 Good afternoon everybody or good morning, depending on where you are joining us from, or even evening if you're joining us from over the Atlantic. My name is Mike Moreno I'm with Learning Times. It's a pleasure to be here with you today and I'll be your technical technical producer. I will be in the background to provide you with any support for the zoom platform if you require it. Before we get started I would like to draw your attention to two items one you should be seeing some closed captioning the bottom of the screen. If for whatever reason you do not see it you can click the CC live transcript button and choose show subtitles. On the other hand if you find the captions to be a distraction for you you can turn them off by clicking the CC live transcript hide subtitles. Depending on the version of zoom it may also be located under the more option or under the ellipsis icon. You'll also note that there is a Q&A option, as well as a chat option, please feel free to let us know where you're joining us from using the chat. And also if you have questions for our presenter today please use the Q&A that will help us facilitate questions during the Q&A period later on. So without further delay I will pass things off to our host Tiffany Emig from AIC, go ahead Tiffany. Great, thank you Mike and thanks everyone for joining us today. My, I am hopeful that you are here for Museum Security Fundamentals that's what we will be discussing today. In just a minute I'm going to, there we go. My name is Tiffany Emig, I am the Programs and Operations Director for AIC and FAIC. You may be surprised to see me here because our wonderful Connecting to Collections Care coordinator Robin Barak-Filgo is out today. So I will be trying to fill her role knowing that I can't ever fully fill her shoes, but she will be back next month. So thank you so much Mike, more than who you just heard from, Mike will be helping with the technical aspects of things in the background. So I know a lot of you are very familiar with Connecting to Collections Care, but for anyone who isn't, we will always like to make sure that you are aware of all the resources that the program offers. I'm going to all of them at connectingtocollections.org and there you'll be able to browse past webinars through our webinar archives. This webinar should be up there, the recording should be up probably tomorrow. You can review our courses which are more in-depth looks at specific topics, and you can join the community if you're not already part of the Connecting to Collections Care online community, I strongly recommend that you join. This webinar is a moderated forum that is moderated by conservation professionals, and it allows you to post any collections care questions that you might have directly to the forum. You can get responses from your peers, but you can also get responses from that volunteer conservation professionals so that you know that the advice you're getting is trusted and well researched. You can find out about future events by following us on social media, on Facebook and on Twitter. You'll also find the recording announcements there as well. And as Mike said earlier, we asked you to sort your engagement with this webinar into two different boxes. So the chat is really great for saying hello. It's always exciting to see where people are joining us from, and what the weather is like, I know for most people in the United States right now it's fairly hot. You can use the Q&A box to list questions and that just helps us make sure that we don't miss any questions as we're going through things at the end. So we will wait until the end of the presentation to read off those questions for our presenter. I want to make sure you're aware that we have another webinar coming up next month, August 18th. We'll be doing preparing for extreme weather looking at fire and hurricanes, both extremely timely topics regarding the summer weather events that we're already starting to see. Also, this hasn't been publicly announced yet, but I wanted you all to be the first to know that we have two courses being planned for the fall, one on care of photographs and one on collection storage that will go through details of how to store specific types of materials. So I encourage you to keep an eye out if you're interested in those topics we'll be making specific registration announcements soon. And now without further ado, I want to introduce Dara Shor. Since 2015, Dara has assisted in the development of museum emergency planning, fire protection and security guidance in the National Park Service Museum Handbook. One museum collections, a premier online resource for collections management policy and best practice. Dara has also participated in the creation of comprehensive museum risk assessment tools and virtual training on collections management fundamentals and museum fire protection. Dara has an MA in museum studies from the George Washington University so welcome Dara. Great to be here Tiffany. Thank you Tiffany, thank you Mike for managing and thank everyone for joining us here today for that perennial topic. Museum security. Can everyone see my slideshow okay, you can hear me all right, yes. Okay, then I'm going to turn off my camera to conserve bandwidth, and then we'll get going. So, when we hear the phrase museum security, what may immediately spring to mind are armies of guards marching throughout every nook and cranny of your institution, or high tech very expensive electronic security systems. But what I really want to talk to you today is about how much of museum security is procedural, how much of an impact planning and implementing corrective actions and changing your operational approach can have on the protection of the objects in your institution, and the visitors and staff who visit our museums. Essentially, I'm going to go over how to stop break ins without breaking the bank. We have a lot of information to cover and I'm going to move it a pretty brisk clip. So to give you a roadmap. I'm going to start us off with the theoretical underpinnings of museum security, and what the goals of a comprehensive museum security program should be. So much of the meat of today is going to focus on identifying and assessing security risk planning and implementing corrective actions sometimes called security countermeasures. And in particular, a large portion will be focused on how to control access to museum collections and implement a good key control system. I'm also going to go over a couple of good collections management practices which improve the protection of our museum objects. And then I'll end with a brief not too technical discussion of physical and electronic security systems that any institution should have no matter how big or how small you are. All the images you see today are drawn from my work as a contractor for the National Park Service. These are either objects in NPS collections, or the interiors of sites managed by the Park Service, for example this padlock you see was recovered from the USS Cairo, a Civil War gunship. Please note that everything I discussed today is based on best practice within the field, but as a disclaimer, I'm not going to name the names of any park or museum I use anecdotally. I can't mention any specific manufacturer or brand this is for example and not as a direct endorsement of one maker over another. And my opinion should of course not be taken as representative of those of AIC or NPS. Although all this mention of the Park Service and I know we have a bunch of Park Service people here today. So it's not in the Park Service you might be wondering what is, what does NPS have to do with museum security aren't you guys like bears and kayaking and mountain climbing. Well no if you weren't aware, the National Park Service is the world's biggest museum system of the 423 national parks national historic site national battlefields and more that NPS manages over 90% that's 388 sites have museum collections. We're not the biggest museum collection in the world, although we're up there we've got 49 million objects and over 85,000 linear feet of archives. But should you be concerned that I'll be approaching museum security from the perspective of a single large organization. In actuality, NPS collections are stored and exhibited at a number of storage facilities. There are center centers museums and yes what amounts to hundreds of small to mid sized historic house museums. And it's really from this perspective that I'll be approaching museum security. Of course, I'll also be approaching things from as Tiffany mentioned someone who develops museum policy and guidance as part of the NPS museum management program. If you aren't familiar with what the museum management program does I do encourage you to bookmark our website www.nps.gov forward slash museum. We develop best practice based policy and guidance, which includes the NPS museum handbook and the conservative Graham technical leaflet series, with which I hope many of you are familiar. What we put out is always available free to access to anyone you don't have to be in the park service to use our materials. In particular, I'll be drawing from two chapters of the NPS museum handbook part one chapter 14 and appendix G associated with this webinar you have a reference sheet, which you can find on C2C cares website. If you so choose, you can open up these documents in another tab and follow along with me. I won't know I certainly won't be mad. But remember that myself and my coworkers are currently updating these chapters at some point in the future the appendix will fold into the chapter so watch that space. And with all that preamble out of the way I think it's time we dive like the US SK row here into the content of museum security. Now when I talk about protecting collections from intruders or from security incidents. I'm not going to be talking about protection against long term deterioration from agents of destruction like ultraviolet radiation. When I talk about intruders I'm not talking about IPM intruders like silverfish. And when I talk about incidents I'm not talking about fires or floods or other emergencies, although all the principles I discussed can be applied to these topics. Rather, when I talk about museum security breaches. I'm talking about a range of undesirable incidents that happen in or around our museum from a to z they range from arson to violence. In particular, I want to focus on the museum specific breaches unauthorized or undesirable access which include theft and vandalism. I show you here the Jessup agricultural wagon, a critical part of agricultural outreach and education at the Tuskegee Institute. If someone wanted to either deface or make off with this wagon, the mechanisms by which they would be able to do so are functionally the same. So I'll be using theft and vandalism pretty interchangeably throughout today. However, we have to acknowledge in the museum field that most cases of theft of museum objects are not the results of daring heists taken during cover of night. They're not the result of opportunistic visitors shoving objects into their shirts leaves during a tour. Rather, the call is coming from inside the house debate rages within the field as to what exact percentage of museum thefts happened from the inside. My low ball estimate is that upwards of 85% of objects go missing because someone in that institution abused their trusted position to gain unauthorized access to objects, or as this depressingly likely existing security permissions and authorizations were so broad so lax that you couldn't really say that that institution had a comprehensive security program at all. Whether we're preventing thefts from the outside or from within our institution, any security breach happens due to a few factors. Any intruder as I'll call them has their own reason for wanting to do something undesirable to an object. And while we can pursue education and outreach programming to keep our institutions entrenched and trusted within our community so that it's not just the building where the expensive stuff is. Ultimately, we can't really do much about motive. It also has their means their plan of attack, then we can't really do anything about means either. What we can do, and what we have to do is remove or limit to the greatest possible extent, the opportunities for a security breach to occur. And the ways in which we do so can be divided into five of the basic principles of security, sometimes called the five days. In the most ideal sense, we want to practice deterrence to prevent security breaches from happening at all in our institution. Of course, we don't live in an ideal world, so we need to deny intrusion by using security countermeasures or corrective actions or mitigation steps, whatever you want to call them. We also need to install enough barriers to delay on authorized access to our objects, and this provides sufficient time for us to respond to an incident before something irreversible is done. We also need to install systems which detect on authorized entry and which document authorized access as well, and which can trigger a response so that we can defend our staff and law enforcement will respond to protect not only the objects, and this is where those objects are housed but also the safety of our visitors and our staff. All five of these principles of security need to be present in your institution in order to have a comprehensive security program, and they need to be present at all levels or all layers of your museum. When I talk about layers I'm talking about the concept of layered protection, sometimes called security in depth. I show you a figure you can find in chapter 14 of the museum handbook, it illustrates this principle. As you enter into any museum, you clear the front gate, you enter the building, you move through the galleries and you make a beeline for any given object. As you move on that trajectory, the principles of security in depth hold that you will encounter more and more layers of security. More barriers that prevent you from handling or touching or damaging the object, more security systems installed to detect where you are, more staff present throughout the campus who are implementing best practice. The more layers of security you have in place, the more protection you have for your collection and your visitors. Taking this layered approach is critical. Redundancy is what you want from museum security. You never want to put all your eggs in one basket because when that egg cracks, your museum is going to be cooked. Layered protection is one of the fundamental principles of risk management as a general approach. If you look outside your window right now and you see that storm clouds are gathering on the horizon, you take steps to protect yourself with an umbrella. Similarly, if we know that our museums are at risk of security breaches, and they all are no matter how big or how small, we'd want to take steps to protect our collections rather than simply waiting for an incident to happen. Risk management is this umbrella approach. It is a fundamentally proactive way of looking at the world and your duties. It asks yourself, what's the worst that could happen in my institution, and how do I prevent that from occurring. Not so much adding more and more tasks to your already loaded plates, rather it's reorienting how you approach your duties because ultimately security is not separate from how you operate your institution. It doesn't sit on top of daily practice. It needs to be woven into everything you do because ultimately the actions you take to help keep your objects secure will make it easier to manage those objects on a day to day basis and long term. Another part of managing risk involves gathering data. You need to have robust information on what you're protecting, what you are protecting against, and what that protection will actually look like. Whether or not you're protecting against theft of objects or theft of data about objects by engaging in assessment and identification of risks and planning and implementing corrective actions will be well on your way towards taking this proactive approach. Make it clear that no single element of a risk management approach is ever one and done. Museum security from a risk management perspective is always cyclical. First, you need to take stock of what risks you have at your institution so you can do something about those risks. That way, if an incident does end up occurring, you know exactly what to do. You're not scrambling to figure out best practice, you can focus on keeping your objects and your visitors safe. And after the fact, you need to take stock of what went right and what went wrong, and correct your approach accordingly, because cyclically, the period of time before one security breach is the period of time after the next, and the period of time after one breach is the period of time before the next, or never out of the woods when it comes to security. Let's go through the different steps of the security cycle, starting of course with assessing security risk and planning and implementing corrective actions. Just so we're all on the same page, in terms of vocabulary, when I talk about risk, what I'm talking about is the interplay of threats and vulnerabilities. A threat or a hazard, which for today's purpose are the same is any occurrence that can negatively affect your museum, a theft is a threat. Vulnerability is a condition or a set of conditions which increases your susceptibility of damage, not having security systems or having insufficient staffing or vulnerabilities. When you're taking stock of what risks your organization faces, it really helps to look from the outside and then move in starting at your overall community, then your building and then the objects themselves. If you have a few of these considerations, first off you have to ask yourself what threats has my institution faced in the past, what threats doesn't face right now and what threats might have faced in the future. As an informal show of hands, you can write it in the chat box if you so choose. How many of us here are in attendance today from organizations with staff that have excellent institutional memory. You can call them up at three in the morning and they can tell you the date and time of every time an object was moved or went missing. However, none of that institutional knowledge has ever been written down. So when that person retires, all that knowledge goes bye bye with them. Security has two key pillars. One of them is documentation. Yes, you do need to have written longitudinal data of the history of security breaches and other undesirable incidents at your site. This will illuminate patterns and what's going on in your museum and will tell you what your top priorities are to correct what you also need to look outward. Has there been a rise in extremism or violent civic action in the neighborhood where your museum is located. Are you getting ready to launch an exhibit that might prove controversial. How is your museum perceived amongst your larger visitor base in your community. Do people keep trying to leave your fence and have a picnic at night because they don't realize that the museum is not a public park. Do you have enough staff presence at your museum during the day and at night to stop an incident from happening or getting out of hand. And behind the scenes are your collection staff engaging in best practice to keep collections protected and documented even when they're not on exhibit. In addition to operational vulnerabilities, you also need to look at how vulnerable the structure and the fabric of your museum is. Are there any access points doors windows even the roof that an intruder could exploit to get in undetected. What types of physical and electronic security systems and hardware do you have at your site, what types of locks what types of alarms what types of cameras, and how well are these systems functioning. So if your location is one of the two pillars of security, then maintenance is the other. I'm going to return to this issue time and time again today, but any system you install is only as good as when and how thoroughly it was last maintained. If you put in a camera system 25 years ago, and no one has looked at it since, do you really have a camera system at your museum. I'm not so sure. If you still identify your threats and your vulnerabilities from the outside moving in, then you need to ask yourself how these will impact the objects in your collection, and this impact will vary by a number of factors first off, what object is it. Is this something that's likely to be defaced, or is it something with a high value that will be stolen and sold on the black market. And how is this object house at your organization is it locked in a storage cabinet in a storage room. Is it on open display in the period room of a historic house. Is it behind glass on exhibit as we see here in this Park Service example. If you can navigate between these different variables, you'll be able to determine which objects are most at risk and which objects have higher levels of protection, as well as actions you can take to improve protection of vulnerable areas of your collections. Of course, I am not expecting you after this overview of considerations to be able to walk through your gallery spaces and just rattle off risk at the top of a hat. Remember documentation is a key aspect of museum security. So it really does help to have a standardized written means of assessing and keeping track of your risks and what you're doing about them. There are many online tools out there to assess security risk and museums they're all fine. You can look at Robert Waller's C PRAM approach or D plan developed by any DCC. But what I really want to go over today is a tool that myself and my colleagues in the National Park Service Museum Management Program have developed to provide robust rich data on the risks that museums face from a number of areas. So let's take a to our MMP Museum Handbook site I show you our website. Zoom in a little bit, you'll see our Museum Handbook Park one has a number of chapters, each corresponding to a different topic in collections management. But what I'm looking at is the attachment to chapter 10. This is our new brand new for this year, in fact, museum risk assessment worksheet. Yes. It was developed for use by parks, but we have made it so that any institution should be able to open it up and start assessing risk, as long as you're able to use the Microsoft Excel program. If you can, and you open up this document you'll see, here we are. This is a fairly sizable spreadsheet for those in the Park Service this is not a required document but it is highly recommended, and it's fairly versatile you'll notice. There are a number of tabs, each corresponding to a different chapter in the museum handbook and therefore a different topic of collections management and risk. We also have a cover sheet which automatically tabulates your responses. So if you want a good executive summary to give to your director or your manager of facilities that cover sheet can serve that purpose. But let's navigate right now to the museum security tab. You'll see that it, like the other subject based tabs of this tool is divided into several areas. Broadly, the left hand side of the page has risks, the right hand side of the page documents and other actions to address those risks. We have several dozen risk factors for museum security, and for purposes of this tool we phrase them as best practices so if you fill out this assessment you're not saying, yes I have this risk, you're saying, no I'm not doing this thing that I should be doing. Some risk conditions like whether objects are put away in their storage cabinets when not being used you as the curator or the collections manager or registrar, whatever you call it, should be able to address by yourself. But others you'll see on the bottom half of the page, you should be addressing as part of an interdisciplinary institution wide team for museum security. Just because the collections are managed by the curator or registrar that does not mean that they are the only ones who need to keep security of collections in mind. This needs to be a whole institution approach so you do need to work with your facility staff in particular your security staff, your interim and education staff, and even the providers of your security systems to address how well your locks and your cameras are functioning. How well patrols are being conducted, and not just document these risks but also divide up who will address deficiencies to make sure that you're providing sufficient protection for your collections. To give you an example, let's say you have cameras throughout your campus, but the camera at your front door has gone on the blink. If you write down in this risk assessment that you don't have a fully functional camera system you'll notice something unusual that once you enter in that risk, it automatically propagates as what we call a critical priority to correct. And what type of risk assessment you do, especially if you're assessing risk for the first time, you're going to come away from that activity with a bunch of risks to deal with, and not all of these risks have the same level of priority. We have pre selected these critical priorities to help you navigate what areas you absolutely need to address first, and which areas can wait on the back burner until you take care of your critical priorities. If you're prioritizing and scheduling the other risks that you have, you may want to approach them from the probability severity consequence approach. That is to say how likely is a given threat to manifest at your institution, if something does happen, how many objects or what percentage of your campus will be affected, and what are the long term consequences to your museum. Are you going to take a hit to your reputation, you have to close a gallery or your entire campus for repairs. Are you going to see a drop off and visitation or donation or fundraising. If you can navigate between those factors, you'll be able to develop a roadmap of how to correct each efficiency, and in what order. And remember documentation is key risk assessment is never an ends of itself it's the means to determine what to do so that those risks no longer face your institution. So please do keep track and write down, not only what each risk is but what to do to correct them, who is responsible for taking those corrective actions, when the actions were started and finished and of course, what the cost is, if there is a monetary cost involved. To go back to the example of the camera system, the obvious corrective action for a malfunctioning camera at the front desk is for you and the facility manager to contact the system service provider to get repairs done ASAP. So I really do hope that you'll check out this excellent self assessment, not just for security risk but for a host of other risk conditions as well. After the close of my presentation, if you want me during the Q&A section to give a more in depth real time tour I can absolutely do so if you want you can just let us know in the chat or the Q&A bar. However, I do want to underscore the importance of repetition and redundancy when it comes to assessing risk. Even this robust tool is not one and done. At the very least, you need to regularly review your risk assessments in order to keep track of how well you are correcting identified deficiencies, and you should reassess on a regular basis, and when conditions change significantly at your museum. Let's say you have a sizable do no nation, where you've opened up a new wing of your building. There are two steps in terms of redundancy to pair self assessments with a professional assessment conducted by a certified cultural property protection professional. In the US you can find these professionals certified by institutions like IFCPP lane or collar. You can also talk to nearby museums ask them who they have worked with to assess the security at their institution. And who should you steer very far away from no matter who you end up working with. When you conduct a professional museum security survey and you're developing the scope of work for that contract, you need to include several provisions. First off the professional has to look at your security from a comprehensive point of view. They cannot solely look at systems they cannot solely look at practice they cannot solely look at your structure, they have to address all aspects together. They should look at how well sealed your building envelope is, they might even want to test out how easy it is to gain undetected entry into restricted areas. They should assess your physical security hardware and your electronic security systems, what types of systems are present in different areas of your building. Are these systems appropriate to your building and what they are protecting. And of course, are they functioning as intended. The professional should make recommendations as to whether systems need to be adjusted, or if new systems are needed, and they should also assess the practices that go on in your organization, not just within your collection staff, but from anyone who works at your building. Is everyone maintaining consistent levels of access control particularly to restricted areas like storage rooms. Is your backup house staff managing collections properly or are they just leaving objects lying around on tables for days on end. And the professional should assess whether you have and are properly implementing a security plan for your organization. Documentation is key and that goes for security procedures as well. The museum security plan is that one stop shop document. This is where you write down your institution's history of security breaches and other incidents. This is a track of who has conducted risk assessments, both self assessments and ones conducted by professionals, and what your progress is on addressing all those identified risks. It should list what specific systems both physical and electronic you have at your museum, and what the contact information is to get those systems repaired or modify. You can also outline what each position or each offices responsibilities are from museum security and emergency contact information, as well as specific emergency response steps for different types of security incidents ranging from what to do when you notice loss during inventory to God forbid what you do if there's an active shooter on your grounds. While the museum security plan can be a very useful document to determine how to protect objects to some people to others at your institution who may have less than noble intentions. This is an excellent listing of vulnerabilities to exploit. So it is very important to keep this plan restricted on a need to have basis. Your head of security your head of collections, it makes sense to have unrestricted access to this entire plan. However, everyone else who works at your institution really only needs to have parts of it emergency contact information emergency response steps for those in facilities who maintain systems, the contact information to get those systems repaired. I am not however suggesting that US curator or as head of security should lock this document in a drawer and forget about it. There needs to be a living document a gray paper will do nothing to protect your institution or its collections. It should be regularly reviewed to make sure that all elements are being implemented consistently. Or if there have been incidents you need to update your procedures and notify everyone accordingly, as well as if conditions change. If you don't have a museum security plan, you may want to talk to that certified cultural property protection professional in some cases they can help you develop one as well. The museum security plan is critical it is not the only document that outlines behaviors that we can take and processes that we can implement to protect our collections. In particular, there needs to be written understood procedures for controlling access to our museum collections, particularly collections in storage, just as with any other aspect of museum security. This is a team effort. You need to have buy-in from your facility staff your security staff, your concessions your interns your interpreters, everyone needs to understand that there need to be different levels of access to different spaces in your institution. And based on your position and your duties, you either will or will not be able to access certain areas. In developing procedures to control access, especially to restricted areas. It helps to ask the basic questions of who what when where why and how access should be granted or restricted. I'm going to go through each of these questions individually, but in point of fact, these are interrelated continuums of considerations. What is being accessed is affected by where it is why it's being accessed is affected by who it is, etc. So start with the continuum of you can have access to our collections, as might be quite obvious. If you have daily hands on direct responsibility for those objects, if you're a register or a collections manager or curator. It makes sense for you to have the broadest most permissive access to that collection, whereas other members of your staff who are not responsible for the collections should not have that same level of unfettered access. If you have a facility staff that manages the boiler room, you're not the one with the keys to that space right. The same should hold for our collections most precious part of our institutions and in any cases the reason our museums exist in the first place. You should have additional restrictions in place for people who are not working full time at your museum, whether it be seasonal docents volunteers interns, or even contractors who intermittently come into work on your utilities. If I may digress for just a moment on the issue of utility panels, whether these are the access panels for your fire protection system your environmental controls or yes your security systems. It's never a good idea to have these panels located inside a museum storage space. Best practice holds that they can be nearby or adjacent. But if this is not the case and you do have access panels in your storage room, then yes, a member of your museum staff who does have access needs to be present to monitor that contractor when they're doing work on that panel. At the end of the continuum of who can access museum collections visitors and researchers who are only ever present at your museum for what a few hours should have the most restricted access evolved needless to say a member of the public should not wander into a collection storage room and start touching objects. Of course, where you are in your organization depends on what levels of access should be controlled and maintained. The most restricted areas like collection storage rooms exhibit work in prep spaces or research spaces where objects are directly studied should only be available to select positions or select people at your organization. This is in contrast to the public spaces your exhibit galleries your period rooms where hundreds of people may move in and out during the day. Of course, even if you are present in a space that houses collections presence in the space does not automatically grant access to the objects housed in that space. If you are changing out the event cover from an air conditioning system in a storage room, your work has nothing to do with the objects housed in that space. There is no expectation set and understood before that work begins that you are not to start opening cabinets or bringing your buddies over to look at the cool objects that this museum has. Almost gets to the issue of why you would grant or restrict access in the first place. There is a difference between a registrar who needs to handle objects to tag or photograph them and a member of your interpretive division who is giving a tour or managing an educational program in an exhibit space. There's also a difference between someone photographing the objects because it is their job to do so and someone photographing objects out of research. You need to restrict how many objects researchers access this information should be determined ahead of time before their arrival. Similarly, if someone needs to do work in a collection space but their work has nothing to do with the collections, you need to make it clear that their work will not affect the collections, and you will need to be present to make sure that nothing happens. And these four basic questions get into when you should grant access and how. If you have demonstrated daily need to access collection that means you need at will or routine access. However, if you're not a part of the collections program at your museum. Let's say you're a big strong member of the facility staff and you're helping the curator with an exhibit de installation, you may be asked to move a cart of objects into a locked storage room. You will gain access to that room for purposes of that project, but there should be expectations in place ahead of time that that this does not grant you the ability to walk into that storage room whenever you please. Another example, let's say you're a guard doing a night patrol of a gallery, and you notice that a pipe has begun to leak dangerously close to a sculpture on open display. That guard should understand that under normal circumstances on an average night when nothing is wrong that they should not touch tamper or put anything on the objects, but in this emergency situation, they will be able to run and get a torque and put it over that sculpture to protect it from damage. And this three part level of access control differentiating between routine access project specific or intermittent access and emergency access will determine how access should be granted to each individual present at your museum. Those who have routine access will likely have keys to restricted spaces issued to them. You as curator, I bet have the key to your storage room on your key ring. However, if you only have project specific need to access a restricted area, it may be the case that you're not issued a key, but that those that do have access help you to sign out a key, as needed, that way you have a documented record of when you were in a space, you would otherwise have access to, or perhaps keys don't need to change hands at all. If I'm coming in to change out fluorescent light bulb ballasts in a storage room, I don't need to have a key to do so. The curator who has a key can simply escort me into that space and monitor my work to make sure I don't accidentally damage anything. And of course, I'm telling you about these different levels of access via a webinar over the internet, none of you are in the room with me as I'm talking to you. So I hope, and I think we've all seen over the past two or three years of the pandemic that there are a range of options available to us to make our collections and our museums accessible to the public without them leading to be physically present in our buildings at all. Ultimately, the answers to these questions about controlling access should be written down in your museum's access control policy. At the minimum, you need to differentiate between the levels of access to public areas like exhibit spaces and restricted areas like storage rooms, and what the different permissions are from museum staff, other staff volunteers interns docents contractors and members of the public, including researchers. You can do research in a research room or doing work on utilities in a space housing collections that is not open to the public. This policy needs to outline procedures as to how those individuals will be monitored accompanied and supervised by those who do have at will or routine access. And your policy should also document how access is recorded and documented on a daily basis and tracked long term. If your institution has specialized restricted areas like a laboratory or a research wing, you should include the procedures as to how these spaces are used in your access control policy. And if I can pull aside for just one moment to speak about research spaces at more length. These research spaces do need to be laid out to facilitate security and monitoring. I show you a good example. This is the interior of a research room at one of the park services regional facilities. I'll show you a larger image of a space right next door. These spaces are excellent at facilitating monitoring for several reasons. First off, notice, there is a large desk in the corner of the room, and a member of that facility staff is present to monitor the researcher when researchers being conducted. The staff presence accomplishes several things. First off, it allows you as the museum staff to do your work without having to drop everything and hover directly over the researcher. However, you're still in the room with them, so you can keep an eye on them. And you provide a useful service to that researcher if they have questions about the objects they're looking at they don't need to run around the building trying to find you they can just turn their head and ask you. And second, notice as well that the door to this room has a large viewing panel and a window that allows for monitoring from the outside as well as inside the room. Think back to those five D's of security, knowing that you are being watched by many eyes is an excellent psychological deterrent, but this deterrent is supplemented by a camera, which detects any funny business that might go on in this research space. And of course, your research areas do not need to be as large or as elaborate as this one, but at minimum, you do need to have museum staff presence to monitor, and they need to be separate from your storage rooms. Remember, collection storage is only used for collection storage. It is not also office space. It's not also research space and it's not used for storage of cleaning supplies or anything else. And of course, the provisions for how research spaces are accessed and use needs to be present, not just in your access policy, but also in some sort of public facing document that's available to researchers on your website and printed at your building. If you don't have this type of document, worry not, because in a pen mix G of the NPS Museum Handbook Park one, we have a conditions for access to museum collections document. Absolutely free to consult this document and use it as a base for what you develop at your institution. It outlines the process by which researchers contact a park or your museum ahead of time to determine which objects they'll be looking at. No, you should not expect researchers to be able to knock on your door the day of and start wandering through your storage rooms. It also outlines procedures for accompaniment and monitoring in restricted areas, how and if photography is allowed, as well as materials that cannot be brought into the restricted rooms. So researchers will need to check their suitcases bags they cannot bring in knives that could be used to tear pages out of rare books or that can be used to hide objects and of course pencils only please no pens whenever objects are involved. According to this document, we also have a sample access policy and procedures also located in appendix G. If you do not have written access policies at your museum, you should feel absolutely free to use this document as a baseline. One other document that you might find useful in appendix G is of course our visitor and staff log. I'm sure your institution uses something like this to document who's looked at which objects when they got there when they left and where they're from. You can either sign in after a front desk or interns who sign in whenever they enter in to a locked storage room. And I do stress that it is useful for both visitors and staff to use this log. Remember the importance of redundancy and layers of protection. This curator probably have the keys to that storage room on your key ring, you probably signed out for them when they were issued to you. So there's no other way of documenting when you've been in and out of a storage space and this is useful information. If an object does go missing or get damaged, who was last seen with that object. However, this visitor log isn't just useful for security. It's also critical for your long range planning and interpretation. What you see from your visitor logs that there's one area of your collection that keeps being accessed for research, and you've never mounted an exhibit or programming on that area that should inform your programming schedule. Of course, in addition to controlling access during the day, you also need written understood procedures to open up the building at the start of each day and close it at the end. One of the worst nightmare is for you and your coworkers to arrive at your museum at the beginning of the day, and you look at each other and realize the whole place has been left unlocked overnight, because no one knew whose job it was to close up the museum. Your opening and closing procedures need to be systematic and specific to each room in your building and each building at your campus if you have more than one. You need to determine which position or which office is responsible for opening and closing. You cannot simply leave it to whoever happens to leave last at night or whoever happens to arrive first in the morning. Your procedures should also outline the specific sequences by which you lock or unlock doors and arm and disarm your security alarm panels. Note I do mean sequence in terms of order of operation, never the specific numerical sequence that forms an arming or disarming code. You should never distribute these codes in the written opening and closing procedures. It does not even make sense to do so, because codes need to be unique per person. You have worked at museums where there is a single arming code for the security panel that is shared amongst all staff and that code never changes and needless to say that it's no way to run a secure building. Each person with their own unique code also needs to change it regularly at least once a year if not more often for restricted areas. Your closing procedures should also outline procedures to run visual checks, especially in exhibit spaces. No, I am not calling for you to do a full inventory twice a day. That would be ludicrous, but you do need to walk through and make sure all the objects in an exhibit gallery or a period room are in place. Nothing has moved, nothing has been damaged, nothing has gone missing. And that all the utility panels in your building are functioning well, nothing indicates the need for immediate maintenance or repair. Also look for whether people have attempted to break into your museum during the night or trying to stay behind after hours, either due to ill will or simply because they got confused and lost. If there is evidence that an incident has happened, your procedures should also outline what to do and who to notify to guarantee a prompt response. And if for any reason you don't have written opening and closing procedures, we got you covered. Museum Handbook Appendix G has not one but two sample opening and closing procedures for you to reference and use as the baseline for yours. One is designed for a storage facility, one is designed for a historic house. In this juncture, I have been mentioning lock and doors and issuing keys but I have not specifically spoken to key control. And you must pardon the wordplay here, but control of keys is key to the protection of our collection. However, it's an ongoing problem in the museum field that keys are over issued. Not only do you the curator have the key to get into storage but so does everyone on your facility staff and the president of the board and the president of the board's brother-in-law. And this is no way to keep our precious collection secured. So I am going to open this up to you in the form of a poll of the following six positions. An alarm system representative who's working on changing out your intrusion detection systems. A collections manager, your curator, let's say a part time interpreter, your night guard, or the director of your board, who should have on their key ring be key to your museum storage space. You can select multiple options as many as you want, but there are correct and incorrect answers here. Let's give you like 45 seconds to respond. And then we'll see how you fared. And I see Tiffany has opened up the poll right now. Tiffany, I think we can probably close the poll now and let's take a look at the results. Oh boy, this is what I like to see 97% of you have marked down that the collections manager should have that storage room key and 72% of you, the curator, and let me tell you, these are the correct answers. Yes, the members of your museum staff who are responsible for the collections, it makes sense for them to have on their key rings that storage room key. However, that is not to say that these other four positions should never have access to this space, or should never have at some point, the key to this space. Remember how I went over the different ways of mediating access at a museum. It may be the case that you accompany and monitor your alarm system rep or your board president when you're touring them through storage on your systems, or perhaps that security guard signs out a key that is kept by your head of security for emergency purposes only and then returns it once they're done. And I do stress the importance of hearing or segmenting what levels of key access different positions at your museum have because keys are inversely proportional to security and directly proportional to risk. By which I mean, the more keys are issued at a site, the more liability there is, and the fewer keys are issued the fewer opportunities there are for that key to be compromised and for something to go wrong. However, the biggest question is, if I have lax key control and everyone to get in and out, how do I make a more secure set of procedures without seeming confrontational or like I inherently just trust my staff. What makes me successful is to focus on that issue of liability, and the very real costs involved with over issuance of keys. Let's say you have a staff of 15 people. Everyone at your site has a key to get into the storage room because it just makes life easier you don't need to ask for permission you can just walk in. And then later realize that an object has gone missing. That means every single person at your institution is a suspect, and this can really prolong how long it takes to investigate and get that object back, and the longer it takes the less likely you are to ever see that object again, but also it means that the door needs to have its lock record and all those keys need to be confiscated and reissued. I'm going to do that whole song and dance again next time something goes missing, and this is really needlessly expensive. Yes, I will go as far as to say that good key control doesn't just protect your collections, it protects your institutions bottom line as well. Now, if we follow best practice this means that you should only be issuing keys to the minimum number of staff as required for the performance of their official duties. This is not just an nps position I'm looking at all you am accredited museums as well. Ultimately, we issue keys because there is a demonstrated need to have a key, not because it's convenient to have one. Being issued a key means that you are entrusted with the responsibility for what that key unlocks, which means that if you're not responsible for what's behind that door, you don't need that key. And taking this logical approach we found can be pretty effective at making sure people understand the different levels of keyed access as at an organization it doesn't seem to accusatory or confrontational really you're doing everyone a favor by making sure keys are only given out to the minimum number of people. And the ways in which you control keys at your site should be documented in your museums key control policy. The person who develops this policy should be the person who is in charge of issuing and managing keys at your museum. This may be the head of security this may be the head of collections if you have a really small museum these are probably the same person. Your key control policy needs to address anything that gets you into a locked space at your museum, both physical keys or mechanical keys, but also electronic key cards if you've got them and access codes. I will mention that if you use mechanical keys, the doors to restricted areas should use keys that have restricted or proprietary key ways. And a proprietary key way means that you cannot get a copy of the key made at your local locksmith shop you have to go through the manufacturer. And in many cases the manufacturer will only issue a blank or a copy to that designated key custodian responsible for keys at your site so just because you work at a museum that doesn't mean you can get a copy made of any key please. Your key control policy should document how keys are issued when they're first given to someone you should have some kind of standardized form that you sign out when you are given a key and that you counter sign when you turn that key back when you leave that museum. Please do not let your departing intern or people who retire from the museum depart without first getting their keys back. I know you may grown at hearing this, but it is a really good idea to do with least annually an inventory or audit of all your keys to make sure everyone has only those keys they were issued. No keys have gone missing, no keys have been duplicated, none have been swapped, or none have been bent or damaged or otherwise in need of being reissued. Your policy needs to outline where each key in your organization will be kept so that it is secure. Without your museum, not just for restricted areas should be managed by the key custodian, if they're not issued, then that means they need to be locked up in a locking key box, probably in and out of the way security office that the key custodian manages. However, there are other museum keys that you as curator or collections manager should be in charge of. I show you here, a key box in a museum storage room, I'm sure many of us here today have very similar key boxes. Inside this box are the labeled keys to each of the storage cabinets storing our objects. None of these keys inside this box ever need to be issued to anyone, not even the curator, you don't need on your key ring the key to get into cabinet number five. What you might have as curator is instead the key to open this box. And you use it on a sign out basis it like any other key that's not issued but accessed for a specific project. Those requiring access would go through the authorizing party, either the key custodian or the curator, you write down that you're taking this key you'd open the box you take and sign out for the key to the cabinet you need. Open it up do what you need to do, and then return it to the right hook so you know it's in its proper place and has it gone missing, and then return that access key and sign out that you have returned it. And this procedure should hold for museum cabinet keys and any key that is not issued but is signed out after organization. Those keys you have been issued however also need to be kept secure. Please don't remove them from your key rings or just leave them lying out on your desk when you go get lunch. A co worker forgets their keys, do not lend them do not swap key cards or key codes, but you know, we're all human. Maybe one day you lock a door a little too overzealously and the breaks off inside the lock. If that happens or if your keys are otherwise lost or compromised, please do not say, stay silent out of fear of embarrassment or reprisal, you need to notify the key custodian as soon as possible, so they can take appropriate action, whether it be re issuing your key or recording that lock. So to recap access and key control, you do need to maintain different levels of access to restricted versus public areas of the museum. And this access should be controlled by differentiating who has keys and when those keys can be accessed. Ultimately, this makes it easier for people to do their jobs and increases the protection of the collection. However, these are not the only procedures that we do on a daily basis which keep our objects safe. I'm sure those of us who manage the collections are doing a number of things to keep our objects protected, and if you're not doing any one of these, these are absolutely your critical priorities to correct. Needless to say, the objects in your collection need to be documented. You can't just have piles of unassessioned items sitting on tables for years on end. The management plan does need to go over the minimum information necessary for the catalog cards which document each of the objects in your collection. If you don't have minimum information, you are welcome to look at part two of the museum handbook, but I've also included in your reference sheet icons object ID standards these are internationally agreed upon and very obvious minimum information standards like what type of object is it what's its title who's its maker what's its date its materials measurements, and adding a brief description that includes any identifying features. In addition to cataloging you also need to appropriate the number mark and tag your objects and yes you absolutely need object photography. You don't have to have glossy coffee table book ready photos but you do need images of the objects from multiple angles that show up those identifying features. If you don't have images, you're probably not getting that object back if it does get stolen. Just as you would restrict physical access to your storage rooms, you should also implement differential access to your collections management system or collections database. Please do keep the information in your CMS up to date in particular object locations, you won't know if an object is moved or has actually gone missing otherwise. You should also implement different tiers of access to that system. Of course, a registrar should have read write permissions, but you should not hold for a researcher. And please do mind sensitive information like sensitive donor information, archaeological or paleontological site locations or crazel values. This information should only be distributed on an as needed basis. Of course, once you document your objects you also need to regularly inventory them to make sure they're still present. And I'm going to ask you a serious question. Is anyone here from a museum that has never done in its history, a 100% baseline inventory of all the objects in your collection. If this is you, then it has been fun talking to you you can access the recording tomorrow, hang up right now, contact your director and your board and your legal counsel, you need to get procedures in place to do that baseline inventory right now. Now for everyone else who does have a baseline I'm sure you're also regularly inventorying your collections. And your CNP should outline how and when that's done in the park service we inventory once a year. If you have a very sensitive collection, you might do it more often. And you should also outline how much of the collection is inventory each time. If your collections are really small you'll probably be doing the 100% inventory, but we in the park service use a statistically valid random sample of no more than inventory. If all of those 250 are present, the rest of the objects are probably present as well. However, this does not apply to what we call controlled property. For us that's firearms objects on loan from another institution and objects over a certain dollar value. If you have these types of objects in your museum, those must be inventoried 100% every year, and your CNP should also outline was responsible for doing the inventory. If you have a small staff, it's probably your collections manager. But if you have the personnel for it, what we do with the park service that we find very useful is to do an inventory in a team as you see here. The curator is joined by an impartial reviewer someone not from the museum program does not have a conflict of interest who can make sure that everything is actually where it's supposed to be. But what happens when it's not what happens when an object is not in its proper location during inventory, and you look high and you look low and that thing is gone. You need to have procedures in place to respond to the loss of objects when they're discovered. And this holds whether you find them on inventory which means they might have walked off years ago. So you find them during opening or closing. I'll reiterate, you need to have up to date information and photographs of your collections or you're unlikely to get those back. And there are a number of organizations to contact to begin that process. Once you have notified the appropriate people in your museum. In addition to local law enforcement there are a number of national and international organizations dedicated to recovering stolen museum objects. There is a very in depth listing in chapter four of museum handbook part two. I have included that link in your reference sheet. These includes the FBI art theft program and the art loss register among others to change tactics entirely. I know so many of us are here today from historic house museums that offer tours to the public. While these are certainly important interpretive programs they're also one of the riskiest conditions you can ever expose an object to think about it in a period room. You've got lots of objects, very high density, they're probably the most important objects in your museum, and they are totally out in the open with nothing to separate them from the tripping feet or grasping hands of our visitors. So how do we keep objects safe on tours. Well first off, tours really should be accompanied. You cannot expect the object to be safe if you just send visitors in to wander through the space at their leisure. But you also need to manage how many people are on tours. If you've got a busload of 50 people walking up to your front door at a time, there is no way to keep that one group manageable, you need to divide up large groups into subgroups of a manageable space, and either start them off on alternate tour routes if your building is large enough, or get them places in your campus to prevent bottlenecks or damage to objects. But you should also look at how many people are conducting tours. If you have the staff for it. What we found to be really effective is just like an inventory to conduct the tour in a team. There's a tour leader at the head of the group who's in charge of interpretation but there's also a trailer staff at the end who serve several important functions. First off, the trailer keeps the group moving very important for keeping on schedule. They're also watching out to see that no one's trying any funny business with the objects. And if a visitor has to leave the tour early, crying baby medical emergency to use the bathroom whatever. That trailer staff can escort them out of the space so you don't send them wandering through your building alone, and you don't have to stop the whole tour and its tracks to move to the entrance. As you would outline what can and cannot be brought into a research space, you need to make available to the public what they can and can't bring on a tour. You should have written documentation on your website and printed at your front desk that visitors cannot bring in things like bags and backpack food drink wet umbrellas knives large videography cameras and other materials. You may also want to look into having lockers for visitors can check their belongings in consultation with your legal counsel to discuss any liability issues. You'll also notice from this image that the Ranger giving this tour is separated from the tour group by a velvet rope and I cannot stress enough the importance of taking a proactive approach to keeping objects well out of visitor reach. In addition to liberally employing barriers stanchions and other physical security barriers that I'll go over in just a few slides. It helps to walk through your tour route with the tallest person who works at your museum. If that tall person can extend their arm and touch in object, please don't let them actually touch it. But if this is the case, you need to either reorient your tour route or move the objects that visitors can't reach them. This is an additional layer of protection. This is additional not substitute. You may want to individually alarm certain objects, or secure small objects that might be jostled by vibration with unobtrusive museum quality materials. And of course you do need to be prepared for what to do if something does go wrong. What happens if someone does try to take an object or a visitor becomes belligerent uncomfortable though it may be you need to have those conversations and engage in training with your front life staff will be giving tours. You need to be prepared for medical incidents. What happens if a visitor grows faint or they're going to collapse. We don't want them to hurt yourself but you also don't want them to crash down on top of the chairs in your period room. I guarantee you very few historic house museums have every single space interpreted to the public, you've probably got a closet or recovered or somewhere where you can sell a few folding chairs that your trailer staff can fetch to be considered of the objects and of the well being of our visitors. So those of us who are not here from historic houses don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you either staff presence in galleries and other exhibit spaces is also critical as a deterrent and line of defense. Whether you have full time security staff interpreters or people who pull double duty present. These are the members of your organization that the public deals with the most, they may be the only people that visitors interact with when they visit your museum. Which means it is always a delicate balancing act between providing protection and creating a welcoming and enjoyable environment. We don't want to create a carceral museum, where as soon as visitors get on to your site, they're being followed around they're treated as though they're guilty until presumed innocent. First off people may become aggressive if they feel that they're suspected of trying to start something. And even if they don't, they're going to leave negative reviews of your museum on social media and you don't want that to be the first thing that you'll look for your site, but we do need to have enough people present during the day and especially after hours to respond to security incidents. The way in which we can get the most out of our public gallery staff is to pet them. That is to say to look at your PET positioning equipment and training. There needs to be enough staff present to quickly respond to an incident anywhere at your building. But what helps with response is for staff to be able to see what's going on. Let me show you an example. This is the interior of a park visitor center, if no longer exists this entire exhibit space has been totally renovated and I think you can see why right. It's not each of which is a different sub theme of the exhibit and maybe that's nice interpretive wise, but when you realize that the Rangers at this site were located here. You realize they could not see a single thing going on in fact there's nowhere you can stand in this one room to have unfettered views of what is going on with your visitors. You also need to have staff present so that they have an uninterrupted view shed of each room in which they're located, and you also need to make sure staff are positioned at the building entrances, especially after hours that's really non negotiable. You also need to make sure staff are properly equipped. You can then make it a subjective decision as to whether you should follow around one visitor or stay present in one space. It helps to supplement presence of people with presence of systems, such as a motion detector that doesn't have a shrill alarm when it's activated but rather a pre recorded message such as please move away or do not touch you can get these motion detectors for like 25 US dollars they are not expensive. In addition to positioning and equipping your staff you also need to make sure staff are properly trained up not just in how to respond to different incidents, but it also helps to go through body language and implicit bias training, and in de escalation training to stop an incident from growing violent. I've included a link to Moab that's management of aggressive behavior training in the reference sheet. This is an excellent training program that I highly recommend your security and gallery staff go through. But to return to that issue of equipment. Now's the time to deal with our final topic this will not be too long, but I do want to give an overview of physical and electronic security systems. And just as a brief note, technically everything I have been discussing today falls under the umbrella of physical security, but I do want to differentiate between those passive systems which do not activate in a security incident and those that do. We need to have systems present in our museum. Good practice is important, but it's not enough. In the worst case scenario if you've got a curator who's been falsifying their sign and laws. If there are cameras in those storage rooms cameras don't lie and you will catch that incident in place to start with an overview of the types of physical security hardware any museum should have no matter how big or how small. You need to have different layers of barriers in place at all levels of that museum security bullseye figure, which mean you need to have fences at your perimeter including a locking gates that people can't get in whenever they want, but also be aware of natural barriers like rivers and cliffs that serve as deterrence. The building also needs to be free of vegetation or bushes that can serve as hiding places for intruders, and the building envelope itself needs to be a secure barrier, which means you need to have doors that are locking windows that close all the way if they can be open and that are locked inside your building the restricted doors to your collection storage room should be using a high security lock with a deadbolt which means that this is a lock made by the manufacturer to be resistant against picking drilling or other forms of tampering. And of course in our exhibit spaces we should be making ample use of physical barriers like stanchions velvet ropes metal grates and others that you should use in combination as needed. I'll show you an interior of a historic house at a park surface site. I am sure many of us here use the same sort of metal rating at our institutions, but take a closer look. Why is there a large acrylic panel only in front of the bed. As some of you might guess, people keep trying to jump into this bed because the US president died there by using this clear panel we provide uninterrupted viewing while interrupting undesired access. This will also turn your attention to the floor. Notice how the carpet in the furnished area is totally different from the one on the tour route. This indicates how important those subtle psychological barriers are at deterring unwanted access and damage to our collections. Something as simple as putting down runner mats or carpeting on our tour route, send subtle signals to people that they should stay on the tour route and not stray. It is important to supplement barriers with appropriate notification and signage, and it's particularly important to supplement written signs that few visitors probably need with audible notations like those motion detectors that play a pre-recorded message. Those are quite a lot harder to ignore. Within our exhibit galleries and at our entrances, it is really important for us to understand the difference between safety and security glass. These terms interchangeably in common parlance but they do not mean the same thing when it comes to protecting your collection. Safety glass is tempered glass. It is designed to shatter into tiny little bits instead of big jagged pieces, but it will shatter with enough force. Security glass is reinforced glass. You can hit it with a brick or a hammer or a stanchion and it will not shatter. Some varieties resist two minutes of assault, others will last you over 25 minutes. If you go to a jewelry shop or a watch shop, you better believe those cases are security glass, not safety glass. And if you don't understand this difference, it can be catastrophic for your museum. Those of us who have been following the news might have read about an incident just a few months ago. I'll set the scene for you. It's not that late at night, and you are a man with a problem. You're really angry and you need to smash something. And you find yourself holding a chair directly in front of the museum with a big inviting glass entrance. And you begin moving through the gallery, smashing opening exhibit cases and throwing objects to the ground. Needless to say, that museum entrance was not made of security glass. There was also no glass break detector present, and I'll get to that when I cover intrusion detection systems. And you might also ask, well, what about the cameras or the guards? Were those not present? No, they were. But to go back to that issue of positioning, guards were present monitoring the camera feeds in the security office, not positioned at the front of that building entrance, which could have prevented so much of that damage. So I will reiterate, your equipment and your positioning and your selection of hardware make a big difference at your museum. Of course, you don't need to smash an exhibit case open if you can just lift the patrine because your case isn't locked. I'm sure we all know that we should be using star headed security screws instead of flat or Phillips head screws we can get from a hardware store. But in many cases security screws aren't actually securely installed in cases. If you can, after the close of this webinar, go to your gallery, run your finger over the surface of the case and touch the head of a security screw, that screw is not securely installed. It needs to be recessed so far that you cannot touch it, but the actual ideal installation is for screws to be hidden behind an access door that's opened with a key. If you have accessible holes to artwork mounted on the walls, you don't just want to hammer a nail in there and hope for the best. We need to use secure double ended bolt snaps or S or L hooks or other secure brackets. I show you an illustration with some examples from one of our conservogram technical leaflets, I have this leaflet linked in the reference document. And if you want more technical information, I can't recommend enough the documents developed by security organization aces in coordination with am. I have three documents listed in the reference sheet, they provide great technical but lay person friendly info on how to construct secure storage and exhibit spaces, including considerations for alarms and other electronic security systems, which is the last thing I'll be discussing with you today. Just as you would have different levels of physical barriers, you need to have different layers of intrusion systems and alarms of video surveillance systems which are functionally the same thing as CCTV nowadays. The lighting is also an impediment to entry if you have a well lit building exterior with no pockets of shadows that can serve as hiding places. That's a deterrent, and it also improves the quality of recorded footage. Of course, any system is only as good as when and how thoroughly it was last inspected tested and maintained. So you do need to work with your system providers to schedule and implement inappropriate schedule with which to do so. I will caution. We never want to be on the cutting edge when it comes to managing our collections. The hot new trend may actually prove disastrous if given enough time, and this holds for security systems as well. Please do not use Internet of Things connected systems at your museums smart cameras smart doorbells smart locks are not the smart choice for your organization. This is a very nascent field and it's largely unregulated. For example, there are no minimum security standards for smart camera feeds. There is no guarantee that someone from the outside can't hack into your cameras for your locks whenever they choose. That's not even getting into how many providers including large ones like ring have sold your data to the highest bidder. Additionally, because there's not regulatory pressure, it's really easy and convenient for these IOT companies to just come up with new systems when an inevitable security vulnerability manifests, rather than provide any support for existing systems. And when these companies go belly up as many do your left saddle with a bunch of useless electronics. Those systems that do report to have encrypted access in many cases this access is opt in, and it's kind of stapled on to the software so it's really hard to use which increases the likelihood that you won't use it properly. The fact of the matter is those factors that make IOT systems attractive like real time monitoring of camera feeds or remote access are no longer unique to these systems. The trusted security providers who have been in the game for years now offer these features to you without a costing a huge amount of money. Now the following only partially applies to Park Service and our friends from the federal government we have specific authorities to operate only certain systems so please talk to your park or regional physical security coordinators, but for you know, when you are selecting a trusted system provider and determining what systems to use, you have to be like Eisenhower here, you got to muster the troops, which means it's a good idea to go back to your nearby museums and other institutions, ask them who they work with, who has provided good service, and who has not. Whether you use a national provider like ADT, a local provider, or even a company that focuses on museums like art century. You can narrow down your choices and then bring those system reps to your museum for lunch and to talk turkey, you need to establish expectations as for what it will really mean to own and use one of those systems. How long is it going to take to install, how long will it take to respond to catastrophic failure versus routine maintenance needs. You need to have this information documented and tracked so that if your provider is not making good on their established schedule, you know that you should look elsewhere. Even local companies are not solely devoted to your museum their attention will be divided between dozens if not hundreds of other clients. But if it takes them six months to adjust to failing camera, you should probably look at a different service provider. You should also keep track of during installation when your systems are calibrated, and if they are positioned appropriately to pick up only what you want. In security there's really no such thing as a false alarm, if an intrusion detection system goes off it's picking up something, but it may be the case that you placed a motion detector directly in front of the pool court for a fan, and it's movement during the day is being registered. If that's the case, the goal isn't to rip out that system and get rid of it, it just needs to be recalibrated. Of course, no matter which system you use, do keep in mind not just the one time cost of installation, but the ongoing costs of ownership and maintenance. If you just barely have enough resources to install a fancy biometric scanner at your entrance but you don't have any resources to maintain that system. You don't have the resources to install it in the first place. In particular for intrusion detection systems. Please go over the notification procedures with your service provider, you never want a system that only enunciates locally, meaning an alarm goes off in the building but it never automatically notifies law enforcement. And finally, it's always a good idea to work with integrated system providers, one company manages your cameras and your intrusion systems. It saves on maintenance costs and it also provides a more robust comprehensive understanding of your building as a whole rather than just one sliver. As an additional bit of consideration for intrusion detection systems of course we know there are many types that we can and should use some detect motion some detect breaking glass like if you smash your way into the front gate. Others detect applying or removing certain amounts of pressure such as lifting an object from the case or an exhibit pedestal, but be aware that each type of intrusion detection and alarm system has its own advantages and disadvantages that make them suitable towards certain situations and not others. For example, a passive audio sensor will do a wonderful job of detecting someone rustling around a locked cabinet, but it's not going to do anything in a busy crowded exhibit gallery. You need to have multiple complimentary layers of detectors in place in the case where an object is in the room where that cases in the building where that room is and yes on the ground surrounding that building. There isn't a power systems are zoned. You never want especially in something like a historic house for the system to either be totally on or totally off. You need to divide up your physical space into different zones with different levels of sensitivity. For example to look back at that bed where people kept trying to jump in, you can better believe that the tour route is a different zone than the furnished area. So that motion during the day on the tour route is not picked up, but access to that bed is well. Many systems can be installed either wired or wirelessly. These have advantages and disadvantages as well. Wireless systems are very easy to adjust. They're not destructive to the historic fabric of a historic house. But the signal isn't as strong or as secured as a wired system, although wired systems again are much harder to adjust and they are more inherently destructive to the fabric of historic buildings. Just a brief note to go back to zones, please make sure your zones are comprehensible towards those with authorization to access the panels. As you see here in these examples, there's the hallway door, there's the mage ports. There's not a bunch of hard to understand numbers or other codes if people don't know how to arm and disarm the panels, they just won't do it. And the same principles as using multiple layers of intrusion systems holds for cameras. Some cameras are designed to be used outdoors at night, others inside a well lit interior. But you can also get pretty creative as to where you put your cameras and how you hide them. I show you what seems to be an innocuous land post but in fact there is a hidden camera present. Or if you've got a historic house where people don't walk through the room, they're gated off and they just poke their heads in. What you do is that adjoining wall is an ideal location for cameras. Visitors don't know that they're there, but you do. However, while you can and should use cameras that don't look like cameras, you can't use dummy cameras, things that look like a security camera that don't actually record footage. First off, it's a total waste of money, why would you want something installed that does not document anything, but also if an incident does happen and visitors are involved they expect there to be recorded footage. If you have tricked them that means you are now legally liable. And the last thing I want to deal with is the one exception to my injunction against being on the cutting edge. You do need to outline how camera footage is accessed in real time and after an incident. Nowadays, it is actually possible to get secure end to end encrypted apps that allow for real time monitoring of all the cameras at your location from trusted security providers. If that app is installed on a tablet given to guards, which has been the case at a few university galleries, they don't even need to move around to follow visitors, they can see everything going on at that space, which cuts down on response time and increases a sense of pride and ownership over their work, which cuts down on costly staff turnover. But even if you're not dealing with real time review of camera footage, you need to establish how long it will be before your camera footage is deleted by the provider. There is not a single camera company out there that indefinitely archives your footage, whether it's a few weeks or a few months that recording will be deleted and the last thing you want is to not know what that grace period is. You can capture it on camera, and it is deleted before you have a chance to get it to send to law enforcement. And speaking of last things, that's the last thing I had to discuss with you today. I do want to reiterate, you do not need to install one single expensive system to protect your collections, you need to combine many systems with robust practices that are implemented throughout your museum. The things that don't cost the most money oftentimes have the most payout to keeping your collections, visitors and your museums safe and secure. If you want to find out more information, please do visit and bookmark the museum management program website. We got the museum handbook, we got the conserver grams. But did you know we also have over 50 fully virtual museum exhibits. I even curated one on photographer William Henry Jackson. All the information is right here if you want to ask me any questions but of course we have time for questions now. Before we move on, I want to thank you so much for joining us here today. I also want to mention if you want to learn more about museum security in October the Smithsonian Institution is hosting its annual national conference on cultural property protection. This is a two day online conference and it's always going to be jam packed with the latest news about museum security. Registration does cost money but it's like 25 bucks and it is well worth the cost. I won't be presenting there but I will be in attendance and I hope to see many of you there as well. So Tiffany, I think we can now begin to read off the questions in the Q&A box I'm going to stop sharing my screen. And I'm going to turn on my camera. Thank you so much, Sarah. This was really comprehensive. I really appreciate all the time you took and the resources you've shared. We do have some questions. I see we have about five minutes left in the land presentation but what we'll do is, if it's okay with you, we'll read through the questions and get to them and for those of you who have to leave, the questions will be part of the recording so you can always pop back in a couple of days and check out the answers to questions if you do have another comment. Yeah, and I'm looking through some of the questions and some of them I think have been semi addressed during the presentation you know we had one about restricting access without hurting people's feelings or what to do if you have a mostly volunteer staff. This goes into the issue of tiering your key control. If you have volunteer staff instead of issuing keys you may have a sign out option so that keys aren't in people's possessions if they're not going to be used for months at a time. And I'm guessing that this is something that makes our jobs easier and removes their liability if something goes wrong can also be useful at making sure that procedures are followed without any feelings getting hurt. Let me look at some of the other questions we have. Albonka says at our museum we have anthropology and paleontology departments. Anthra was cracked down on access, none of our volunteers have keys it's in your collections policy. paleontology doesn't feel the same way they have over a dozen volunteers and interns that have keys and access collections offices. Oh how can we approach this conversation with our colleagues without creating a rift between our departments. Oh that's an excellent question. I would say that one way of looking at key control from a whole institution perspective is how you would approach any other undesirable incident, it might help to engage in some kind of tabletop incident or training that simulates a breach of collection security. You might want to gather everyone around to discuss what went right and what went wrong and collections approach, which might illustrate the cracks in security that are different between different programs. We also want to look into working with a certified professional I know we have someone asking where can you find one. There are a number of organizations I know in the US, Stephen Lane who actually gave a C to C care webinar back in 2008 runs a good shop. You may want to approach his company IFC PP to look at cultural property protection professionals of course I can only speak for those within the United States at present. Oh, we have a question about key cards. Okay, key card systems electronic keys are great. They are highly sophisticated they automatically document access, you can restrict access based on time of day per person so if you have an intern, you can actually program that system so that they can't access a different hours, but it is very much a get what you pay for sort of system they can be expensive. If you have the resources to install and maintain the system. I would absolutely recommend that you use an electronic key card system. Please just make sure that you use a system with a mechanical fail safe. In many cases, when the systems don't work, they fail in the closed position, sort of isolating you from getting into your collections at all. Let's see what other question does NPS provide security grants from museums. No, we do not. But if you are looking into funding such as funding to develop a museum security plan, you might want to look into what IMLS offers it may be an option you have you may also want to work with a security professional to see if they can help in the development of that plan. I will also say the national endowment for the humanities has a preservation assistance grant for smaller institutions that is a small dollar amount that they like to fund what they call the unsexy projects like this that are important to preservation and access but you know maybe aren't big and flashy things so you may look into that as well. Yes, what I've also done seeing as we're approaching 230 Eastern. I've also put in two links into the chat. One is the link to that national conference on cultural property protection and the second one here we go. If the link to our website, please do check us out. As always, any information we put on our museum management program website is always available to the public free to access its good information. We hope you'll use it and I hope that I'll see you at the conference in October. Thank you so much to everyone for joining us to Tiffany and for Mike for managing things, and for you all I wish you the best of luck in your security journey. Don't be a stranger. Thank you.