 introduce to you one of the co-hosts for today's webinar, Mr. Eric Porsche, excuse me, Eric Porscheo from the foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. Eric, please go ahead whenever you're ready. Okay, well thank you so much. Welcome everybody to today's Connecting to Collections Care webinar. Really thank you all for joining us today, where we're going to give you an overview of some of the changes coming to Connecting to Collections, an opportunity to hear from you what resources, features, and webinar topics you'd like to see in the coming months, and I would like to thank Learning Times for facilitating this program and especially to Mike Morneau for working with us today. So I'd like to introduce Errol Wentworth, who is the Executive Director of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, and its foundation FAIC. Greetings everyone. Thank you all for participating in the webinar today. All of us at the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, that is FAIC, are delighted to be working with you to provide information and training in collections care. We are so grateful to the Institute of Museum and Library Services for providing the funding to keep Connecting to Collections alive and growing, and we thank AASLH and in particular Heritage Preservation for all of their work to establish this community. As of January 1st, FAIC assumed responsibility for the C2C community and webinars. You'll learn more details about the transition during today's webinar, but please know that any changes will be small and incremental. The webinars, discussion forums, and online resources you rely on will remain available to you and will continue to be improved and added to. And to ensure continual improvement, we will be relying on you for suggestions about future programs and services that can enhance the community. Please be sure to make suggestions about any improvements we might be able to make. I'm so excited that we're joining you on the C2C community. And now, so that you can learn more, I'm pleased to turn the program over to FAIC's institutional advancement director, Eric Porscheau. Good afternoon again. Today's program basically is trying to do three things. First, we want to tell you a little bit about AIC and FAIC and why we are involved with Connecting to Collections. Second, we want to let you know about some changes that are occurring with the online community and the webinar series. And third and most importantly, we wanted to get your advice on future topics for webinars, additional resources that might be added to the website, and how the discussion forums can best meet your needs. Although FAIC, the foundation, is the lead organization for the project, we're relying on a lot of partners. And in particular, the Collections Care Network of the American Institute for Conservation, the Collections Care Network, or CCN, is contributing key advice and leadership. AIC is a membership organization that supports the professionals who care for America's treasures through research, exchange of knowledge, and upholding professional standards. FAIC, the foundation, is a 501c3 non-profit foundation. And it has a somewhat broader focus of supporting projects that help preserve our global cultural heritage. FAIC provides education and information for conservation, but also recognizes that preserving cultural heritage involves many other dedicated professionals and volunteers. FAIC encompasses several projects and just broadly, including the operation of the Collections Emergency Response Team, or AIC CERT, supporting publications, we offer a wide range of grants and scholarships, and we operate a robust program of continuing education, which includes live hands-on workshops, online courses, as well as webinars. FAIC has received funding from IMLS to continue the Connecting to Collections Care online community and the webinars for the next two years. Other projects have been funded by the foundations and agencies that we're showing here. But it's important, I think, to say that none of these projects, including Connecting to Collections Care, would be possible without additional support from individuals and corporations that help pay our electric bill, the office rent, staff salaries, accounting services, and other necessities of doing business. So now we get to the big question of the day. What is happening to the Connecting to Collections Community and Webinar series? And I hope that we're reassuring you that only good things are coming. So first of all, please know that the webinars, the website, the forums are all going to be continued to be offered to everyone free of charge. And that's possible through the two-year grant from IMLS to FAIC to continue to support the community and the programs. And you may start to notice some small changes. We'll change the copyright notice, for example. You'll see the FAIC and AIC logos, probably some small design tweaks. But the intention is to build on the good work done by AASLH and HP to develop this community and the rich array of resources it offers. One small change that will be instituted pretty soon is to change the name of the site slightly to Connecting to Collections Care. We felt that better reflected the purpose of the community. And we're going to be doing a lot of listening in this webinar and beyond, as well as some more formal research that will help identify directions for improving and expanding our resources in the future. The AIC Connecting, I'm sorry, Collections Care Network has helped to put together an advisory group to help guide Connecting to Collections Care. So the goal here is to be sure that voices from a wide variety of professions and types of institutions are included to better reflect the users of C2C. And you'll hear more about the advisory group in a moment. Now, if she's ready, I'd like to introduce Ms. Susan Barger, the C2C Care Coordinator, and she'll be managing the community and the webinar series. Morning to everyone. It's morning where I am. So I want to welcome you and let you know that I am passionate about small museums. In my career, I've been a museum scientist. I've been a professor teaching scientists to become museum scientists. I've done a lot of professional development work. And for the last, oh, 15 years, I've mostly worked with small museums in New Mexico because when I came home to the West, that was the biggest need. Who knew I was really good at it? So I've done lots of different things. One of the things that I did was start this small museum pro program, which is now part of ASLH. So and I really look forward to listening to you and helping to make this a program that will work for you and that provides services that you want to see continue and also provide services that you'd like to see new ones. So we're going to begin now and look at some, begin asking you some questions. These are the people that are on the advisory group. There's also two sub-committees, the forums chair, the forums committee and the webinar committee. And those are still being formed, although they each have about four or five members. And then there's Eric and me. And so there are a lot of people contributing to this. There are a lot of people that can provide support for you in small institutions. And we want to do that. So we're going to ask you, what are your dreams and how can we help you achieve them? So let's start with polls five and six. So first we want to know, regardless of whether, if you're looking for information about caring for your collections, where do you go to find those regardless of whether or not you're connecting to collections or not. And then we want to know how you prefer to look for information on the C2C website. And so we're going to give you some time to look at it, at these polls. We're really interested in figuring out the best way to provide information in the most useful way for you. One of the things that we'll begin doing is, well, have conservators who are monitoring the forums and they will be able to, hopefully, answer questions very quickly for you. And so we want to know how you need to get this information. It's pretty striking how many people rely on webinars for information so far. That's right. And we're seeing going to be asking you what kind of webinar topics you are. So get your fingers ready because we're going to have some discussion questions that are coming up. Also, just to break in here a little bit, in addition, the polls are mostly set up with fixed answers, obviously. But we certainly welcome any other suggestions you have. And if any of these trigger something in your mind, please feel free to use the chat box to give us more information or elaborate on what you're thinking. Now you should be able to, in poll number six, you should be able, oh, Mike, can you make poll number six? He's changing it so you can put in whatever. There you go. So now you'll need to fill in poll number six again. Thank you. And then we'll give people a few more minutes to fill in poll number six. And then polls number seven and eight are asking about when you're most likely to look for an answer from that, connecting to collections care community, and how quickly you need that. And so we'll slip those in in a few minutes. It's like we're still putting in, yeah, I agree with you, Connie, in Fort Smith, that having an easier way to search through the webinars would be a nice feature. And we will work on that. Okay. It's like we're still having people fill in poll number six. All right, are you ready to look at poll number seven and eight? Okay, we're going to do those. Here we go. Pulse number seven and eight have to do with, as I said, when are you most likely to look for information from the connecting to collections care community? And how quickly do you need an answer? Remember that if you have an emergency, you can always go to AIC cert. And on the AIC website, there is a 24 hour poll number. And if you have an emergency, definitely call them. We do have people that are trained and to work with emergencies. And I don't know how many people are in the cert network, Eric. There are 107 responders. Yeah. And then the other thing that we want you to know is that connecting to collections, the collections care network in AIC, are anyone in AIC can belong to it. And they are people who are interested in assisting institutions with collections care. So that works. So it looks like we've gotten a pretty good response to poll seven and eight. Interesting that people can wait one to three days. I'm glad to see that because I don't know that we could promise anything faster. Yeah. Yeah. And then poll number nine is just asking what kind of webinar features you'd like. And so it's just kind of general. We want you to we want to know how we should organize information for you in a way that it will make it the most useful. And then the poll number 10 has to do with what new features you might like. And I believe on both of these you can certainly choose more than one selection. Yes. Yes. And let's see. It looks like we have most people have answered in those. And then let's go on. The next four questions how to do with if you might do multi session webinars, how you might like to have them and or if you would like them. And if you would if you had preliminary assignments before a webinar, if you do them. So that's what these are looking at. Just so that we can begin to plan webinars in a way that makes sense for you. So poll number 11 is really asking about having a very focused discussion. So maybe we say on next Wednesday and Thursday we want to talk about storage of clothing and textiles. And it would be a sort of a free for all discussion during that given time period. Poll number 12 is a little more structured in that we're talking about a series of webinars specifically on a different topic. And I think probably a lot of you have participated in C2C webinars. I know there have been several I've participated in that were offered over a series of months. Oh good. Yeah. So let's see how are we doing for filling in things? It looks like people have quit responding. So let's go on. Now we're going to do the discussion questions. And these questions, let's look at them one by one. So the first one is, and you can just type in what you want and we all, we really want to have your input. And that's really what this session is about. So what would encourage you to log into the C2C care community if you had a question and needed help finding an answer? So we want to make sure that we like this to be your first trusted place for information. And we're going to have a nice group of qualified experts to help you. Yeah, I think that seeing if people have had the same issue. The one thing that I've learned in the last week or so about the forums is anyone can use the C2C website and coming up the C2C care website. But you need to be a registered user with a password if you want to ask questions in a forum or respond to questions. But you can look up what's gone on in forums, whether you've logged in or not. And you can expect that over the next few weeks or the next month we're going to be asking, we're going to be checking on email to make sure that we have correct emails in our database. So if you get something, we want to make sure that it's correct. So if you get it, just respond. We know that people have signed in who were students and they may not be students anymore. They may not have that same email. So we want to make sure that we have those correctly. So how are we going on this? Let's go for another few minutes on this. We're getting a lot of good answers. Oh, I'm so glad that Marcia, that the community is your first trusted place. That's very nice. We certainly want it to be, I'm very pleased to be doing this because I think that the CTC program has been very good and we really want to see it continue to provide quality information as it has. Okay. So let's go on to the next question. Is what kind of additional resources would you like to see on the Connecting to Collections Care Community website that haven't been mentioned before? So is there anything that you've wished might be there that hasn't been or something? Or perhaps topics that have not been covered as fully as you would like them to have been? Yeah. Yeah, Collections Mover really is a really tough and a big project and I think that would be a good one to do. I think I see questions about labeling artifacts on a lot of listservs. That seems to be a perennial issue. Yes, email archiving. Yeah, and this thing about libraries, archives, and museums, we really want to serve that whole community, especially in smaller, for smaller institutions because what smaller institutions can do is not always the same as what a large institution can do. We certainly understand that if you've got one or two or even 10 people or 100 volunteers but knowing who's paid staff still has issues that people who are paid and in a larger institution with money can do. Lots of lots of good ideas coming in here and I think a lot of these we definitely could find some experts to come and address. Elizabeth Trond, what do you mean by Collections Discovery? Oh and somebody wants photograph chemistry. We just happen to be working on a program of that exact nature. It should be launching soon. Okay, I see that Elizabeth, thank you. Okay, why don't we go on to, people are still writing here so we'll give you a little bit more time and then we'll go on. I was just going to point out that this discussion question is really about general materials and information for the site. The next discussion question is actually on specific webinar topics so if we do change the screen before you're finished you can put it into the next one if necessary. Right, and also know that these last discussion questions, some of them are sort of overlapping but we thought it would be useful to ask things in different ways because sometimes when you ask something in a different way you get something that someone was talking about but we're afraid to ask. Okay, so why don't we move on to the next question which is what webinar topics would you like to see? So we're very interested in producing topics that you're interested in. We're interested to know if you'd like to see things about case studies where other people have accomplished something that might be useful to you. We're, ah yes, humidity control. And just to be clear we are planning to continue to offer approximately 12 webinars each year so approximately one a month and so there's lots of room for lots of ideas. Yes, Lynn Ireland asked if we can put up the polls one through four for people that came late and I think we can do that at the end. I see lots of policies showing up here, security, conservation, collections, legal issues. Legal issues. I'd really like to see something on legal issues. There are a lot of legal issues that have to with collection care that people usually don't think about. Oh my God, moving 7,000 toys. Oh my. Some of these in this question and last question had to do with storage and I just wanted to bring up another resource that's available from FAIC which is Stash. Storage, oh boy, they're going to kill me. Storage techniques for art and oh I've lost it. Anyway, it's storage for collecting institutions and it can be found at stashc.com. We had to add the C because we ran into some other meanings of the word stash that were unfortunate but right now that's stash.com. It will be moved to one of our websites eventually when it's completely done but there's a lot of information there about storage techniques and specific storage tips as well. There's also a fabulous website about storage from I think UNESCO. We'll make sure that we'll put these in the resources. Getting buy-in, yes, that's always important. Okay. So, military collections. You can continue putting in things in the side conversation box if you want and we will go on to the next poll. I was going to ask you, Susan, do you think there are enough suggestions there to keep us busy? No, I don't think so. I think that would keep us busy for a long time. Thank you. I mean, we want to work on problems that are problems for you, not things that we think are problems for you. So, that's really important to us and at the end of this, there'll be an email address if you think of something tomorrow or next week or next month. Just send email and we'll put it on our list and we'll respond to it. Okay, so we would like to know what professional meeting breakout sessions do you mean on Linda that we would have something at professional meetings? So, if we went, okay, fine. Yeah, we'll try and do that. That would be, that's a good idea. And this is certainly something that the, our advisory group will be looking very carefully at of, you know, not just the webinars, but the forums and other online activities and how those can really draw on, you know, this massive knowledge that everybody who uses the site has collectively that no one person would ever be able to provide. So, it really is the strength of the community and how to make that work for you, how to make sure people feel safe and trusted, both in asking a question and in answering a question. And Rachel Benkowski, I just have been handed over the CGC Facebook and Twitter account, so I'll try to get those more active. And you can like the Facebook page and you can be active too, that'd be great. Michael, just curious if you can elaborate on member guest blogs. I'm not sure I understand what you're looking for there. And on D, our things are free. So, we do have free, everything on the Connecting to Collections Care is free. So, that's for you. The only thing, as I said, you need to be registered in order to participate in the forums, but you don't need to be registered to participate in the webinars. I mean, you need to register for a specific webinar, but you don't need to have a password. Thank you, Dee. Yeah, Lynn, Ireland, I think that's a really good idea. And I agree with you about combining C2C and steps. Oh, what is steps? Steps is a fabulous program on, from ASLH. And you can become a member of it for a small fee and you get a workshop, you get a workbook that has fill-in-the-blank stuff so that you can go through and check off things that you've done. It's a very good program. Eric is adding lots of information over here. Yes, thank you, Connie, for putting that in at the site. And I see Eric is answering a question about the website. We've been in the process for the last couple of weeks of transferring the website from one IP to another. And so, there's been a little bit of, it was down for a few days, but don't worry, it's not going to go away. On the, Dee, the website for steps is over in the chat board. How many of you are participating in steps? I think let's go on to the last question, which is, is there anything else you want us to know? You've let us know a lot of stuff already. Yes, the responses have been terrific. This is a lot of food for thought and things for us to start looking at. And also very useful because later this year we will be doing a more formal emailed survey that will try to reach as many users of connecting to collections as we can. And this kind of feedback right now really helps us shape that kind of survey. So we ask the right questions, we include the right answer choices, have a little better chance of really getting to what the needs of the community are. Yes, that's right Connie. We know that especially in smaller institutions that people come in and are caring for collections when they were a banker beforehand or something else. And so we really understand that. Oh, Jessica used C2C for her thesis project. I like that. Yeah. Yes, we will be keeping the recordings of past webinars. Everything that's or most everything that's been on the website will continue and be there and be available for you. So what we see in connecting to collections care is not going to go away. And I noted in that earlier surveys we were interested in or we asked if people were interested in digital badges, which are it is not exactly continuing professional. It's continuing professional education, but it's not continuing education units which require some kind of accredited institution. And I know some people have said that they like that. Does anybody want to take a hack at why they might be interested or not interested in that in this question? These are all great comments here. Could I repeat that question? My question is if you had the possibility of getting a digital badge, which means you participated in three or four webinars and answered brief questions about them, would you like, is that something that's useful to you? We had in one of the first polls we asked you about this. This is a feature from the early, from C2C. And we wanted to know about continuing that or not. Well, this is so nice. Everybody likes C2C. I think it is too. Yeah, the badges are, digital badges are becoming a way that that people can get credit for education and many people are accepting them now as something to show that you've done something. Okay. Yeah. Interesting suggestion on sharing program from regional labs and other institutions. Yeah, certainly something that, you know, there is a calendar feature on the site and we could certainly start using that to make sure people know about other events. Yes, and there are other programs, the Library Association has a program on certain things that may be helpful to this community and we can list their things too. Yeah, Jessica, that's right. People put digital badges on their digital resume. And I gather this is a growing movement. So Eric, do you have anything to add here? Well, I mean, I think we're kind of coming to the end of most of the comments and suggestions. We can certainly leave these up a little bit longer, but we had allowed, you know, some extra time in case this discussion merited, but I think we maybe had a good point to start wrapping up. Yeah. Now, we want you to, so we'll leave these and you can continue answering them. And we will, let's show our final slide here that has our contact information. Let me get down here. Okay, so we want to know what you want. Please get in touch with us and we're listening. So this c2cc at conservation-us.org is a way to reach me and to reach us and we really do want to hear from you. And now we're going to put back on the polls from the beginning. And if you didn't answer them before, please do. And while those are going up, we're going to look to the things that we need to, that maybe we need to follow up on. And just a reminder, this program is recorded and it will be available in the webinar archive. So if there are colleagues who have questions, obviously they won't be able to take the polls, but they can at least, you know, hear what was going on and know what the next steps are going to be. Yeah, I see that we have several questions about searching through the website. And that's something that I feel we definitely need to look in. So that would be like an abstract of discussions. We can see about that. And we missed the question about Caroline's question about passwords. Let me see if I can find it. I hope I answered that to tell you that we will be checking on emails. You do need a password if you're going to check into the forums. And you just go to the website and sign in. If you've done it before and you've never used your website, you are likely to get an email over the next probably month. We have a lot to check on. Over a thousand email addresses. I hope that answers that question. I don't see it. Okay. And it looks like we're still filling out polls. So Eric, we'll leave this up for what, another 15 minutes? And Mike, can we put up the maybe the last discussion poll and let people work on that for the next 15 minutes or so too? Looks like he's going to do that. It's going to be up in the left hand corner. So, oh. We've, sorry to interrupt. We've put it up at the top left of your screen. It sort of overlaps the general chat question. I'm just going to modify the window size here for the general chat so that it's still available. Yeah. So this other one is. Polls 9 and 10. Right. Right. Discussion five. Right. And Sonia, do you mean more webinars offered in the morning your time? We have a lot of people talking. Oh, okay. All right. We can put up 9 and 10 too, I think. Well, yeah, I think we can probably take down one through four. It looks like people have had a chance to fill those in. Yeah. Sonia, the problem with offering, we could probably offer programs in the late morning that, you know, we go to all over. So if they're not towards midday central time, it means that they're at, you know, say if we started at nine o'clock central time, it would be seven o'clock in the west. So we have to make things so that they are kind of spread out and it's reasonable for people to do that. This one started at 8 a.m. in Hawaii as Malia points out. Yeah, right. So, yeah, let's see. Late a.m. is okay. Yeah. We get people from all over the world, which is really exciting. So we want to make sure that we don't have anyone trying to sign in at midnight or something. Oh, a comment from Lynn reminds me to put in a plug. This is sort of the last couple weeks for responses to the Heritage Health Information Survey that went out to a lot of museums and collecting institutions and typically would have gone to your director or the director. And if you haven't seen that or if it's still sitting on somebody's desk, it's very important to get that into Heritage Preservation. And if your museum didn't get it, you can go to Heritage Preservation to their website, which is heritagepreservation.org, and you can get a link to it. There we go. Jessica just put it in. Yeah, because that Heritage Health Index is a really important survey. For one thing, it's important for helping to provide for funding, governmental funding. And so we want to have a really good idea of what's out there. And we're going to put up, we really would like you to do the evaluation of this webinar. And so we're going to just put the link to that down below here. Yeah. Okay. And, oh, did I lose you? No. Yeah. If your system allows pop-ups, we've just pushed the URL out to participants. And so if a browser window appeared on top of your screen, we're still there. We're just behind it. Yeah, I'm back. Yeah. So we'll leave this up for another few minutes and probably until noon. And, you know, please feel free to contact us to let us know what's going on. Ah, architectural and yeah, those are important. I spent several years working on Adobe preservation. Another question I know we had and we'll be asking later in the year is about living collections and, you know, how many people are dealing with animals, plants, fish, and need more information about caring for living collections as well? And I think Eric and I will say goodbye. But we're going to leave these up for what, Mike, about another five or 10 minutes? I think, yeah, until the top of the hour, if anybody has any last brainstorms, if that's okay with you, Mike. Yep, that's fine. I can leave it up for easily another 15, 20 minutes. And as soon as I see that there's no more typing, I'll close them off. Okay. And as we said before, I mean, certainly please feel free to email us if you have other thoughts at any time. And we really appreciate your input and your commitment today and hope that we can live up to your enthusiasm. Yes, we hope so. And if we don't, poke us. Tell us so we're not doing what you think we should do. And it's great to have all this input. Thank you so much.