 Great, hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar and again thank you all for your flexibility in pushing back the start time of these programs. This is of course the sixth in your eight-part series to complement the Inverse Training for the Seattle Heritage Response Team. These programs have been made possible through the generous grant funding support of the National Endowment for the Communities. In two weeks we'll have a program on salvaging book and paper objects and then two weeks after that we'll have our final program on salvaging furniture. If you missed any sessions I will email you after the program with a link to the recording and just simply email me when you have finished viewing the program and I'll mark it on your file. Before we begin the presentation a quick refresher of your technical notes. On your screen you'll see several boxes including one label chat on the left hand side. You can use that to say hello as many as you have, ask questions, share any information or links that you'd like. If you post a question there in the chat box you'll receive a response from me. Any questions will be noted, collected, and then I will verbally ask them of Andrew at the conclusion of the program. Today we have the return of the web links box the bottom of the screen. Simply click on the link to highlight it in blue and then click on the browse to button to visit the site. And with that I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's presenter Andrew Robb. Andrew is the head of photographic 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 is 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 is a member of the National Heritage Responders and has deployed to the Brooklyn Recovery Center after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. He also assisted with recovery efforts in Hawaii, Japan, Russia, and Washington DC. Andrew was the past program chair and chair of the photographic material specialty group and has served as the co-chair of the AIC Emergency Committee. He is a professional associate at the AIC. He majored in photograph conservation from the Winniter University of Delaware program in art conservation and received a BA with honors in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania. With that, I'm pleased to turn things over to Andrew for his presentation on photograph and electronic media salvage. Great, thanks Jess. Hi everybody out there. If you can't hear me, put something in the chat and we'll work on that. With that said, I'll get started. So we're going to cover today a pretty big topic, salvage of photographs and electronic media and I'm going to try to put that into context that can help you. Typically, these collections are not isolated. There are a lot of other materials and I think the approach that you can take is quite easy to respond with lots of different things. So some of the things I know will be covered by Randy in the paper salvage area. So we'll cover things specific to these things but I think broadly what Randy has to say will be reinforced with what I'm saying today. So let's get started. So I'm really going to be focusing on the risk of with water. There are obviously, particularly in Seattle, California, other locations, risks associated with say earthquakes or other kinds of natural disasters, but even in an earthquake, you typically will have situations that create fires which then typically are put out with water. So water is a risk factor that's fairly prevalent and it can happen both at a small scale that is a drip from a sprinkler system that's there ironically to protect you from fires. But it can also happen because of a flood or other kind of phenomenon and that's what I was working on today of just getting ready for the high amount of rain that we're anticipating getting here over the next week because of Hurricane Florence but also to some extent getting ready for the two hurricanes that are behind it and not knowing exactly where they'll go. So water is our big risk factor and I'm going to really focus on that with these two things. It's fairly universal across all different kinds of incidents. So let's take a step back from the kind of format we're talking about. Let's just review some emergency assumptions. So we're going to first deal with people and then we're going to deal with buildings and then we're going to deal with things or collections. So safety is going to come first and the safety of your staff, the safety, your safety, the safety of your team, access to buildings. These are all constraints that are going to come up and it's really to the advantage of your collections that people start getting harmed or are harmed. You want to make sure that people are being cared for that they're not being injured and that can be very challenging particularly if your real focus is getting into a space or being concerned about a space. But these are the generic concerns. They're going to come up particularly in a large incident just because of incident command and how first responders are going to allow people into a space or not into a space. So I touch on this a little bit incident command these terms but broadly speaking we're talking about emergency management. We're talking about four phases and it really works in a cycle. They overlap. It can be somewhat confusing. But we're typically talking about preparedness that is getting ready for something knowing that something is going on that we have a concern about like a leak or something like that. So how do we prepare? How do we get ready for that? What kind of supplies do we have? We talk about response. That is what we do when something happens and incident happens. Recovery what we how we get out of that situation and that can both be short term and long term and that's particularly problematic in terms of response and recovery actions can overlap. So we're talking about salvage that can be somewhat in between response and recovery. A lot of assessment actions may happen in response but as you start actually salvaging material it may start leading into recovery. You're able to start getting into your building. You're able to do different kinds of activities related to stabilizing the situation. And then lastly mitigation is really reducing risk. It might be you're doing a building campaign and you decide to take a collection area and improve it or move it to a higher ground or something like that. We want to put those terms into the context that can be somewhat easier to understand or is more familiar has to do with our how we deal with risks associated with our own health. So preparedness or activities we do to stay healthy. There are things that we do might have medicines or the kinds of bandages or the kinds of things in our house in our first aid kit. Responses calling 911 or going to the emergency room and emergency room is a good way of thinking about salvage. It is both response but it's more than just a 911 call. It's actually beginning to stabilize the situation. So a lot of salvage activities you can think of as essentially being quite comparable to an emergency room situation. It's largely response but it does start getting into aspects of recovery where you're trying to stabilize the situation. Recovery can be thought of as very similar to rehabilitation and I think the most important thing of all of this is if you have a large incident particularly with photographs, electronic media, your recovery time could be very long. You could take an approach of freezing things or having to have things treated where they're not accessible to you and it will take a long time to make them accessible. And that's very similar to say the rehabilitation that we go through if we have a serious injury or a serious surgery. Someone has a stroke. We don't expect them to go back to work right away. It's not possible. There's a lot of rehabilitation and that's similar to recovery. A lot of recovery efforts take a long time. I have a case study that goes into that. And then lastly mitigation can be things like surgery or medication that are really reducing risk, the kinds of things you do to actually not just prepare for risk but make it make it less. But we're really going to be focusing on that salvage component, that response component. But that's how it fits in. And this is one of my favorite things because a lot of times when people hear preparedness, what they think of is a plan. They think of your binder, they think of your disaster plan. I like this quote from Dwight Eisenhower, which is in preparing for battle, I've always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. And really, plans are a critical part, but they're not the only part. And within preparedness, you should be doing a lot of different things like organizing, training, drilling, making sure you have assessing your situation and that you're making it better. So it's a cycle. And what I would say is if you have an emergency plan, that's great. And this is the first poll question is, if you have an emergency plan, when was the last time that you updated it? When was the last time that you used it? It's important to have these things be active. A plan that sits on a binder, excuse me, in a binder on a shelf. It's not particularly helpful. But, you know, so far, the first responders anyway have this question, that they did it pretty recently, and that's good. And to some extent, I'm not surprised. People that live in earthquake zones are used to this kind of thing because their emergency planning is quite robust, and people understand that there's a risk that really needs to be prepared for. We're going to talk a little bit about other kinds of ways to deal with that. But one of the biggest things that I take away from that quote is also that why is the planning part indispensable? And I think it's because it's doing the kind of thing that you're doing with the lens for response in your area, you understand what people's where people are, what they're doing, what their responsibilities are, and you've worked out a lot of that for the incident. So the planning part is important. And the plan is an outcome you need it. But in my experience, you're typically not pulling off a binder in the middle of the incident. You're using that experience from preparing it and reviewing it to inform you. But it's really there as part of that process. And then as I said, just returning back to that, that notion of these are a variety of different kinds of emergencies, they can turn in, they generally will turn into a water emergency of some kind. Sometimes they start out that way. And there's a flood Florence fled to picture on the top left. That's where the books are in the middle, the mud angel recovering things, hurricanes, bottom, bottom middle UCLA, there was a flood a couple years ago due to a water main break on Sunset Boulevard that then cascaded millions of gallons of water through the campus. These are some moldy books that say even worse situation where things get wet and that's one of the risks we'll talk about is not just the damage from water, but the damage caused by high humidity. See on the on the right issues that are germane, even if it's not technically water emergency, but the way you put out fires is use water. So this is where earthquakes come into play where earthquakes don't necessarily create water emergencies, particularly if you don't have a tsunami, but they can because fires started and fires are put up by water. So water's a common theme and it's a common risk area. And as I said, with mold, you can have risks with material just because they get wet. But mold is another problem and we want to avoid that. So you'll see in the literature, a variety of different things about how long it takes things to get moldy. Sometimes it'll be as little as two days. Sometimes it's four days. I've been in situations where things haven't gotten moldy for actually far beyond four days. It really has to do with the temperature and the relative humidity. But as a good rule of thumb, you have about 100 hours, what I'm trying to kind of call the golden 100 hours before in a high humidity situation, you could have mold start being a real problem. So generally, that's about four days from when things get wet. And this is borne out by, unfortunately, the experience we saw last year with Harvey in Texas and Maria in Puerto Rico and Irma in Florida. It's a lot of different situations where things could be kept at bay for a while, but mold starts increasingly being a problem. So that's where there's a time component to this. And that really runs into that safety first issue of I need to get into my areas. I need to see them. I need to understand where water is. I need to need to do that quickly. Because things sitting and getting wet is a big risk factor, particularly for photographs. Photographs typically have gelatin on them. Mold really likes to grow on gelatin. So mold can be a problem for books. And it can also be a problem for magnetic media. So there's just a lot of reasons to be worried about mold. So it's one of the reasons why a real focus is put on prevention and not having things get wet in the first place. But if they do, got about 100 hours circling back a little bit to that recovery, those terms of recovery and response, you know, in an emergency, you have these safety issues that can take days to weeks. And the important thing there is that different people and different actors will think and be in different parts of that cycle. They may be done with response and they're really starting with recovery while you haven't even gotten into your collection area and you're barely in response because you haven't even gotten in. So, you know, that's where the safety issue comes in. First, it takes days or weeks. But then when you're really getting into recovery efforts, salvage efforts, that can be within that days and weeks because you have to do something before it, say, gets moldy. But when you're really returning all of those things to service or you're fully treating them and getting them back, that can take months if not years. Okay. Excuse me. So we've talked to sort of laid a context of how this fits in to broad emergency response. Talked a little bit about how emergency management works and different kinds of terms. So we're talking about photographs, we're really broadly talking about a set of classes that you can almost think of by century. So inkjet prints, if you're talking about hard copy, physical things are really your most common photographs in the 21st century. There are some color prints that are chromagetic, but generally if you had to generalize you'd say inkjet prints. In the 20th century you largely have color prints for the latter half of the century, black and white prints for the early part of the century and film and transparencies throughout the 20th century. And all of these materials in the 20th century are pretty robust. They can get wet to some extent, they behave like other kinds of things. But inkjet prints of the 21st century are very sensitive to water and we'll see that in a second. But there are differences in the way they respond to water. In the 19th century you have a variety of a lot of different kinds of formats. Collodian prints, abhuman prints, those are typically the kinds of things in your family collection that are mounted onto boards. You have negatives on glass and you have photographs in cases. And so the reason I have these these these stars is that if you're looking at various resources there are some negatives on glass. Collodian ones in particular that cannot withstand getting wet. And daguerreotypes and other kinds of cased photographs also can't get wet. They don't respond well to that. So generally the idea is you shouldn't let them get wet at all. There are some negatives on glass that in fact you can salvage the kind of later kind and we'll go into that a little bit. But broadly speaking the 19th century prints can largely withstand some amount of water with some exceptions. And so they behave more like your 20th century things. You can freeze them and we'll go into identifying them a little bit and what to do with them. So here's some here's some pictures of them. Classic black and white print in the top left. The transparency in the top right. Albums, photographs mounted onto pages, negatives, and in prints. So these kinds of collections are very typical and they're found throughout all kinds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Photographs are used in support of them or collection items in all those places. So it's one of the things where while my job is at a library these materials need to be salvaged and dealt with in the same way regardless of what institution they're in. The biggest concern we have with materials of all of these centuries is that they will stick together as they dry. Generally speaking these these photographs have some kind of binder or emulsion layer gelatin often more modern things different kinds of polymers or resins. So as they dry they stick to other things and it's really this drying part that ironically is the problem. If they dry together they will get stuck and if they get stuck it's much harder to get them apart. So a lot of what you're trying to do is identify or think stuck. If they are stuck what should I do? How long do I have? But sometimes you're actually trying to do things where you're actually not letting them dry and you're been trying to figure out what to do. So let's let's look at some examples of that. So here's an example of Alicia Chipman she was an intern with me and she worked on a project where these are all film-based negatives that were stuck because they've been stored under a sink not a good place to store things. And they got wet and they were stuck together for many many years and she figured out a way to get them unstuck by essentially freezing them that slightly dried them and also as as ice crystals formed and were slightly bigger than the water that they that was ice is slightly bigger than water caused a slight amount of drying and separation of the different items. So it is possible over time even if things are stuck together to get them apart but you'd rather not have that happen. The other issue that we have is that some media particularly say inkjet media are very sensitive to water getting on them and the inks that they're made out of pigments that they're made out of will bleed and while this will happen in varying degrees across these kinds of materials they do bleed far more quickly and then say a silver gelatin black and white print or a chromogenic print would be. So you're essentially your 20th first century materials your inkjet hardcopy should be very careful about because the kind of damage that they that they can take is much less than other materials they can't stand to be immersed and they will bleed. Okay so we went over let me just go back and say so we've gone over those kinds of materials their risk factors it's basically bleeding and and sticking together and you only have so much time a very limited amount of time only a few hours before bleeding really starts being a big problem with things sticking together as things dry it may happen over a series of days but this is where particularly with photographs unlike say other kinds of say collections that you really wouldn't want to get wet but they could withstand being wet like say metal objects or other kinds of things that a metal person will say oh no you can't get them wet either but you have a lot more options with with those kinds of things where you you can can actually be wet for some amount of time. Photographs don't like being wet so this is where we go down some paths of freezing them or how we buy ourselves time because they take out they take up a lot of space to treat excuse me let me go the other way. So let's just review a little bit about electronic media so you really can divide this out into a digital world that is things that are on hard drives thumb drives optical discs magnetic tapes and discs and analogs which is largely magnetic tapes of either audio or videotape. So there is some overlap because obviously some digital material is on a tape or a disc that's magnetic in nature but but generally speaking when you're talking about this most of your electronic media is going to be in some kind of tape it's going to be the cassette it may be quite idiosyncratic to certain kind of machine and that's really the big issue is that you have a plethora of different kinds of electronic media in the digital era and you have less of those but what you have a lot of with the analog era is a lot of different kinds of machines you so this is an example of different kinds of formats and while they are all the same kind of media they require different kinds of machines and the machines can be the real issue with this is that if you if you think the machine gets damaged if you have a machine how are you going to read these things they're very time consuming to do it's not typically the kind of thing that a conservator does so for example we can do a certain amount of recovery of photographs in my emergency plan but we really don't have much capacity to do any kind of thing with magnetic media we really have to have an outside contract that someone that really focuses on magnetic media and they will do that so this is where we get into some differences between salvage for books and papers this can be relatively straightforward with a lot of people and a lot of space you can air dry things it gets very difficult to do with machine readable things because you have these two components you have to take care of your machines you even have a machine then you start getting into questions about who can do that how do they get that but machines are another component you may have a collection but you may not have the machines may not even know if you have an ability to play back so that's where doing typical collection management activities with your electronic media may be very helpful from an emergency point of view by just understanding what you have what's important to you what it is so that you understand what you might prioritize in an emergency okay so we've talked about an overview of photographs of electronic media so let's look at what the salvage wheel says about photos and electronic media and this is where we'll repeat some of the things I went over about sensitivities so you you if you can you want to remove things from frames and sleeves because things will photographs will stick to those frames and sleeves um if you have time and and this is where we'll get into how you can judge that you definitely want to save information that's related to those frames and sleeves sometimes the only cataloging information or organizational information is on those sleeves so be careful about separating things too much or throwing it out because you may need that information you want to be careful about surfaces they're often quite fragile and they can stick to things if they're touching other things so air dry them and keep them from touching each other this is all within the context of if you have a small number and you can deal with all of them in the time that you have but if you have 20th century photos and you cannot get through all of them in an air drying way within say 48 hours you should keep them in cold water and I have some pictures of that you can freeze them and if you can interleave them that is to separate them so that you have things in between or in group you managed to put things into groups that that would be ideal um so that you can thought batches of them and then you don't want to freeze glass negatives and this is where there's this star so with the star is there for glass negatives because there is this early type of glass negative called a collodion wet plate that really can't that it can't be wet and that's why they're saying don't freeze those they can't withstand being wet however dry plate wet dry plate glass negatives the later kind which they're generally are more of in collections if if there are any there's someone uncommon those can be frozen so that's there's a slight qualification to that on it for like trying to come here for the salvage wheel it's it's you want to avoid scratching things you want to rinse things in clean water because dirt is obviously a problem with anything that's machine readable it gets in the way of the machines reading them so you want to you need a source of distilled or clean water and this goes back to this resource issue you may not have you may not have access to that clean water in a in a particularly bad situation and you really should be planning ahead with some kind of data recovery company or some company that really works with these materials and this can be done through a larger emergency contingency contract but but generally speaking with these collections you cannot do a whole lot by yourself you really will need the assistance of others and so if you have those materials that might be something that you have to prioritize in your your storage or your planning for tapes and cassettes you should try to remove them from their cases and air dry them and then reassemble them and copy them that's a pretty laborious thing to do but it is possible to do it you can freeze disquets within 72 hours and this is again where particularly with your data recovery company you really want to be I can generically explain how to freeze photographs but it gets a little trickier with electronic media and you need to be working closely with those that would really be doing the work with CDs and DVDs they can be air dried too and you shouldn't freeze dry them and then I have qualified hard drives and thumb drives that the salvage wheel wasn't really written in a time of hard drives and thumb drives and you essentially want to treat them in the same way as your as your other electronic media want to keep them generally not from getting wet and you want to be able to rinse them if you can but you can't really easily take them apart you and this is again where you're really working with your data recovery company one additional component of this which is not easy to do but if you have things in a digital realm you have more opportunities to make backup copies and work out your data retention plan and other kinds of things where you're you're managing all of your digital assets so if something were to happen you would know well we have we have this copied and it's another outside area that's easier said than done but it is it is a in a digital realm there are some advantages for some kinds of collections to be in a digital realm where they can be easily copied and managed well maybe not easily they can be but this is generally what you'll always happen always happen in emergencies that you have too many things you you that these are pictures from the Florence flood in 1966 huge drying racks they this is like a three-story space in one of the buildings where they didn't have freeze drying options at the time and work that out yet and so these are things giant sheets that are that are folded over ropes and and they're just on a route they're on a escalating oh I'm looking at some at some questions so I'll come I'll look at those in a second so you're just dealing with scale scale is a big issue and if you have a lot of space you have a lot of people you you can manage things at scale but often you don't have that much space and that's where you have these other options oh right so can you please repeat what is advised for hydrides and thumb drives before recovery company can help so as with other electronic media if things are getting if things have gotten dirty you do it is advisable to try to get them clean with with water just as you with clean water just as you would with an audio tape or magnetic tape but again this is getting into situations where you really wouldn't if you had a lot of things that got muddy or dirty as we'll see in a couple examples you may not have the ability to do that and it may be something that you're working at with your data recovery company or your or your media company about how a salvage how you should be planning for salvage but generally you want things to stay clean Andrew if you're pausing for questions here we have another one come in too sorry if you were just going to take a little break there's a question about what harm is associated with water that is not distilled for rinsing oh right so so that's a good question so again the wheel says you should use clean or distilled water and that's because if the water has something in it like salts or other kinds of materials and it dries it can create some situations where you have more of a problem than if you had distilled water but generally speaking if you are in a situation where you're having to just get mud or dirt off of things just clean water will be better than doing nothing so distilled water or deionized water is often the most controlled water that a conservator might use for treatment and so that's that's not a bad thing to have but it shouldn't keep you from if you really have to get things dirt off of things before it dries on them clean water tap water but then you need to make sure that you've understood that what you use so that people later on may know okay so we're going to have to do some other things again this is where clean water is good distilled water is best dirty water may not be what you want to be using you're trying to get rid of that so going into freezing a little bit and we'll have some time to go over questions in a second freezing so freezing is often a good option for all sorts of materials photographs some kinds of electronic media like a magnetic media paper objects photos books so if you're freezing them you can use all sorts of different freezers these this is a this is a research freezer that I saw in Japan it's at minus 30 it's it's pretty cold it's it's colder than say your home your home freezer but also in Japan I saw people after the tsunami and in 2011 using all sorts of of just home freezers so again you're it's a similar to the question of water um things can be salvaged later after freezing you typically can salvage something and the difference in temperature from very cold to just cold there's some advantages to it being very cold minus 30 as opposed to zero but you can use zero is it's perfectly fine the big issue with that is you want to have things in isolatable units just so that you can manage them so putting things into ziplock bags or separating them by different kinds of say deli wrap or different kinds of materials so that you have it's just like a sheet of polyethylene can really help you divide your things into units that are manageable so that when you thaw them or you're freeze drying them you you have can break things down from a large scale to a smaller scale and freezing is well described in some of the links Peter Waters just talks about it a little bit and his really helpful book salvage of water damaged library materials a lot of the focus on freezing came out of frustration after the Florence flood in the late 60s and Hendricks and Lesser really go through a lot of of what you can freeze and not freeze with in their article disaster preparedness and recovery photographic materials and that's where this issue about the wet plate negatives come in they do make a clear distinction between this earlier kind versus the later kind but they broadly show that most photographic materials can be safely frozen and freeze dried and the Library of Congress site there are a number of resources about drawing things they're drawing things and then a Northeast document conservation center also has some things about creating a disaster plan and other kinds of things so all of these to some extent point towards freezing and how you can practically do it some advantages and disadvantages but but it basically is buying you time for these things that you don't have time to to salvage and I in my case study I'll go over that immersion can also be good step in between this is a microfilm collection that got wet and so it was easier to just get all of it wet this happens with motion picture collections too just put the whole thing in cold water that's clean in this case it was just tap water it was not it was not distilled water or special water might have been better but since this was getting washed in a film processor almost immediately that had more controlled water this was this was fine worked out really well and then drying so sometimes drying will happen individually on a line as you might have done in a dark room sometimes it'll happen on these really big contraptions like what happened in Florence but increasingly this is happening many years later or months later in freeze dryers there's a small one that's top right a very large one on the bottom bottom right but now 50 years after Florence there are companies that deal with recovery of all sorts of things from hospital records to legal records to collection materials so that's where large contracts can be in place or contingency contracts to help salvage those things after the fact in freezing those materials puts them in a place that you have some options so these are some examples of those those articles yeah so there's a question on the freezing so is there a freezing is there a danger that they'll stick so if you're if you it's if you're if you're separating things with so you can take it's a kind of deli wrap it's just a very thin sheet of polyethylene it's often used in sandwich shops it's fine that will allow you to if it may get stuck to that and then you have to get things unstuck from the freezing in that regard but if things are wet and you the whole drying process is designed to get these things apart freeze drying removes the water without it ever getting into a liquid state and so it's just going from a solid ice to a gas and that keeps things from sticking so it may be frozen together but it won't be stuck together and that's where you want to have these things separatable by different layers and that's where generally speaking if you get wet things and you freeze them in a bag you'll be able to get that chunk of things out of that bag and in freeze drying you'll be able to get the bag off if it does in fact get stuck so I guess it's it's really a matter of jargon of sticking meaning that the gelatin has gotten soft enough that it's adhered to something versus something was frozen to something because of ice forming and that's that's different and it's easier to deal with in neither thawing or freeze drying so let's go through a case study related to an incident I went to in University of Hawaii in 2004 this is a really common situation in the sense of it's it's fairly local it was not a regional disaster but it was pretty severe there was a flash flood on Halloween of 2004 and it overflowed all these streams above the lower part of the University of Hawaii campus and you can see that there's this drive that's in blue that is where the streams essentially all funneled into this this area and the Hamilton library right I don't know if you can the Hamilton libraries in the middle went down from the biomedical sciences in the inset map on the left that library was slightly below grade and those windows that you see were actually the water came in through those windows because the water was coming down hill and it filled into a light well those windows looked into and then water came gushing into this lower level combination of ground and basement level about 90,000 maps were in that area as well it's about 60,000 photographs so there were a lot of efforts just to get materials out get them out of these file cabinets those are the aerial photographs and get the maps out of that area although in as what you can see is that people are generally at this point not removing photographs or maps and individual things they're taking out just whole drawers so that they can triage them outside of this location there was an attempt with some of the photographs to wash them individually and dry them that gets back into this clean this clean water issue and and just being able to wash things with experience of like say just being in a dark room about 3,000 things a thousand things in a three day each day for three days was was actually washed and it if you had about 3,000 photographs you could probably wash your way out of it with only a few people but they had much more than that so the decision was made to freeze those things along with the maps so these are areas where this is at the map stage whole map case drawers are being taken out and put into freezer trucks back and this is also what happened with those those sets of photographs that are in those drawers they were taken out of the drawers and put into plastic trash bags and frozen and put into records storage boxes so things were frozen in 2004 this is an example of those things you can see that they're they're intermingled with their file folders and other kinds of lateral file hanging file materials they're just put into big plastic bags and then that bag is put into a box and it was all frozen and kept frozen for many years 2007 I was a consultant and trying to figure out how to how to dry these maps and return them to use the the issue was is that while these were not original or excuse me unique items the way that they were filed and their relationship to negatives that the National Archives in many cases had was so unknown that it was really better and cheaper to just salvage all of these with and try to figure out how to reproduce and make copies later if that was needed because there was no way to easily determine what was actually in there based on different filing systems between NARA and their systems so we just we found in this case that we didn't need to do any kind of freeze drying that we could just they were in good enough shape that we could just thaw them in clean water and they would they could quite easily come apart that you didn't even need to use different kinds of ethanol baths or other kinds of options where you might have something that was water sensitive you could basically just wash them bring them up to temperature and they could they could easily come apart if you're working in relatively small batches and that's where if we go back one of the odd things about you encounter it when you're freezing things in your home freezer is that freezing in and of itself does draw water out of things and does dry them that's where you see those ice crystals that are forming and why your food gets freezer burn it's because it's really getting dried out so over this time there was some drying action and that allowed things to be manageable in units so you didn't have this like solid thing that was all stuck together and you had these lateral files that were also acting as separators so you didn't have just one big block that had to be thought it could be done in relatively small units and the emergency recovery company Belford recovered all of those things according to a protocol that we worked out so that was an example where basically freezing was buying you a lot of time that's where and then we could work out what to do and then they could work out how to do this in an efficient way so this is where we have different we're working in trays and we're going from one bath to the next bath the next bath so there are three baths and then the last bath is the cleanest obviously and then you rotate your trays as you would say with other kinds of washing techniques with your traditional photographic chemistry then take the cleanest water and you make that you rotate your trays so that you're gradually using that clean water for eventually the cleanest water becomes the dirtiest water bath and we're just air drying them and in this case it was really kind of surprising it was not what we anticipated and it wouldn't have been what we would have initially recommended without testing it out but we tested it on enough different ones so we felt confident that that for the vast majority of these things they could be thought after the fact in small batches and washed and dried and then after they were dried they get to a certain place they could be flattened in a stack and this worked really well for for those tens of thousands of things and had they not frozen them that the moral of the story really is freezing them was the right thing to do it worked really well and it allowed gave them time years later to do that and that gets back to that recovery cycle for all of these things scale is going to run and is going to run into scale it's a small thing you may be able to do it yourself you may be able to do it say in that thousands of if you have three days and all you do is wash and dry things you may have time before they start drying and they start getting moldy but after about three days your resources you really should be freezing them and freezing can give you a lot of options you have time you can get other things stood up like your reader services or other other kinds of things making sure people are safe making sure your building is safe and freezing can come later and that's really when you have time to salvage your collections freeze drying is another option it can be done it takes it's more costly but it can be done with more sensitive items and basically as I said it's what it's doing is gradually converting that frozen water in a vacuum to a gas and it's just because of the physics and chemistry of water if it's cold enough and there's a vacuum it actually will go from ice to a gas in one step and you don't have a liquid stage so you won't have things adhering or sticking together it's really a workable solution for a lot of materials particularly for 20th century and most 19th century photographs it's a good option and it's much better than not doing anything I'll touch a little bit on Japan because I talked a little bit about that but this was a situation where the water was much different source not just the local thing but a much larger flooding across all of the northeast due to tsunamis and devastation miles from coastlines things that were very unexpected it was a really really large incident it also had a lot of destruction and many people died it was really traumatic and horrible and decisions in some towns were made to salvage photographs that they found in these debris fields this is just a sense of the scale it was enormous storm surges and a lot of energy some storm surges as high as buildings like this one in addition there were things like radiation so it was just very complicated you had water damage you had earthquake problems you had radiation problems in some areas and this is an example where about a month after the New York Times had this picture of someone salvaging photographs which was really kind of amazing but what they were doing is they were finding things in the debris fields they were collecting them freezing them in plastic in Ziploc bags and in home freezers and then gradually thawing them and washing them and drying them there's a lot of damage to books books falling off shelves books getting wet and that's where all of these things about freezing and freeze drying was these approaches were borne out in the recovery of these materials I went the earthquake was in March I was in Japan in September so six months later and you can see these these are times where they were finding still finding things so that's where although I was talking about four days as being really important they still were finding recoverable things months and months after so just because you've passed that 100 hours doesn't mean that you should give up just means that you'll start potentially having more damage but you shouldn't give up or just say well I can't do anything you may be able to recover things weeks after it may be harder and you may have more damage but things were put into bags they were frozen this is where they're coming in put into bags frozen and then the location is the way that they're organized where they were found is how they're organized so then people could could then look for things based on where they were found and see if they were patterns and it was very successful for this town a lot of a lot of things were salvaged and they were just using very basic things simple like bags that they had access to freezers that they had access to sinks that they had access to and then they were using a chemistry lab in their high school for drying them so that's that's that table that we were seeing in that photograph it's the same same sink and this is where they have it set up for actually drying things on absorbent mats and then a very elegant way of drying them with paper clips or with them with clothes clips and on lines separated by plastic straws as separators so each of those pink things is a straw that's keeping the clips away from each other just enough so the photographs don't stick as they dry and just using lab chairs it's it was very it was very smart it was very efficient and they they literally saved thousands of things using very basic materials and drying them in stack very typical bladder stack and and here I am with the conservator in charge of that day and she was also the one who was in that picture so it's just this amazing thing of kaizuna which is sort of this notion of banding together and working together was really inspiring to see what they had been able to do and it's the kind of thing that I think Alliance for Response groups can do they can work together they know each other they can support each other in small incidents and they can work together on larger incidents and you can do a lot of good things with the resources that you have and this is a really good example it was not particularly fancy it was just using what they had so to wrap up I just want to go over some things that are related to Washington and it has to do with mapping but it also has obviously specific things for you all in Seattle so the Washington Department of Natural Resources has done a really good job of of taking geological hazard information and mapping it in such a way that I think could be really useful it's not just for photographs and electronic media but just largely for identifying your risks so they started looking at shaking hazards mapping those and then looking at a this is just a map of Seattle this is all familiar to you taking this information about where there are risks the top left is a set of like is how often presentially declared disasters happen and they often happen around Seattle both because of the scale of incidents but also because of these different risks from earthquakes from floods from weather events so one of the things that's really helpful about what they've done and it could be helpful for you in evaluating risk in your area is they've mapped out different scenarios where there's different kinds of risks based on that scenario so this is what they call the 7.2 scenario it's kind of centered in the sound and it's it's these are orange areas the worst damage the most stress and it's escalating out they've mapped different hospitals in this case and they've taken the information about the age of the hospital and the structural type of the hospital to say well in fact there is there are some red hospitals they're they're red they're the most at risk they're in the most at risk area but there are some hospitals that are actually less at risk that are yellow in that area and there are some that are blue that are in that area a few so that it isn't just a matter of what what your area is it what it's what the building is and so these are things that can be useful you can do the same kind of thing for tsunami risk and these are really powerful tools and the challenge for groups like Alliance for Response groups is well it's let's map our cultural institutions our collections and that can really help us as we get into both risk planning but also in response planning of if we know that something has happened that's bad we know where our our collections are and so whether they're photographs or electronic media this can really help us work with each other and help each other using these kinds of tools it's a challenge so it's something we've been working on for the last few years particularly after last year but particularly for for you all earthquakes and tsunamis are are a risk factor there's no doubt about it and I think that there are ways to use this kind of mapping information to help you assess your risk and help you when you're planning this is for schools so it's not only just they also have so you can evaluate like children's schools and how much a risk they are and oh let me just summarize so you know I've covered a lot of different things are these maps available to the public? absolutely they are and let me pull up I can pull up the URL for that because I should do yeah I will do that right now and that's they should be commended for that because they the issue right now is that you can see the maps that you can't add things to the maps and that's one of the challenges of where we are on the mapping side of things but let me pull that up and if people then can aggregate oops aggregate let me I'm offline for them I'm not offline but I'm I'm in my browser right now and let me get that URL and if people can put in some other questions I'll get back to you in just a second so thank you everybody and I'll be right back I'm gonna go ahead in advance to his last slide there oh yeah oh yeah that's perfect yeah that's the way those are the best ways to reach me thank you for for sharing that very generous and I would encourage any of you who are on Twitter to follow Andrew on that platform because he's sharing a lot of really helpful and interesting information about disasters and cultural heritage so anyone else who had questions I've tracked a couple that we didn't get the chance to ask yet so once we get the link from Andrew and back we can go to those again thank you to everyone for your flexibility with rescheduling this but thank you to Andrew for getting everything done within the hour I did promise that we'd try and wrap things up hope 30 local time any luck there yeah I'll just take me a second I always have a little bit of trouble finding it I am gonna go ahead and pull over the survey link for you all so I think everyone should know the drill at this point just click on evaluate the webinar and the browse to button so while we're waiting on that link just make sure we have all of the questions and speed up here we go now I'm coming back that's great thank you Andrew yeah it looked like a really helpful resource so I would encourage you all to take a look at that and play around and figure out where your institutions are located and as Andrew mentioned that's a project we're really trying to take on on a broader level to make sure that cultural resources are included in some of these mapping projects okay so we had a question it's part of the earlier conversation about various cleaning techniques and wondering about if it's okay to clean hard drives and thumb drives with water as well yes the issues there so the question about cleaning them is generally speaking yes keeping kind of that immersion approach that cleaning approach can be useful but what you're really worried about is that the quality of that water so you could have salts or other kinds of things in the water that will as they dry deposit on the hard drives in particular and cause problems so what I would say you're trying to do is minimize the amount of damage that save muddiness or salt salt water is causing but at the same time this is why having certain kinds of things worked out in advance with the person who's going to do that salvage for you so on the east coast for a lot of magnetic media spec brothers is a good resource I'm not as confident about their ability to get to the west coast and it's a good question and I'll have to look into that of what your options are particularly for electronic and videotape for motion picture film it's a little easier what you know what you're looking for are different kinds of companies that would have a film processor and they may be available in your in your area for example there's still some companies that do microfilming here and so they can wash materials because they have film processors that they're still working but it's getting harder and harder and it's getting to be more of a challenge so again that's something that another way of approaching it would be if you had a large contingency contract say for building salvage or say your book or paper salvage they may be able to be in a place to subcontract and that could be a question that you're asking them is is your it may cost more but then you don't have to worry about that so but I'll look into I'll look into those specific vendors particularly on the west coast because you don't want to have to move things but it is increasingly a problem this was not as much of an issue say five particularly for film five or ten years ago and it's getting harder and harder thank you Andrew I think over the course of your presentation and and your responses you've addressed all of the questions here so you confirmed that the information you've shared is very similar to what was in the conservatogram so it core reminded everyone that was in our handouts for the meeting back in May so that would be a reference in addition to the web links that Andrew's provided here yeah I think I think we've gotten to all the questions so again thank you Andrew for ability to get through all this content and there's a lot of it very quickly and to address the questions as we went thank you to everyone who joined us for the program today and again if you have questions Andrew's very generously provided his info here and I will be in touch with you all about the next webinar which will be as I mentioned two weeks from today with Randy Silverman to talk about book and paper salvage all right thanks everyone thank you bye everybody