policy is not being followed or is not doing its job, that policy ought to be reviewed. Now, part of the whole thing with running museums is it has to do with transparency. And museums are public institutions and there's a growing expectation for transparency from our public institutions. And you can easily avoid a lot of problems by being as transparent as possible. So it is now fairly common for museums to post their collection management policies on their website and make them available to anyone who wants to look at them. And if you look at museum websites from around the country, you'll be able to find some very interesting policies posted. And I think in general this is a good idea. It is possible that you would have policy issues that should not be made available to the general public. But a lot of your policies, particularly things like accessioning and acquisition, should be made available to everyone. It helps us all not to keep things secret. There's a few other considerations for policies. They should help the museum staff carry out their responsibilities by defining what those areas of responsibility are and then delegating decision-making authority to the appropriate individuals or committees that need to make those decisions. And frequently you see in museums people are saddled with the responsibility for taking care of something but aren't given the authority to make the decisions for that to work. So this is a chance to clear up those problems. So you should identify who has the authority to do this and also who has the authority to make exceptions. If you feel that an issue has arisen that is going to be contrary to your policy, who do you turn to to say, can we make an exception this time? Someone who will take the responsibility to do that. The policies should all direct the staff to maintain complete written records regarding collections, decisions and activities. And we, of course, talked about the importance of these records. Last week we talked about documentation. This is, as I say, it is important because we want to make sure that the people, given the responsibility for carrying out the policies, also have the authority to do it. So good collections manage your policies avoid the conundrum by clarifying this issue. When you're writing your policies you want to make sure that they are easy to read. So you want to write succinctly using very clear, simple prose, nothing fancy, and of course you want to be grammatically correct. The easier the policy documents are to read the more likely it is that they will be read and followed. And I have two recommendations that I think can provide wonderful help for your writing. One of them is the book that's been around for a very long time called The Elements of Style by Strunk and Widus. The book, I believe, goes back to the 40s or the 50s. My favorite edition of it was one that came out in 2005, which is illustrated with somewhat humorous paintings throughout. And it's very useful for helping just polish your writing up and say things without having to be too wordy. And another extremely useful volume is the Chicago Manual of Style, and the current edition is the 16th. You can also find a lot of the information from the Chicago Manual of Style available online at no cost. But if you really want to make sure that you get everything in the right format and you use words and terms correctly, the Chicago Manual of Style is a very useful reference to have. So what should these policies address? Well, of course this is going to depend on the institution, but in general there are some areas that are almost all policies should address. So one of the readings is a couple of the readings actually address this issue. One of them is there is a reading from 2010 from Museum Registration Methods on Collections Management Policy, which includes a chart on policy issues. Of course we also discussed some of these issues in week two with acquisition, accessioning, and deaccessioning. And then last week we discussed loans, collection access, and collection data. So we're not going to repeat all of that stuff again, but we are going to take a look at a few other key policy topics. But if you go back to this reference of the collections manager policies, you'll find a good list of things. So the first thing is categories of collections. Some of us don't have more than one category, but many museums do. They have collections they might use only for exhibition or only for education or research. So depending on how your institution is organized, you might need to define those categories. There are no standard definitions for the categories, so you're going to need to define them on your own as you run into them. And the definitions should take into account how the objects in that collection category are acquired, how they're used, what the documentation requirements are, if there are any in the standards of collection care. So for instance, you might have a collection that's used only for public programming that you want to have inventoryed so you know what's in it, but you're expecting these things to be eventually thrown out because they are handled by the public and they're going to get broken. So these are not things you would accession. You would just inventory them and you would plan from their demise at some point. So there can be a lot of differences. So one of the most important categories arguably is the permanent collection. So this is the museum's primary collection. Your policy should state that it gets the highest standards of care and requires, of course, the most complete documentation. So these are where you want to keep these objects because the permanent collections are intended to be in the museum's care held in the public trust for the foreseeable future. So this is the most important things in your collection. Education collections are fairly common. These are objects used for hand zone activities, for demonstrations, so they'll have a lower standard of care because they will be damaged. And you can see here a museum visitor is probably going to damage this object the way it's being used. The objects though should be selected for safety and durability. In this case, this is me handling a taxidermied animal, and so you would not put out an animal. For instance, it was preserved using arsenic for the public to touch. It would need to be one that doesn't have any poisons with it. Good mind that educational collections are going to suffer wear and tear, so they should be very easily deaccessioned and gotten rid of, or often they are not accessioned at all. They're just inventoryed which makes it easier to replace them or get rid of them when they get worn out. Some museums have exhibit collections, and these are usually objects of very fine quality or rarity. They may not have very good documentation, but they may be selected because they are extremely good examples for people to see. So these would be intended for exhibition and for loans, and they would require, of course, a high standard of care taking into account the needs of exhibition and loans, but may not have that high a standard for documentation depending on the course situation. There can be teaching collections and study collections. These are generally objects of good quality, but they may have only minimal documentation, but they should be suitable and appropriate for use by students and visitors. And here we see people at the National Museum of American History getting to handle real collection objects in this case from their educational collection, touch them, feel them, talk to the volunteer about them, and in any of these situations things are going to get worn out faster and certainly can be damaged, so you want to keep that in mind. But that is a good use for them. There are also research collections. These are usually extremely well-documented collections reserved for comparison for research or scholarly study. Often these objects are the most important in the collection, but they don't make very good exhibits. Often they are not of what we would call exhibit quality. They're not necessarily the finest, but they're the best documented and the best known. And so that's another entire category. If you work in a natural history collection, you might have type specimens. In natural history, the specimens that are designated as holotypes or paratites are those that are used to define a species, and these become extremely important in science. The use of these is normally highly restricted, and to only two scholars they are very rarely put on exhibit. Some museums maintain as well a reserve collection. These are objects that could be used for study or exhibition or public programming. They might be objects that are being considered for accessioning or considered for de-accessioning. They may be things that you're holding in case you want to transfer them to another institution or make an exchange with another institution for other objects. So there's a lot of these categories. These are just some of them. There's a fairly long list in the readings, and you may have categories that I have not even thought of yet. Another category related to collections, of course, are your archives and library. This usually contains any documentation of the museum collection that is not included in the accession files, and as well as documents that relate to institutional history and the institution's activities. And so this is another extremely important category of collections. And here we see part of the archive and library at the LaMaine Society in London. The LaMaine Society in London has the original collections of plants and animals from Carl LaNaeus, the man who invented binomial nomenclature, and then they have his library, which is annotated and frequently relates back to the collection, so it's an extremely valuable thing for them to have. All right, moving on from policies. Another thing we want to talk about, and this should be covered in a policy, is repository agreements. Some museums take on long-term management of collections that they do not own, and they do this under the terms of a formal repository agreement. Historically, repository agreements have been most common in archaeology and natural history collections, but they are beginning increasingly to be found in other kinds of collections as well. In most cases, the collections that are on a repository agreement are owned by a government. Usually, the United States federal government are a government of a foreign country. And what they're doing is they're saying, you take care of our collections, you manage them, and you can use them, but the ownership stays with us. And as much as possible, you would try to make your repository policy parallel your accession policy. So, for example, you should not accept owned-reposit objects that do not relate to the museum's mission or objects that are illegal or unethical to have. And the thing about a repository agreement is it needs to have a beginning date and an ending date. No repository agreement should ever be open-ended. Repository agreements can be written so that they can be reviewed periodically, that they should always have a termination date. And the repository agreement may allow objects to be studied on site but not loaned out to another institution, and the repository agreement should state at the end of the termination of the agreement who will pay to pack the objects up and send them back. Well, the photograph here is a museum where I used to work, and one of the curators worked in the Philippines. It was collecting very large numbers of specimens. There are natural history specimens under a permit. But the Philippine national government did not have the facilities to house the specimens, but they wanted to maintain ownership of them. So they entered into a 20-year-long repository agreement with the University of the United States. The specimens were brought to the United States. They were then cataloged as if they were part of the collection. They were handled like they were part of the collection. Scholars could come and look at them. They could be loaned out and used. But at the end of the 20 years or possibly further into the future, those specimens will all go back to the Philippines where they should be because they are specimens from there. So this is an example of a long-term repository agreement where everyone benefits the researchers benefit, the government that owns them benefits by having someone take care of these collections until they're better prepared to, and the host institution benefits by having these on site to be studied. Your care and stewardship policies are important. Ideally, we would like to think that every object in the collection receives the same level of care. But of course, in practice, this is not always possible due to budget and staff time constraints. And so for this reason, collections care and stewardship policies often establish a framework for how to prioritize collections care. The policy should be rooted in the principles of preventive conservation, which we previously discussed, because this is fundamental to collections care. And the collections care and stewardship policies vary in the level of detail they provide, but generally you want to state which staff members are responsible. There should be reference to maintaining a stable storage environment and how the collection is monitored. Storage environment policies can sometimes be in conflict with other museum policies. For instance, you may have an energy saving policy for your institution, which requires you to turn off the heating and cooling systems at nine and on the weekends, which may affect the stability of your storage environment. So when you run into these problems, you need to check with the people that have written the building-wide policies and see what you can do to come to an agreement so that you get appropriate set points for temperature and relative humidity and are able to maintain these with minimal fluctuations. But it is not unusual for the care and stewardship policies to conflict with other things that are designed for sustainability or better functioning of the institution, and these things need to be worked out. Frequently, there are policies for the care of sacred or culturally sensitive objects. Culturally sensitive objects refers to objects that are designated by a nation or a cultural group as having unique importance for historical, cultural, or religious reasons, and they may include ritual objects, sacred objects, or human remains. Many of the objects in our museums were acquired when what was considered proper regarding the rights and desires of other cultures was very different from what it is today. And so we have things that basically we think that we would not go out and collect today, but they wind up in our collection, and these might fall under a policy like this. So as the museum profession has developed and societal mores have changed, there have been changes in how cultural property is perceived and handled. So the sacred and culturally sensitive objects policy can ensure that the museum does not acquire objects that would pose ethical dilemmas in the future and that the museum's care and use practices are sensitive to the beliefs and the creators of the objects and their descendants. And of course this is going to depend on what the objects are, how your museum uses them, and how your museum wants to handle this. This is a very controversial area because sometimes traditional care of objects actually conflicts with standard conservation methods, so you have to find that compromise. A few examples. Some Native American sacred objects require spiritual care such as ritual cleaning with sage smoke or ritual feeding with corn, pollen, or tobacco, which would of course is contrary to the principles of preventive conservation. So if you have objects fall into this category, you need to decide how to do this. Some museums have separate areas where objects can be treated this way. Some museums are able to reach accommodations with tribal members. There are many ways to handle it. Conservation work is prohibited on some objects. There is a torus scroll and depending on the condition of the torus scroll or rabbi might recommend against doing conservation work on it. Other objects require special handling. So the cultural property policies that include traditional care and use requirements for objects should be developed in close consultation with representatives of the cultural groups that produce the objects. And as I say, this area is going to be very controversial. So when you enter into it, be prepared to look for compromises where everyone can come out feeling that their considerations have been taken into account. Risk management policy is another important area. A risk is defined as the chance of an undesirable change occurring. The risk management consists of planning for risks and the targeted use of resources to minimize undesirable changes to the collections objects. And this means analyzing the risk to the collections, developing avoidance strategies and mitigating the problems that are presented by the risks. Risk issues are often related to security, to building integrity, to the storage environment test, poor collections management, how the collections are used, public safety. For instance, in this photograph you see a number of risks to the collection here ranging from improperly maintained windows to accumulation of bird droppings on the electrical box. So if you were doing risk management, you would look around your building for these sorts of things and make lists of them and see how you're going to resolve them. The risk management policy should identify the risks to the collections, should address how those risks can be avoided or ameliorated, and it may address such things as door locks, alarm systems, motion detectors, smoke and heat detectors, access to collection storage, and the schedule for regular building inspections. There's a fair amount of information out there now on risk assessment, so if you're writing a risk management policy, there's a lot of information that can help you. So a few other policy issues to mention. There are many other things out there that you might want to look at, but we don't have time to go over all of them, so do take a look at the table I mentioned in the reading today that's called Issues Addressed by Collection Management Policies that send the Collection Management Policies from MRM reading. And there is also a book on Collection Management Policies that came out in the second edition in 2017 called Things Great and Small, Collections Management Policies that have a lot more information on writing policies and some examples of sample policies. So once you've got your policies written, they of course do need to be managed. The policies don't do any good if they're not followed, so I want to spend just a little bit of time thinking about how they should be managed with the staff. And as I mentioned, involve the staff as much as you can in the process of developing the policies to ensure that you get their cooperation and their acceptance of the policies when you have them. This includes letting the staff comment on drafts of the policies before they are finalized. The staff may see problems differently than you do. They may be well aware of problems you are not even aware of, and so that's important to consider them. If you do take the route of hiring a consultant, make sure that that consultant has a meeting with all of the staff members so that person gets to talk with everyone. But don't just send the written copy of the policies up to the governing authority and expect them to approve it. You need to go in person and explain what the policies are and be prepared to answer questions. And remember that the board is not composed to meet in most cases of these imperfectionals, and they may not understand why some of the policies are awarded the way they are. And don't be afraid to change a policy that isn't working like it should. If it's not working, fix it. There's no shame in having a policy that doesn't work. So there's no reason not to change one. It's breaking down. This brings us to the question of why do some policies work and others not? My friend Steve Williams actually did an analysis of policy theory and why policies fail. And he wrote in his paper that it's important to get back to basics and recognize that the primary purpose of policies is to manage people. So that the organizational goals are achieved. And we often think of policies as managing problems or fixing problems, but of course that's only achieved by managing the people doing it. So remember, these are going up to people. And Steve proposed that policies can be ineffective due to three different kinds of problems, inappropriate concern, inappropriate processes, or inappropriate products. So inappropriate concern means policies that are not implemented, because you never got around to doing it, policies that are enforced inconsistently, which makes them not work well at all, or of course a complete lack of policies. Inappropriate processes may mean that the processes that were used to develop the policies were bad. It may mean that there was a failure to include all the sectors of the museum's staff in their development. It may be that you don't have the support of the museum's governing authority to enforce the policies. And one of the most common process errors is of course to use policies from another institution instead of writing your own and thinking about what your institution's needs are. Inappropriate policy products include policy manuals that are just too large and to read or policies that are too complex to understand, policies that are confusing, so it's really hard to figure out how to implement them. There are also policies that contain gaps or have redundancies or contradictions in them that make them hard to follow. Our policies started out good and simply became outdated. So if you'd have policy failures, look for these issues and figure out what they are and get them fixed. You should also have a policy on policy revision. Slide to change. There we go. The purpose of the collections management policy revision, the purpose of the collections management policies is to help the institution achieve its mission and goals, and that means if the powers and if the policies fail, the mission and goals aren't being addressed. So you want to revise these policies when they fail or of course if the museum mission changes. And when you're revising policies, you should approach these situations with an attitude of creative compromise. Think about the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law. Don't get hung up on what the policy says. Think about what it wants you to do and how can that be rephrased so that you can write a better policy. So to resolve the situation, you want to conduct a review, determine how the policy can be improved or made more effective or whether you should just start over with it completely. We should not expect our policies to be perfect although we should strive to make them as good as we can. We can expect policies to change as the organization changes and therefore we will have to work on those, making those changes. But as in the case of any profession, use in-professional standards change and evolve with the profession, which also means that the policy should evolve. But in the end, the ultimate test of a policy is how well it helps the staff, the volunteers, and the governing authority fulfill the museum's mission. If it doesn't help the staff and the governing authority and the volunteers to fulfill the museum's mission, then it's not a very good policy. There is one more way that you can think about policies and develop them and that is by playing a game. So your handouts include instructions on how to download the mono policy game as a free PDF. The instructions are there for how to cut it apart and tape it back together to make a board game. All you need to supply is a dice and some pieces to move around the board. And the reason this game came about is that even I who am supposedly an expert on museum policies has found that they get kind of boring. Maybe start talking about them and how to implement them. So I was looking for a more interesting way to do this, so I came up with this game. So the idea is that you can sit your staff and your volunteers down and play the game together and develop a better understanding of how resources and policies are used to solve problems. So you have players in this game roll a dice, they move around the game board, and as they go, they draw policy cards, which are cards that say it's a specific policy such as an accessioning policy. They draw resource cards, which might be, for instance, a supply of asset free paper. And then they have problem cards, and they have to use some combination of policies and resources to solve the problems. And in the game, they're allowed to trade policies and resources with each other until they can work out how to solve a problem. And so this game is useful for getting people to think about how policies, resources, and problems all work together and how to solve these in their own institution. And the game that you download includes a few blank cards so that you can customize it for your institution. Okay, I wanted to change the topic at this point and talk a little bit about some of the legal issues. And we'll begin here with museum law. Museum law is not a specialized set of laws written just for museums, but rather it's the laws that affect museums. And basically, museums are subject to the same laws that affect other nonprofit institutions. These depend on how the museum is legally organized and governed. The obligation of the museum's governing authority to make sure that the collections are cared for and the objects are held for the benefit of the public. Museum law can address the acquisition, accessioning, and deaccessioning of collection objects, how the objects are used, public and staff safety, and a lot of other issues. For more information, I have also included in the readings handout entitled Legal Resources for Collection Management that has links to some significant laws and regulations and also some resources related to museum law and a sharp bibliography. So we'll just discuss the bigger, broader issues here if you want details. I'll go to the handout. We'll start with the basic idea that museums should not take ownership of an object. If the object is illegal, they should not try to take ownership of a stolen object. You cannot own a stolen object. Even if a museum acquires an object in good faith, believing it to be legal, if it turns out to be stolen, the object must be returned to the owner. And this is the reason that provenance research in a good accessioning system are so important. So there's two common law principles here. The first is, these are both in Latin, but the first one is that no one can give what they do not have. And this is the common law principle which says that even if you thought you acquired an object legally, if it was stolen somewhere previously and you are acquiring it, you have to give it up back to the owner if the owner can prove ownership. Even though you may not get your money back on the object, if it belongs to someone else, you are not allowed to acquire it. And the other is the much better known caveat emptor, which means buyer beware. It is your responsibility to make sure that that object is as far as you can determine legal. There is an entire Connecting to Collections webinar on museum legal issues you can watch for more details. So in this course, I only want to mention six categories of laws and regulations that you may want to think about and that relate to managing the collection. And these have to do with the workplace, intellectual property, imports and exports, protected places, protected plants and animals, and nag growth. And so we're going to deal with these here fairly quickly one by one. And in the workplace, museums do have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. And this affects both public access to institutions and how employees work behind the scenes. Due to the nature of collection storage, retrofitting storage areas to meet ADA requirements can be a serious problem. So what you want to keep in mind is that the Americans with Disabilities Act does have some flexibility that museums can work with. For example, it may not be necessary for all collection storage areas to be handicap accessible if there is an accessible work area and a regularly scheduled employee available who can bring collection objects out to that area for so handicap people can have access to them. So there are ways that you can compromise here. Another thing to keep in mind is OSHA. This is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which enforces standards for workplace health and safety. In many states, they have a state level OSHA that is the equivalent, meaning it meets or exceeds the federal requirements. And so you would have been lined up under the state level rather than the federal one. But OSHA regulates workplace safety, including chemical exposure, working conditions, and required training for working with hazardous materials. So there's a lot of different aspects to this to keep in mind. I want to mention intellectual property rights. These can be defined as products of human intelligence that are unique and have potential commercial value. And here is a picture of a stack of publications that I bought last fall that I was traveling around. Some of them are new and some of them are used. So how many of these do you suppose are still covered by intellectual property rights? And you can't tell just by looking. You would have to look at what these publications are when the copyright date was, where they were copyrighted, what country they were copyrighted in. It's not an easy question to answer. So intellectual property rights includes a lot of things. Intellectual property rights can be applied to physical objects, to products, but also to ideas, designs, inventions, literary works, unique names, industrial processes, and computer programs, among other things. Generally, the creator of a piece of intellectual property owns the copyright for a set period of time. And this will depend on the country that you live in. So the exact time period depends on that and plus on the legislation that the work comes under. There are four general categories of intellectual property rights. Copyright protects original literary, artistic, and architectural works that exist in tangible form, and copyright law governs the right to copy, distribute, and exhibit the protected work for a specific period of time. So you can see this might be an issue if you wanted to exhibit a copyright protected work or use an image of one in advertising and exhibit at your museum. Trademark protects distinctive words, phrases, designs, or symbols that identify and distinguish specific goods or services. And trademark protection varies quite a bit from one country to another, and it sometimes affects museums, although not too often. Patent law protects inventions, processes, and chemical compositions by granting the patent holder the right to stop others from making, using, selling the same thing without permission. And that is something we rarely run into a museum problem with. And the same with trade secrets. This protects information such as formulas, programs, or devices that confer value and competitive advantage in the marketplace. So museums frequently have issues with numbers one and two, but not with three and four. Creators of intellectual property may sell, license, or transfer all or a portion of their intellectual property rights to others, including the museums. But it is important to know that the rights are conveyed separately from the physical ownership of the work. It is entirely possible for a museum to own the intellectual property rights to a work but not own the work, or for the museum to own the work but not own the intellectual property rights to it. Just because you have the object in your collection does not necessarily mean that you have the right to make copies of it or use images of it. So a museum that does not own the intellectual property rights may have limited use. So for example, you can probably display an object without permission from the copyright holder, but you would not be able to use an image of that in a publication. Our inner brochure are even on a banner hanging outside the museum to attract people into a show. The Visual Artist Rights Act of 1990, known as VARA, is another one that museums can run into problems with. This grants artists certain rights regarding the works they produce. So this effect applies only to living artists, no matter who owns the copyright. And this is good for the life of the artist plus 50 years after their death. So VARA was written specifically to cover paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and photographic images. Under the terms of VARA, the living artists are their heirs for 50 years, retain the rights to have their works correctly attributed, and that includes on-exhibit labels. So you must list the creator's name properly, maintain without alteration, meaning you cannot change colors or add things to it, and protected from destruction even if another party owns the works. So under objects that are protected by VARA, another artist would not be allowed, for instance, to destroy the work in the process of creating his or her own art if it was covered by VARA. There are a few cautions for museums about intellectual property rights. A standard loan of a copyrighted work from one museum to another does not include the transfer of the copyright to that work. It only includes the physical temporary transfer of the work. The law protects all copyrightable works, whether they are published or unpublished, so it does not have to be a published work to be copyright protected. From the collections management perspective, the problems it most often arise when someone wants to use an image or an object, so that's when we should be extremely alert. There is a provision in copyright law for fair use. This means the ability to use copyrighted material without asking permission. Fair use has some serious limitations on it. Basically, it refers to educational use, and in practice, for instance, this means you might be able to use a copyrighted image as part of a copyrighted work. And in practice, for instance, this means you might be able to use a copyrighted image as part of an exhibit if it's educational, but not, as I mentioned, on an advertising banner. Copyright is extremely complicated, but there is a good website that can help you resolve a lot of your copyright problems, and that website is listed on the handout, so you don't have to try to write that down. It is in the readings. A few of the laws that protect things internationally, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property, and the Event of Armed Conflict, frequently just called the Hague Convention. This was passed in 1954, and it's the first significant international agreement to protect cultural property during wartime, which mostly meant protecting things against looting. So this one has been around and has been used for a long time. Related to that is the immunity from seizure under judicial processes of cultural objects imported for temporary exhibit or display. This protects foreign-owned works of art and objects of cultural value from being seized by, in our case, by the U.S. court when they are imported into the United States for temporary exhibition. And this is a problem that some museums borrowed things that came in that were contested internationally, and the government impounded the objects which put the museum in an awkward situation. So the way this works is if your museum is borrowing something that may be controversial internationally, you need to apply for this protection before the object is imported. And what this would allow you to do is import the object, use it in an exhibition, and then return it to the institution that loaned it to you. The Pre-Columbian Art Act of 1972 prohibits importing specifically pre-Columbian material, meaning from the Americas, without a certificate of export from the country of origin. And this is another one designed to prevent looting of sites, pre-Columbian and historic sites. There's a lot of things having to do with import and export. The international agreement called the convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit export, import, and transfer of ownership of cultural property. I just called the UNESCO Convention. It was passed internationally in 1970. It was ratified by the United States Senate in 1972, but the enabling legislation so that it took effect in the United States was not passed until 1983, and that is was passed under the terms of the Cultural Property Implementation Act, so that makes it effected in the U.S. The UNESCO Convention makes certain forms of cultural property subject to seizure if they are imported into the U.S. It also authorizes the President of the United States to enter into bilateral agreements with other countries to prohibit the importation of certain cultural property. And this is frequently used for things coming made by indigenous cultures in areas where they have long been exploited. And this is in contrast to the Hague Convention. The UNESCO Convention is focused primarily on peacetime destruction and looting. The Hague Convention is focused primarily on wartime looting. The UNESCO Convention particularly addressed as objects obtained without permission from the country of origin and then later sold and then imported into the United States. There is also the Unidroit Convention on stolen or illegally exported cultural objects. That was an international agreement that dates back to 1995. This was written to correct some loopholes that are in the 1970 UNESCO Convention by making it easier to identify the current location of stolen cultural property and making it easier to recover it. It went into effect in July of 1988 and provides a means for a government to recover stolen or illegally exported cultural property including things that were illegally excavated. Although in this case the United States, although they participated in writing the convention, the U.S. government has still not ratified it. 32 other countries have but the United States has not. And looted cultural property can turn up in some odd places. I want to mention some legislation that protects specific places. The Antiquities Act of 1906 protects historic ruins on public lands from being destroyed or damaged. And this was passed in 1906 in response to vandalism that was occurring in Casa Grande ruins in Arizona and also because of concerns about how well Mount Vernon in Virginia was going to be protected into the future. The Historic Sites Act of 1935 was passed to strengthen the Antiquities Act by declaring it national policy to preserve for public use. Historic sites, buildings and objects of national significance are the inspiration and benefit of the people of the United States. The Archeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 expands the Antiquities Act again to protect archaeological resources and sites on public land and on Indian land by prohibiting the sale, purchase, transport, exchange or receipt of archaeological resources removed without permission. So this does not affect privately owned land. This is public land, government owned land and land owned by Indian tribes. There are also a number of things that protect species. These can be a problem because a lot of animal and plant parts do get used in art and in historic objects. So there are several pieces of legislation that you might think are primarily related to natural history, but many are far more reaching. The most important of these is the Lacey Act, which was passed in 1900 to control the trade in bird feathers. At that time, feather collectors were devastating wild bird populations to meet the demand for feathers that were used for ladies hats. The Lacey Act was subsequently expanded to cover almost all animal and many plant species as well. In essence, the Lacey Act prohibits the import, export, transportation, sale, receipt, acquisition or purchase of any animal or plant that was obtained or transported in violation of some other law or regulation. So it affects the Lacey Act enforces the laws and regulations of other countries by making it illegal to bring into the U.S. specimens of plants or wildlife that were collected in those countries without a permit. Under the Lacey Act, what's the key thing to remember is that any recipient of an illegal animal or plant specimen could be held responsible in charge of the violation. And this includes objects that contain parts of an illegal animal or plant, such as an artwork, a historical object, or an ethnographic object. So if your museum received one on loan that contained parts of a protected species, in theory, you could be charged with a violation of the Lacey Act. There are some other laws that protect a particular species. Probably the most widely used is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora in Flora. This is commonly called CITES. It was established in 1973 to protect species threatened by international commercial trade. And they wanted to protect these by regulating the either import and export. The species of plants and animals are listed in three appendices, and each of the three has different levels of protection. And what you need to know about this is that you may need a permit to move an object or a specimen of a CITES-listed plant or animal across an international border or even between institutions within the U.S. And this includes art and artifacts that have ivory, bone, feathers, skin, or teeth in them. The one that is probably most familiar with is the Endangered Species Act, which is sometimes confused with CITES. CITES is an international agreement that protects species threatened by commercial exploitation. The Endangered Species Act is a United States legislation, and it protects species that are threatened for many reasons, primarily through loss of habitat. And I've been using the word specimen. We need to mention something more about that. These laws are all enforced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, so the Lacey Act, Endangered Species Act, and CITES. They say that a specimen has any recognizable part, product, or derivative of an animal or plant. This would mean pieces of bone, feathers, teeth, tusks, skin, tissues, and so forth. So leather, all of these things, if they come from a protected species, are subject under these laws. There's a bunch of other wildlife laws we're not going to talk about now, but just so you're aware of them, there's the African Elephant Conservation Act, which deals, addresses the trade in ivory. There's the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, Marine Mammals, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the Paleontology Resources Protection Act. So there's a lot of these other laws out there. And the questions I've been getting most often lately have to do with ivory because the profile of ivory is pretty high right now. Basically, as of the 6th of July of 2016, there has been a near total ban on trade in ivory in the United States, and this includes importing and exporting ivory to and from the U.S. There is provision for exceptions, and one is that the ivory was removed from the wild before the 26th of February of 1976. The catch is you have to be able to prove that. So if you have an object that is older than that, with ivory in it, you would need to prove its date in order to be exempt. And the last of the laws I wanted to mention is NAGPRA. This is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which passed in 1990. This affirms the rights of Native Americans and Native Hawaiians to take custody of human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. It affects federal agencies and any museum that receives federal funds, including grant funds. So if you've received a grant from IMLS, for example, which is a federal agency, you would have to comply with NAGPRA. NAGPRA covers new acquisitions as well as past collections, so all new collections also have to conform. So NAGPRA, again, that could be easily the subject of an entire webinar. There are some references in your handouts so that you can look at those for yourself if you are concerned about how that might affect your collection. I now want to move on to highlight a few resources that can help you improve the way that you manage collections. And again, there's a list of these. We're not going to go over them in great detail, but I want to draw your attention to some of my favorites. In the readings this week, there is a handout called Resources for Registrar and Collection Specialists, which is from the website of ARC, the Association of Registrarians and Collections Specialists. This list has publication details for most of what I'm going to mention here today, and I'm not going to mention everything due to lack of time, but if you want details for publication, you can just go back and look at that handout. But I want to start with two books written by Rebecca Buck and Gene Gilmore, who have done a phenomenal amount in helping us become better registrars. The first one I want to mention is Collection Conundrums, Solving Collections Management Mysteries. And I see I have that on the slide wrong. It is not Conservation Conundrums, it is Collection Conundrums. The book came out in 2007, but it still has a lot of very useful strategies for solving difficult problems and managing collections. And I believe that Gene Gilmore is working on a revision of that, so there should be a new one coming out fairly soon. The next one is one I've mentioned many, many times, and that is MRN-5, Museum Registration Methods. The fifth edition was published in 2010. It's often called the Registrar's Bible. It's a very useful book, and there is a new edition of this book underway also. It should be published. The end of this calendar year are possibly in early 2020, and it will be a new and slightly expanded version of the book. A couple of things that focus on the conservation of collections. Later this year, 2019, there will be a new book out called Preventive Conservation Collection Storage, edited by Lisa Elkin and Chris Norris. And this is a joint project of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, the American Institute for Conservation, the Smithsonian Institution, and George Washington University. And it's going to be, I think it's running around 800 pages. We'll have a lot of information on care of collections and storage. I have also included in your handouts an article from Collection Forum Journal called Resources for Preventive Conservation and Collections Care, which is very useful for helping you find what you need, depending on the kind of materials you have, came out in 2013. And I wanted to mention a big comprehensive reference called Help and Safety for Museum Professionals that was published in 2011. Another very useful reference. A few more that I found useful, just working with collections day to day. The first is Heather Corovilla's book came out in 2016 called A Legal Dictionary for Museum Professionals. This is very useful for explaining collection legal issues in plain English. I use it a lot. There is a book that came out most recently in a fourth edition in 2015, Basic Condition Reporting, a handbook which has a great amount of information on how to do good condition reports. Excuse me. And then Rights and Reproductions, the Handbook for Cultural Collections, the Cultural Institutions that is first published in 2015 that's already out in a new edition from 2018. And this book answers a lot of the copyright questions and a lot about how images can and cannot be used. And it's available through AAM and through the publisher, Roman and Littlefield, though. So it's another very useful reference. There's a few websites that I find pretty useful. And of course, again, we can't mention all of them. But of course, the first is the Connecting to Collections Care, which you're already familiar with. There is the Image Permanence Institute, which has a lot of good information with it. And then the National Park Service Museum Management Program has a very useful website, particularly their Conservagram series and their Museum Handbook. And both the Conservagrams and the Museum Handbook are vetted by conservation professionals. So you can rely on the information. These URLs and information about these is in the handout, so you don't have to copy it now. But those are very useful. The Conservagrams are written so that the information is usable immediately by anyone. The Museum Handbook includes a lot of what I refer to as National Park Service Speak that has to do with the National Park Service Parts of Managing Collections. But the actual information on managing collections is useful. You just have to skip over the rhetoric relating to the government ownership of collections. That doesn't affect you unless you're a Park Service. Professional societies, I think participation in professional organizations, whether those are national, regional, state, or local, can be extremely helpful in finding resources connecting with individuals who can help you and a good way to meet some really nice people. The American Alliance of Museums, for instance, has six regional organizations, as well as the National one, and those six are listed in your handouts. There is also the American Association for State and Local History, which I would expect many of you are already members of. The AIC, the American Institute for Conservation, of course. Small Museums Association, which meets usually in the Washington, D.C. area in February, is a great place if you're a small museum because you would be in among people that are sharing the same kinds of problems you have. And then, of course, the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. So again, the URLs for those are in your handouts, so you can look them up and read about those organizations. There are a variety of professional training opportunities for anyone interested in learning more about managing collections. Your options include university-based academic programs. These can be residential, meaning you would move there and be a full-time student, or online. Many of them are now 100% online. You can find undergraduate minors, graduate degree programs, usually a master's program, and also graduate certificates. And a certificate would be about half of the amount of classwork of a graduate degree program, and usually if you already had a master's and another topic, you would do the certificate instead. There is a reading called How to Select a Museum Studies Degree Program was written primarily for students that are just graduating with a bachelor's, but the information on how to examine a program and see if it meets your needs is good for anyone. There are several for-profit professional training programs that are available. These vary a lot in quality. My advice on these is to look up who is teaching the classes and check the instructors out. See if the instructor is someone well-known in the field or well-credentialed, and that can probably tell you a lot about the quality of the program. And there are, of course, many non-profit professional training courses, such as this one that you're taking now, as well as a lot of webinars and workshops. Again, this is a big deal. We can't cover all of it, but I wanted to make sure that you saw all of those available as options. I encourage you to also look at some of the assessment programs that can give you an unbiased review of how your collection is managed. Particularly, I wanted to mention first, MAP, the Museum Assessment Program, which is run by the American Alliance of Museums. MAP has three assessment programs, one of which is the Collections Stewardship Assessment, which would relate directly to what we've talked about in this class. And if you apply to that program, you would have an assessor come out to your museum, spend a couple of days talking to you, looking at your collections, you'd fill out a self-study, and you would get back a report that would be very useful for, as the basis for, looking for grant funding. A similar program is the Collections Assessment for Preservation, known as CAP, which is run by the American Institute of Conservation. In this case, the person coming out would not be necessarily a collections management professional, but would be a conservator, and you would get a very different look at your collection from this person. And again, after an on-site visit, a very detailed report. And then there is the Standards and Excellence Program for History Organization that goes by the acronym STEPPS, that is run by the American Association for State and Local History, which is designed to help history museums improve the management of their collections. So this is just kind of scratching the surface. I just want to make sure that these things are on your radar to look at. And I want to wrap up today by saying a few things about the future of museum collection management. As I mentioned in the first seminar, come this fall, I will have worked in museums for 50 years, half a century. And so my career is more or less drawing you a close, and I'm concerned about what will happen to all these collections after I am gone. And so it's interesting to look ahead at that future. And let's start with a look at the Peel Museum, which is a very interesting museum. It was the first important museum in the United States. It actually wasn't the first as many people claim, but the first important one. Established by the portrait painter Charles Wilson Peel, who is best known for painting portraits of the founders of the country. He opened his museum in Philadelphia in 1785. There was later a branch in Baltimore as well. It was a private museum. It was based on the European model of museums. And established with the idea that as Peel said, it should amuse as well as instruct public. So he had very high ideals. And this is a very famous self-portrait of Peel in his museum that you can see in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, the Peel Museum closed. And its contents were auctioned off in 1858, which isn't all that long after it was opened. And it's important to note that the problems that forced the Peel Museum to close are still the problems that threaten museums today. Lack of funding, insufficient admission income to keep the enterprise going, and failure to change exhibits enough to attract new audiences, or failure in general to attract new audiences. So this is kind of a sad story, and it tells us that not a lot has changed in the museum world in terms of what are the threats to museums. So we can add Peel's list, add the Peel's list of woes, a few other problems confronting our museums. One of these is the increasing expense of maintaining larger and older collections, which all of our museums face. Almost all the museums in the United States now lack sufficient space to store and care for their collections. And this is a problem that will get worse in the future. And so we're all going to have to be looking at downsizing our collections or looking at off-site storage. What we need for the future is to find more efficient ways to manage our collections. We need to find ways that we can reconfigure our collections' storage to make it easier to monitor the objects and thereby take better care of them. We need better collection databases that don't just duplicate what we do with pencil and paper, but actually give us a strong management tool. And of course, as I mentioned last week, we need to address the problem of the long-term instability of electronic information, because that information isn't going to be around much longer. So I don't want to depress people with these ideas, but I do want you to think about the fact that that future of museums, there's a lot of problems to be confronted. None of them are insolvable, but we do need to pay attention and do our best to fix those problems. But coming around to the assignment, at the end of each of the first three weeks, I asked all of you that wanted to credibly badge to submit a short essay about the strengths and weaknesses of the topics covered that week. And I have read all of these that I have received as of about 11 o'clock this morning. And so at this final week, at the conclusion, what I would like for you to do is go back to your first three essays and reevaluate what you wrote and write up one more short essay, just one or two pages at all. And in that essay, I want you to prioritize the things you think should be improved in the way collections are managed at your institution. And by prioritize, I mean what is the most important to fix, followed by next most and so forth. And look at what needs to be fixed, and if you have ideas for how the problem could be fixed, include it. If you don't know, just list the problem. What I would like for you to do as you write that essay and then submit it to me, and I will read through all of them, is I want you to consider that that essay could be the groundwork for applying for ways to address your collection management needs. For instance, it could be the justification for why you would apply for a CAP or a MAP assessment or to apply to the steps program. Or depending on where you are and what you're doing, maybe you would go ahead and apply to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The IMLS for funding to address some of these problems. So what this will do, I hope, is help you focus in on not on your strengths, but on what needs to be fixed to make things better and get started thinking about and then ways that those problems can be fixed. And so I would like for you, if you could, to get that essay to me a week from now. So next week is the 12th of March, so if you could get it into me by then that would give me time to cover it, to read it. So that is the assignment. And the last thing I would like to say is I want to thank Mike for his enormous amount of help with the technical production of the program and a huge thank you to Susan who has made the life of me and every other webinar presenter or connecting collections very, very easy to do. And I really appreciate your help. And lastly, I thank all of you for sticking with us through these four weeks. And at this point, I think we can take a look at any questions that people have and anything else that Susan would like to say. I'm back. Sorry, I disappeared. Oh, that's OK. These things happen as we know. Yeah, we had a power outage. Oh, my. Yeah, OK. So there is a question from Nora Schneider. And she says, could you provide an example of a difference between a policy and a procedure? OK, sure. So let me think here a minute and pick something that's relatively straightforward. Your policy could say that your museum collection area should be a secure area, off limits to those who do not have business to be in there, and that the number of the people going in and out should be monitored. That would be your policy. When you give this to your staff, your staff would then say, well, in that case, we either want to limit the number of keys or we want to go to a card system so that you have to have a special key card for the door. We want the door to lock when the door closes. We want to have a sign-up sheet so that anyone going through must sign their name so we know who they are, and maybe they will have to go through the curator or through a registrar in order to gain access. So the policy would say that it must be secure and you must keep track of who goes in and out. Your procedures would tell you how to do that. You would do that by the door lock that locks automatically, what kind of lock who has access to the keys or the cards to get in and keeping track. So that's what we mean. Let's see if we go ahead. Amy says if we already have our policies and procedures in one document, should we move forward and make these two separate policies? You should be two separate documents. I think this is important because your staff should be able to change procedures as often as they need to to make sure they're working. But those procedures, of course, have to have come from the policy document itself. And your policies should be what's approved. Your board or your governing authority should not be approving procedures. So I would definitely separate those out and let the governing authority worry about approving your policies. Let your staff worry about developing procedures. And Guru Fateh says, does anyone know of policies related to Egyptian objects, i.e. an artifact that was obtained in 1965 in Egypt and brought to the U.S.? Is it a personal estate, not an institution? It's in a personal estate, not an institution. Can it be sold? Because of the date, my guess is that there was not any legislation prohibiting that at the time because I don't believe there was any legislation controlling Egyptian artifacts that early. You don't need to check. And I would go back and look at, say, the legal primary on managing museum collections, check perhaps with an institution, a larger institution that has an Egyptian collection such as UPIN or someplace like that. That's not an area of expertise of mine. I don't deal with ethnographic objects. But probably that object could be legally sold. But I would definitely check because in addition to legally there is the issue of shouldn't ethically be sold as well. But you should check with someone who knows far more about Egyptology and the laws. But that's a very good question. Right. And I think that's about all. So if anybody has any other questions and we have this question about, will you be able to access those slideshows and handouts after the class is concluded? I think so, but I'm not sure. And I will send you all an email note about that. So remember, if you're going to get the credibly bad, you need to have looked at all the webinars whether live or recorded. And you need to do the assignments. And once that's completed after March 12th, I should get those posted. So if you think you don't want one, just send me email and let me know. And also, I know there are a few groups that are watching this. And the one thing that we don't have is if you're a group, we can only give you one badge. So please also do the course evaluation. Thank you, Mike, for putting this up. And thank you for attending. And remember, we're going to have another course beginning the end of March that's about storage and the reorg process, which I think is a fabulous program. So be sure to check that out. And yeah, I'd love to see the World Museum of Mining and Pute. So I think that's it. Thank you, John. Thank you, Mike. And thank you for...