 time to turn things over to our host, Susan Barger from the FAIC. Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. I want to welcome you here. If you have questions during this session, please put them in the general chat, and I'll make sure that they get put in a place where we will answer them after the end of the presentation. The two handouts down below in the handouts section, you can download those. They'll also be posted along with the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any trailing questions if we have more than we need or more than we can answer. And that will be posted in the next few days. If you no longer see the ad for this on our website, that means you'll find the recording in the archives. So the best way to keep informed with Connecting to Collections Care is not to join all the CCCC announcements, which has gone away, but to join the Connecting to Collections Care community. And that's also the place where you can ask questions and get answers from conservators about caring for your collections. And you'll find instructions for joining on our website under discussions. And you can join us on Facebook. You can follow us on Twitter. Next month we're going to have a, looks like it's going to be a really interesting webinar on caring for herbaria and herbarium practices. And that's a little unusual for us, but we do cover living and dead biological things, so that's part of what that's about. During this summer we're going to have two free webinars, one on HVAC and the Reservation Environment and one on fire emergencies, and there'll be a course during this summer on assessments and how to use them. We get questions all the time about, I just had a cap or a map or something, and now I don't know quite what to do with it. So that's what that's going to address. And without further ado, I'm going to hand this over to our speakers today, Andrea and Rose, and I'll let them introduce themselves. So be sure if you have problems to let us know in the chat box. Thanks. Well, hi everyone. This is Andrea Gardner, the Director of Collections at the Toledo Museum of Art, and I am joined by my partner Rose. Rose, do you want to introduce yourself? Hello, everyone. My name is Rose Wood, and I am from the Birmingham Museum of Art. Glad to see everyone here today. Yeah, thanks all for joining us on this very exciting topic, old loans, the sword in the side of almost every registrar, collections manager out there, and so we're going to do our best to kind of walk you through the process of old loans, at least from our experience, and give you a couple of examples of works that we have dealt with and successful old loan resolutions. And then there will be time at the end, because I'm sure many of you have questions, and we will do our best to answer those or to follow up later if it isn't something that we feel equipped to answer right away. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. Okay, this is Rose, and I'm going to start off with the definition that Andrea and I use for old loans. Basically, an old loan is any object in your collection for which you have some sort of documentation indicating when it arrived, who it belongs to, or what its intention was, which you are unable to easily resolve and which the museum does not own. And we wanted to start that out because an old loan also doesn't mean that you have a loan form on it. It's great if you do, but there's a lot of instances where you have an old loan in your collection and you do not have a formal loan agreement. Some examples where you would have an agreement would be an exhibition loan, a long-term loan, but with gift offers or purchase considerations, you might not always have an agreement on those. Right, and so just to be clear, what we're talking about, again, is anything that you have some sort of documentation or you have some idea where it came from or why you have it. This is not dealing with thick or found in collection where something has mysteriously appeared in your storage area and you have no idea where it came from. That's a different topic that is not going to be covered today. So something for another webinar at another day. Okay. So why are we interested in helping with old loans? And the reason why is because if you have a loan, you have a duty to notify the lender of any damage to a work or any preservation that needs to happen. Often with old loans, you do not have the contact information any longer to do that. You also have a duty to ensure, and we'll go into more details about that later. You have a duty to document and writing all the terms of the loan. You have a duty to keep current and accurate records of museum property. That's very important for your inventory. You have a duty to diligently try to locate the lender or lender's heirs at the expiration of the loan. And if you do not have accurate contact information, that makes all of that much more difficult. Lastly, you have a duty to treat the loan with the same standards as museum-owned property for care. All right, so some common problems that you might encounter with your loans or that your lender moved and they didn't tell you and they maintained no contact with you. So now you don't know where they are. Or even worse, your lender died. And so now you need to locate the heirs or whoever's dealing with their estate to try and resolve it. A staff turnover can be a common problem where maybe someone at some point had more information, but they're no longer here. And those of you that do remain or left with this burden that you don't know how to resolve, your museum may not have a great loan renewal process. Or you may be understaffed where this is one of those things that goes to the back burner. And so you don't have a great process in place. And your objects may be remaining after their initial purpose. So this is that, you know, exhibition loans, they, you know, have just kind of lingered on well past the exhibition or a purchase consideration that just never really got presented. And so it's kind of sitting in limbo and now you're not sure what to do. So those are some of the common things that Rose and I have encountered when we're dealing with old loans. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the risk versus benefits of tackling your old loans. One of the risks that you have with your old loans is a lender or heir lawsuit. If you do not have a loan, an active loan agreement on an object and the lender passes, there is a more difficult process you need to go through to return the object. And you have to make sure that you're returning the object to the correct person. You can also get fraudulent claims. Someone could present themselves as the person who is representing the estate and that's not the case. You could have the loss of an object that the museum wants and needs. And also just the staff time and expense that you're going to have to do an old loan cleanup project. But there's really a lot of benefits that you have with old loan projects as well. You can resolve some of your old issues and you can get some things out the door that are causing some roadblocks in your storage. It only gets harder the longer the loan fits around. I can tell you that from experience. Also, it helps with you to be able to update your information and your records and then your ability to adequately ensure your collection. Again, we're going to talk about insurance later in the webinar. Okay. So many states, and you'll have to excuse us. We didn't realize there were going to be so many Canadians. So you guys are going to have to kind of investigate separately. But I believe there's also old loan legislation in Canada. But all the four states do have old loan legislation, or at least something dealing with abandoned property law. The only four states that do not currently are Hawaii, Idaho, Maryland, and West Virginia. But there are other states such as where Rose resides in Alabama that they have limited abandoned property laws. For instance, in Alabama, the statute covers the state archives, but not all the rest of old loans in museums throughout that state. And so that is a challenge for some people in certain states. But most of us are covered. I'm in Ohio, so we do have old loan legislation. And they generally tend to work the same way. There might be slight differences. So you're going to want to consult your state's legislation to make sure, because this is a state issue. But I'm going to kind of walk you through what the process looks like in general. And then you can at least get a sense of how this works, likely in your state as well. So at first, at the very beginning of the process, you need to obviously identify your old loans. So Rose's database was in much better conditions than our database was at my museum where my old loans were not in the database. So we really had no electronic records of these things. And so I had to do a physical inventory to try and track them down, take some pictures, gather whatever information I might be able to find to make a list of them. Then you want to meet with your staff. So you're trying to, you're in the information gathering phase where you're trying to find out as much as you can about that loan. And you want to decide what do you want to do in the end. So what is your goal? Is your goal to return it? Is your goal to get them to gift it? What is your strategy around each object? Then you have to develop your overall strategy. So here's where you have to decide like how are you going to tackle this? And this is where a lot of us become paralyzed, because you start to realize, oh my gosh, I've got so many of these. And they're all like very hairy and I don't know what to do. And so you need to prioritize so that you can take off smaller chunks and not feel so overwhelmed. So for instance, as I'll share an example later on, I decided to tackle it by what is taking up the most space in my storage. So although some of these were difficult, I was like I've got huge amounts of storage being sucked up by these old loans and I need to resolve it. Sometimes though you might want to just get those easy wins by doing some low hanging fruit that you think you can resolve pretty quickly and that can gain traction for you and you can feel like you're really getting somewhere more quickly. So that's another strategy you could use. Then you're going to need to search for your lender or heirs and document everything, which I'll go into detail. You might need to consult legal counsel depending on the situation. You're going to reference your state loan legislation if you have that and then you go into the process of notifying your lender or the heirs. Okay. All right. So how do you notify when you have an address? So you need to send a letter via certified mail with a return receipt requested. So this is giving you that verification that it went out and that they received it or they didn't receive it. And in that, you have to include certain things and this is outlined in the legislation such as a description of the object, the date of the loan, if you know it, and then there has to be a statement within that saying that if you don't hear from this person within 45 days, you're going to infer that they have given it to the museum. So then you wait a bit. If you don't receive any response, you send another letter. That's the same basically as the first. So you're giving a total of 90 days to respond. And then if that one also is not responded to, you send a third letter that indicates, okay, now the museum is the third title because we haven't heard from you. And from that point on is when the statute of limitation starts. So depending also on your state's laws, you don't want to do anything rash with the stuff when you're still in that statute of limitation because they could still come back within that time period. But after that runs out, you're free to dispose of the object or assert the title to the object depending on what you'd like to do with it. All of now, part of this is conducting a reasonable search for your lender or error. So when you don't have an address or the letter has returned to you, you have to conduct a reasonable search, they call it. And the goal is to establish whether can you still give an actual notice to the person like you've tracked them down and you can actually give them notice. Or you have to do what we call constructive notice. So for a reasonable search, there's a few types of records that we commonly use to try and find the person, such as probate records, telephone records, real estate records, and vial, which are really death records. And I've developed a handout that's posted as well that has a bunch of information on descendant research. So actually your local library can also be read as well. So actually your local library can also be really helpful with this type of research, because some of you may notice and some of you may not. But a major proponent of what the libraries now are doing is helping people with their genealogical research. So they're very active in that. And so this is the type of research that local libraries are used to helping with. So I would highly recommend getting in touch with them if you're trying to track people down. So you've done that and let's say you don't have a address. You've come to a dead end. You cannot find any address, any person to contact. And so you have to resort to constructive notice. So a constructive notice has to be published, and it includes the name of the lender, their last known address, description of the object, date of the loan, who would you contact at the museum if you had information, and a notice that the museum is terminating the loan. And so at least in Ohio, you have to publish this for three consecutive weeks in the newspaper in the county where the museum is and the county that the lender's last known address is. So obviously this seems a little outdated. People aren't using newspapers nearly as much as they used to. So I would anticipate at some point a lot of this legislation getting updated. You can also publish this online on your website or public radio, but even heard of people doing a physical posting at the courthouse so that you're trying to get the word out there to see if anyone has any more information. Hey, and I think Rose is going to talk about how to avoid old loans in the future. Yes. So we're grateful that everyone wants to clean up their old loans, but we also want to give some advice on how to avoid this. So all loans should have a fine loan form with a finite loan period and should be renewed promptly. That's something at my institution we did not do, and it's one of the major reasons why we have an old loan problem. A lot of our loans would have a start date but no end date. Thus, we had no motivation to renew them. And additionally, we would get busy doing other things and did not renew them promptly, which is why they turned into old loans. The standard loan agreement should state an expiration date, and the lender should be required to notify if there's a change of address or if there should be any type of death who should be contacted with regard to that. And there also should be some type of language that says in the event that we cannot contact you, we are going to determine that your intent is to give the object to the museum. And so you should have some terms on the back of the loan agreement that state, you know, if we try to contact you X amount of times and we cannot contact you then within a certain amount of time, say six months, then we will consider this to be a gift to the museum. Also, another thing that is important is returning any type of unsolicited item that is dropped off at the museum or mailed to the museum. Unfortunately, for many years, this was not a practice at some institutions and it's basically impossible to return those items if too much time has passed. So you promptly need to return those. And do not allow drop-offs. Just make sure that you train the staff at the front desk or any kind of security guards that if someone wants to drop an object off that a person from the collections department needs to come and talk with someone or just to refuse it and ask them to come back another day when the collections department is available. Yeah, and how we handle it at TMA is we've had all our front-line staff trained that if someone's trying to drop something off at the museum, they're not allowed to drop it off and that they need to take a picture and send the information and we give them actually the contact information of someone in the collections department or whoever you want to field these inquiries and then we then funnel that to the curators who would then follow up to decide if it's anything we might be interested in. So it kind of softens the blow a little bit in that you are collecting the information, you're going to get back to them, but you're not allowing them to physically drop anything off. Yeah, I think that's a great policy, Andrea. I think you've mentioned that before. So some best practices in loan agreement. Loan agreement should be in writing, signed by the lender and borrower. As I stated before, the date of the exhibition and the term of the loan should be on the agreement. Lender identification and contact information should be on the agreement as well and also include contact information for a legal representative or authorized representative. The exact work being placed on loan should be included in the description. This is another issue that the Birmingham Museum of Art had in the past where it would say 43 coffee cups, but it wouldn't give any type of description. So trying to identify the coffee cups later on is difficult if they weren't properly checked in at that time. Also, the borrower could ensure the loan or the lender can ensure the loan. We've started doing this recently when the loan is to the benefit of the lender versus the museum. We actually ask them to carry the insurance and we've had many lenders who have agreed to do that. However, if it is still to the benefit of the museum, such as an exhibition loan or a loan that we're taking on because we want to have it for our permanent collection galleries, then we still do ensure those. And another thing is the right to photograph the loan work. That is very important to get an original photograph at the beginning of the loan. Okay. Some other best practices are just putting in the original loan agreement, whether the object can be reframed or the ability to put a mount on it. That's also very helpful. The shipping responsibility, like insurance, you can negotiate whether the shipping is going to be paid by the borrower or the lender to the lender's benefit. The standard care of the museum will adhere to. Requirements for the lender to update the contact information, which we've already discussed, and what to do if the loan is unreturnable. Again, we mentioned that in the past, that you should have some type of language in your loan form. And it's best if that language confirms to what abandoned property legislation you have in your state. Yeah, so one thing that Rodez and I were recently discussing with the idea of standard of care is whether or not this is property that you could send to off-site storage versus having it at your museum storage. My museum, for instance, has works that we house both at the museum proper and at off-site storage that we rent. And so, up until this point, we have never put anything that is on loan to us in the off-site storage just because it feels wrong in some way. And so, if that's something that you might be beneficial to the museum, you might want to include that that is an option, for instance. Okay, I mentioned loans and insurance. And there's some information that you need to have when you're doing insurance for a loan. So one of the things that you can look at with insurance is the agreed value. So the agreed value is listed on the loan agreement by the lender. It provides a certainty in the event of a loss. This allows registrars to know if they have enough coverage for loans as well as their collection. Additionally, what we can do is, if there's no value, then the current market value at the time of the loss is used. An independent appraisal is required then, and then if the lender disagrees, you go through an arbitration process, which can cause the claim to be lengthy. So for best practices with loans, you always want to make sure that there's agreed upon value for any loan. And with old loan, what we've found is that the agreed upon value is very low. And so we recommend that you get up-to-date values with your old loan. And if the lender has the responsibility to provide the up-to-date value when there's a change in the market. Loan periods should be no longer than one to three years. And this is something that Andrea and I have discussed a number of times. The program in Birmingham is where we actually go to a five-year renewal on some loans. However, we make sure that during that five years that we remain in contact with the lender. And it's because we know that those loans are going to be here on a long-term basis. But any type of loan that we bring in for any period less than that would be a one to three-year loan period. Right. And so one thing I would recommend is kind of doing a risk assessment when you're bringing in a longer-term loan on the demographic of your lender. If they are a very elderly lender, I would recommend a much shorter time period of checking in as they're more likely to move to different retirement homes, assisted living, that sort of thing. You're going to want to keep good tabs on them versus maybe a younger lender where they aren't going to be quite as problematic, we'll say. So that's just one tip on how to prioritize maybe the length of a loan. Correct. So as we said, best practices for insuring is to get an agreed-upon value. And if for some reason the lender does not include this in the loan form, then it's your responsibility to actually contact them again and say, hey, you've sent your loan form back, but it doesn't have a value on this. We really need to have a value that's agreed upon. And for, if any reason, you do not agree upon that value if you think it's too high, then you need to have a conversation with the lender and basically ask for an appraisal or ask for comparative value and make sure that you do not sign a loan agreement that has a value that is higher than you feel is the current market value because then you're basically agreeing to pay out a higher claim. And you need to make sure that your loan paperwork is updated regularly and make sure that you understand all the terms and conditions on the agreement. Some lenders want to use their own paperwork and so you need to make sure that you understand what you're agreeing to. And you also need to make sure that you evaluate your total loan values with your insurance broker before you do your annual renewal process to make sure that you have enough coverage on your loans as well as your permit collection items. Okay. So now we're going to jump into a few examples of some real-life old loans that Rose and I have dealt with and resolved. And so my first example is an entire exhibition that was at TMA by the artist Mark Boyle. So there was a collection of 47 works that came to the museum in 1985 for an exhibition that apparently as far as I can tell never actually happened. While the works were at TMA and they were deciding, I guess, what to do, whether to have the exhibition or whatever they were going to do, the artist passed away. And so any kind of a return was then stalled. And not until 2013 did we really turn our attention to this where I actually reached out to ARS. So ARS and VAGA are the two main rights and reproduction copyright agencies that if you're trying to request images by artists who are still under copyright, those are the two agencies that cover most of the artist. And so I figured that they were the ones that covered Mark Boyle, and they may be able to get me in touch with the estate of Mark Boyle to kind of get the process going. So eventually we were able to get in touch with his descendants. We had a partner and then also two children that we had to work with. And in the end, we did end up paying for the exhibition to be returned to them in London back in April 2014. So that is another important aspect of the old loans process. You're going to want to put something in your budget if you really are getting serious about this because oftentimes the museum is going to have to incur the expense of returning things to people if there's no evidence that was agreed beforehand that the museum wouldn't do so. And so if you really want to resolve it, you sometimes have to invest in getting it resolved. And this was, I'm sure you can tell from the imaging, quite interesting works. There were everything from blown-up photographs of insects to a giant hair blow-up mural to earthen works that were basically synthetic materials that were made to look like earths and different things. So it was quite an interesting collection of things to return. And so that was one extreme. So I really tackled that first because who would not tackle an entire exhibition? First of all, how does that even happen? But this is also just to show do not be ashamed of your old loans. We all have them. They're embarrassing, but we're all working together to resolve them. So on a much smaller scale, we had this prototype dish that was brought to TMA for an exhibition in 2002. And so we had all the loan paperwork for that exhibition. And as I was reading through, I saw that the lender at the time had expressed a desire to give the dish after the close of the exhibition, but we never had any kind of completed deed of gift paperwork. And so we hadn't had contact with the lender since 2003, and I quickly figured out that the lender was now in his 90s if he was still alive. And so did some research and discovered that there was a possible relative. I couldn't tell if it was a niece or a daughter or whoever who was running a yoga studio in Santa Fe. And so I used the Yoga Studio website ContactUs feature to make a very odd inquiry to her, basically saying, hey, I work at this museum and I'm wondering if you're related to this guy who I think has something on loan at the museum. And she actually responded right away that the donor was actually her father who had moved to Santa Fe to live with her in his old age and that he would be happy to give the artwork. And so I was able to quickly get the deed of gift completed and a few months later he actually passed away. So that was like a glorious day that in old loan history where we were able to resolve it, the museum got an object that they wanted and now this lender had a nice legacy in his name. And then the current example of something we're working on right now is that we brought this vase in on purchase consideration in 1996. It actually got approved by our art committee in 1997 to move forward with the purchase but we never received the proper invoice and verification that it was exported and imported legally. So from what I can tell our register at the time reached out several times trying to get the proper paperwork and they never got it and so it just kind of had that in limbo. Excuse me. So then we had to try and track the dealer down because we had lost contact with him and we actually used our museum network to contact the curator at a Finnish museum because we figured he was living in Finland at the time based on his previous record of where he had lived and the type of artwork that he dealt in and so we are now in the process of reaching out to him to resolve this. So we have some contact information. We reached out to him so far as far as I know we haven't heard anything back so we'll be bugging him again soon to see if we can get this resolved and so one other thing I just wanted to mention is that one thing to keep in mind with resolving your old loan is to put the amount of effort in that is equivalent to the value of the object. So you do not want to be spending hundreds of hours for instance on my last example of a dish that you want for the collection because it's just not worth that sort of a value but if you happen to have a Picasso on an old loan obviously you're going to spend a lot of time and resources to try and resolve that because that is worth your while that's much more likely to have some kind of a claim or a lawsuit versus a prototype dish like the one that I was just showing you so just to kind of keep that in mind. Alright, so we'll get an example from Rowe. Yes, so I'm going to talk about some of the old loans that we've returned we really started our project in 2016 trying to return our old loan we had tried a couple of times prior but for various reasons we were not very successful but in 2016 we decided we were going to try this again because our Asian art curator was going to be retiring in December 2017 and the majority of the very, very old loans from before 1980 were in the Asian art department and so it made sense for us to start there he was retiring, he was still a resource that was on staff and we wanted to try to get as many of these settled so the one that I'm going to talk about is actually a family of lenders the father was deceased and the old loans were here previous to 1985 however he donated between 75 and 84 so at one time he was very active with the museum and the curator wanted these as a donation that was another thing that was important so the father was dead and one son co-owned three loans and one son had loans on loan by himself and so the son that co-owned the work coordinated with the other two children in the family the son that had worked on loans to the museum and then also a daughter and he was able to coordinate letters of offer for the objects that the museum had from the father and so we were able to get the objects from the family that we wanted and then the one son that had things on loan solely from him he gazed the objects from his father that he co-owned but the other objects he wanted to have returned so it was a very successful old loan very complicated because of the number of relationships between the museum and the family and what we found to be a successful strategy is if you're dealing with an old loan where the parents have died and there's multiple siblings involved in it if you can deal with one sibling that is willing to negotiate for the family and is willing to ask for letters of offer from the rest of the kids that has been very successful for us and we've been very successful with getting donations and not having to return a lot of the objects and so I would recommend if there could be one point person that might be helpful so another... Can I chime in real quick? With that I agree with Rose it's best to try and find your family representative to deal with rather than trying to navigate family dynamics on some of these things but do do your best to again get in writing from everyone even if it's an email just saying that look we all bought into this we all agree that we want to give it because sometimes you can get a little hairy with like oh yeah sister Sally and brother Joe are all in favor of this and we're just going to go ahead and give it and that may or may not be completely accurate down the road so just do your best again in relation to what kind of an object you're dealing with to get some kind of verification even if it's something as simple as an email right this is Rose again we actually we say to them we appreciate and you're so grateful that you're doing this but we need to have letters from each of your siblings and so we actually will not do without a signed letter of offer from each of the siblings just because we do not want to have any kind of hard feelings in the future from the family so this is another Asian object that we were hoping to get the curator identified it in the 2013 long renewal process in December 7th 2016 we sent the information to the curator to solicit the donation and he very promptly wrote the letter and then December 20th 2016 we got the letter we got a call from the owner saying that he wanted to pick up the object and so I wanted to add this one in just to let you know that when you're doing an old loan project you can be very successful in acquiring objects for your museum but there also could be objects that your museum wishes that they could have that the owner wants to have them back for their own reasons and so that is a bit of a risk but for us the benefits outweigh the risk because also it helps us with collection planning so that we do not count on this object for our collection and if the curator really wants to have this object or this type of object then they can start either looking for one for purchase or also developing another relationship with a donor so we're not counting on an object that we actually do not end up in the end great yeah and so I know we should have probably outlined this at the beginning but Rose and I have been on similar trajectory with our old loans I think we both started around the same time like maybe around 2013 or so with our old loans cleanup Rose comes from a city museum so it's and I come from a private museum so there's that aspect between the two Rose had an incredible volume of old loans and still does although they're diminishing every day on her plate where really I didn't have as many at TMA it was a much more manageable number but many of them had been loitering since even the 60s or earlier and so between the two of us we have two different experiences one on the smaller scale one on a larger scale but yeah I just kind of wanted to share that and then I think we're ready to move into the questions section now so yeah so and okay do you want me to read the questions? Sure Razvik Anderson from Norway said hi an old long-term outgoing loans that you have lost track of be called an old loan that's an interesting question so I can chime in first on this one we had this issue at TMA as well and we actually prioritized these I didn't even technically count them because what Rose and I have really been talking about has been incoming but on the flip side there are outgoing old loans which are not exactly the same process because you're and I guess they kind of are in that you're trying to track down where they are and you're trying to find perhaps whoever it is that you went to and what might have happened to it but it's not a certain title because you already have title you're trying to find your own property I just happen to also dealt with this where the museum used to have a lending collection I think this was very popular at some point with museums especially for us in the 50s and 60s and we then lent out to individuals who were donors of the museum to local businesses to all sorts of places and then had to somehow try and keep track of these things which as you can imagine was a nightmare and so in the 2000s we decided this was a horrible idea that we needed to get back all the things that we had on loan and try and figure out what we wanted to do with them and as you can imagine some of it was successful some of it was not most of the material we got back some of it we couldn't locate anymore and so as part of our deaccessioning process if we can't locate something and we've tried for over a decade at least three different times we will officially deaccession it and take it out of the collection so we actually did that with an old outgoing loan that had been gone since the 60s and last year it reappeared so we had it where the family had passed away they discovered this painting and they thought had a TMA sticker on the back so they reached out and I quickly was like oh my gosh I think that's one of my old loan old outgoing loans and so it was a really weird letter that was basically like actually that's ours and we need it back and so then we actually went through the formal process of deaccessioning it where we decided we really did not want it for the collection and it ended up that we ended up selling it to the family so selling it back to the family because they really had fond memories of this piece and wanted to keep it in the family after all so it did resolve it was kind of an odd it's the first time that I've had to deaccession reaccession deaccession something but it is kind of a different aspect which wasn't quite on topic for what we were talking about today okay so Hallie Chambers in Alaska said we've updated our loan forms to include an alternate contact which you then very shortly confirmed that that's a good practice so Elizabeth Caesar in South Dakota said in the third TMA old loan example what would the museum do if the donor can't provide an invoice or if the dealer can't provide an invoice and verification of legal export so yeah so if that unfortunately happens we all could because if I was going to guess the reason that we're not providing it is because they didn't have it unfortunately we won't be able to purchase the object based on our acquisitions policy and due diligence guidelines my museum is one of the ones that has been dealing with a lot of provenance issues and repatriation so we have really buckled down on our acquisitions policy and it's pretty stringent now in that case we would unfortunately although we want the object have to return the object to the lender which again could become complex on the export license and all that I'd have to work through that with legal counsel unfortunately but that's where it would land if we can't get that verification that it was exported illegally the other option which I've talked through with some dealers is perhaps exporting and where they would then get the proper paperwork it just kind of depends since that piece in particular is a multiple it's a little less sticky than some original like if it were obviously a painting or a sculpture so we'll have to kind of figure it out but it is complex and I don't have the exact answer but the short answer is no if we don't have the proper paperwork we're going to have to get it back okay now there are a bunch of questions that have to do with and one of the most succinct is Leslie Ori Llewellyn in Minneapolis says how can you be assured that the rightful heirs are the children I'll take that one since it was my example and I think it's a great question that's one of the things that we've struggled here fortunately I I worked directly across from the courthouse and so I have spent quite a bit of time in the probate office pulling old will and additionally we're very fortunate with this particular family we knew the family very well we knew who the heirs were we were able to work with them on that with the proper documentation and so we ask we ask for that documentation we ask for copies of wills we ask for copies of trust we we only do that if we are sure that we are returning it to the rightful people I have a couple of instances where we're not as close with the lenders and we do not have as much information on them so we actually have to send that over to our city legal department one of the ones that I have in city legal right now is it was someone who actually used to work for the museum and she put something on loan before she passed and she started a trust in 2009 and did not give us a copy of the trust paperwork and so when her children contacted us after her death we sent the trust paperwork over to our legal department at the city and said can we just transfer this into the trust's name and then return it to the representative of the trust and our legal department evaluated the trust and said there was too many loopholes in the trust and actually we're going through a process with the family and our legal department to determine who is the right person to return the object to so I think that's an excellent question on do you know if you're returning it to the right person okay there's another question along that same line that says with the family of the lenders example were the children the executors of the estate or was one of them and they all agreed to work together what we have found is on a lot of these old loans the family member that had lent it to us has died and the estate has been closed for many years so the executor is important but it doesn't help us with our situation and basically I do pull the will if I can and find out who was the executor and we do try to contact that person first but if we have a closer relationship with one of the other children because they could still be lenders or they could be donors to the museum we will contact that other person and say hey we have an old loan from your father we need to discuss this with your family would you be able to assist us and most often the children will tell us which is the family member that they want us to deal with they'll often say oh my brother John handled my father's estate could you discuss it with him or something along those lines but whenever we do anything with returning objects to any children or so forth we make sure that we have letters from all of the children agreeing to which child we return it to and then also we make sure that we pull the will or we get some kind of documentation from the family that they were the heirs okay so Sarah Bueller says to piggyback on that previous question do you require written documentation that the children family members are heirs before releasing objects and Amy Thompson for Maine said in determining rightful heirs do you require proof for a copy of the will so the answer to both of those is yes we pull a copy of the will or we request it from the family first we'll have it some family members will say oh that was too long ago we don't have it and then we pull one from the probate office and then we require whenever we release anything we require written documentation from all of the children that they're okay with it and then we also have written documentation that if they agree to one child getting the object returned and I do have to say this isn't always successful we are dealing with another old loan where there are two children there was a trust involved we contacted one son and he basically there's some family discord and he said you know what I'm happy if my brother gets the object there's just too much family discord and we've reached out to the other brother and he has not returned any of our contact we try to go back to the first brother and say you know could you help us and he said you know no the family relationships broken down to the extent that I can't help you with that so I think that's probably going to be an old loan that I'm not going to be able to because the one brother does not have a relationship with the other brother any longer okay there was some discussion about rural addresses that have changed so do you have any tips or anything about finding them I really haven't had that issue I know a couple people chimed in saying that they're having that issue and I guess I've been fortunate that rural addresses hasn't been an issue for me it hasn't been an issue for me either is that with regard to the 9-1-1 when they made all the the addresses yeah so I'm wondering if you contact your local library and ask the librarian if they've run across that question before I bet you they have that's what I would do I would either contact the local library or the county assessors because they'll know what those addresses are I have a question and it's related to another question that's coming up later and so I'm going to skip to that question I have if Lender has loaned us multiple items of small value that it would that I would be willing to keep should I try and find every single item before contacting the lender I have many loans often with a couple of of a dozen items per loan this is Holly Derara from Alberta now my question is in in small say a small historical society they might have that is not very valuable you know like pot holders that were loaned by Mrs. Grisby who's died but would those be considered part of her residual estate which then would be controlled by what happens the the residual the residual estate would be stuff that it isn't mentioned in the will but is that the right it is part of the residual date if it's not mentioned clearly in the will itself so another tip that we have you know lenders that have long-term loans at the museum encourage them to share with their state attorney a copy of the loan agreement so that more people are aware that they have property at the museum so that you can try and resolve these things upon their death and when they're dealing with the estate rather than never finding out and then maybe years later you find out that they passed away that was one thing that Rose and I had talked about so it goes with the residual estate however that's been outlined in their will okay and so back to the question on what do I do if I've got a bunch of chat keys they're not high value I would like to keep them but do I have to find all of them until before I reach out to the lender that's a tough one so I guess it's if you think the lender is probably willing to just give it to you you could list everything without technically locating it and kind of roll the dice if you're feeling lucky like they're going to probably just go ahead and sign over title but if you're worried that they could turn around and say hey no we want it all back then you could have an embarrassing situation where you're like okay well that's great but I can't locate everything right now and I'll give you what I can find I don't want to say that's never happened before I'm sure it has but I think you kind of have to assess what you think is going to happen if you have any idea when you do reach out right so I'll chime in on that one as well we made a policy that we were going to look for and photo document all of our old loans before we would contact the lenders so when we start on a new old loan we actually go back in storage and locate everything we make sure that we have at least basic catalog information on it and we have an up to date photograph on that before we contact anyone and I do have to own up to the fact that there have been a few items that we haven't been able to locate just because it might have been returned previously but our records are not good enough and so if we're working on and we have that situation we own it up to it we tell the family I'm sorry this also is on loan we can't locate it we don't know if it's been returned previously if we happen to find it we will definitely either return it to you or ask for the donation and it's only happened two or three times during our process all of the Lunders families have been very good about it to us so I don't think that you should be as afraid it doesn't mean that you're not going to have a negative interaction with someone but I think honestly telling them the situation is a better policy just saying this is where we're at our inventory is not accurate and as soon as we find it we'll be happy to have a further conversation with you okay Kara Westby from British Columbia says an item was loaned to the museum for display not as an artifact to augment an exhibit and no loan agreement no commitment from the museum to care for it now the donor wants the museum to pay for conservation suggestions on how to navigate the situation no paperwork on the loan so let me make sure I understand this it was lent for exhibition is that correct that's what it says okay and there's no paperwork the museum wants to keep it correct she doesn't say that she says there was no commitment from the museum to care for it it was to augment an exhibit but so I mean maybe O'Kara says no one no the museum doesn't want it anymore the loan it's an old canoe fairly modern and no value to the collection so they're trying to return it to the family and the family is saying you have to conserve it before you give it back to us O'Kara okay well I mean this is tricky because it's sounding like it's falling into this ephemera category where it's like you got something in that the museum didn't technically consider art you brought it in and we're about to do a ton of this for an exhibition we have coming up on car culture where we're going to get a bunch of car ephemera we'll call it versus artwork where like hood ornaments and nice and plates and that sort of thing and so that is tricky I guess what I would say in rows let me know if you agree as far as conservation goes unless it was actually damaged while it was with you you don't have an obligation to conserve something if you're returning it in the same condition that you received it so they really don't have even though there really isn't any paperwork I don't think they really have a claim against you because that certainly wasn't part of the agreement and the object hasn't suffered in your care at all I would agree with you Andrea on that you know it's going to be difficult because it sounds like there is emotion involved in this they want conservation for some reason you know I possibly would try the track that I'm sorry the museum does not have the funds to do this and we're very happy to return this in the same condition that it arrived here but we're not able to conserve it and see how that goes and I just honestly have to say that on some of our old loans we have just not been able to return them because there is some emotion involved in it and so we've kind of let a couple of drop in the hopes that maybe if we approach the family in the future that we might get a different result however Kira says Kira says she was asking for a friend yeah sure Kira to be ephemera it's something that I did when I was in Des Moines we did a couple of exhibitions there even if it wasn't art if I was taking property in from someone else I was putting it on a loan agreement and so even though it's a pain you basically you have to treat it like a loan and so I'm going to be getting in hundreds of license plates under loan agreement it's unfortunate but it's just really the best way to go to make sure you're covered okay William Brown in Raleigh, North Carolina says we do not conduct any conservation work on any loan items except to stabilize it for transport if necessary he's just telling us their policy Renee Ferris says not sure if you brought this up but as a component of a loan agreement there really needs to be assigned in dated section indicating when a loaned item is returned to the lender and you did mention that yes I agree I think that should be revisited so I mean that's part of separate from the loan agreement you're going to have your incoming and your outgoing receipt that needs to be signed so obviously when it's coming in the museum's signing it saying yes we've received the property and then when you've returned it you have the lender sign that saying yes I've received the property in the same condition blah blah blah it's very critical that you make sure your language marries between your loan agreement and your receipt this is something that we've recently been dealing with and the work which we've been using some of these forms for decades is updated and in agreement with each other so you don't want to have any kind of language that doesn't pair well so that's something to keep an eye out for so Amy Thompson says I have a rather odd situation with a loan from 30 years ago that's still on exhibit it's a fossil it came in on loan but technically it's our property regardless due to where the fossil was collected on state controlled land so I have a sticky situation of if this lender approaches us you can't have it back so well it's interesting that Amy's at a state museum or something she's getting ready to type yeah at the state museum yeah I think that if I were you I just wouldn't say anything and kind of wait it out since it's been there from 30 years maybe they've forgotten about it you can kind of wait it out and it will be yours by default it sounds like anyway so I guess I wouldn't proactively do anything unless they approach you since you know you technically already have title to it that is an odd situation yeah maybe you let the curator handle it if someone comes back yeah and I think that also goes to the fossil I think that also goes with Andrea's previous comment about you have to wait if there is enough value for you to actually get involved in some of these and what I mean by value is are you freeing up enough collection storage so it's important for you to tackle some of these old loans are you freeing up enough of insurance value because you're getting these things out of your your insurance your insurance liabilities and so that's what I would look at with each of these how much risk do I have with this old fossil is it worth my time pursuing it I probably would agree with Andrea and say I would just let the old fossil just kind of be there okay from Alberta again says oh wait we already did that one Rachel Loveless portal from Deadwood says what do you do if a family member of a deceased lender tells you that their relative did not have a will so in other words that they died in test day right it's by understanding that if someone doesn't have a will that the property will if they were married it automatically goes to the spouse or if they had children their spouse is also deceased so there's kind of a process that happens with the property if they have descendants where even if you don't have a will the will really just is there often to if you're following the normal set of a will like for instance I passed away my husband gets all my property the will expedites that process for you but it would happen regardless through the court system it would just be if they don't have like if they weren't married they had no kids you know they had no siblings like I guess then it would get trickier but you can basically follow if there's no will what I would call the normal descendant line to figure out who would have inherited the property is that your understanding Rose well first I would say Andrea and I are not lawyers so we can't give legal advice but but I love to play one on a webinar yes yes but after covering covering our basis there I think it goes by state and so each state law might be different on who inherits it could be parents it could be but I believe there's a prescribed way and then additionally I think I would just go if I know where the person dies and with find a grave website it's a lot easier to find out the county where the person has died I actually have contacted probate offices in other in other states and a lot of them are online now so you can actually get the probate records so I think I would do a due diligence in just finding out if there actually was a will that was that was recorded at the probate office just in case someone tells me there's a will I would still check also I think most states have regulations about how if someone dies in test state how their estate gets resolved so you can't have someone who's the former daughter in law say oh well my former mother in law meant for me to have that that doesn't happen right so this is a good question Kara Westby again says what do you do with the loans that you can't resolve the museum keeps them in perpetuity well the answer is no go ahead I was just going to say Andrew and I have different cases with that in that Andrew has an abandoned property law in Ohio so she actually can follow the abandoned property law in Alabama we do not have an abandoned property law for most museums we try to get that passed in I think it was 2017 and it ended up dying in the state house but there is a property law from 2004 that was put on the books for abandoned cars that I can use and I would have to go through that process and basically I have to turn the property over to the state and so that would be something that we would consider for the low value items that we just do not want to have and we want to free up the space in our storage would be to use that state old car legislation even though it is not part as Roe said we would just use the statute of limitations so we actually have to hold on for seven years then of documented that we asserted the title and we cannot resolve it and we want to get rid of it so we wait that seven years and then we can get rid of it so that is what we would follow Kayle Palmatier in Hagerstown Maryland says what about when the loan has multiple generations back 70 years the heirs won't know that this object exists and we really don't want it huh that happens yeah I've had that happen yeah you base, I mean in my experience what I have done is you either get one or two kinds of people far back that they're not aware of it you either have them the curious heir who is intrigued with their relative had stuff on loan to the museum you know and they kind of want to know the history and story behind it and so they're kind of eager to participate or you have the I don't really care heir that's nice and all that aunt Sue had candlesticks at the museum I have just gone ahead and sent things back via you know certified mail so that I verify that they had to sign to receive it so I know they got it I have done it I'm not going to lie but it's not the best way I mean I'd rather not send things that I know people are not really happy to receive but on the other hand it's their property and I don't want to care for it anymore and so I've warned them that I'm going to do it and I send it back Hillary from Asheville North Carolina says we have a number of old extended loans that came to us from several siblings as individual loans the living siblings have since formed a trust do we need to work with the original lender or the trust as a whole to resolve these outdated loans what do you think I think that's when my city attorney tells me trusts are complicated Rose and you can't do this yourself I actually would involve a lawyer with that one I think it's just it's complicated it's like how with the trust formed who's with the trust yeah I think it's it's a you need to contact a lawyer with that one sorry so there were some questions about how much does it cost to get a copy of a will I think it depends on the place I can tell you in Birmingham, Alabama it's a dollar per sheet and they will only take cash so I often will go over there that is correct I have to go over I find out how long the will is I come back and then I have to do a form to get petty cash and then I have to take the petty cash back over and get the will get my receipt and then bring the receipt back to my accountant to account for the petty cash so yeah some of the stuff I have to go through to solve an old flow I've never had to do that I've done it all online oh yeah that's right some places are available on my K. Palmiture says wills cost 50 cents per page in Maryland but some places there's a flat rate I'm told I've only seen the per page fee because obviously wills can vary a lot in lengths so I think that's how they typically handle it but yeah I've only been doing it online luckily I've never had to appear in person with cash in hand so we're fortunate in Ohio so Elena Horajada I probably butchered that and Manitoba says what is the what if the air executor is unwilling to show us the will or provide a copy and we aren't able to get a copy through probate well one if they want the property back I'm curious why they wouldn't be able to show you a copy of it and also once the will is probated it then becomes a document you should be able to get now if the item is part of a trust you do not get that trust document that does not become a public document but the will does become a public document so you might just have to wait until probate is over but also if the state is in probate the executor should have letters and the letters of the executor should give them the authority to determine what happens with the object don't you think Andrea yeah it sounds like though she is talking about someone that died a long time ago so it's not that it's in probate like a decent it's that it happened so long ago that they and I haven't tried to get a will of someone from many generations ago have you uh no I haven't tried many generations ago no I have and in some places you can get them in other places you can I also think that for some people they feel that even though a probate court or a probated will is public it feels that it's a privacy issue right I have experienced that and again depending on the object and what you're dealing with we really go by the risk assessment here on whether or not um you know is this a high risk item really or is this not really a high risk item and so to my senior management we kind of weigh it case by case so I feel like we may not be quite as stringent as roses in Birmingham here in Toledo just um just throwing that out there so okay I think that's all the questions please fill out the webinar evaluations they're very important to us they help us decide what we're going to do in the future and um we really value your feedback so thank you and thank you Rose and Andrea this is really interesting and I think that's it so in the next few days you can look on our website and if there's no ad for this webinar in the slides at the top then look in the in the uh archives for 2019 and you'll find the the the webinar slides the recording the handouts and I will add to my handouts um uh the link to the old on legislation for different states I will add the addresses for ARS and VARA those two things you mentioned Vaga yep yep yeah that'd be great yeah so you guys could send this to me uh but I know I have the old on one so I'd be happy to do that and uh so just keep an eye out we will have our next webinar is uh May 8th now I have to look um but it's on Herbaria it should be really interesting so um even if you don't think you're interested in that it might be something to look at you know a lot of 19th century old historical societies have copies of um I have you know folded up fried um um um um um um um um um um um