 Hello, this is Susan. Welcome back again. And I think for most people who have already said hello and explained that you can use that chat area over to the left to give each other greetings, also to ask questions as we go about the day. But right now, I want to turn this over to Jenny Arena and let her welcome you and get this started. Thank you, Susan. Hi, guys. It looks like we have about 128 people logged into this webinar, so thank you so much for joining us. I'm, as Susan said, Jenny Arena with Heritage Preservation. I'm going to give just a quick introduction to the community and these webinars, and then we'll move on to our topic. So Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Time. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. At least once a month, the online community hosts a webinar related to a particularly helpful resource or topic. A recording of today's webinar, along with all of our webinars, can be found here under Meeting Room. And then if you click on Online Event Recordings, you'll see an archive of all of our webinars. We also have our resources and webinars filed by topic under the Topics menu. So if there's something you're particularly interested in, such as paper, you can find those resources there. So today, I am so pleased to welcome back Tara Kennedy. And as we said, Tara is snowed in, and she's calling us from home, so just bear with us on the sound. But hopefully, everything will go smoothly. So in January, Tara served as an instructor for our online course, Collections Care Basics. And she presented a webinar on mold, which you know is important to everyone and was particularly popular. And so we're bringing that to these regular live chat webinars. Today's webinar is a little different. It'll be 90 minutes instead of our regular hour. Tara, thank you so much for joining us today. Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? Sure. Thanks, Jenny, as Jenny said. And I think I mentioned earlier, I'm the Preservation Field Services Librarian at Yale University Library, which is closed today due to lots and lots of snow. I've had experience looking in libraries, archives, museums, historical collections for over a decade. And besides my work at Yale, I also do preservation consulting at cultural institutions around the country. So I'm curious to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me back. Thank you. So before we pull over your presentation, Tara, we are just going to ask one question of our audience. And it's really simple. What brings you here today? Let me expand this for you guys. So what brings you here today? You suspect your organization may have mold issues. You want to be prepared and more informed about the topic. You've dealt with mold issues in the past or another reason. And like our poll questions in the past on our live chat events, this will be a door prize question. So we'll choose a few names at random. And you will win a fantastic resource from the CDC Bookshelf. I do have to say, though, you need to be a member so that we have an email so we can contact you. So it looks like most people, 82 folks, say they just want to be more prepared and more informed about this topic. So I'm going to pull this off. Great, thanks, Penny. Throughout the presentation, if you have any questions, feel free to type them into that Q&A box. And we'll try to get to them during breaks and at the end. That's all yours, Tara. OK, great. If I can, there it goes. I'm going to slide that over at this. I can see the screen. Great. So actually the official title for today's lecture is Neek, Mold, Help. Because I imagine that is sort of how most people feel when they find that there's mold in their collection. So the next slide should progress. There it goes. Whoops, I went too far ahead. So the first slide here will sort of show what I'm planning to talk about today in terms of an outline. So first I'm going to talk about what mold is, what the contributing factors are in terms of getting mold to grow and progress and spread, how you can prevent mold in your collection, some of the health hazards associated with mold, and how you should respond to a mold outbreak and finally the recovery steps that are necessary to even take care of a mold problem in your collection. So to start, what is mold? So the first thing I want to point out is mold is everywhere and we can't get rid of it. The only thing we can do is discourage its growth and reproduction by making its environment inhospitable. That is keeping things clean and dry. So surface mold is what we're primarily concerned with. And what they do is they spread something called canidia. And surface molds are specific class of mold. And they're reproduced by producing canidia, which are four carriers. And you can see one that looks like a bit of broccoli there on your right. The four carriers release ores into the air and let them flow away so that they can reproduce elsewhere. It's similar to acorns in an oak tree or pollen from other types of plants. So we have a couple listed here. We have aspergillus. That's one of the most common species of surface mold, and that's the picture you see on your right. Penicillium, which as the name suggests, is where penicillin comes from. It's also found in blue cheese and other types of cheese. And saccibatris, that's the scary toxic black mold that you often hear about in the media. So all of those are classified as surface mold. So what you need to keep in mind is that canidia and spores are specifically designed for survival. They will only grow where they have a chance for survival, meaning that they have the correct food and the correct environment. Spores and canidia have fixed cell walls, if you remember your biology, that have to be penetrated in order to fully kill them. So a little bit about the spore life cycle. There's maturation and release, drum and C, activation, germination, high C, canidian formation, and the cycle continues. So I will show a tutorial version of the life of a spore. So I talked about canidia. That's where the spores come from, and that's what you're seeing there If you follow the red arrow, it will take you through the more life cycle. So the canidia are releasing spores into the air, and there's a lovely little spore. You can see it's one tough customer. It kind of looks like the head of a mate. So it's tough to kill, because that's why it's pretty much ubiquitous, and you see it everywhere, and it's hard to get rid of. And activation, that happens when you actually have the right environment for it to grow. Actually, that's technically germination. The spore found the right environment and nutrition, and it started to grow. So the high C or colonization stage is, you could also call it the buzzing stage. The high C have grown across and down into the substrate and have released digestive enzymes to ingest the food source that they're interested in, hence the digestion of our collections. So this can be papers. This can be just on the surface of an object, any of those things. Anything that's organic, that the mold would be interested in eating. Correlation, so out of these colonies of high C, more mold spores are formed, which are then raised to be released again into the air through the canidia, and so the cycle goes again. So some information about spore characteristics. Dormant canidia and spores can survive extreme environments, and that can be freezing, dry, hot, et cetera. But not once the canidia has been activated and germinated. So once if the canidia are and spores are dormant and haven't been activated, it's really tough to get rid of them. So that's when they're floating through the air after they've just been released from the canidia. So this is why removal of canidia is super important, because they can remain viable for over 20 years, waiting for the right environment to germinate. So that's why conservators and other professionals emphasize the removal of spores. So that's cleaning, especially. That's one of the key things. If you remove them from your environment, they will not have a chance to activate, germinate, and multiply. That is key. OK, so we're on time for some fun videos. So we get to see mold and action. The first one I'm not even going to try to pronounce. I will just call it blackbread mold. So the sequence that we have here will show the mold, the blackbread mold, over a span of seven days. And the images were made at every 10-minute interval. So if any of the outfits can move the video over, that'd be awesome. Sure, is this the strawberry? That's the strawberry. All right. Let me ask also, is there any audio with these? Nope. There is dramatic music. All right, I have to disconnect our audio in the room while this goes on. Go ahead. So yeah, it's not like I just ruined anyone's lunch there. I mean, yeah, it's not exactly pleasant to watch. But entertaining all of that, and then the less so. I just sort of wanted to show how quickly some of these circus molds can really go to town and really devour. I mean, these are live things that are devouring its food source. So the next one isn't quite as gracious, but this is actually very entertaining. So this is a white oyster mushroom that has been basically injected into this book here, which happens to have the illustrious Fabio on the cover. So I thought it's only fun to watch Fabio get injected by a mushroom. OK, now we're live. Thank you. So in that particular instance, as it says here in the slide, that was a much longer sequence than the Blackbird mold. So that was a month and 24 days, nearly two months of growth. So that's not quite as gracious as the other surface mold, but it was too much fun to not show because Fabio gets eaten by a mushroom. So I had to show that. So some other information about spores in Canidia, mainly sources. A lot of them come from airborne particles, and they range from 5 to 1 to 100 micrometers. So they can be super, super tiny. In the middle of growth on plants, that's where we get a lot of our spores in Canidia from. Food, as you sort of saw in the last slide, sometimes on collection materials. And contaminated collections through manufacturing use of history. Here's a nice example of spores being released into the air. This is a giant puffball. I think it's a technical name, believe it or not. So you can sort of get an idea of how some of these can really release a large number of spores just at one time. And this slide here is a microscopic shot of an air quality sample that was taken. And this is how experts can tell about what kind of mold is actually in your air. And this is when they do air quality testing, this is part of what they're doing. So they can identify what is actually floating around in the air. So in this instance, you can see there's allergens like ragweed, nettles from, I think that's from a tree. And the different types of mold spores, you can see those are three different types that they're showing. And I'll talk a little bit about active versus inactive mold growth. So active mold growth, some characteristics I would use to describe an active mold growth situation would be squishy, bungee, or fluffy. Inactive mold characteristics would be dry, powdery, and dusty. And I want to emphasize that it is important to get rid of both kinds of mold growth, as both are a risk to your collections and to your health, and to the health of you, your staff, and your patrons. Here are some early indicators that you might have a mold problem or a mold problem coming. So the presence of insects, especially book life, we have a book last on your right there at extremely high magnification. These are very, very tiny insects. They're millimeters tiny. But one of their biggest food sources, book life, are microscopic molds. So if you have a large book life problem, you also might have a mold problem as well. And of course, that telltale urtus, that damp musky earthy smell that smells like a closed up basement. Incidentally, that smell you're smelling are volatile organic compounds, or VOC, that the mold is releasing as it multiplies and grows. There are some contributing factors that can make mold grow more quickly or spread more widely. Microenvironments exist that can support mold growth. And these can be in environments that are controlled or not. Microenvironments exist that can support mold. The most common one being behind shelves where air circulation isn't so great. Basement floor storage in cardboard boxes, especially underneath the cardboard boxes. Damp microenvironments, the location of water. And that can be near sinks, bathrooms, windowsills, any type of active leaking, that sort of thing. And any place where there's a post water incident, we're trying to not take place immediately. That's a big one. So I mentioned the cardboard box issue in your basement. So here's an example of the cardboard box incident, like I mentioned. You have some, I think most of what you're seeing here is tides lining. But this is sort of a tides lining being the really dark brown lines here that you see. But it's just to give you an example of someplace you might want to check to make sure there isn't mold growth happening. This example here that I'm showing with the data logger over to the right is sort of to demonstrate that you don't need the environment to be at 65% relative humidity or to really high relative humidity is to have a mold outbreak. So what you're seeing here is there's an active mold there on that book, but the relative humidity is 37%. So it may not just be the environment. You definitely need to investigate what's going on here to see why there is this mold outbreak. This particular instance, this is because there was mold in the air handling system. And this is another example of mold. This is on the paste down of some very large newspaper volume. What had happened was there was a leak behind a cabinet. So the wood behind the cabinet was getting extremely wet, but it was also hidden by all of the large newspaper volume, so it wasn't discovered much, much later. And the longer it sat there, the more the mold grew. So this was a really heavy outbreak. So it's very hard to, it's very important to make sure that you check your corrections if you can, especially during extreme weather conditions. This was during a particularly bad rainstorm and the building didn't have very good drainage. And that's why it leaked behind these particular cabinets, which were against the wall. And this is another example of a smaller mold outbreak. The window happened to be open near these books while they were at a facility being digitized. And so the mold grew very quickly onto the books in these particular areas. So we had them sort of document it before they had the items cleaned. So how do you prevent mold? This is the number one thing that people really want to know. What is really important is the equilibrium moisture content of your objects. That means getting rid of excess moisture, reducing your relative humidity, and your dew point. The dew point being the moisture level in the air relative, well, not even relative to the temperature yet, but the moisture content in the air. Well, avoid storing your collections in damp places, such as your basement, any place that has a sink, any place that has active leaks. You want to keep your relative humidity as well as you can. A good range is 45 to 50%. When you start getting about 65% relative humidity, that's when you start increasing the moisture levels in your organic objects. That's really important to make sure that you keep your relative humidity as controlled as possible. You want to ensure good air circulation around your collections. So I was talking about the micro-environments that can be a problem for mold, where you can have mold growth behind things because there isn't good air circulation. So it's important to have things not embedded up right against the wall. It's really important to have space between your shelving and your books so that things can actually circulate, air can circulate well. And make sure you respond quickly to water damage. Like the example I showed with the balanced newspapers that were in the cabinet where the water leaked behind the wall and no one knew it for quite some time. It's really important to make sure that you respond quickly so you don't give the mold the chance to grow. So materials that can hold more water than others are more susceptible. So things like paper, leather, textiles, things that are more hydrophilic, meaning that things that really love water are going to be more susceptible to mold outbreak. When I mentioned equilibrium moisture content, that's talking about the moisture level in objects. And anything that really likes water and can readily absorb it is definitely going to be more at risk. So libraries and archives are the ones that really, really, really have to keep an eye out for mold. So another way to prevent mold is to regularly change your air filters in your air handlers and clean ductwork if you have a major outbreak. So I have an example for a library. A couple of slides back, I showed you that mold outbreak that was next to the data logger where it was a dry relative humidity, but there was definitely a mold outbreak happening. And I mentioned that it was because of the air handler. This particular library had a history of mold outbreaks. They had had, I believe, three in a span of, I want to say, five years or so. And in that timeframe, they had cleaned the collection, but they had never taken the time to clean the ductwork. So when I actually went to inspect this particular mold outbreak, I saw that the mold was growing on the collection that were directly in front of the air supplies. I mean, you could actually almost draw... It was a completely obvious schematic. You could see exactly where the air was growing was exactly where the mold had landed. So with the help of environmental health and safety and some testing, we finally got the library to have the ductwork cleaned. And once that happened, they didn't have a mold outbreak ever again. And nothing else had changed in terms of the environment, in terms of air circulation, nothing like that. It was simply cleaning out the ductwork. So cleaning the ductwork is very, very important. If you're not sure what you need to, you could have air quality testing done, and you can even do the inside of that. But that would be errors that you need to. But I really can't emphasize this enough. It's super important. I played an examining incoming collection. This is helpful in preventing potential mold infestation. Not only that, but also can be helpful with insects and rodents, too. And you won't be sure about both types of infestations as well. And regular housekeeping, something as simple as keeping your shelves and surface-to-cephery or dust, actually is one of the best things you can do to prevent a mold outbreak. If you have a clean environment, those dormant mold floors will be removed and they won't have that opportunity to activate and germinate. So that's super important. You can use disposable static rides like swippers that have no additive. Those things are really good to use in a collections environment or a HEPA-filtered vacuum. HEPA-filtered vacuum means that the mold will be kept inside the vacuum and not be spit out the back of the vacuum and back into the room. And this is the only type of vacuum that you should use to clean mold because you cannot afford to have the air sit back out through the vacuum cleaner again because all of your hard work has just been spit back out the back of the vacuum and then you're creating the problem all over again. So infestation, mold will grow on everything and anything. It honestly will. If it has the right conditions and the right food sources, it's good to go. Depending on your molds that have part of the outbreak, they like different conditions and different food sources. They'll grow at almost any temperature than there is enough moisture content in the material for the dust that it's growing on and it can grow in random patterns or it can grow overall over the complete surface. Primarily exterior surfaces are where you're gonna have problems like bindings and boxes and that sort of thing, but you're also confined it on end papers like the example I showed you from the bound newspapers. And in the gutters of books are on the edges of papers and boxes. Here's a really good example of that sort of random pattern that I mentioned. This is microfission. You can see that the mold is favoring particular areas of the microfiche and not the overall surface. So it can be as random as something like this. And here's another example of sort of a random selection. This is mold that's growing on the spine of a pamphlet. Early pamphlet binders like these have a starch into the adhesive and mold really digs starch. So it grows right on there, but you can see it's not growing on some of the adjacent books nearby because this particular mold is favoring the starch content of the adhesive in that pamphlet binder. So it can be as random as that based on the food source and the overall environment. So we have a couple others here and some other random examples. It can grow on mold reels. It can grow on mold reels. It can grow on microfilm reels like you see at the bottom of your screen there. It can grow on paper. It can grow on the surface of particular sound recordings. It really is, it doesn't have a particular favorite. So a little bit about the health hazards associated with mold. One thing I really wanna emphasize, I know there's a lot of news coverage for things like sepsibotris and things like that, but all molds will pose a health risk and some people are more at risk than others. Most at risk to mold are those with compromised immune systems, people who have severe allergy to mold obviously, or people who are allergic to mushrooms, people who are allergic to penicillin. These are all sort of indicators that these people are going to be and also people who have respiratory issues like asthma and that sort of thing. These are the kinds of people who really, you should not have exposed to mold. And for people, mold is first a sensitizer, which then becomes an allergen and then later it can become toxic. So like I said, all molds can pose some sort of health risk and really will be dependent upon the person. The mold itself doesn't need to be a quote unquote toxic mold. If a person is sensitive or allergic to a mold, it can be a blood threatening situation for them. It doesn't have to be sepsibotris, it can be a form of aspegillus, it can be a form of penicillium, it can be a different type of mold. And here it is again. So as I mentioned, some molds are toxic to begin with, but only test things really gonna tell in terms of if it is actually sepsibotris or another type of toxic variant of mold. Sepsibotris, black mold that everyone sort of goes on and on about, is usually like to grow on construction materials, especially drywall, it's not really so much. It's not really so fond of collections. The only way you're gonna know for sure is what kind of mold you have. If it is an actual toxic mold, it can get them tested. But for now, however you can always assume that there will be a health hazard now or in the future, so treat them. You don't necessarily need to have it tested. It's just not a good idea to have any mold in your collection. So here's a nice picture of a bright pink wall with sepsibotris growing on it. That's the big black spot there. So you can sort of see how it really likes drywall. And again, testing is the only surefire way to know if the mold is a toxic mold. And you have to test all of them. And if you remember back to the microscopic shot of the slide I showed you of the air quality test, there were at least three different types of mold for it. There's a lot, there can be a lot to identify, especially in an air quality sample. So as I said, mold is everywhere. It's going to be in your air constantly. So there could be a lot of testing involved. So if you have mold, keep calm and carry on. So I just wanted to kind of like, just for the folks out there in the audience that are experiencing a mold outbreak, especially for the first time, I think keeping calm is really important. And I'm going to give you some practical step-by-step instructions on how to respond to it. I also will have some vendor recommendations that are part of, that are handouts that you can contact who has national offices who can help you especially if you have an extremely large mold outbreak. But in terms of the response, here are the four steps you need to think about. You need to confine the outbreak. You do not need to have this spread further. And I will be speaking about each one of these steps in more detail in slides that are coming up. Number two, stop the growth of the mold. Three, kill the active mold growth. And four, take steps to prevent re-infestation. And ideally, response and recovery will be done by a vendor and not by your in-house staff. And really, really important, do nothing unless you have personal protective equipment. And I'll talk a little bit about that because safety first, everyone. Personal protective equipment, you also will hear the acronym PPE. What that entails are gloves, masks, goggles, and protective clothing. Your gloves can be nitrile or latex for handling collection. Now, latex is for people who don't have, obviously don't have a latex allergy, but nitrile is more versatile in that respect. And those you can get from any sort of lab supply store. Mask, you can get full or half-map, half-face, half-mass, half-face respirators. They will require medical approval and fit testing. Or you can get N95 particulate respirators. They also look like masks. And I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. Unvented goggles, you wanna make sure that the goggles are sealed all the way around and don't have vents so that some hope can't get in and bother your eyes. Protective clothing, you can get Tyvek overalls with or without feet or at a very minimum, aprons or lab coats. So here you can see some folks doing this kind of work in a library setting. Not suggest that the bag that the Tyvek sleeve doesn't go all the way down to his hands. There he would have been better off having sleeve guards. You can also get these Tyvek sleeve guards that you can put over your sleeve so that it will give you further production. Because you really don't want any skins exposed. But he does have N95 respirator on. I'm also not jazzed about the glasses because they're not so goggles. But this is better than a lot of people sometimes who are doing this sort of thing. So here's a big one that I wanted to emphasize. Is it a dust mask or is it a respirator? But number one, look at the labeling. It will tell you what kind of mask it is. Now a dust mask is something for very large particulate dust. Like if you're working with sawdust or, I mean sawdust is the only way it can come up with a top of my head or something like that. That's enough. We're talking, speaking about big particulate size. Now if you're talking about molds, these are teeny teeny little microscopic types of things that you're not going to be able to see right away with the naked eye. So something like a dust mask isn't going to be very helpful in protecting you because it's not going to be able to filter out something that tiny. So you want to get something like the one on the white, which is an N95 particulate respirator. They'll call it an N95 particulate mask. They'll call it all sorts of names. But if you want, make sure it says that it's an N95. So it's usually printed right on the respirator, as you see in this example that I have on the right. Another good indicator, believe it or not, is the number of straps that are on it. If there's a double strap associated with it, oftentimes that's going to be a higher particulate filtration level than it's going to be your standard dust mask like you see on the left. So I'm really concerned about people's respiratory health because once you get mold in your lungs, it never comes out. And especially if you work with it a lot, it becomes cumulative and it can really have detrimental effects to your health. So I really, really, really want to emphasize the respiratory protection. OK, so now that you've got your personal protective equipment on, you're ready to confine the outbreak. Or at least, hopefully, the vendor is ready to confine the outbreak. If you have a large incident, you want to isolate the area. Creating a negative pressure room to ensure that the mold does not spread to other areas. And this might include shutting down any air handling vents that may return air from that area. The slide on this slide shows an example of basically peeling off a contained area. In the middle there, that black line that you see there is actually a zipper that would allow staff to go in and out. And if you have a staff that does health and safety, they can test the air to make sure that the air that's surrounding the contained space has reduced the amount of mold in the air. They can do a test inside the containment area and a test outside, and then they can see the difference, and they'll be able to tell you whether or not it's working well. For smaller incidences, if you have just a couple of books that are a problem, you can want to talk to them to isolate them. You can wrap using Kyvek or spun polyester, which is kind of expensive. So I mean, if you use something as simple as this top plastic bag. But as long as the materials aren't wet, you don't want to do that because that's just going to exacerbate the problem. I move the collections to a quarantine area, and I slice them from the rest of the collections. I hear the picture of moldy things in the bag. So it's just the regular, the black bags, sealed up. OK, the other thing you want to do, step two, is stop the growth. So remember when I talked about moisture being key, dehumidification in situ is basically one way you can stop the growth. Because if they don't have enough moisture to grow, they won't. They won't supply. They won't terminate. They won't spread. You won't have the high-fee stage happening. So dehumidification is super important. You can do it in situ. You do not have to move collections if you have a really large outbreak. This is probably the best way to handle it. Dropping your temperature is not going to be sufficient in dehumidifying the air it space. You really need to get industrial strength dehumidifiers to do that. So as your air cools, some people think about dropping temperature will help because mold-like heat. But as you're dropping that air temperature, you're now creating air that can hold more moisture. So the relative humidity goes up, and the material will blow water, which is a problem. So if this is a water incident that's happened, as well as mold, air drying doesn't well help with stopping ink from bleeding and that sort of thing. So you're going to have some distortion of objects. And sorry, I saw some questions flying by on the left-hand side about sunlight. Sunlight doesn't tell mold. It's most likely the dehydration components that's happening. Basically, you're removing all the water. That's why it's pulling the mold. Or it can be the ultraviolet or the UV radiation. Now, the thing about ultraviolet light is it does help some molds, but not all of them. In fact, there are some strains of penicillium that can resist UV radiation due to the colorants or the pigmentation that they put out. And there are some mold species that are actually activated by ultraviolet light. So unless you know what you're dealing with, it's probably the best way to tackle the problem is dehumidifying, getting rid of the moisture. So here's an example of a big old dehumidifier. And that will help with drying out the space. And here's me in a space where I'm showing basically that this is a space that has dehumidification going on. And I have my protective equipment on. I should have a hair net on actually or something covering my hair. And I'm cleaning mold-infested artwork with a HEPA-filtered vacuum on my back. And I look a bit like a space person, an astronaut, but OK. All in the name of saving art. So I see someone on the left mentioned something about freezing. So stopping the growth and killing the mold. Freezing actually does work, but it has to be the right temperature. The growth stops when the active mold is filled when you freeze, because it forms ice crystal causing the cells to burst. So I was talking about the cell walls that are really hard to penetrate. It's freezing causes ice crystals to form inside the cell and burst the cell. And so that's how mold is filled. If ice freezing also buys time for decision-making and recovery preparations, you want to use caution when you're freezing new air objects, especially composite objects, because if they're wet, they can become severely damaged when put into a freezer. And freezing in an air drying can reactivate mold, depending upon where you're doing your air drying. So yeah, so if you do the air drying, it's not going to help with coated papers. It's not going to help with looting ink. So it really depends on the collections that you're trying to save. Vacuum freeze drying is something that can be done by a vendor who can also then clean the materials. And what vacuum freeze drying does is it freezing your object and then supplement the water out. So it does a phase change by basically changing the pressure in the particular compartment so that the water can readily go from a frozen state to a gaseous state. So it never gets wet again. It's really cool. And it's really helpful because it means that the collection doesn't get as much in terms of the way of the distortion. Inks don't tend to bleed. And if you have coated paper, like in art books or magazines, the paper tends not to stick since the water is sublimated out of the collections just like that. It can desiccate collections, so use caution. Use caution depending upon what you're actually going to be putting into the vacuum freeze dryer. This is best for large outbreaks in libraries and archives. And here I can show you sort of the inside of a vacuum freeze dryer chamber, which is what it looks like. So it's changing the pressure. Sometimes you can apply heat as well, but you can actually opt out some heat part of it and just work with the pressure changing so that you can just sublimate out the water from the object. So just a quick note on fungicide. Generally, we don't recommend the use of them as conservators mostly because they can have a real problem on collections and people. So they really only should be used as a very, very last resort. And some chemicals will only stop the growth, not kill the mold, and those are fun to stab. Ethylene oxide is a chemical that was used often to kill mold. But it actually can increase some of the cure of susceptibility to future outbreaks. So it really is something that we don't recommend. And it's even found in the European Union at this point in terms of safety. So don't move it. Get rid of your ethylene oxide chambers. OK, now how to prevent re-infestation. Clean the entire space, not the collection, with a HEPA filter vacuum, smoke sponge, I'll tell you what that is in a second. And if necessary, wipe down the shelving with a solution of no more than one cup bleach per one gallon of water. And then dry thoroughly after wiping it down. Replace any carpet, padding, furniture, wall board, that was moldy. Repair or replace any equipment or plumbing that may have caused the problem, and begin an environmental monitoring program to make sure this doesn't happen again. And when I talk about cleaning the entire space, I also really want to emphasize the cleaning of the air ducts, as I mentioned in one of my previous slides. Really important, because that was the reason why we kept having the same mold outbreak where we're not over again is because the mold was in the ductwork. So it's really important to do that as well. And I know I feel awful saying all of these things because all of these things cost money. So I'm sure you all have a lot of questions and concerns about that. So hopefully I'll be able to try and help you with those questions at the end of the lecture. This is a really scary picture. And this is from Katrina, from one of my colleagues. If you can see, I'm going to try to get the green arrow to behave here. There's a pointer that sometimes puts me in, sometimes doesn't, and right now it doesn't want to. So if you look at the, you can see the mold on the wall. That's quite obvious. So if you look all the way down, follow the line down, all the way down to the bottom, and you can see a distinctive line where the mold isn't growing below there, that is the water line basically creeps all the way up. But that line down there meant that there must have been some really toxic things in the water because it wasn't bad enough that the mold wasn't actually even growing there. So that's pretty yucky. So it probably is where the water line is, where that line of where there's no mold below probably stops. So above that, the mold can go up really high. So you may think that the mold only or the water at the wall has only gotten wet so far up, but the mold can grow up and beyond where the wall was actually wet. So you want to think about where the mold has grown. You want to think about the mold being above the water line on a wall. So if you're going to just replace your dry wall, you want to probably go up further than you think. It may be in a case where you have to basically do the entire wall, because mold can grow even above where the water line was. So a very lengthy explanation to say, replace your dry wall. So for collection recovery, oh, the thing that there is a health hazard and where your PPE is, don't even think about it. There's something you absolutely should do. You should always protect yourself if you're going into an area with which mold. The inactive mold will need to be removed from collections to ensure that the collections are safe to use again and often to prevent reinvestations. So mold goes physical damage to collections. So any in-house cleaning should be done by trained staff wearing the protective equipment and knowledge of careful handling techniques for fragile materials. And I'm going to say this in IELTS. I'm going to say this in all capital letters. You should not clean your collections by yourself. Leave it for the professionals. It's super, super important, especially if you have a really seriously large outbreak. So only clean once the mold has been rendered inactive. So that means stabilize your environment. Remember I talked about active mold growth and inactive mold growth? So when you have active mold growth, you've got squishy, sticky kind of mold, which is really hard to remove. But once you have it rendered inactive, then you have a dusty powdery sort of thing. So when you basically stabilize the environment so it's dry enough that the mold has become inactive, it's much easier to remove in terms of vacuum cleaner or a smoke sponge. I will tell you what that is in a moment. And it will be much easier to remove for you. Some things, when I talk about collection cleanup, I mean, if you're talking about one thing that's moldy, that's one thing, but if it's a really large outbreak, that's when we really want the professionals. And especially if it's things where it's really tricky, some of the other, like, most day removal is tricky business. Leave it to the professionals. That's something that's really hard. When you have mold outbreaks and once the enzymes of the mold start digesting the objects, it will often leave discoloration, their colorants, into the paper. And those individual color components, they often remain there. And when it's decreased with pigments, those things are hard to get out. I've had people bring me things in my life as a paper conservator. And those are really, really difficult to get out without using some really tricky treatments in terms of chemicals, in terms of using the paper. It's really tricky. So you definitely want to leave that to the professionals. Contact a professional paper conservator who'll be able to help you with getting stain reduction. It's absolutely important in terms of mold staining. And considerable placement is a viable option for some materials. Not everything is necessarily something that's one of a kind, especially if it's like a circulating library. Oftentimes you might be able to get a replacement copy which might be cheaper than actually doing the recovery. It really just depends on your situation. But here again are folks doing some cleanups of molds from some collection items. They're wearing protective clothing, very important. So cleaning collections I mentioned are about to have the filtering vacuum. And once mold is inactive, it can be eaten. Carefully cleaned off collection materials either using a soft brush to brush the mold into the nozzle, or it can be vacuumed through a screen if you're cleaning a textile. And it should be done in a fume hood in an isolated space with negative air pressure or lash resorts outside on a not windy, sunny day to reduce the risk of spreading the mold throughout the building. Wear protective clothes, protective personal equipment please. So here's me cleaning some moldy, I think that's a painting, yeah. And if I look around in paper or painting that's where I'm doing is I've got a half a filtered vacuum on my back and I have a soft brush and I'm brushing the inactive mold into the nozzle of the vacuum. And here is a smoke sponge. It's also called a gonzo sponge. It's also called, as you can see on the right, a lampshade cleaner. It's also called a pet hair picker upperer. I think it has a variety of names. And this is a really great tool to use after use vacuum. Once the smoke sponge is ultimately it's also nice rubber and it chats mold and dirt and it's a really great thing because you can cut it in different shapes so you can have it something to be really tiny if you need to clean a tiny area or you can use it in a variety of sizes. You want to make sure that you, if it's something that's really porous or something that's something like that, you want to make sure that you don't drive the mold into the paper by using this so you want to use a light touch when you're using it quickly and it's not something you can sort of scrub, essentially. Hey, so actually that's the end of my presentation. So if you have any other additional questions please feel free to contact me at my email address there. Don't forget the D in the middle because apparently there was another cherry canopy that were hanging around Yale at some point but I'll be happy to answer your questions. We have about a half hour or less, so. Yeah, Tara, I can start throwing some matcha. Okay, so this is what I will like to catch on. The million dollar question today and we've gotten it from a couple people is what if you have no money for professionals and of course I guess it all depends on the circumstance but could you elaborate a little on what to do? I mean, when we talk about all the steps that I've mentioned here it's important for an institution if they have no money to still follow these steps, isolation and that sort of thing. I think it's depending on your institution. I think it's really important to, I mean, I know we're recording this so educating your board about how these sorts of things are a real health hazard and really how it's important to have professional data source might be one avenue I would take in terms of being able to do fundraising. I wanna emphasize also that you can prioritize because if you need to do an item by item treatment thing you can also do it that way. If it's an isolated incident with a couple items, if you follow the steps I've said and take safety precautions, you can probably do cleaning up on a small scale. The ones that have really like their entire basement is blown up into the mold. Those are the ones where I really, really wouldn't want the lay person doing the work only because it could really be adverse to their health more than anything else. And their collections are important and they're important to a lot of people but I feel very strongly about people's health more than anything else. I think educating upper level administration is important to kind of get them to understand the health risk. I would probably start there rather than trying to have staff not to be dramatic but sacrifice our own health because people don't wanna spend money. I think it's really important to kind of educate the people who have control of the money to get them to understand that we can't do this on your own, it really can make people sick. I don't know if that's, I'm pretty sure that's not the answer to your question. But only because people can get very, very sick from this. It's definitely a great start. And Devin from Illinois says, it's always an issue discussing it with the power set be. So I guess the answer is to keep trying. I would actually, there may be things that could think about this. If they're not the priority, I mean, I'd be interested to know one what their priorities are because some of the priorities that they do have may in fact directly influence the, I mean, for example, if they're really jazzed about exhibits, for example, maybe some of the collections are affected that they wanna exhibit are covered in mold or at risk to be covered in mold. So if you can look back to some of the other priorities that they might have, you might actually be able to get them to at least listen. I don't know. That's a great suggestion. We have another question from Sarah who is curious if there are special considerations for mold on photographs. That is a good question. Mold on photographs, what the mold probably is, is ingesting there would be gelatin sizing on the surface of the photograph. You can still do the dehumidification, drying out the air, getting it to that inactive powdery state and doing the vacuuming. You just wanna make sure you don't make it so dry that you end up cracking the emulsion in the photograph. So that the collection can be super sensitive about relative music changes because they are in fact a composite object, their paper and their gelatin which are gonna react to your environment in different ways. So as long as you don't do it, like these are things I would not put in, if you could have access to vacuum freeze drying, you would not wanna put photographs in there, for example. The pressure changes and things might actually do some major damage to them. But the smoke sponge, you don't wanna use a photograph either because they're a vulcanized rubber which has sulfur and sulfur can do damage to photographs. So you wanna stick with your soft brush vacuuming for photographic material. And we have another question moving from a different object. What's the best way to remove mold from leather? And we also have a question from Holly about removing mold from leather that's found on the covers of books. Okay, leather is again, another hydrophilic material. So it's going to be susceptible to mold. Again, it's about dehumidification and rendering mold inactive and doing the same thing, doing the cleaning with the hyperfiltered vacuum. You can also use the smoke sponge just for those since they're in the city, already sulfur-containing material with the penins in it. So you can actually use the smoke sponge for that as an additional way to clean. And we had a, well, we're on the subject of books and the covers of books. We have a question from Rebecca who's curious about foxing and does that also need treatment? Foxing can come from a variety of sources. There's different types of foxing. They have different names. One of them is, I mean, they're sort of, I don't know what the word is. So generic terms that we use, there's ones called bull-eye foxing and the other is called snowflake foxing. So they're all bull-eye foxing which basically what that means, essentially, is there's a very distinct dark center to your foxing. That's most likely metal components that have been left in the paper during the paper making process. So that have left it over time due to high humidity. So those aren't really as much a problem. Actually, that's not a problem. It just makes, it doesn't make the paper look very pretty. And the same with snowflake foxing that actually is due to mold in the paper substrate. It actually isn't something that is, it's not really going to be a serious problem because surface mold growing directly on the paper is just a defacing type of thing. So again, it's something that would need the treatment from a paper conservator to actually do sort of chemical treatments to lessen that effect. But it doesn't have any adverse health effects to anyone. It just, it definitely doesn't make the paper look very nice. It's part of the problem itself. Okay. And we had another question from Susan in Asheville who's curious, is mildew and mold the same thing and is treatment the same? Yes. So the same, everything's the same mildew. It's just another name for mold. And then kind of a follow-up question from Angela in Kansas is what's the best way to tell the difference between mold or wax or oil blooms and foxing on the surface? That's a good question. And one really good indicator is if it's not weather, it's not going to be spew. That's the term for it, the white waxy, sometimes whiteish waxy bloom that comes out of particular leathers that have been treated over time with different waxes and oils. And again, that's also a sign of an adverse environment as well when it starts to exude from weather. If it's spew, all you have to do is wipe it off with a clean cloth. And if it comes back, it's OK. It actually doesn't hurt your object any. So if it's mold, or if you can know the difference between mold and spew, it's kind of based off spew. And I know no one wants to test it. That's part of the problem. So it definitely has a consistency that's waxy, that's unlike mold, that's unlike active mold. You can also use ultraviolet light. If it fluoresces, I'm remembering correctly, if it fluoresces, then it's usually mold. I think that's another indicator. But again, I think I'm not positive about that one. It's usually based on touch, essentially, which I know nobody wants to do. Be sure to wash your hands really well. OK, we have a couple of questions about some of the equipment that you would use. Laura and Delores, curious how frequently should you change your HEPA filter and your vacuum when it's used for mold removal? Oh, I don't know how often would you? HEPA filters are filters that are really, like they filter out a lot. So I would imagine if you have a very large mold outbreak, I probably would do it at the end of your session every time. She would bag up everything, all the filters and things, fill them up and fill them out outside. Like, make sure they get removed from the building. OK, we have another question about a HEPA filter vacuum from Barbara. Who's curious if you should enclose the HEPA filtered vacuum bag in a Ziploc bag? When you remove it, yes, absolutely. OK, let's see. You've got a bunch of questions to get through. I thought you had the extra half hour. Yes. So we have Paul in Connecticut who is curious if there's a best way to deal with mold on wooden objects. Mold on wooden objects. We still, again, with the whole dehumidification and activity of the mold and vacuuming, still is applicable. I guess I don't know. Is there a specific, do you have a specific question in terms of, I can't see the parking lot, so I don't know if I need to read it exactly, but. No, there wasn't, it was just, it was wood in general. OK, basically the thing about mold removal is the general guidelines I was given in terms of dehumidification, stabilizing your environment, rendering the mold inactive, and removal of the floors, pretty much will apply in most situations. It's the only time that might depend on the sensitivity of the object to changes in relative humidity, like I mentioned with the photographic material or composite objects. Wooden objects can have a tendency to split and crack if your relative humidity gets too dry. But if you're keeping it at 40% RH, you're not going to have that problem. So those steps are really the key steps, pretty much in mold removal for anything. OK, we have another question from Elizabeth who said, you mentioned the tail-tail odor, and that the odor is always an indicator of mold, even when you can't see anything. So would you recommend accessioning something if it comes with that odor? I would do a very thorough check of it. Sometimes what happens is it may have been, like there have been things where you've kept them in an area that's had mold actively growing. Like I said before, mold is kind of ubiquitous, and the viewer sees that that item is picked up, even though that material may have just picked up the sort of vulnerable components they're being given off, but not necessarily as mold for themselves. So I would inspect the object thoroughly, and if you can vacuum it, do that. If the smell itself is a problem, there are, if you go back, if you go to my, I'm advertising for myself, if you go to my odors and collections webinar that's available here at the Connecting to Collections site, I give you a hint of ways of getting rid of odors and collections that will reduce the odor for that. There won't at least smell like mold. There shouldn't be a risk to your collections provided you inspect this orally based use and basic vacuuming and cleaning to make sure there isn't anything on the object. Okay, and I hope Leah had a very similar question earlier about how you would approach a small collection with a mild mold that you're considering, acquiring, and can it be done without professionals? I think that kind of, it's a very similar question. It is, and like I said, I want to emphasize personal protection, number one, and making sure that you are in an isolated space if you are going to do the mold recovery yourself in terms of cleaning, because you don't want to spread it or expose other people to it. So, I mean, a lot of the steps I mentioned in here can be done on a smaller scale, and I really, really want to emphasize people, emphasize that people need to do that so that they don't spread it, put their coworkers at risk, the rest of their collections at risk, anything like that, so. All right, we have another question from Lisa who's curious earlier. She asked, can inactive mold growth cause respiratory issues? Yes, absolutely, because the thing about mold, even in an inactive state, it still can be a sensitizer or an allergen to someone who's highly sensitive to it. So, what's most important is getting rid of those mold scores whether they be active or inactive. Okay, let's see. So, we did have a question when we were talking about air quality tests about the cost and who would you contact? Who does this? There are a ton of companies that do this kind of work. I would go to the OSHA website, which is, oh goodness, what does that stand for? Office of Safety and, whoo! I don't know what OSHA stands for, but if you do a search for OSHA, I bet you they would have recommended companies or sites where you could get someone to come in to do an air quality test. If you're at a university, they often have the Office of Environmental Health and Safety can do that testing for you. But I know there are a lot of laboratories around, like I know in the state of Connecticut, there are a ton of them. Make sure that they have people who are basically registered to do this kind of work. Do checks through the Better Business Bureau, things like that, to make sure that you're getting a laboratory or someone who is a hygienist who knows what they're doing, industrial hygienists, make sure that they know what they're doing and they're doing a legitimate air quality test for you. Okay, and then another kind of question about whether we need a professional or not. Barbara in Montana says, do you need a professional to clean the duct work? Can you do the duct work with a HEPA filter vacuum? Is that sufficient? Actually no, what you need to do is hire a professional company to do the duct cleaning, only because they actually do a different process for cleaning duct work. What they do is they actually, they seal off all of the supplies and returns in the duct work and actually cut a hole or several holes, depending on how large your system is, in the actual duct line, and apply the longest HEPA filter vacuum to that hole. And they might attach it also to one of the actual duct lines. I don't recall the one instance I've seen it half and where they actually cut a hole in the duct line. And they seal the vacuum to that and then turn the vacuums on and it sucks the living the Jesus out of the duct work. So it cleans it very thoroughly. They go back in and clean, I think, by hand with different tools and they also do, they apply a fundus on top of that. Okay. In the duct line if you want them to do that. So yes, it has to be done by a professional company. Okay, good to know. I'm going to, so we're gonna, I have a bunch more questions to get through, so hang on if I haven't gotten to your question. But I just wanna pull over, we have a survey for this webinar if you get a moment, please consider filling it out. It really helps us plan our future webinars. So I'll put that up, but let me keep plowing through these questions. Let's see. We have- God said, thanks, Scott, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that's what Ursa stands for. Thanks, Scott. So let's see, we have a question from Lynn in Kansas. He says, how about cleaning under a fume hood? If you're cleaning under the fume hood, does the hood need to be cleaned after you're done? Oh, that's a good question. I would definitely clean the inside, right away, accessible area. But the thing about the air, if you have a good fume hood, it should be sort of self-cleaning. I don't know whether there's actually, I actually don't know if there's filters or anything like that. I'm actually not certain how the fume hoods work. I know they work in terms of being able to protect you while you're cleaning the object, but I actually don't know how long we clean that. I've never had to do it, and I don't know. I don't know, maybe Scott knows. Scott says something if you know how to clean a fume hood. He's another conservator, that's why I'm asking. Let's see, okay. So Sharon in South Carolina says her museum is planning a big move into a newer building in about a year, and she is wondering if, you know, some of her things need to be cleaned. Do you have any recommendations on how to assess a move like that, and how important it is to look for signs of mold? Oh, that's a very good idea. It's variant because you don't wanna move the mold outbreak or mold with you. That's a very good point. Might not be a bad idea to, I mean, depending. Did you say it was a museum? I'm sorry, I don't recall you. Yeah. Do you say? It's a museum? Okay. It might not be a bad idea. I mean, again, this is a money issue, but it doesn't say have to be. Having sort of, if you have a year out, you might actually have time to do a clean, like a mass cleaning of everything, either by a company or even the people in house. If you get the proper equipment, just in terms of dust and things like that, that might be a huge help in terms of making sure that you don't have any insect problems, mold problems, federal dust. I mean, that's actually, they have the time and can do that. That would be a really good idea. You can follow similar steps in terms of cleaning. If you have books and things like that, or things like boxes, that's pretty easy to clean. You're using your HEPA filter vacuum with a brush attachment. For other things, it might be a little more difficult, like textiles and things like that, because you need screens, you need large tables, depending upon what you're actually needing to clean. The need of just doing simple dusting would be a huge help, probably, in terms of that. But if you want to have a professional company come in and do it, there are conservators that do conservation companies that will clean all collections, too, that I know are, if you can get to an AIC directory, I know that there are companies that do that. It's easy. I can post one. There's one in New York that we've used in the past. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I was just gonna, we have a couple questions about protective equipment. Our first one is after use, do you need to get rid of all your stuff after you've used it once? Yeah. Yep. I mean, there are respirators. If you get a proper full-face respirator, you're a company where you're changing cartridges, like those types of respirators, no, but I would throw out your N95, your gloves. I mean, I would just throw it all away and bag it up, throw it away. No, I wouldn't reuse it. Okay, let's see. We have another question about, from Tracy North Carolina, who says when she is suited up and wearing the unvented goggles, sweating is an issue. Do you have any recommendations? Because she also has glasses, and so there's an issue of fogging up. Oh, I know. For sweating, I know gloves are really good trick is to wear cotton gloves underneath your nitrile gloves. That's a good trick for hands. For anything else, I would wear clothing that's cotton or something that's readily observable, so that actually will help absorb some of the excess sweating. For glasses, it fogged up. I have glasses, too. So it's, I actually don't even know how, I've often taken breaks where I just step out and try to see them off for a time to do that, but I actually don't know. Okay. So we did have earlier on in the webinar, we had a lot of questions about sun and whether or not you could vacuum an object and then expose it to the sun if that would help it. And I think that you answered it. I did. But the answer is no. The sun is not a viable source. Nope, it's just, it basically dehydrates the object and see humidification in the sun. Okay. It's not the actual sunlight during it. Okay, let's see. I have a question from somebody in Mexico who says, does biological disinfectants like those made of citrics, are those recommended to kill mold on bugs? And we also had a question, kind of a follow-up if there's an alternative to bleach. Okay, I would not, anything that's a biocide or anything like that I would never use on an object directly, mostly because there's a lot of other components in a lot of those cleaning materials, those cleaning things that actually will cause more problems than health. But the really key, again, is deactivating the mold by reducing the moisture content and for good surface cleaning. Is there alternatives besides bleach? Because I know when I did this before, a lot of people asked about different types of cleaners that they could use. We usually recommend bleach because we know it will actually take care of the mold. I don't know if other cleaners will, so I can't really say if anything else would be in terms of cleaning shelving and that sort of thing. Because the dilution of it shouldn't be a problem with fumes or anything like that, except what the person's concerned about in terms of using bleach. So I don't know. I'm afraid I don't have a real answer for that. I just know that bleach is one of the things I know will, like if you're gonna clean a surface, like a shelf or something like that, that that would be your best bet. I mean, I don't know whether, you know, a life-all disinfectant cleaner or something that would be, or I think people ask about vinegar using other types of cleaners and I don't really know. So I don't think I have a really good answer for that one, I'm afraid. Okay. I have a question about another type of material. So I've got a question from Belize City. We have colonial bricks. How would you address mold spores on those? So brick. Colonial bricks? Are we sure it's mold? That's the one, that would be my first question, only because if I'm thinking about brick, I think about efflorescing. A lot of times there are mineral deposits that can effloresce or kind of come out of brick. I've seen that in regular brick, but since I'm also not familiar with the material, I wouldn't even know. So that would be probably my first question if it isn't some sort of efflorescing and not mold. I would probably check that first. Okay. Because I'm not sure, that doesn't, yeah, that's my gut instinct for that, but I'm not even sure. If it were mold, I wouldn't be certain how to clean that except the whole dehumidification vacuuming, but I would still recommend that probably. Okay. We have a question from Dee. So I hope you're still on, Dee. I know you'd asked if you've gotten to it. She says, I was recently asked about a piano that has white powdery spots. The owner says there's no musty odor. She says she hasn't seen it only in photos. Do you think white powdery spots is that likely to be mold? And if so, what do you recommend as a first step beyond isolation? A piano, so a big thing. Where on the piano? On the actual, on the keys, on the black keys, on the white keys, on the piano itself, on the wood? Let's see. Dee, if you wanna type in where these spots are, you might be able to help. Yeah, I see she's there. So in Canada, because I'm wondering if it's something from, oh, there we go. It's all over the wooden surface. I should mention I'm a conservator. Oh, hey, hi. This is, oh my gosh, and you're asking me? I'm a paper conservator. Oh my goodness. I'm wondering if it's, I wonder if there's some other issue with the wood itself. Oh, hey, it was in a museum. Oh, okay. It was in a museum in another city, so I've only seen it in pictures. Oh goodness. Yeah, because I would wonder if the environment in the museum is causing the problem. I would wonder about if there was a high humidity there and if that's what was causing the mold. Or that would be a hint to know if it actually was mold. Otherwise, I'm wondering if it's some sort of, I don't know, some sort of adverse effect from a cleaning product? It could be that too. It looks like mold in the pics, but she says there's no odor, no odd environmental issue. Oh man, I have no idea. Oh, but Scott says that you should have them look at that website. Yeah, Scott and his wife have made this really cool website about different types of white stuff. And it's a lot from like, there's different types of spew mold, that sort of thing, so like, is it mold? It's a good place to go. Yes, yes, it's a, oh, it's a very good idea. Go over to Scott's site. Scott's gonna be taking this. All right, let's see. So we had a question about putting books into plastic bags and whether or not that's gonna make the mold grow faster. We had a question about putting something outside. Is that the best way to go if you're able to isolate something outside? I mean, you can if I suppose, if we're not worried about it being exposed to the elements, so I guess it depends on the object. And putting something in a bag is okay, provided the item isn't wet or damped because basically, they're right. If you put it in a bag, it's gonna increase the mold activity if it has the right moisture content. So you wanna make sure that things dry before you put it in a bag. Okay, and then we had a question from Kim about how cold is cold enough to kill mold without damaging the host? Okay, it's gonna depend on your object, but it's gotta be, I think it's minus, is it minus 20 Celsius or shoot? I don't remember the exact temperature. It's freezing in below. Like we're talking about, it has to be, and not something that's gonna be your regular freezer, it has to be something like a chest freezer. I wanna say, I'm getting my bugs in my mold mixed up. That's part of why I'm not remembering correctly. Because there's certain temperatures that will kill certain insects in benefits collections. And I mean, if you do, do minus 20 Celsius, you're good in terms of killing mold and insects and pretty much everything. But yeah, for some composite objects, that might be a problem. But for things like paper and books, you should be fine. Okay. And then kind of another question about freezing. Sonya was curious when we were talking about air drying, or doing the freeze drying process, how can that possibly reactivate the mold if the mold itself bursts in the freezing process? Oh, it can't. Okay, that's the beauty of it. I think it's meaning that if there's some that, okay, this is a little confusing. I see what she's asking. Because the mold that was activated, was previously activated and put into the freezer. That would then, they would be killed in the freezer. And the air drying process, what we'd be concerned about is the mold that actually wasn't activated. I know this is a little, it's splitting hairs a bit. So that there could be air drying problems. Air drying could be a problem if there happened to be mold spores on the object that were in fact not activated. Because taking them out of the freezer, because they can survive the freezing process and all of that, they could be activated by air drying. That's what we're referring to, not the mold spores that were previously activated. It's very much splitting hairs, but good catch. Because it's important to differentiate the two, so. Okay, another question from Stacey in Nebraska. She's curious, is it safe to assume that if you see mold growing on a dry wall, that there's also mold growing behind it? Probably. That means that you've got a real, you've probably got a water issue behind that wall, especially if it's isolated. Oh, I see another conservator has put the temperature. Mold can still grow at minus five Celsius. Okay, that's true. So they're going back to the temperature. I'm pretty sure it has to, I know minus 20 Celsius will certainly kill it, so definitely minus, yeah, we'll just leave it at minus 20 for sure, to absolutely kill mold if you're going to freeze it. So, yeah, I would inspect, back to the wall issue, I would inspect to make sure there isn't some sort of moisture problem, like a leaking pipe or anything like that. Okay, and then Beverly, you asked if we can post some of these links that are being provided by participants. Yes, definitely. As soon as we post a recording of this webinar, we'll also include all these great links. So thank you guys. Yeah, everything's been really helpful. Thank you so much, because my memory's failing me. So we have just, I can get through a few more questions. I've kind of put some of the health questions on the backburner only, only because it's not exactly the topic we're trying to cover, but okay. For all the other questions, we'll try, I'm going to try to get to them. So Erin, she has a question and she says, she probably already knows the answers. So what do you think about discarding moldy pages or cutting pieces of moldy papers off? She thinks that the mold she's dealing with is inactive already, and they don't have a ton of money for professionals. Will removing those pages help at all, or is it not even worth it? Oh, if it's inactive mold, I mean, they could just do vacuuming if they really want to keep the object. I wouldn't have to ask the resort to cutting things out. Because if you're in a dry space, the object itself is dry, and you've got powdery mold, then you can vacuum, and provide you keep it in an environment where it's not going to be reacted, like it won't grow on it again. You're not going to put it in a place with high humidity or anything like that. I don't think you need to resort to cutting pages out or anything like that. Okay. We had a question from one of our UK participants. She says, Tara refers to air circulation to decrease the risk of mold, but also the fact that mold does not need high relative humidity to develop. So what is the purpose of inducing air circulation? Of reducing air circulation? Of inducing, sorry. Oh, inducing. The thing about mold is it really likes, I mean, in general, mold likes warm, damp, still dark conditions generally. The dark is key also, because it's one of the two biologicals. It doesn't need light, doesn't have, doesn't use blank. Oh, my bio is UF'd. Yeah. Is it chlorophyll? Is that what I'm thinking of? There's certain plants that need light, basically, to grow at all. And this is one type of biological that doesn't need it. So it's just sort of, everything is sort of compounded into one sort of thing. If you have the right components together, you'll get, you can get mold, but it's also dependent upon the factors, like what type of mold is it? What is it growing on? What does it want to grow on? There's always like, so air circulation alone isn't going to prevent mold if you have all these other factors coming into it. It's one way that might help it from not happening, but it may not. I'm not really sure I'm answering this well. Is it written down on the parking lot? I read it again. Let me see. Just so I can read it again because I think I'm not... I might have cut it. Okay, that's cool. Sorry. I'm sorry. She's full of synthesis. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Anna. Oh, there it is. There it is. Allows it. There, I made it big. No, I can't see it. The question is in the parking lot? It is. I just made it a size 14, so it should be a little bigger. I have to move the parking lot all the way to the right on my screen, so can I move it? Let's see. No. She did have a follow-up in here. She was just curious, wanting to know why you would use air circulation. Okay. Essentially, air circulation is one component that will help. It's not going to totally get rid of mold or anything like that. So it's kind of one of the four factors that I mentioned that mold likes in general, these four things. Air circulation will help as one of the components to prevent mold from happening. Essentially, it's what that means. If that answers your question, maybe, hopefully. Sorry. We are out of time, Tara. Thank you so much. Oh, you're so welcome. So let's see. Our next webinar is Thursday, February 28th at 1 p.m. here in the meeting room. We'll be going over object handling with Mary Coughlin, who is a conservation professor at the George Washington University. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Again, if you have a chance to fill out our survey, it really helps us plan for the future of recording of this webinar. And all these great resources you guys have included will be in the community shortly. So thank you again, everyone. Have a fantastic afternoon. Thank you.