 In developing this community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the Connecting to Collections initiative, including the Bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. And links to these resources are all filed under the Topics menu on the site. We will also file a recording of today's webinar there. And it's a good place to go later to continue the discussion in the general discussion boards. So about twice a month, the Connecting to Collections online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource, and we host a webinar related to it. The resources we posted for today's webinar can be accessed by clicking on our home page. And today, I am very happy to welcome Julia Clark and Laura Hort Stanton. Laura Hort Stanton is the Director of Preservation Services at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia. And Julia is the Curator of Collections at the Abbey Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. So I wanted to invite you both to say a little thing about yourself, Julia. Do you want to go first? Sure, thanks. My name is Julia Clark. I am, as Elsa said, the Curator of Collections at the Abbey Museum. The Abbey is a medium-sized museum focused on Native Americans who are located in Maine, in beautiful Bar Harbor, Maine, vacation land. I am one of a full-time staff of six. So we're not huge, but we're a little bit bigger than small. I am the only collection staff person that we have. I work with volunteers and some part-time people off and on with grants. And I also do a lot of exhibit work, and I share facilities management responsibilities with one other staff person, which was an outbranching of being a collections person. I started my museum studies coursework in graduate school and then continued with a variety of on-the-job training, including workshops, hands-on training with experts, conferences, and so on. And I continued to learn on a regular basis. My first job here at the Abbey Museum was actually to inventory and pack and move our collections from our original facility in 1928 to the last 1957 facility to our new, as of 2001, facility. And I continue to work with the storage bases in both museums, so I've got both of those experiences to draw on. That's great. Thanks. Laura? Hi, everyone. My name is Laura Hortdanton. I'm Director of Preservation Services at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. You guys have the cheat sheet, but I normally tell everybody if they can remember my full name, my full title, and the full name is the place where I work, I'll give them a dollar. But this is a lot to remember. But here at CCAHA, I head up our Preservation Services Department doing education and training and also doing a lot of one-on-one consultations and working with museums and libraries, archives, historic sites on assessing preservation needs, also doing things like disaster planning, preservation planning, helping with development of various policies and procedures as well. Came to this job about seven years ago now. My background is as a museum curator and collections manager. I feel it's really wonderful to be in this conservation environment and to be able to work with so many different types of institutions. And you'll see today some of the photos that I've included, getting to see the good, the bad, and the ugly at a lot of different kinds of places. Great. Thank you so much. So we wanted to start off with a couple polls. For one second, I'll pull those over. Everyone can just take a minute and slow it in. This gives us some idea of who we're talking to and what the range of experiences and issues everybody has. I'll pull over our first-door prize question. These are similar to the ones that we aired in that first webinar on the topic. I'll be familiar to some of you. So that's a museum. OK, so majority museums and muscle cures. Pretty even mix. I mean, I said select all that apply, but on what kind of storage situations everybody is working with. So I know those all present different kinds of problems. Where in your building are collections stored? The Latin is basement, the closet, the attic. Are you surprised by how many have dedicated custom space or is that what you would have expected? That's a nice amount to see, that that many places. Good. So congratulations to all of you who have been able to maneuver that. We've got a couple more here, off-site storage and staffing at your institution. And here's our last poll. We're asking if your institution has a budget for collections care. This is a pretty decent number of folks that actually have a full-time staff at the collection. We've got a good number of lucky institutions today. Great. And off-site storage. This is you with off-site storage. It's great to see that over half of you also have a budget for collections care. Number, numbers. OK, I will pull over our first door prize question. And we select someone at random here in the Heritage Preservation Office after the webinar. And we send a book from the bookshelf. I'll send a form with a list of books that you can choose from. So what is the biggest challenge in storage that our participants generally deal with today? I know there's going to be, everybody has more than one. But if you can just start us off by telling us what some of the things that you have problems with. Oh, Caroline in Florida, space, space, space. I think probably a lot of people would say the same thing. I'm just going to mention right now too that tomorrow we're hosting a webinar on data logging. That'll be at 1 o'clock Eastern time in this same meeting room. And we'll be addressing a lot of concerns about measuring humidity and temperature and other environmental issues. And what the best equipment is for specific cases. So I'm thinking that's going to be helpful for a lot of these people too. Look at everybody's space. And actually, space and organization actually are pretty tightly interrelated because if you could, organization can help a little bit with space. Look at all that, look at all the space. Let's try and spend a lot of time on that. And maybe some of the more environmental questions we'll address. We should touch on them for sure, but in case people can't make it tomorrow. One other thing I was going to say is that the chat is unmoderated today. And if you type a question in there and it's not addressed right away, just don't worry. I'll be pulling things off to the side and we'll address them as we go along. But we do a pretty good job of addressing everything. So feel free to type in your questions at any time over there in the last. This is Julia to talk a little bit about the challenge of space. You're not alone in having space challenges. We were in a purpose-built collection storage space in a purpose-built museum building that we moved into in 2001 in our collection storage spaces for all intents and purposes. There's some already committed room that's available, but we don't have a lot of room to add to our collection storage. And one of the really important policy or strategy pieces to have in place to deal with space is, and obviously if you can build new space or add on space, that's excellent, but a really good tool for managing the issue of space is to have a really good collecting plan in place so that you're collecting only what you need to collect. And a good collecting plan can also allow you to do some strategic de-accessioning so that the space that you do have, which pretty much is always going to be limited. I don't think anybody heard anybody say they have too much collection storage space, but a good collecting plan makes sure that you are using that space for what it really needs to be used for, which is an important tool to have when adding space is just not going to happen. Ann is asking, how do you estimate how much storage you'll need in the future? That's a really difficult question, and it's funny with working with a lot of different institutions, it's a question I get asked a lot. And the best answer that I can generally give is to look back at what your historic pattern has been about how many donations you get a year, what's the relative size of that, look back at any accession records or cataloging records that you have so you can try and ascertain what that average is, and then you can kind of guesstimate from there what your seven to 10 year growth rate is going to be. Now, chances are sometimes you know a huge donation might be coming down the pike, but those anomalies are few and far between usually. I don't know how do you do it at the Abbey Museum, Julia? I would, the design of the collection storage space was actually done before I came on board, and they had planned, one of the challenges we face is that they had planned for a substantial amount of additional space, but what happens, what I expect places will find that will happen when you plan a new collection storage space is that both your leadership at your institution and your stakeholders in the museum will get very excited about the fact that you have new collection storage space and your rate of new collections coming in will go up. So what happened is we knew we had new collection storage space planned, so we were given a collection of 450 more baskets, and that took up two whole sections of our compact or rolling shelving. So the expansion space, I think you get a bump when you build new, or designate new collection storage space. You get a bump in how much comes in, so look at historic patterns and then add a cushion like you would if you were budgeting for a grant. Okay, plus we're gonna add a 10% buffer for the fact that when you have new collection storage space, everybody gets excited about having a new space and you get a bit of a bump. In our case, it doubled our larger scale three-dimensional objects, so that's possible to keep in mind. And then the other thing that we had to do is our shelving had, the way our shelving had been designed, and I think we've got some photos of this was, and this is something that probably you'll find either in purpose-built, you'll encounter a purpose-built shelving or if you're retrofitting existing shelving, is you may have air space, head space in your shelves that isn't being used up, so coming up with creative ways to, within a horizontal area, add vertical storage space by building temporary shelving, and I think we'll see an image of some of the temporary shelving that, or not temporary, but lightweight shelving that we're able to design to substantially increase the amount of space that we had in our collection storage. I think we're pulling across some of those photos now. And I would just add in also, if you're thinking about new space or reorganizing the spaces that you've got for collection storage, you also need to look at how your collections items and shelves are stored. So how are they stored now? Is it the way you want them to be, or a lot of times when you start to re-house collections, they take up significantly more space than they would otherwise? So that's something else to keep in mind if you're planning. Yes, one of our goals with our move into our new facility was to decompress our collections, which decompressing means adding certainly a lot more space needed. But there are creative ways to create storage mounts and adapt boxes to, at least on a small scale, adapt. Well, that's some of those space needs. I'm just going to see. Do you want to start by talking about the materials? Is there a particular photo you were thinking of there? I was thinking of, where do I have it? I don't know what it's called. Shelving mattresses, I think, but I'm not sure that's not it. I don't know if it's on here. It may not be. The photo may not have made it in. It shows our basket storage on the rolling storage shelves, and it shows cardboard shelves that we were able to make. It might be this one. It doesn't appear to be here. Is that it? Nope. I can just talk a little bit about what we were able to do. We have the powder coated aluminum storage rolling shelving, and the shelves were too high. There was not enough, there was all this empty airspace above what was being stored. And so we were actually able to, using Astrophi cardboard, hot glue, and Valar padding, bake shelves that almost doubled our storage space within that contractor storage shelving. And it was relatively inexpensive. It took some time, myself and a volunteer doing it. But it was a fun solution. It worked, in part, because we have lightweight collections. So you think about what you have and how you could make stack things within your shelving. You can think creatively about it and change things later. And in terms of organization, I know Laura has some good insight on that as well. But we went through various stages of how we organized our collection storage. We started out just where it would fit. And obviously, working within the framework, if you want to store like things with like. But then we also started thinking about, as we had more time, how the collection was being used, so that access to material in collections went smoothly. And we didn't have to move a lot of things to get at other things based on how collections were used. So that's something to keep in mind when thinking about how you organize your collection storage space is not just what will fit where, and storing like materials with like, but thinking about how you will need to access them, so that you don't have to move a bunch of things to get at other things that you might use differently. We have a question from Kathy about pests. She's asking, how is the best way to monitor for bugs, especially in an off-site storage room, when they're not there daily to check on it? Well, the best way I found to monitor for pests, whether you're in the space or not in the space, are just glue traps that you can put down, and they should be checked at least once a month. If you know you have a huge pest problem, then you'll want to be checking them more frequently so you can track down a little better what sort of insects are in your space and how you can go about eradicating them. But basically putting down those glue traps is the best way to get a good idea of quantity and types of insects that you'll see. And I know Julia has great images, too. And think about positioning your traps in terms of understanding how insects enter in spaces and travel through spaces. And doing a little bit of research about integrated pest management can help you get an idea of that, but make sure that you have sticky traps near any insect access points to your space so that you're catching them when they come in. The images that are on the screen right now, the person on the left was in our storage, in our original building. We have storage drawers built into our gallery display cases. And this piece was one of several that were laying in the drawer, and people would open the door and look at the top other side that you're not seeing looked fine. And then eventually someone needed to move them for some reason, and they flipped them over and discovered that the germestids had been munching down on the underside of the piece. And so that's an important aspect. Also, if monitoring for pest activity is making sure that you check vulnerable pieces on a fairly regular basis, because bugs like dark, hidden areas where you may not see them. So doing periodic spot checks of what pieces might be vulnerable also is a good idea in addition to the sticky traps. And one of the things I learned with the sticky traps is you just have to get over any aversion you have to spiders, because most of what we catch, which is a good thing, is spiders. But spiders often get caught, and it takes a while before they're no longer moving. So don't be surprised if you took up your sticky trap and the spider's still moving around. Just be prepared. I'll mention here also that we did have a webinar that was on integrated pest management and planning. That was a couple of months ago, but you can view the recording for that and the presentation archived online recordings under the meeting room heading on our home page. Shelly's asking if we can put back up the storage material slide. Did you want to address anything else about pests first? I know we have the copper plate slide. We could talk about that and then go back to materials. Sure. I think people often think about insects when they think about pests. But in most buildings, especially historic buildings, you're also going to have the little four legged pests that are a real challenge. We have continued to try and prove our historic building against mice, and they still continue to make it in, especially when fall comes down and looking for a warm place. But one of the interesting things that happened with our collections and our original collection storage space, we had some you briefly saw a photograph of our old space. We had a lot of material stored in rigid plastic totes, which were good. Those were good at mouse-proofing. But we had other collections stored in your standard archival storage boxes with the little open handles that you can reach in through. And we had a collection of copper printing plates from an early museum publication. And they were very nicely stored. They were nicely wrapped in tissue paper and sheet as a foam and stored in this acid-free archival cardboard box. And the mice came in, and the mice went through the little handle hole and got into what was a luxurious amount of bedding material for mice. They loved the tissue and the sheet as a foam. And they proceeded to make their nest inside this box of copper printing plates. And the damage that was done by the mice, in this instance, was that they peed and pooped all over our copper printing plates. So the plate you see there is corrosion to the copper caused by mouse urine. We don't have a lot of mice eating things that have got damage, but this is a really good example of how other pest byproducts can be a real challenge. Monitoring for mice can be similar to monitoring for pests. We honestly just rely on snap of dead mousetraps to control and monitor for them. And then there's a whole series of steps to take to try and proof your space. But it's amazing the size holes that a mouse can fit into. As anyone who deals with historic structure certainly knows. Mice can fit through spaces as long as it's as big as their head the rest of the body can fit through. So you're thinking of usually a dime size hole. So you're really looking for small spaces when you're thinking about mice. And pipe chases and electrical holes cut for electrical wiring and the whole sort of thing. And mice will eat right through. You might put foam insulation around the pipe chases or an electrical hole to insulate the building, but mice will eat right through the foam. So one of the inexpensive materials that we've used to try and, and it's an ongoing battle to try and mouse proof these spaces is you use steel wool. You stuff the voids with steel wool and that tends to be a little bit harder for the mice to make their way through. So, but that wouldn't work in these, these caties asking, does that suggest that we shouldn't use boxes with holes for handles because they have a lot of them. They can chew right through the cardboard next to where you stuffed steel wool a few times. Yes, yes, no, that's just, that's a matter of if you have a real mouse problem, you might want to not use boxes with holes with handles. If you don't have a mouse problem, that's not necessarily going to be an issue. That's just something to keep in mind, yeah. Do you see Jennifer vote about a corn snake that she found in a sticky traveling? Oh, that would be about me. That would be about me. Oh, Jennifer. You find all kinds of interesting things when you put down those glue traps sometimes, so. Did we want to go back to storage? I think so, I think that sounds good. Okay. Well, I know this slide flashed up there for a moment and then disappeared, but I put this slide together because I think a lot of people see that word archival and think it's automatically a good material to use, but I think the word archival has been co-opted by a lot of other industries and in particular, you know, scrapbookers. I don't mean to pick on scrapbookers, but a lot of other industries in office supply materials have just started to slap the word archival on a lot of things. So in some ways it has basically lost its meaning. So what you want to look for rather are some specific kind of buzzwords and these are only some of them that you might see in an archival catalog, but you will also see these if you go to a office supply store and if it has these words on it, then it's probably okay to use and if you have really some questions, by all means pick up the phone and call a conservator and ask them. But I always say, sometimes folks they're a little hesitant to call a conservator, but I always say they're not lawyers. They don't charge an eight minute increment, so feel free to give that ring. So some of the buzzwords you want to look for are acid-free. That one has been freestanding a long time, but the other word you want to look for is lignin-free. And lignin is basically the component in wood pulp in papers that becomes acidic over time. So a box might be or a piece of paper might be acid-free when it rolls off that assembly line, but if it has lignin in it, then it will become acidic much faster. You also want to look for rag paper. That's another pretty stable, or it's stable it's made out of cotton. That's a good material to use. Buffered. Most of the materials you have in your collections you'll want to store it using buffered papers and buffered boxes. And what that means is those boxes and papers are slightly alkaline. So they have a little bit of a material that makes them slightly alkaline. If we go back to our high school chemistry for acidic, pH neutral, these are materials that are more around an eight on the pH scale. Zeolites are another product that's out there. It's basically an acid scavenger that can be permeated into the boxes so that if you're dealing with things like newspapers or other highly acidic materials, you might want to look at materials that have zeolites in it. And Permalife is another brand name out there. There's a lot of plastics you can use too, but here are kind of the three biggies that you can use for storage. Polyester, which is Mylar, Melanix, those are brand names that's pulled under polyethylene and polypropylene. So. I know an email question came in between this session and the last one that there may have been able to... I couldn't get online to answer, and that was a question about using plastic boxes. And we use and continue to use plastic totes in our original building for storage. And the concern was that they had heard that plastic can trap moisture and trap humidity, which can certainly be a challenge. Plastic can provide excellent protection, especially if it's the right plastic for your collection. It provides good collection from a water emergency type of it. It can provide good protection from pests and how tightly it seals. But it is very important not to put wet or damp or moist or moldy collections inside of a closed plastic space, because they will, in fact, you can develop a nasty microclimate. You can create good microclimates inside of a plastic tote or a rubber-made totes like that with things like silica gel packets and so on. But it's true, you don't want to trap moisture within them. And the other piece that I'm most familiar with that you want to avoid plastic storage with is actively unstable material that's producing toxins as it breaks down. We have a small number of film, photographic film material. It's acetate film. It's not the nasty stuff that burst into flames. So it's acetate film and it started to break down. And what that does is it produces its own acid. And if that were to be containerized within plastic, it would feed off of its own breakdown and it would break down more quickly. So there are certain things like that where you don't want to trap the nasties inside plastic. But there are many instances where you're using plastic for your storage. Plastic totes, that sort of thing, can be a good option. I was gonna say, I know I have some slides in here about thinking about how you might want to customize storage and thinking about, we all see the different archival catalogs and know that there's a lot of products out there but that might not necessarily meet your specific need. So I always encourage institutions to look at what's out there, look at your collections and do the best you can and think about different ways that you can customize some of the commercial options that are available out there. So know your collection, know your environment and know what's best. Let me see if I can see that. Those slides, of course. Certainly. Carrie had a question about using choroplast. We use choroplast for making boxes for certain pieces and items in our collection that do not play well with buffered cardboard because it's almost impossible to buy acid-free cardboard that's not buffered. And we have some material in our Native American collection that are materials that don't like the buffered board. So we use choroplasts for things like wool, hide, horn, things like porcupine quail, things like that that we would prefer not to have in buffered, we use choroplasts and it can also make for good boxes that if you have a high risk of water, especially water from above, choroplast can be a good option. And it's really, choroplasts are the really neat feature that cardboard does and that's if you can heat it just a very bit, you can bend it and roll it and make really wonderful supports out of choroplasts that would be harder to do using cardboard. So it's a neat material to work with. Absolutely. Well, I know there was, when we had started, there were a lot of questions about organization and doing what you can in the space, the limited space that you've got. So I just wanted to show this picture to show how an institution might take advantage of using as much space in a box as possibly can and also how you might customize some of the products that are available out on the market. So this is an image from a collection where what they've done is taken the standard cubic foot size, acid-free lignin-free boxes and in order to make the most use of the space in there, they have trays, they've purchased the trays that go with the boxes, but then they've made their own other trays out of acid-free board. It's the blue corrugated board and then to hold the objects in place, they've taken some scraps and just made these little L pieces at the corner so the pieces don't shift within the box and also have made little handles so they can get these out easily and replace them. So these are the sorts of things when I say to think about what's commercially available and doing what you can in being creative. Don't just limit yourself to what's available on the market in terms of boxes and storage enclosures. And the fun thing about making storage enclosers is that you can be very creative with how functional they have to be and you don't have the pressure of exhibit mounts or they have to look beautiful too. They have to function. So I find it therapeutic at times to be able to make collection storage mounts and get your hands, work with your hands and work with your utility knife and your hot glue and come up with creative solutions. And again, with using leftover scraps from bigger projects, it can be really fun. Is it hot glue that you would use to secure those corners to the trees, Leslie was asking about? I would use hot glue. You could use double-sided tape, but it's more likely that to dry out and let go, hot glue and put it together. Cardboard is really important. Keeping in mind that if you're working with things like coraplast, which is plastic, and ethyl foam, hot glue can be a little bit more of a challenge. You may have to make sure you have a temperature-adjustable hot glue then so you can use the low-temperature setting because the hot glue will actually melt the coraplast to the ethyl foam, but if you do it right, you can certainly use it that way as well. And hot glue is quick. It bonds quickly and cools quickly, and you can move on more quickly than if you're using some other kind of adhesive. How do you space out the trays inside the box? Well, these spacers, if I remember, it's been a while since I saw these in person, so please forgive me if I'm not remembering correctly. But the picture is kind of deceiving. The corners are actually taller than the objects that are kind of making little sink mounts for them. The object sits below the corners, so the corners themselves act as the spacers. And left-over blocks of ethyl foam, like if you've got the one inch or two inch ethyl foam, left-over blocks of ethyl foam, that's a good you can put them in the four corners as spacers too, certainly. Yeah, absolutely. And this is the kind of thing that goes towards making museum collections managers and curators a bit of a hoarder. Because I know I never want to throw out any of these little scraps, because you know you can use them for something. So you end up with bags of scraps that you can use for projects just like this. So we don't want to end up on one of those TV shows, but it is good to hold on to some of those things. And another good material, if you need a little bit more rigidity than the blueboard, the blueboard is acid-free archival foam core. If you need something that's got a little bit more rigidity and structure to it, that can come in really handy also for making boxes and storage amounts and that sort of thing. Anne Miller in Virginia Beach is asking for ideas on how to store a large number of framed pictures or paintings. Do we have photos that I think that we do have some photos of that? When it happens, defer to Laura on that, because I only have about three framed paintings in my collection. OK. So framed materials are quite difficult. It's something you do want to store them vertically, so you don't want them to be flat on the shelves unless they're loose in the frames, and that's a whole other issue. But a lot of places have done just built little bins with dividers in them out of wood and put in some padding material on the bottom. While wood isn't necessarily an ideal material, it's better than putting your paintings right on the floor. So that's probably the lowest cost option, so creating some bins where you can easily slide the framed materials in and out. You will see a lot of commercial systems that are available for hanging storage, which is, again, ideal if they move in and out on a track and you can basically hang lots of paintings right next to each other on these different tracks, but those systems can be quite expensive. I have seen people adapt and use things by really securing chicken wire on a wall and using that to hang some paintings. Also, I saw a creative solution of someone use dog kennel gates and hung them so they could use that for hanging storage as well. So if you can't come up with one of those solutions, what you can do, and if they have to be leaning against a wall or something, you want to make sure that the paintings are at least raised up off the floor at least three inches or so. But the paintings, if you have a lot of them and you don't have a dedicated space for them, are quite difficult to deal with. If someone says there's rolling racks that are available as well, someone said that in the comments. Those handles on the boxes on the slide that we're looking at now, Kathy's asking if they came with the boxes or they were added on by the staff? Those came on the boxes that way. You want to make sure when you order your boxes, because you can get them without those as well. So when you're ordering for some place like Collins or Metal Edge, that's an option. So make sure you review all the options when you're ordering the pieces, because you can get them with the pull string or without the pull string. The pull string is very handy if you're maximizing your use of shelf space. I did find, in talking a little bit about retrofitting store bot or archival catalog bot boxes, we have a lot of archaeological collections. And they're stored in trays within archival boxes. And the trays didn't come with any kind of a handle on them. So you would stack these trays. And then to get the trays back out of the box, what you need to do is very difficult. You're actually retrofitted by just punching a hole in each of the short ends of the tray and tying a piece of twill tape through the tray to be able to lift it up out. So again, learning through experience of skinning my knuckles on the inside of the box, trying to get the trays out. But don't hesitate to modify. You'll handle a lot of collections, and you'll figure out pretty quickly what's nice and handy to use. Sometimes when you're looking at these archival catalogs for purchase, if there's a price difference, there's always a reason why there's a price difference. So sometimes it takes a little detective work because they might not put it in that description. So always call the company, ask, why is this box $5 and this one $7? So you want to make sure you're a good consumer in knowing what you're purchasing. And you also, this is a lesson that I learned the hard ways. If you're going to buy stock boxes and stock trays to stack things inside the boxes, it's probably a really good idea to get the trays in the boxes from the same place because the dimensions will be a little bit off if you get them from different places. So that's not an option necessarily for saving money if you want to buy a whole lot of boxes and a whole lot of trays, do get them from the same manufacturer so that they're a supplier, so that actually trays actually fit in the boxes. Okay. The corners of frames. Bubble wrap or do you use anything else or bubble wrap in addition to something? What do you recommend? I would use, they sell the sheet as a film. So you can, it's in different thicknesses. You can get, it's a stable material and you can cut it down and use that to create a little corner for your frame. One of the concerns, bubble wrap can be good for temporary use. One of my concerns with bubble wrap is that its surface with the little bubbles on it might have a tendency to catch any loose bits of, you know, if you've got molded frames or painted frames. And also, Valara, if you want to go up one more step from the sheet out of the film, the Valara has a slightly smoother surface that may not be as likely to catch. But bubble wrap certainly is something that is highly efficient for early temporary use. You definitely don't want to pull it off. Yeah. And I was going to say Sandy in Texas made a great point that I forgot to say about storing frame materials, that if you are using bins and you want to put more than one framed piece in a bin, you must have a divider in between them. So using a good piece of acid-free cardboard or another more rigid material, that helps protect the paintings or the frame materials from one another. So great point. And thank you for putting that in there. Sarah asked about stacked specimens that are heavy. She said, do you have any suggestions for stacked herbarium specimens? About 15 stacked. It seems like a lot of pressure on the bottom, but that is the way the cabinets are built. Oh, I'm sorry, Sarah, that with the herbarium collections, they have so many issues that you're having to deal with. If you can somehow divide the stacks, that's the best thing that you can do, be placing them in two smaller boxes that fit into that cabinet space. But that is very, very tough. When you're dealing with plant materials and paper and everything, you have some difficult issues to face. But trying to see what you can do to separate them, there are companies that will make you custom sized boxes. So that might be something you want to look into to get perhaps two boxes that fit in the same spot where that one stack pile of stacked materials are. OK. I was trying to think about Lloyd's question about online instructions or YouTube videos about how to make custom sized boxes. I learned it in workshops and then experimented from there. There have been some good print descriptions about how to make boxes. And I believe that at least one or two of the National Park Service Conservagrams do have some step-by-step instructions on building acid-free cardboard boxes. And I think that we have links to a couple of those on the featured resources list for this event, which is on the home page. My recommendation is often look at your time investment into making it your own box versus purchasing a ready-made box. Unless you have something that is so oddly shaped or just as huge, and there's not a commercially available box out there, a lot of times the time it takes to cut a box, make it, and put it together, the staff time investment versus purchasing a box isn't always there. It might not be the best use of your time in that way. And if you have something that doesn't, it might be a little bit too big or a little bit too small, rather, for the size box, you can always pat out the box so the materials don't shift and try and retrofit it in that way. Now, I just clicked on a slide. Did that make the slide show up on the screen, the basket slide? This is just a quick example of, again, rather than building a custom box for each of these pieces of using a pre-built tray and then just padding with some soft wrap or pieces of ethyl foam so that they're not moving within the tray. It can be a really quick way to use pre-made boxes. Katherine was asking if there was a specific company that you recommend. I would, the only thing I would say is there's been some real concern about light impressions recently, so I would avoid light impressions. And I think I can comfortably say that because they actually have multiple better business bureau complaints about them. But other than that, there are a number of good options out there and compare price, compare shipping costs from where you're located. Julie, would this be a good time for me to bring over that PDF of locally available material? So this is a PDF that Julia provided us and I've posted it with the other resources at that URL that I just put up there. If anybody wants to find it and download it later. This is the information sheet that I prepared for a couple of workshops I've done with small historical societies in our area where they take a look at some of these archival catalogs and they are blown away by the prices of things. So working with our consulting conservator, I developed a list of improved storage materials that are better than what might be being used that you can actually get locally either you may have on hand, they may be in people's households or they are available at your local craft store or big box store or hardware store with the idea that there are bad options and there are better options. I mean certainly it would be wonderful if everybody could afford all the acid free, lignin free, perfect archival material but there's some good improvements you can make using locally available material. Everything from nice soft, clean cotton sheets that have been washed with a phosphate free detergent or if you have a nice high quality, low chemical detergent to wash cotton sheets with, those can be a good option. Padding like polyester batting is going to be a huge improvement over newspaper. Some of the foam that comes from packing boxes of computer material electronics can be a good replacement for other kinds of foam that things might be stored in. It talks more about the types of plastics you can use but there are some locally available materials that can make a big improvement and then you can work from there as budget permits and you can buy the fancy archival catalog material. Unbleached muslin from your local craft or fabric store washed and rinsed twice is a nice affordable option to some of the archival fabric catalogs which we've never had the budget for those. For example, I do exhibit them out. There are some good locally available options that can be a lot less expensive, less daunting. Erin, you can get a copy of this sheet at the link that I just posted. It's in the chat right above Sarah's comment that says, thank you. Is one of these fabric things the best thing to use to line metal shelves? Jonathan had a question about that. We actually use Balara which is a foam padding to line our shelves. I probably wouldn't use fabric because it would be slippery on metal shelves. I would tend to use something that had a little bit more padding. So something like a sheet at the foam or a Balara or as a first step at least something like an acid-free cardboard to keep things from sliding. One of the things with metal shelves is they can be very slippery. But a foam padding is probably going to be a better bet for a metal shelf than something fabric. All good options. Ken, you say something about PVA adhesive and white should be... That was asked of me last time and that was based on information from the conservative that we work with. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer. I don't know if Laura has... I don't know enough about it to be able to say for sure but something I can find out for you. I'll make a note of it and we can address it on the discussion boards afterwards. There's a note on here and it's generally the case with anything that you're going to be using if it has a strong smell or it smells bad. I'm pleasant to use and what that means is that it's off-gassing and so you want to avoid it. So that's a good initial test. Do the sniff test. If it's something smelly like PVC or those final shower curtains or something like that, that's a good quick clue that you don't want it near your collection. And if you have a lot of boxes and you're not sure whether they're acid-free or not and if it's on enclosures, you can use a pH testing pen. I think they're around $3.50. They're not a huge investment but yes, there's a picture of one and you can just use that. This is for use on enclosures and boxes never to use on the objects themselves but they change color if it's less than 6.8 on the pH scale, it will turn yellow and if it's above 6.8, it'll turn, the pen will turn purple. There's a lot of different ones out there on the market but they're all relatively inexpensive and a good way to just kind of see what's going on with your materials. And you want to periodically check back the materials because some of these non- or somewhat archival materials may become acidic over time so it is important to keep monitoring those. Okay. We've got an answer towards the question about PV. Yeah, thanks, Sandy. They're generally considered stable but absorbent or porous material. Do pH testing pens also work on things like photo sleeves, the plasticine that's from Carrie Eden? No, they're not going to work on those for you. You're not going to be able to test with those. Those are just more knowing the materials that they're made out of and like Julia said, that SNCC test is usually a really good place to start. Sometimes you see those vinyl, I see them a lot, vinyl binders and the vinyl slide sleeves and they do get that smell to them. But it's supposed to be knowing what the packaging, look at the packaging of what the plastic is made out of. The new toy smell, the new doll smell is what I associate with the child, that's not a good smell, that's PVC that makes that new plastic-y smell. And also some of the often heavier weight sleeves are the PVC material. The polyester or some of the more archival plastic sleeves tend to be a little bit lighter weight, you can buy them somewhat heavier. What are your lighting recommendations for storage? Only have the lights on when you're in there. That's the nice thing about storage storage is where our collections rest from light because they get a gram of light when they're on exhibit. So ideally your collection storage space is one where your lights are only on when you're using the space and if not, then pieces are either boxed or have some kind of a thing over the top so they're not getting light. Again, that's really where the collection should be. But however you want to have, when you turn the lights on, you want the lights to be good enough so that you can see if there's something going wrong. One of the challenges in dark, poorly lit collection storage spaces can be that you can have, for example, an insect problem and you won't necessarily see it because the light levels are not high enough. So you want to be able to turn lights on that provides good visibility and so you can see collections well when you have the lights on but then keep them off all the rest of the time. There's two buzzwords when you think about light. You want to think about light is cumulative and it's irreversible. Light damage is irreversible. So you do want to think about over time how much light your materials are being exposed to and just like Julia said, shut the lights out whenever you can. There's no need to keep them on when you're working or accessing the space. And I guess it's part of the architectural plan of our building but if you have your light switches on the outside of your storage space, retrofit them with the ones that have a little indicator light when they're left on so that you'll have a quick visual check to realize that the lights, because oftentimes they'll walk out and close the door and then you're in the middle of something and remembering the lights are still on. So I think you can probably get those switches and retrofit switches if you don't have them that way. I hope it's a little way to remind yourself to keep the lights off. Back to the question of the odors and the off-gassing that can happen with different materials, Lloyd asked. He said, I heard that some paints can off-gass. Can you speak to that? It was new to me. I normally think of plastics or wood for it. Yeah, there's a big movement. Paints do off-gass. There's chemicals in there that are released as the paints dry. There's been big movement for the low VOC paints, the volatile organic compounds. So there are some paints that are more stable than others. So if you are painting a space, you would probably want to go for that low VOC paint. There's a great resource. It is put out. I'm trying to see it on my desk now. It's the National Park Service. Some time ago put out a CD-ROM of Exhibit Conservation Guidelines and they have a lot of lists in there of good materials to use for exhibition, but it's the same thing for storage. If it's not good for exhibition, it's not good for storage. And they give some paints and varnishes and things like that that are better to use in storage and exhibition than outside, than other options that are available. You'll want to use water-based paints, rather than oil-based paints. It's a basic step. The museum world is benefiting, again, from the desire of people to have healthier homes and workspaces so that paints are being developed that are healthier for people, and those paints also turn out to be healthier for museum collections. And then the other key thing is that when you paint something, especially if you're painting a collection of storage spaces, shelves or the flooring or whatever, you want to give that space plenty of time for that paint to fully dry and to finish off gassing. That will allow a good several months, in reality several months at least, from final finishing touches of your storage space before you start moving collections and if you can possibly manage it. And that CD that I was saying, the Exhibit Conservation Guidelines, they do give you some time frames in there for different materials. How long you would ideally let them sit before they come into contact with collections. Okay, I'll look, see if I can find anything about that. I'm going to test it in those discussion boards. Yeah, Kathy, you just read that. I'll figure out what I can about that. We only have about five more minutes, I just wanted to mention that, to encourage people to put in their questions. We had one that someone emailed me. What is the best way to deal with documents if one is made of cloth and you suspect it of having mold? I know you were saying earlier at the very beginning not to put that in a plastic bin, but what should you do with it? I'm going to take a look at it and have them take a look at it to do some mold remediation work on it. But if you suspect something of having mold, you want to separate it from the rest of the collection. So mold is a byproduct of environmental conditions. So when you get a higher relative humidity in a space, that's when mold blooms. There's mold in the air all the time and it's just when those environmental conditions get right, get to be just right, that it blooms and we see it on our collections items. So first thing to do is separate it from the rest of the collection to check what's happening with your environment. So if you're having this issue, go to the data logger session tomorrow to see how you monitor for that. But you get the environment under control because while that won't get rid of the mold, it'll inactivate it, at least, so it's not spreading. So Rebecca has a really good question and it's the fascinating conundrum of our collections can harm our collections. She says we have a lot of rubber and latex and vinyl toys. Those are putting off acid. That smell is acid being produced from the breakdown of the rubber. And depending on what else you have in your collections, you absolutely would like to figure out a way to isolate those pieces from materials that are going to be sensitive to those acids that are being put off by those pieces. So figuring out a way to containerize them in a way that doesn't trap too much of that because they'll speed up their own deterioration. But keeping them separate, especially from things like metals or photographs, because those acids can be really harmful for those sorts of things. And keeping ventilation good in your storage space so that the mature doesn't build up can be really important. And I would think that wrapping those in a buffered tissue would probably be a good idea and box them in buffer because that smell is the breakdown of that as often means that an acid is being produced. So buffered housing would probably be a good idea. Rebecca, I'm sorry. I don't remember if you were on this webinar, but we had one in December on the care of dolls and it addressed a couple of these issues. That one's archived on the website as well. Julie, this is a question we haven't gotten yet. Do you restrict access to storage or keep a log of who enters? Jonathan Canning is asking for Chicago. This is Julia at the Ivy. Our access is controlled by who has keys to storage and who has the code to get into storage. So our collection storage space is on a different tiered key level and has a separate security code entrance for that space. Again, our security system actually I guess records and we each have individualized codes that records who's getting into that space. But we do have to accommodate the fact that non-collection staff will have to have access in case of an emergency. So there is the ability for a couple of other non-collection folks to get in. But by providing a different code and a different key for the space, if you can't do that, then you definitely want to keep a record of your insurance company for thank you. Certainly it's a good idea to keep a record of it. And I would say as best you can with the powers that be at your institution, limit access to collection storage as much as possible. I put up this slide that just has a link to AIC's website, which is a great place to go to find a conservator if you're having really specific questions that need eyes and hands on help. All right, well, we are almost ready to wrap it up. I'm going ahead and putting a link to an evaluation and we really appreciate it. If you can take some time to go there, there's only about eight questions. It doesn't take very long, but it's really helpful to us to figure out what's working for you with these online chat events. We do have that one tomorrow on data logging, which I think will be useful to a lot of the same people that are on here today. If there are any other questions, you can always post them in the group discussion boards on the website and we have some resources there. We'll be making some of these photos available there and that list of locally available materials is already posted. I'm noting people's questions. We can certainly put the photograph of my adapted cardboard shelves if it didn't end up in the PowerPoint. Oh, great. Get it on there. Okay, I'll make a move. All right, well, I want to thank everybody for attending today. This is a great crowd. And, Juliana, I thank you so much again for coming and doing this topic again. I think it's been really useful. Thank you. Thank you for having us. All right, have a great afternoon, everybody. Thank you.