 All right, let's go ahead and get started. Again, thank you all for joining us for today's webinar. This is, of course, the fourth in our eight-part series to complement your in-person training for the Miami Heritage Response Team. These programs are made possible through the generous grant funding support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Today we will continue the discussion of some material-specific salvage tips. We were fortunate last week to be joined by Susan Blakeney to discuss paintings. And today we will hear from Andrew Robb about photographs on electronic media. We'll have a break next week, and then we'll pick up again on Wednesday, August 16, at 2 p.m. Eastern for a program on salvaging textiles with Meg Geiss Mooney. All of the presenters on these material-specific programs are conservators who also serve as team members for the National Heritage Responders. Many of them have a variety of personal experiences responding to disasters, so we're very fortunate to have their expert knowledge shared with us. Again, a reminder that if you've missed any live programs, please make sure that you watch a recording of your miss session. You should have completed watching all eight programs by Monday, October 16, which is the date we're picking up our in-person training. And after today, we'll be halfway through the series. So if you've missed any, it's a good opportunity to catch up if needed. Before we begin the presentation, just a quick refresher of your technical notes on your screen. You'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left-hand side. Again, you can use this chat box to say hello and ask questions, share any information or links that you'd like. A reminder that links will be live, so all attendees can click directly on them, which is really handy. If you post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a response from me. I will collect those questions and verbally ask them of Andrew during a break in the presentation. Today, we have a return of our web links box at the bottom of the screen. Andrew has supplied some really helpful online resources for the group. So be sure to take a look at those. Again, you just click the link to highlight it in blue, and then click the Browse To button to visit the site. A quick note that the final link included there are the Library of Congress Disaster Resources. It wasn't loading for me earlier this afternoon, but I think there might just be some maintenance work happening on the site. So be sure to just flag that URL and go back and check it out, because it really is a wonderful resource. And with that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's presenter, Andrew Robb. Andrew is head of Photograph Conservation and coordinator of the emergency team for a large research library in Washington, DC. He also serves as a point of contact to the Natural and Cultural Resources Support Group of the Federal National Disaster Response Framework. And he's on the steering committee of the Heritage Emergency National Task Force. He has been a conservator and consultant for a variety of institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Getty Conservation Institute, the National Park Service, and Harvard University. He's a member of the National Heritage Responders, and he deployed to the Brooklyn Recovery Center after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. He's also assisted with recovery efforts in Hawaii, Japan, Russia, and Washington, DC. Andrew is a past program chair and chair of the Photographic Material Specialty Group and has served as the co-chair of the AIC Emergency Committee. He's a professional associate of the AIC. He majored in photograph conservation from the Winniter University Delaware Program and Art Conservation and received a BA with honors in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania. And with that, I'd like to turn things over to Andrew for his presentation on a photograph and electronic media salvage. Oh, hi, everybody. I hope everybody can hear me. We did our test and I will get started. You sound great, Andrew. Good. So our theme today is going to be talking about salvage of photographs and electronic media. And as we get started, I just want to go take a step back and just talk a little bit about why we're doing this. This is the most obvious reason for those of you in Miami. What's your biggest risk in Miami? Hurricanes are by far the biggest large risk for the region. And you can see historically, this is the map of all hurricanes since the end of World War II in 1946 to now. And there have been approximately 17 storms, depending on how you count them. And so that roughly is every few years. It's been a while since the last one. So that also shows that there's some randomness to this. And I think that's one of the things on the preparedness side that can be difficult. So these are storms. These are things that you're very aware of. They happen. Your disaster plans are focused on them. But there are also other kinds of risks and things like sprinkler systems, things like water pipes, things like water mains near your building. Those are elements from a more repetitive nature. And those are the kinds of things as the coordinator of an emergency team that we deal with most of the time. They're actually the smaller incidents rather than the larger ones. The common theme, and then let's just take another step back. And when we're talking about emergency planning at large, collections are important. They're the most important thing in terms of what drives our institutions. But from a safety point of view, people are going to come first. The building safety is going to come second. And then things or collections are going to come third. And that's just something that's a part of the way incident command works, the way first responders will work. And so I think one of the biggest issues is while we're talking about salvage is to keep in mind that we really want to have prepare and mitigate for these risks rather so that they don't happen or don't happen to the extent that they could. Because as you'll see, photographs and electronic media are sensitive to different kinds of threats. And it's better to not have them happen. But we want to get ready. And that's what we're going to focus on today. We're going to focus on what happens if they do get wet. So I mentioned some of these terms before. I'll just try to be consistent with these words as I'm talking. So let me just take a minute to review those. So preparedness are things we do to get ready for incidents, drills, having a plan, planning, exercises, things like this training. Those are all parts of preparedness. It's not just having a plan. It's having people that are ready. Response is what you do when there's immediately an incident. This can be tricky because there's a very steady gradual shift in responses when you're responding into recovery. So talk about that in a second. Salvage, from my point of view, straddles response and recovery. Mitigation are things you do to minimize risk. So you may see that there's a risk and it may be something like we don't store things in a basement. We don't store things on the bottom shelf. We don't store things on the top shelf. We don't store things in an attic. Where are your water risks? Where are your risks? You're reducing them. So to think of this in a health context is useful, particularly when we're talking about response and long-term recovery. Often when we're talking about salvage, our goals are really to stabilize the situation. They're not to completely treat all of the items. And I think that's important. It's important for this kind of training, but it's also important in conveying to people that you're working with, whether it's your institution or someone else's things, that what you're trying to do in salvage and your first recovery steps are to just keep the situation from getting worse and to get it to a place where it's stable. And then you have more time to do recovery, what we often call long-term recovery. It's a helpful term in the medical field to think of this as long-term recovery as rehabilitation. So someone has a stroke or a heart attack or severe injury. They're in intensive care for a long period of time. They're in the hospital and then they get discharged. There's a really long period of rehabilitation that we're used to thinking about. And that's something to think about with our recovery of objects, our salvage of objects. With salvage, we're really focusing on that rehabilitation step. Excuse me, not the rehabilitation step, but the stabilization step. And that long-term recovery, full treatment, returning things to service, is part of that longer-term rehabilitation. And that often can be very frustrating for people in institutions, is that they feel that the effort on the salvage side took a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money. But this is the reality that often our salvage efforts take a long time and they're only part of the way down the road. But they're really important because they're the way that you save collections from loss or even bad distribution or from loss. So I'm gonna focus primarily on water and the impact that water can have because particularly with storms, but other kinds of incidents, fires, floods, water main breaks, pipe breaks, leaks. Water is a common theme of almost all disasters. It may not be the primary cause, but it's a secondary issue, say for earthquakes. Water is not typically part of an earthquake, but if you have pipes break, water becomes an issue. So we're really gonna focus on water. It's a main threat for photographs and electronic media. And that's gonna be kind of the basis of what we're gonna focus on. So from some of your previous webinars, one of the things that's always a problem with any incident for almost any organic material, of which there are some in both electronic media and photographs is mold. I like to think of it as a kind of golden 100 hours with molds. You have about 100 hours of time before mold starts growing on paper, starts growing on photographs. It may not, but I would dare say in places like Miami and tropical areas, it will grow sooner rather than later. And in particular things that had mold grow on them before are more at risk for having it come back in humid or wet situations. So this is where this 48 hours to 96 hours comes from when we say we really need to see something soon. We wanna do it quickly. We wanna see what the situation is because for all of our collections, water is a risk factor. When it comes to photographs, oh, excuse me. So when we're talking about emergencies, we have this pressure to respond to them quickly, to see them. We really don't wanna have things get worse by having mold grow on them. Some things are very sensitive to water, as we'll see photographs sometimes are. We wanna get there quickly, but going back to that hierarchy of life safety, buildings, collection safety, these are things that will unfold in that order. And often collections, you won't be allowed into a building until the building is declared safe and until everybody is accounted for and things like that. So this can take time and the larger the incident, the more time it will take. So this is something to be aware of that this short-term recovery, this response where you're going through life, building, collection safety can take days, sometimes even weeks, depending upon the severity of the incident. And then returning services, people can go into your museum, people can get records from your archive, people can check out books from your library. Those can come online sometimes in a matter of weeks or months. Buildings can take longer, but often the full rehabilitation or return to service of collections may happen well after buildings are completely fixed and renovated. And that can be a real surprise to people. And that goes back to what I was saying before about salvage being the first step, but it's not the last step. And rehabilitation can take a long time. So let's then start talking about photographs. When we say photographs, it's complicated. There are a lot of different kinds and one of the challenges we have and the time we have today is to give you confidence about what to do with photographs, but also have some sense of the varied nature of them. And there are some distinct ways to think about them as you go through a recovery so that you do the right thing. They can behave differently and we'll talk about that. Let's first just talk about just classes of photographs. We now are in an era where most printed out photographs are inkjet prints. Some things are color laser printer things which are actually fairly robust in water, inkjet prints are not. We'll see some examples of that, but if you are dealing with modern prints since say that roughly speaking, the turn of the century, it's most likely that it's an inkjet print. It may not be, but you should be aware that those are things that are very sensitive to immersion in water. Color prints, black and white prints, film and transparencies, the bulk of what you find from the 20th century are actually very robust when it comes to water. There may be gloss changes and other kinds of significant change, but they will not run, they will not bleed. They actually can withstand being in water, particularly cold, clean water for a fairly long period of time. And that's helpful. It's one of the things that while they're sensitive and can be time consuming, you have some time with the majority of 20th century things. The 19th century, we're looking at a kind of photograph called the Chlodian photograph or an Albumin photograph. They're typically mounted on cards and that's their weak point is that they can withstand being in water but they can come off of those supports or mounts and their paper supports are very thin. So you'll then have a complicated matter of having supports, these cards and the photographs actually separate. You also can have some classes of materials, negatives on glass, photographs and cases that really can't withstand being wet for any long period of time. So or they're very badly damaged to care types as an example of that. So we'll talk a little bit about that in a second. So here are some examples. So black and white photographs, transparencies, I'll link up my arrow. Typical black and white photographs, color transparencies, this is a black and white negative but it's on glass but it's a type that's on glass that actually can be frozen. There are examples where you'll see in some literature particularly on the salvage wheel that you can't freeze photographs on glass and that's because the oldest kind of photographs on glass that are called wet plate or collodion are very sensitive to water immersion. However, they're fairly rare, particularly in places where there wasn't a lot of photography in the mid 19th century. So most likely you will not encounter them in great numbers in Miami and Florida. You'll encounter more of the glass gelatin plate that are more robust underwater and can be freeze dried. So that's one of the things that just, if you run across those kinds of things, something to note and we'll return to that when we sort of go through some of our case studies. You also can have photographs mounted in albums and those are another kind of challenge where you have a kind of combination of book and photograph. One of the biggest problems we have that's different from paper objects or say books where you're worried about things getting wet primarily because they'll get moldy, they may distort is that with photographs that big bulk of the 20th century, those black and white photographs, colored photographs, negatives, transparencies. As they dry, the gelatin will stick to anything that it's touching. So this is the kind of counterintuitive aspect of that huge amount of photographs is that they actually, it's not so much the wet part that's the risk, but it's the drying part that's the risk. So you can't dry things in stacks. It takes a lot of space. You don't want them to dry against something because they won't get stuck to it. And then that would be very difficult to unstick. It's not, it is possible to get stuck to something to get it off, but often it's that second adhering that is hard to treat. It's unpredictable, so you want to avoid that. So blocking is one of the things we're really worried about with most photographs and it's why we take the approach that we do with how to air dry them or how to freeze them. This is an example of Alicia Chipman who was an intern with me a number of years ago and she was working on a project of some, these are black and white negatives from the 1960s that had been stored under a sink and over the years, water had dripped on them and they had all gotten stuck together and they were stuck together for a very long time, many decades of time. And it was sort of a hopeless cause, classic kind of internship project. And she figured out ways to get them apart. So it is possible to do it, but it was time consuming and she was doing it with a combination of freezing items actually and getting them apart just by freezing them and then carefully peeling them apart. There are other ways of getting things, nursing things in water, nursing things in combinations of water and ethanol, but it's this adhering aspect of the gelatin that we really want to avoid. So by far the biggest issue is we really want things to not start drying because at that drying point it will start sticking to things and dirt will start getting embedded and any kind of material that's in that water will start getting embedded in that gelatin. This is an example, as I was saying before, with our more modern materials, we have materials like inkjet in particular that to some degree are very water sensitive. It varies depending upon the nature of the specific product, the specific paper that they're on, but unlike a photograph where you could keep it in cold 20th century photographs could keep it in cold, clean water for literally days of time with that significant change, you can have change like this happen in a matter of hours or easily a day or so. So the risk to these more modern materials is greater and if you had to prioritize from a planning point of view these are the items that should really be kept out of farms way, kept higher up, kept in boxes, kept in more protective cabinets like say even gasketed cabinets. It can be a real challenge and that's something to be mindful of as you're entering into an area by the time you actually can get to something even if it's quickly at your own institution this kind of damage may already have started and so you should prioritize looking for those materials first if you think that they'll be there. Let's talk a little bit about on the electronic media side. Our experience with photographs is fairly robust. People have done a lot of research in the conservation field. People have a lot of experiences. You'll see some of the case studies of dealing with those things in an incident. It's much more known and manageable. The issue with electronic media is harder. It's harder in part because what people do with items and who they go to to fix them or recover them is done by people that aren't conservators and it's not going outside of the field into experts that really deal with these materials day in and day out in more of an emergency recovery point of view, companies really specialize in this. So your risk for these materials is higher. It's harder to deal with these things without having someone else to assist you because of that it's also more expensive. One other way of thinking of these materials is sort of to describe what they are. And in fact, I realized on my slide I've switched these two things around. The top group of things are the digital materials. Things like hard drives, things like thumb drives, optical disks, things like magnetic tapes and disks. The first kinds of disks. All of those digital materials of the last, say 30 or 40 years. Those digital materials really require an expert to take care of them even in small numbers. You can, there's some advice to start trying to dry things and or keep them wet in clean water until someone can take them apart and recover the say the hard drive disk into it. Those are all things that you really need to be preparing for those things with someone in mind and ask for their advice as part of your planning. Obviously they can help you after the fact, but this is something where the person that you're working with may ask you to do certain things. Sometimes it's keep things wet. Sometimes it's not to do anything. Let them take care of it. But your time is short with those things because as metal objects, they're vulnerable to dirt. They're vulnerable to corrosion. And they're typically talking about a day or two of time. The advantage on the digital side of these materials is that they, as digital materials, particularly hard drives, there may be some sort of backup plan, data system of either backing up or creating redundancy or creating gray archives. So that they're part of your emergency preparedness is that the first thing you would ask are these things, is there backup of this? Is there a protocol in place where we don't need to work on these items? With our analog materials, our oldest sort of electronic media that those magnetic videotapes, magnetic audio tapes, things like VHS tapes, things like audio cassettes, those things are typically often without other copies or not easily copied. And often that's your challenge with those things is that as those formats become more and more obsolete, you're challenged by having to find machines to copy to, copy from, and it's an whole added level. And then lastly, the way to, you know, you can see there's a plethora of formats. This is from the UCLA Anthra Musicology Archive. It's very typical for an archive that has audio visual materials, electronic materials. It just has all sorts of different kinds of formats. And this can be an enormous challenge for recovery effort. And that's where as your risk factors, as you're planning, those are things to start with first so that you really are prepared for having someone assist you because you will need their assistance in how to drive these materials, how to reformat them as part of how you're drawing them. It can, these materials are very challenging. And unfortunately, as you'll see in the web links and the list, the amount of information on what to do is very sparsen. I've basically summarized it. There are not good broad references that describe in detail what to do. And it's a real lack of sort of point in the literature. It really needs to be covered in a better and more consistent way so that you're ready for a larger scale incident. The other thing to keep in mind is that it's also problematic because these materials all, by definition, require machines. There are another way of looking at them is that they're not electronic only. There are machine readable. That you need a machine to run them. And in many cases, your machines can be damaged by these incidents as well. They're very vulnerable to any kind of dust or dirt. And so something like an emergency can be really harmful to those machines as well. And that's again, where the approach of many of these emergency companies is to recover your items by getting them to a place where then they can immediately be copied. And so that's also something that raises a lot of questions. What are you copying? How do you want that done? What do you want it copied to? So it's where, as a prepared this point of view, these materials are very vulnerable and they have a high risk. And for all of the reasons I've described, but hopefully it's digital things. They're being backed up so you don't need to worry about the things that may be damaged. If they are unique or they're analog and they have no other copy, then you really may need to go through some sort of triage approach of what are the highest priority things? What are the things that are unique to us that are most important to us? And then if you have machines having to figure out how important those machines are to you as opposed to having those things copied. So let's review a little bit about what's on, say, the salvage wheel, which is the most readily available resource if you're dealing with an incident, particularly with formats that you're not familiar with or that are outside of your typical area. And that'll help us with our review and I can fill in a little bit about where this advice comes from. And then we'll go into some case studies where we can see some of this in application. So with photographs, the first thing the wheel says is to remove them from frames and sleeves. And that's for the reasons I was describing before. Most photographs, if they're wet or damp even, if they're in a frame or they're in a sleeve and they start to dry, they'll stick to those frames and sleeves and then you have a whole other set of problems. So that is in an ideal world, something you could do. That can be very time consuming and we'll see one of our case studies that that's something you have to weigh is you may not have the time to remove everything from frames and sleeves. So you may have to make some hard decisions about rolling in a D-frame or on sleeve, so many things. And that may lead you down a path where you choose an option of instead of unframing them or particularly desleaving them, that you just freeze them. We'll talk a little bit about that later, but you freeze them without doing that step and find yourself some time to follow up in it at a later time with fully recovering them. Another issue with photographs and electronic media is that there's often a lot of associated material on boxes or sleeves, other kinds of things that really organize and help identify those items. So you have to be really careful, particularly if you are removing things from sleeves, that you don't completely separate the arrangement or the association of a sleeve to say a negative because that may make the whole process of reorganizing the collection once it's dry much harder. So the notion is just trying to save information or at least save an arrangement can be really important, particularly as you get larger and larger collections. And I'll show you an example of that in a second. Then we're getting into that gelatin surface where this is a really don't touch the surface. That has to do with the gelatin surfaces are sensitive when they're wet, when they're damp and any kind of contact you have with the surface will embed dirt, it could cause Mars, other kinds of problems. If you have the space and air drying photographs is good but you will need to keep them from touching one another. It takes more space to air dry photographs and it does say paper objects where you can begin to stack them, interleave them and stack them in bladder stacks or under some kind of compression. And this is where you may have too many for immediate attention. And that is a real issue with any kind of incident is do you have enough time and space to deal with the photographs, items in front of you in the time that you have. So the wheel it advises keeping 20 century photographs in cold water for up to 48 hours. And in fact, you can go past 48 hours, you just start running into the potential for other kinds of problems. If they're weak, if they're mold damaged, you may start having damage but you need to keep them from drying against something. So, but you can buy yourself time with big buckets of water keeping things closed. We'll see an example of that in a second. But by far the night the biggest thing to do or to keep in mind with a large incident where you're overwhelmed with the amount of material you have is to freeze items and if possible to interleave them or put them into smaller groups. We'll see some examples of that. But freezing photographs is a really, really good solution and it's something you'll see as a common theme in our case studies. And it's something where if you have to make a decision you have to do it quickly because you're worried about other water sensitive materials that may be associated with the incident. Freezing is a really good option. It's basically buying you time. It's putting things in a place where they're frozen. They're stable in that state. They're not usable, but they're stable. And then they can be freeze dried at a later point. We'll see some examples of that. But freezing life is your best option when it comes to large amounts of photographs. It's also not a bad option for other kinds of materials, paper materials, archival materials, many kinds of books. I'm sure Randy got into that but freezing was a really good option for large scale incidents. And then it has, where I have the stars is don't freeze glass negatives. And there are examples of glass negative collections that have been successfully frozen and treated. They're that later kind of a gelting dry plate. Chlorian wet plates are very sensitive to water and it may be within a matter of hours that those collections are so vulnerable to water damage that there isn't much to save. So in a way, if you have wet glass negative collections freezing that may not be the worst thing because if it's an intermingled collection you'll at least save your gelting dry plates. Again, this is where our generic advice in the wheel is good. Don't freeze them. This is a fairly uncommon format, particularly in 20th century collections. But this is where there's a slight caveat where the reason that's there has to do with the earlier kind of glass negative, not really the later kind. And again, some of our experience with glass negative collections is that once frozen, it again is the freeze drying part that's hard. And if you're patient and you're willing to pay for it you can successfully salvage most of those. So that's what the salvage wheel says. And this is generally good advice. On the emergency and electronic media side, excuse me, the salvage wheel is talking about avoid scratching them. Obviously things like optical discs, things like discettes, if you can be very vulnerable to scratching because they have a high density of information on them. So a scratch can remove and damage a lot of your information that's on those materials. It doesn't say this, but I have in brackets, you should rinse dirt off of them. Dirt is gonna be a problem if you're having to put this in a machine. Almost all of these require things rotating at a very high rate against some sort of reading head or near reading head. And so dirt or other things can be a problem. So you wanna rinse dirt off of things and you want to use distilled or clean water for rinsing them. That advice is really practical if you have a very small number of things that are less than 10, less than five. But for a large job, you'll need a data recovery company of some kind. You'll need that external expertise and your planning and your resources should have some discussion about how you're gonna approach that because it will be overwhelming to deal with all of these materials. In the case of the wheel, there isn't a lot of advice about removing things from cases, air drying them and reassembling them and copying them. And that disquets, not optical discs, but disquets can be frozen within 72 hours, which is typical of other kinds of advice on freezing. The issue with removing things from disquets and tapes is another example of where if you have a small number and you feel comfortable with this and you've done it before, you know how to do it and you're ready to associate what a disquet has supposedly on it, you're able to keep track of that. This can be manageable, but I would say that for a very large collection and that would be most collections, taking things out of cases is gonna be difficult and time consuming. It may not be your best use of time and that's again, we're having that relationship with a data recovery company ahead of time can help you put your particular context or situation in context. CDs and DVDs, those are things that shouldn't be freeze dried and so they need to be air dried vertically. Generally with a lot of CDs and well with a lot of DVDs and some CDs, you have that question of is this information somewhere else? Is this a used copy? Is it a master copy? And the wheel sort of stops at that point. It stops, it doesn't get into what to do with hard drives and thumb drives and that's where with those things, generally the advice that you'll see from data recovery companies is to rinse them but not try to take them apart and to call them within 24 hours and what they will do is essentially take apart that case and take out those disks, put them into a similar machine that's in good shape, read off that data, but it's very, very costly and so all of this is to say your preparedness efforts will be far less costly than your recovery efforts with those materials. Here's an example from the foreign spread about what is too many? This is huge air drying, so you can see a man on the left who's air drying large pieces of paper from large folios that are on these hanging racks that go many stories up in the air in the main reading room of the Italian National Library that was damaged in the flood. They did not have a lot of notions about freezing, about freeze drying and they had to air dry using the ways that means that they had and a lot of our use of freezing is because of this feeling that this was not a good or efficient approach and so this is where you need to have a sense of too many and we'll see an example of that in the University of Hawaii case study. So freezing comes directly outside or out of that experience from Florence. People start thinking hard about what are other options for large size collections in photographs or one of them. It works really well. The idea is that mold is not gonna be a problem when things are frozen, particularly when they're really cold. Freezing is more ubiquitous than it used to be, access to any kind of freezer will work. Freezing at a very, very cold temperature is slightly better than freezing at a normal temperature. Your house refrigerator or freezer is about zero. Ideally it's minus 20, minus 30 is a practical matter. You'll have slightly different ice crystal sizes. It'll be smaller, slightly better but realistically any freezing actions you take putting will be fine. You then have a problem later of how you're gonna dry them and we'll look at that in some of our case studies but freezing really is safe for almost all photographs except for those few exceptions, those early glass negatives and those case photographs. But those are generally in numbers that are small and that you take other preventive measures putting them in gas and the cabinets, really keeping them from getting wet. And this freezing notion is also consistent with what you might do with very large archival paper collection or record collection. So that's also, if you have a mixed collection it can just be helpful where everything comes out, everything gets frozen and you freeze dry it later and it could be many years later. For some things, and this is what we get into with our electronic media, things need to be immersed and in water. In this case these are reels of microfilm and in this incident that was part of the recovery effort where we chose to use our processing machines for microfilm but we needed to keep things wet so that they didn't dry and stick together. And so this is an example, this is a five gallon bucket, it's clean water in it, put things in there. People get, they feel like they're doing the wrong thing because they sort of feel like they're making things worse but this is really the right solution and this may be the kind of thing that you do for a lot of your electronic media is get those things in clean, cold water and then start talking to your data recovery people. And as I said, drying is that key part. For both of these classes of materials it's not just the threat that water has for them but it's how you're gonna dry them that is a big question. So the classic way of dealing with photographs for those of you that are old enough to have worked in a dark room is that you air dry them. You have a line, you have clips and you hang your photographs up in such a way that typically from one corner and they dry in a way where they're not touching something else and once they become dried then you can take them off. And this is the approach that you can see down here in the large scale with Florence. These are obviously paper objects not photographs but you could take the same approach. It's very large mechanisms for drying them. But in modern times we really now move more towards for frozen items you can dry them in what's called a vacuum freeze dryer. Water can go directly from ice to water, excuse me, from ice to gas. If you pull a vacuum on it and it's cold enough. So that avoids all of this adhering problem and other kinds of issues that you have when water is actually liquid. And so you can have small freeze dryers, you can have large freeze dryers and this is one of the ways that large emergency recovery companies will dry your things and a vacuum freeze dryer can be done in sort of batches where it can be done in large groups here. We'll see one of our case studies that this is a huge advantage when it comes to a large recovery effort because you can do this drying many years after the fact. You don't need to do it right away. It buys you a lot of time. So for in the conservation literature as I was saying before the really good resources when it comes to a lot of formats. Peter Waters wrote this amazingly helpful book for conservators, the salvage of water damaged library materials. It goes into some degree photographs, some degree of books and paper objects, but unfortunately he did it shortly after the Florence Bleds in 1966. This was published in 1975. And while very helpful does not cover a lot of machine readable or any electronic media. So it's limited in its scope if we're talking about electronic media but it's very helpful for practical advice for different kinds of photographs particularly 20th century photographs. Subsequently in the 80s, Klaus Hendricks and Brian Lesser wrote a very similar kind of article looking at a lot of different approaches for photographs and deciding that vacuum freeze drying was a very good and safe way for almost all photographs and did make that distinction between collodion wet plate versus gel and dry plate glass negatives that it is possible to even in their research that they demonstrated it's possible to freeze dry. Those later dry plates. And that's where that caveat, that asterisk on the wheel comes into play. These two things are available by the links. They're really useful if you really wanna dive in more into having something that you can read, something that you can think about. But broadly speaking, what they describe are ways to manage scale, to manage preparing things for freezing and then managing how you freeze, how you work with someone to freeze dry then. So let's look at a couple of case studies in the next, you know, 15, 20 minutes. These are things where I was involved with them. So I can, if you have questions, I can go into more detail about them. But I want to go into talking about sort of a scenario that you might have. These are very possible for what might happen in your neck of the woods. So this, the University of Hawaii, there was a flood started on Halloween. Basically, you can see there's a creek that runs through campus. And the Hamilton Library is right here. So it's kind of, it's nearby. And what happened was is that the water exceeded the banks of the creek. It went through these bottom windows. The building is situated where there were a lot of collections in the basement level. There was a light well around the building and all the water concentrated in that essentially moat broke through the windows and it damaged really severely a large collection of maps as well as aerial photographs. The water was very muddy. You can see the water line here. It got, it basically covered almost all of the file cabinets. They were housing this photograph collection about 90,000 things. Very muddy, as you can see. We go back here, it was extremely dirty, very salty, very, very messy, really complicated, just the removal of the material. And this is a picture where they, as I said, was about 90,000 photographs. They were able in about three days to wash and dry 3,000 of those photographs. About 1,000 a day, that's pretty good. I mean, it was impressive. And these items were really recovered in a very sensible and undamaged way. These are photographers, they had a lab, they were used to handling these things, but they could only get through about 3,000. And that for me is always this thing in the back of my mind, even as a photograph conservator, that number is important, because if you have a large collection, you can try to treat your way out of it, but you're gonna run into a limiting factor. And that's where you get into what's too many. Even if you have experience and you're willing to work for a long periods of time, you're not gonna get through a very large collection with success. So you're either gonna have to make a decision about what you're gonna save, or you're gonna have to decide, you're gonna take another approach. And in the case of what happened there, is that with both the map collections and the photographs, they took the things out of the building and put them into freezer trucks. They did it very quickly within 24 to 36 hours of the incident. And this is an example where they're talking, or they're moving their maps in their map cases. They just took the drawers out, carried them and staged them on these tables as they're getting things and stacking them up into the freezer trucks. This is extremely successful recovery. I know Randy talked about it some too. He was involved with me in figuring out the treatment protocol for these photographs that were frozen. As I said, because they were maps and they were photographs and they were all frozen. The maps were taken out, left in their folders, put into bags and frozen. Four years later, three years later, excuse me. That was in 2004 and 2007. A group of us went to Hawaii to consult with them on how, what would be the best protocol for them, essentially drawing that 85,000 photographs. And while I talked about freeze drying being a good option, in this case, as they thought, it could be peeled apart, particularly if they were put into cool water, they did not suffer any damage. And for the most part, you could get all of these things apart by just washing them in water and going through a typical washing bath scenario of progressively cleaner water, rotating your trays. But getting them apart, if they were hard to get apart, letting them sit in the water for some period of time, carefully getting them apart and then air drying them. And this was done for that large collection of things. They were taken out in batches and an emergency recovery company used that protocol to dry all of those things and did not require anything particularly technically complicated, it was just a scale issue. But it happened many years later and I think that's the big issue. If you have a collection, one of the easiest things I ever did from helping somebody with an institution is they had a historic collection of photographs, they'd all gotten wet from a fire and it was basically like, you need to get a freezer truck there and you need to freeze it. And they did that, it was very successful. Items in that case were freeze dried and it was not a laborious effort. It was somewhat expensive, but it was not a laborious effort. And freeze drying, particularly in small batches can be a very effective way of dealing with those materials too. Sometimes you're lucky, sometimes you can wash them and get them apart, but then you're dealing with a longer timeframe of getting all of those things down if you're doing it in small batches. Another example at an even larger scale is earthquake that happened in Japan in 2011. This was a very complicated incident. It was not only regional and it was really national in scope. It involved earthquake damage, it involved water damage as well because of the resulting tsunami that was much beyond what people had been planning for. And it had wave heights and sea rise heights of many meters. So if you're looking at a very tall building, a five, six story building, you're talking about wave fronts that were extremely large and really created an extensive amount of damage and really disrupted people's lives in a very significant way. There were many deaths. Power was affected in Japan, particularly the northern part of Japan from sort of Tokyo north for many, many, many months. But efforts, and in addition, there was a Fukushima nuclear disaster that was related to the tsunami. So this worked on many different levels. Many things were damaged. I want to talk about an effort that happened in a small town in the northern region, a town called Ofunatu, where I saw this picture about a month after the earthquake and tsunami and it was on the front page of the New York Times and it shows somebody washing photographs, starting to dry them next to a sink. And it was really inspiring to think that about a month after this had happened that recovery efforts were underway and that people were doing things. As I said, those were clearly family photographs, but there was a lot of library damage. There were libraries that were damaged from the tsunami. There were libraries that had to reshell their books more than once because the books were all tossed off during aftershocks or the earthquake. Very typical kind of damage, both here from water that was often dirty, physical damage from things falling off shelves. In the case of Ofunatu, what was happening is that as late as even into 2012, as people were going through debris fields, they were finding photographs and they were from families and there was an effort in this town with the knowledge and experience of a conservator there. We're lucky to have her who basically figured out the protocol to get collected. They're put into bags. They're dated. Where they were found is located on the bag. They were put into freezers. So they put into either freezers like this, freezers like this. They use all sorts of different kinds of freezers. They were not always commercial grade or lab grade. They froze things. They were in these discrete bags. And then with volunteers, they set up a system of which this is the first step. They were basically taking them out of the bags. They were washing them. This is very similar in that approach that I was talking about before. They were then drying them. So this is an area where I'm going to arrow out of the way. They were washing them. In this case, it's an absorbent pad. It seems somewhat ubiquitous in Japan, but it's essentially the same thing as blotter or newsprint. And then they were hanging them up in an extremely ingenious system of having a string. Each of these colored pieces of plastic is a cut straw. And so they're acting as the separator between these clips that are attached through a hole in the top of the clip. And then they're spaced far enough out part that the photographs don't touch. And generally the family photographs are relatively small, four by six or so. And these are being recovered from the debris fields months afterwards. So this is where that notion of I need to get in there within 48 hours or 96 hours is good practice. But in some situations, you can be salvaging things depending upon the circumstance, literally weeks or months afterwards. And it always pains me when people feel like that there's nothing that they can do or they throw them out because they don't know what to do with them. Air drying things, this is done in a high school science lab where they use the upended lab chairs, take them together, use string, use clothespans and use straws, use things that are available at any kind of drugstore, 7-Eleven. So these are ways that you can efficiently do this. They would then batch it. So it would take out what they could do in a day. And it would take a long time, but they're basically doing interestingly about a thousand things a day. You can see in the back here, they're air drying them. These are all air drying. They then set up a classic blotter stack, drying stack with fans blowing on them. And this is this amazing thing where it, you know, you go up there and I realized once I was there that that's where this picture had been taken. That was the love of the conservator working on it. So it was really an amazing experience to see that they basically did close to, excuse me, they did close to 300,000 photographs in about a year's time, which is roughly a thousand photographs a day. So that gives you a sense of scale. You can wash your way out. You can dry in a given day about a thousand things, but you don't have a year with wet things and that's where the freezing comes into play. And as I said, from the freeze drying point of view, things can be put into record storage boxes, frozen and emergency recovery companies will do that and then store it in their freezer storage all over the United States. And your things can be supports all of our food and supermarkets. And then we can figure out what to do later as we've talked about it in the Hawaii incident. Figure out later if we want to freeze dry it, if we want to thaw it, if we want to do it in a particular way that maybe conservators can do or a group of volunteers can do as in Japan case. So I hope this is helpful. This has been about an hour. Covered a lot of territory, some of it broad, some of it specific. I hope in some way it was helpful to you. Certainly you can contact me in the event of an emergency. I'm on call with national heritage responders this month but I'm always available. You can email me, you can call me. These are situations that are not always easy to deal with but they really can do things with these materials and I hope this gives you some sense of how to start and what to be thinking about, particularly when you have the specific circumstance of an incident in front of you. So with that said, we're just at three o'clock and I think we've got 30 minutes of time for questions and other things like that. So thank you very much. Great, thank you so much, Andrew. That was really wonderful presentation. So if anyone does have any questions or comments or anything else they wanna throw into the chat window, please do feel free to do that now. Similar to the content that we went over with Randy Silverman on book and paper salvage, I imagine that many of you have photographs and electronic media in your collection. So if there's any concerns that you had specific to your own collections, feel free to address those in the chat window now. But I'm not seeing too much coming in at this point. And Andrew, the group ran over considerably our presentation last week, so I feel like I do owe them a bit of time if there's. No, I understand that. So I will say, even though we do have a week off next week, if anyone's dying to get on another webinar, for those of you who aren't familiar with the Connecting to Collections Care online community, and we did assign some of that coursework for the summer, but they do have ongoing webinars and next week's webinar actually on Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time is gonna be with folks from the American Zoological Associations. See if I can get this acronym right. Basically they're Emergency Preparedness Center and they're gonna be discussing developing emergency plans for living collections. So I'm just gonna share the link for that program in the chat window now. So I would encourage you all to check that out if you're at all interested and I know some of the folks in this group are from Zoom Miami, so you might find that especially useful. And with the Connecting to Collections Care group, well likewise, create recordings of those sessions and then they'll be posted on their website so you can check those out after the fact if you're not able to join live. I see a few people typing in some questions, so. Oh, great. So yeah, Andrew just noted the Library of Congress Disaster Resources link, that's the bottom link in the box. It must be working now. So glad to hear that. Again, I can't emphasize enough how helpful all of these resources are. So I would encourage you all to check them out. Yeah, so. Are you seeing Sylvia's question? Yeah, so I see Sylvia's question about freeze drawing. So yeah, the freezing part is not very complicated and as I said, in Japan they were using all sorts of different freezers that they could find. Some of them were home freezers, some of them were lab freezers, but the freezing part, you'll see in the literature a discussion of some advantage of say minus 20, minus 30 as opposed to zero Fahrenheit, but the freezing part really can be done in any kind of freezing situation that you would run into at home freezer is fine. The key part is kind of keeping them in an isolatable unit so that things as they're frozen are in manageable blocks or chunks. So putting things into Ziploc bags is helpful because it just keeps things vaguely organized. You can keep things sort of straight, but as you can see in the Hawaii experience, they did not put things in bags. They put them in plastic bags inside a record storage box, but they weren't Ziploc bags. And that worked fine. One of the real challenges I can go into with that is that when they should do that, they all got out of order. And it took them a fair amount of time to then, after they got dried, to get them back in order, it was complicated. So that's one of the things that they did what they had to do. So on that freezing side, you can freeze it. Typically what will happen with the emergency recovery company is they'll come with a truck, a semi-truck typically, or kind of truck that you might use for produce or food, and load it up with those boxes. It'll then get put on a pallet and put into a commercial freezer. And that cost is relatively small. Monthly cost per pallet, something like that. On the freeze dryer side, generally speaking, that's done by the emergency recovery company. And that gets a little tricky in terms of how willing and patient they're gonna be in working with you on the specifics of what you want and how much time they're willing to take. But these machines are very expensive. The small one, like the desktop one, let me go back. You're still seeing something like this one. This is the Canadian company Roscoe that's done some recovery work in Canada. These are in the tens of thousands of dollars and they take a certain amount of expertise to use. But archeological conservators have a lot of these things. So it might be that there's an archeological conservation lab in Florida that might be willing to do some freeze drying for you for your things. They're used to dealing with muddy, organic materials. So when I talk with them, they're pretty open to dealing with things that are not as dirty as coming out of a river bed or coming out of the ground. So there may be some options there, but generally speaking, you're doing that through a company and they're kind of doing it for you in a contractual way. And they're used to dealing with people in this way, but that gets a little tricky because you're starting to get outside of kind of a normal conservation interaction and you're dealing with contracts, dealing with real constraints financially or other kinds of things. So, and as I said, that may not be necessary. If you get things frozen quickly enough, you may be able to just thaw it and over a whole other case study in Europe where things were thawed using basically ethanol with a very tiny amount of water in it. And that was used to thaw very water damaged things. So freeze drying is not your only option and that's where freezing is a nice approach because you really can figure out ways to manage that at a later time once your institution is back up and running once you have time, once you can batch that out. And Andrew, did you see Sylvia's follow-up question there? Let's see. Do you have to send, oh, do you have to send them off-site? Yeah, so generally yes, but the freezing may be able to be done on-site. But yes, that is a, that can be a real issue in terms of, you know, how much control, how comfortable you feel with things going off-site and you get into sort of inventory control, trust, you know, with the things with the University of Hawaii, they were frozen and they were shipped to Texas and they were, all their work, even though it wasn't freeze drying, was done in Texas. And so you do get into some issues about inventory control that you're gonna have to work out. But again, that freezing, that freezing could be done on-site with freezer trucks in a small scale with freezers that you might have on hand. And then you get into those options about, well, can this be done by thawing? Can this be done by freeze drying? But that freeze drying equipment is almost always gonna be off-site. I suppose you could have small batches and you could have someone who's doing their recovery work bring in the freeze dryer, but then this will take longer. There isn't, you know, as I said though, the archeological conservation world, objects conservators are the, probably the conservators that use freeze dryers the most, vacuum freeze dryers the most. And that's an area that, beginning to make some headway with just trying to figure out how many of those there are in the country and how able they are to help us with emergency work as opposed to their more typical salvage work. Very interesting. And actually one of the team members works as an archeologist with the National Park Service down there in South Florida. So I will ask him what he knows about the archeological conservators and his community and if he knows of any active resources like this. Working on trying to just send, I'm getting more up to speed on the practical parts of freeze drying myself and that's where I've been working with Nicole Doob, who's an archeological conservator at the Maryland conservation lab, archeological conservation lab. So, I mean, we'll be meeting later in the month just to go over some of these things and I think it could be promising. And I think particularly it may provide some resources that are more like what we're used to as conservators and more of a give and take in how we're trying to understand treatment. And a lot of emergency companies are really used to dealing with companies and companies are just like, I just want my records back. They're not always so interested about about sort of quality of recovery they're often interested in speed and cost of recovery. And so I've worked with them. Some of them are extremely responsive. Some of them are less responsive and it's just the way that they manage their work. And so it's like any kind of contractor having that relationship first and having that planning first can be really helpful. It's a lot harder and more stressful to do this when you're having to do all of that thinking during the incident. And it's one of the things from the University of Hawaii point of view, when Davis was a preservation librarian at the time had a good plan, she was there. And except for a few bumps in the road that had to do with Thanksgiving and all of their freezers getting taken from them. They had very few, very few big bumps in the road. They, that was their biggest bump is that they had to take everything out of freezers because all of the freezer containers had to go to the mainland to get turkeys for Thanksgiving. And so then they had to find other freezer trucks and it was really, it was difficult for them. And that's where there was some damage that happened because the mature had in some cases had started to thaw. That was the only thing in that recovery where they could have done something differently or better. And that was really a matter of circumstance that no one had probably fully thought through when they rented the freezers in the beginning of November. So yeah, I would say that with the, like I said I worked with the historic collection here that had a fire, things got wet, they didn't get burned, but they got wet. And my advice on the phone was I think you do not have enough space or people to do this, to dry all of those photographs you need to freeze them. And that was an extremely successful recovery. The most time consuming part of the recovery was getting all of those photographs back into arrangement. But they ended up with a better arranged collection, a better finding aid. They probably could have done that at much greater cost, at much less cost had they not had the emergency but it got things done. And all things told it was pretty minimal impact on that collection. Oh, that's a good silver lining of that story. Yeah, yeah. And they dealt with the things that was interesting. The things that there were the most pressing things that they were the most worried about in that it was in a library, a public library that had special collections was actually a set of very old paintings that had been part of an initial gift and an absorption of a historic society. And those were things that the first responders the firemen got out of the building first and because they were the most worried about those and that was the right thing to do. It was correct to deal with the paintings first and then because they had the time because I wasn't worried about things drying because they did it pretty quickly. There was a freezer truck there within a few hours and the emergency recovery company was able to convince the fire department to get in there sooner than anybody else was able to get in there. So there was a lot of like drawing maps of where the collections were so that the emergency recovery company could go in there because they would let them in because they're used to dealing with dangerous things and they were willing to take on that liability. And so the fire department let them in everything was lit in the freezer truck before we would ever have been able even to get in there. So it was another illustration of having these things and having emergency recovery companies can be helpful and in this case, they were extremely helpful with the client. I think they were very happy with the result. So if you did the simplest thing to be would be if you need to freeze those photographs there's some exceptions as I said and the articles go into that but generally speaking you can freeze them and buy yourself time to figure out what to do. Great, and I know the group has had some questions about working with recovery companies and past programs. I mentioned that there's some folks who are working on developing some resources for how collecting institutions can have a good interface with recovery companies as they're establishing contracts, et cetera, know what the right questions to ask are. I just wanted to let you all know that in the training that we'll be doing in person in October, we're able to get representative from the Bell 4 company to come speak to the group and talk about this issue from their perspective so the kind of information that they would want upfront and that sort of thing. So we'll have the opportunity to address it as part of the in person training as well. I'm looking for, in the Library of Congress site there is a generic contract for an emergency recovery contract which includes some freeze-drying components in it. Yes, that is a great resource. I'm in trouble finding it. I am familiar with that. I can share it with the group perhaps before our next session. Why it's so hard to find. Well, I'll send that to you, Jessica. I'll send that to you when I find it. It's just why it's hard to find. Did anyone have any final questions? I haven't seen much activity in the chat. Oh, here we go. Yeah, so it's just I can explain where it is. If you go under preparedness, there's a link, be familiar with available disaster services and then there's a link. So the risk management page and then more about preparedness and then maintain a contract for disaster service and that will take you to a model contract. It's another one, I know there may be other ones, but it's a pretty broad thing. It's not just about freeze-drying, but it's about a set of requirements that seems to work from what I understand. Great, yes. This is a really wonderful resource and a lot of people have referenced it in the past. So I just put that in the chat window so you all can access that now. All right, again, I want to give a big thank you to Andrew for this wonderful presentation. He has a lot of experience in this field and I hope you all benefited from it as much as I did. And as always, feel free to reach out with any questions and enjoy your week off next week. But I would again encourage you to check out that Connecting to Collections Care webinar if you do have time and we will see you all back here on August 16th to discuss textile salvage. All right, thanks again, everyone. Bye, everybody, give me a call.