 We'll get to one o'clock, so we'll go ahead and get started. We're glad you have joined us to dive into the new publication, Preventive Conservation Collection Storage. This 944-page, 5-pound book is essential reading for everyone who is involved in collection care. On this digital platform today, please note two features, which you will see to the left of the slide presentation. The first is the link. Mary. I'm sorry. Yeah. There we go. Sorry about that. You want to back up? I'm back. Should I start over? I'm sorry. Yeah. I'd say please do. We have time. Okay. Sorry about that, guys. The little tech issue is on my end. I want to say we're glad that you've joined us to dive into this new publication, Preventive Conservation Collection Storage. This 944-page, 5-pound book is essential reading for everyone who is involved in collection care. On this digital platform, please note two features, which you will see to the left of the slide presentation. The first is the links section. Here you'll find content and links related to today's talk, including a PDF of the presentation. To access one of these items, click on it to highlight it, then select the open button below. It will open in a new window. The second is the chat function. The chat allows you to ask questions during the presentation and is your way of communicating with speakers and moderators. Please note that anything you send into the chat can be seen by all participants. It is not private. The session will be recorded and remain available to registered attendees. So if you want to go back and review anything later, you will be able to do so by clicking on the same view button you used to access the webinar room. As we go through the session today, we encourage you to share your thoughts using the hashtag AICNTG20 and AICCCN as seen on your screen. If the slides on your screen are not advancing, along with the presenter, your Internet connection may be causing a lag. If that happens, please refresh. If that does not work, you can follow along using the PDF in the links section. My name is Mary Coughlin, and I'm the Care of the Collection Care Network. I'm also associate professor of museum studies at the George Washington University, where I teach preventive conservation in person to students in our master's program and online as part of our museum collections management and care certificate program. I had the privilege of serving as one of the editors for the book as well as writing brief overview of past experiences at a grant section. This book will stay a part of my life in many years, since it is a required text for all my preventive conservation classes. Today, I'll be serving as moderator, taking speakers on time, and taking a track of questions. You can write questions in the chat box, and we will address as many as possible at the end. Seekers will cover section topics when you order the idea in a book, as seen on your screen. For this talk, we added a bonus section about looking for future trends in collection care. During the session, please participate in the quizzes that each speaker will post. After questions and answers, we will announce the winner of a free book. If we announce your name, please type a response into the chat box. If you do not respond, we'll move on to another person to be sure to stay on with us until the end if you want a chance at that free book. Now, when the book and want to order it, it is available on AIC's online store. If you want to read the abstract free chapter and have access to additional online information, please visit the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collection's Wiki. Since we have a very full session today, let's get started. Our first secret today is Lisa Elkin. Lisa is Chief Registrar and Director of Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History. She is the co-editor of this volume, Preventive Conservation's Collection of Storage, for which she wrangled an amazing array of editors, authors, and reviewers who have built a comprehensive reference volume for professionals of all levels and industries who prioritize the presentation of heritage collections. Lisa, it's all yours. Please remember. Thank you, Mary, and thank you everyone for joining us. We're really excited about this panel session today and our speakers. We decided to start off by giving you a bit of background on how the new Preventive Conservation Collection Storage volume came to be. Many of you may be familiar with these two volumes, published in the 1990s by the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collection, also known as Spinach. Both arose out of the Symposium on Collection Storage held at Spinach's 1989 annual meeting in Alberta, Canada. Funding for the volumes was provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Sorry about that. Ideas and practical solutions focused as its name indicates on the practical aspects of collection storage and storage of natural history collections of preventive conservation approach explored the principles that underpin good storage design. The pair should be seen in the context of a growing international movement to recognize the value of natural history collections that was taking place in the 1990s. Beyond that, the volumes had a huge influence on collection care more generally. So why a new volume? Well, there were many reasons for this. The books were 25 years old. So much progress has been made in the field of preventive care, and they simply became outdated. Also, beginning to take hold of the development and continued growth of collection risk assessment as a tool for planning. We thought this approach warranted more emphasis. We were faced with new challenges and concerns like sustainability and accessibility as well as new collection types, such as the growth of digital media and born digital objects. And finally, this was an opportunity to expand the scope of the book to other types of materials beyond natural history collections and to collaborate with partners representing other fields. And it's agreed to provide the content of ideas and practical solutions to stash when the site was first set up, I believe, in 2014. The web-based format was ideal for dissemination of this material. For the preventive conservation approach book, we needed to significantly expand the scope, which meant approaching authors outside of the field of natural history. To do that, we needed partners. AIC was an obvious partner from day one with its expansive coverage of conservation and collections. The Smithsonian, through the National Museum of Natural History, the book is an important training resource, both for its own staff and for the courses that it supports around the world. And because the book was intended for training and education, the Museum Studies program at George Washington University was another key partner. So there you have it, our four publishers, Spinach, AIC, GWU, and the Smithsonian. The final volume is organized in nine sections, and you will hear more on all of them shortly. Chris Norris and I are the book editors, supported by an invaluable team of seven section editors. There were over 100 authors, an astounding number, all representing the wide diversity of collection types, and several of whom will be speaking today. An attempt was made to unify the chapters in the new volume using themes that we felt were current and that we considered quite critical, including risk assessment, accessibility, collaboration, and sustainability. Again, you will hear these themes come up throughout the presentations to follow. I don't want to take up too much more of your time, as we have quite the lineup awaiting. I hope this gives you a good initial feel for the book and the mountain we were about to ascend. Thank you very much, and back to you, Mary. Thank you, Lisa. Our next speaker is Chris Norris. Chris is the other lead editor of the volume and is former president of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collection for Spinach. He's the director of public programs at the LP Body Museum. Chris, it's yours. Don't forget to unmute. Thank you, Mary. Sitting here in Connecticut, I want to start by saying that Yale University acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including the Mohekan, the Mashantucket Pequot, the Eastern Pequot, the Scatoconk, the Golden Hill Pegasus, the Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquin-speaking peoples have suited for generations the lands and waterways of what's now the state of Connecticut. And so we honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and the land. So I've been asked to introduce the first section of the book, and I'm going to start by thanking my co-authors in this section for their outstanding work. We asked a lot from our authors, and they delivered spectacular products for the most part in terms of the work that they did. And to me, there are three main points that you can take away from this initial section. And I'll summarize them as follows. The first is you can't talk in a meaningful way about conservation without understanding risk. The second is that successful conservation strategies are not entirely dependent on conservators. And the third is that the well-being of the object or the collection that you're working on is not the point of conservation. And I'm going to go through and explain what I mean by all of those. So first, understanding risk. When I started working with collections, which is a very long time ago, about 30 years ago, conservation was still thought of as something that you did to an object in response to a problem that you had identified or noticed. In natural history collections, that's not a very effective strategy with numbers in the millions. There's no meaningful way in which we can inspect every object individually, let alone treat them. So mitigation becomes the goal. But even that can be difficult if the resources at your disposal are limited. How do you target finite resources most effectively to reduce the risk to the collection? So, for example, do you weigh the cost of installing a new fire suppression system against purchasing new cabinets? Or how do you figure out whether it's better to line all the drawers in your collections with foam versus employing a staff member to implement an integrated pest management strategy? So to do that, you need to understand how each of those actions is likely to reduce the overall risk to the collection, which means that you need to quantify that risk. Quantitizing risk is a complex challenge, and one of the major breakthroughs over the course of my career has been the work done by Rob Waller and others to develop methodologies that are applicable to collection. How you go about doing that is going to be part of the second section of the book, so I won't cover it in detail here. But understanding the nature of an object's value, how that value is impacted by various agents of change, the probability that those agents will act on the object if you get them period, say 100 years, and the extent of the loss in value that will occur gives you a measure of the magnitude of risk to the object and ultimately the collection. Now, it's a lot more complicated than it sounds. So in the late 2000s, when I was working at the American Museum of Natural History, the museum did a comprehensive risk analysis of these collections, which was led by Lisa Elkin, who you just heard from. And I was fortunate enough to work with her on assessing risks of 5 million specimens in the paleontology collection, and I can testify personally that this was very, very hard work. But it's also invaluable when it comes time to explain to other people, especially those that don't have a background in collections care, how their actions will impact the well-being of the collections that they are holding in trust. Being able to say an investment of a million dollars in new cabinetry will reduce the overall risk for the collection by 80% is a metric that most people can get their heads around. Which brings us to the second point. So it's a truth universally acknowledged that while you might be responsible for collections care, you don't usually control the budgets, or at least not all of the budgets, but are necessary to care for the collection. This is a particular challenge for preventive conservation because the further you get away from the individual object, the less is under your control. Test management becomes the responsibility of your custodial staff, your climate control systems are maintained by your facilities department, your collection safety is handled by your security department, your finance department fixes the size of the budget, your development department determines whether you get access to any additional funds, and your strategic planers will decide whether your necessarily long-term preventive conservation plans will remain in people's minds for long enough that you get a successful outcome. And a lot of these decisions are going to take place as a result of discussions that don't include you. Your ability to insert yourself into those conversations is going to be limited to zero depending on the size of your organization. So you need to educate yourself regarding who has the power to facilitate or block your work, and you have to become quite skilled in the dark arts of institutional politics and propaganda. And that's not all of the level of strategy and macro-level funding decisions. Implementation of your preventive conservation plan means that you'll also be working on a day-to-day basis with people who don't answer to you, have problems of their own, and may need help incentivizing your needs. The siloed nature of most organizations, which results from hierarchical management structures, means that you start with a series of barriers that are kind of baked into your institution. In the second chapter of this section, Dieter and I talk about matrix management systems as a solution to some of these problems, but at the most fundamental level, you need to develop positive, mutually beneficial working relationships with your colleagues in other departments. That requires a degree of empathy that can be challenging if your soul and intense focus is on the needs of your collection. And this is the basis of what I call Norris' second law of successful workplace dynamics, which is it's not about you. For those of you that are interested, Norris' first law of successful workplace dynamics is don't be a jerk. If everyone implemented both those laws, I think we'd all be much more productive. So it's not about you that brings me to what I think is the last of these fundamentals of preventive conservation. The well-being of the object or the collection, I would argue, is not the ultimate point of conservation. Or, to put it another way, if you think a job begins and ends with the preservation of objects, either singularly or collectively, we don't look after these things for their benefit. We look after them because their continued existence benefits other people. And you can see this when you consider all of the different kinds of values that people attach to objects that we need to quantify when we do risk assessment. Not that you could be academic or aesthetic or spiritual or cultural or educational. When we curate objects, there's always a risk that we privilege our values over other people's interests on our expertise. That's actually part of the process of building a collection. To justify the accession of an object, we have to explain why that object is relevant to the mission of our organization. It's a very necessary focus, but it's also an exclusionary one. It plays into the ongoing question of decolonization. We're being asked and we're beginning to ask ourselves by what right do we hold these objects, interpret them, and decide who gets to access them and maybe for you too, this takes us into uncomfortable territory. Our practices, which are hardwired into how we train into our professional standards and our institutional policies have the effect of isolating other people from the objects that we work on. In some cases, these people are the creators of the objects concerned. They were created to embody values that we might understand in an abstract sense, but which we don't share. So when we tell someone they can't see something or touch something with their professional standards, we need to think about whether those standards are really as objective as we think they are. Because inevitably, in our training and in our work, we reflect the values of the institutions in which we work and the society in which we live, and it is becoming painfully apparent those values are shaped, among other things, by systemic racism. I'm relatively new to this way of thinking in part because I moved job dating months ago and I now spend far more of my museum is going through a major renovation, which is not just a bricks and mortar rebuild, but also a complete imagining of who we are, who we serve and how we best do this. Up until now, a lot of that discussion has been how we diversify voices and perspectives in our gallery, but we're now thinking more widely about how to address the systemic problems within our museum. As I said, we're newcomers to this, but some people have been thinking and acting in this sphere for a long time, and I commend that if you read nothing else in this huge book, and you really should read the whole thing, because it is awesome, and I say that as a person who didn't write most of it, but did at least edit it. If you read nothing else, take time to read and absorb respectful and responsible stewardship, maintaining and renewing the cultural relevance of museum collections by Sanjita Balachandran and Kelly McHugh. There is a reason why that chapter and why it's the first chapter of the book, so read it and you'll discover why. And with that, thanks. We have a quiz. So question number one. I mentioned that we did a comprehensive risk assessment at the American Museum of the Natural History some years ago. What do you think we identified from that amount? This is the greatest risk to our collection, but I'm not sure. Very interesting. Fascinating to watch how it ticks over. I think we've kind of come to, have we almost come to a halt? Yeah, we have. Look how many of you hate pests. That's fascinating. Actually fire. Fire is by far and away the biggest risk, or was by far and away the biggest risk that we encountered in terms of that risk assessment. So question number two. Which of these is an agent of change? Discordance, association, dissent, or dissonance? No, you guys are very good. You are put straight away. Yes, it's dissociation is an agent of change. Although dissent can be quite a good agent of some types of change. Question number three. What is the prisoner's dilemma? You describe this in terms of institutional management. Give you a bit of a clue. Yeah, there you go. You've all got it. A lot of you have got it. It's whether or not. And finally, what was found in the gunner's turret of the World War II bomber flak bait when it was being conserved? You guys are thinking hard about this. Come on, take a punt at it. Yeah, you're all thinking, you're all thinking pinup toaster, but in fact or a lot of you are thinking pinup toaster, but in fact it was actually, and this is actually the gunner's was obviously a heavy smoker. I'd probably be a heavy smoker if I was in the gun turret of the bomber in World War II, but he collected matchsticks which he then stored in the gun turret. So I think that's it for the first section. And so I'm going to click it to advance to the second section assessment and planning. Great. Thank you, Chris. Our next speaker on the second section for assessment for assessment and planning is Joel Taylor. Joel Taylor is a senior project specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. Prior to that he worked in various institutions in the UK and Norway. He holds a B.S. in Archeological Conservation and a Ph.D. related to collection surveys and assessments. Joel, it's all yours. Don't forget to unmute. Thanks very much, Mary. Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. I'm going to be describing the section on assessment and planning. That complies with five chapters. I'm not going to go through them all and describe them. I wouldn't be able to do them justice. I would like to go through some of the things that they have in common to help illustrate how this is why this book is important. Why the mainstream conservation can develop these chapters and how they raise the field in a certain way. There are a couple of themes that I wanted to go through and then describe each as we go. One of them is just about balance. I think it connects a little bit to Chris that it's not about you. It's about prioritising different needs and values, understanding the different needs for storage, the different needs for collections, the different needs for the museum or the institution and the public that uses. Requiring a degree of compatibility between those elements. Sometimes competing, sometimes complementary and in different ways. All of the chapters in different ways depending on what are collection risk assessment, collection care surveys, balancing collection storage with historic buildings. Building project processes and functional planning for storage. But seeing how these different functions of the museum can support one another instead of being these kind of traditional photos. Another element to this is not just kind of assessment but just gathering information. It produces knowledge and ultimately should kind of develop wisdom. And part of this is something which they all correspond to in different ways. And this is what I like to think of is kind of knowing what is possible and doing what is necessary. And this is just to elaborate in different ways. And some of the things which are possible, that could be the limitations, it could be the kind of climate which a museum is in. Some of that content. Some of the institutional capacity. But also the possibilities. What options are available in terms of technology. What could be done with unlimited time and resources. And then being able to understand how the most effectively applying those resources. And this is what a lot of this planning is connected to. And part of that is understanding the value section. What is actually helpful in these different ways. So in particular with risk assessment very explicit. And this is a very important part of how these things are done. But also kind of different kinds of strategies. And being able to the most appropriate course of action. Refining planning. Refining assessments to make them useful. Not just for heritage conservation. But for the particular content involved. And that kind of allows for more responsible resources. There was an element that all of these went beyond when we started to think about when Lisa said the last this was based on a volume from 1995. One of the most influential conservation since then has been risk assessment. And I'm lucky enough to be the one presenting on the section that has the chapter on risk assessment. And I think I mean and it is written by Rob Wollett that should be enough to I'm so sorry to interrupt but you are just to let you know you're fading in and out a little bit. Okay. I'll pull the telephone. But Rob has taken the concepts of risk assessment in the field externally. But has made this very much our own. Now it's such a fundamental part of our preventive conservation planning to prevent the conservation management. And for example just some of the nuance that goes into this kind of very well thought through and very well kind of connective concepts. Statues which are meant to be touched all of a sudden as Chris was saying this doesn't necessarily correspond with the professional ethics that we may have been taught some time ago. But all of a sudden he starts to see that in order to really appreciate the value of this object and so there are different aspects of this which are connected. And that's all of the chapters have gone beyond conservation in different ways in statistics or architecture or engineering. For example Nancy McCoy talking about historic buildings which were designed to take advantage of passive systems that thermal mass that cross ventilation that kind of the representation. All of these things are part of how we can start to transfer this knowledge to the benefit of collections, to the benefit of the public, not necessarily just to the conservators but reaching beyond our traditional points to a bit of these things which to that extent promotes sustainability, promotes good stewardship in terms of resources, in terms of economic benefits. And a lot of hard work goes into the preparation. But this is all to create holistic integrated action. Sustainability requires assessment. Planning requires assessment. So instead of having to fight fires or to cordon off elements of the collection being able to come up with nuanced ways to really promote its values. This is really where I see the profession maturing in a way. The image on the side is that two robots just fighting, we don't know why, we don't know how long they've been doing it. One says, why must we always fight? The other one says, can you do other things? And then the first robot says, no. And then they just carry on for who knows how long. And this is kind of to me the benefit of being able to reach across all of a sudden over there. Well, over a long time we started to see much more collaboration with different groups, with architects with facilities managers being able to understand where we are in this process, what to ask, who to inform. And as Chris was saying before, kind of conservation isn't an end in itself. Storage isn't an end in itself. Conservation isn't an end in itself. This is all contributing to a wider mission which is really I think where a lot of the benefits of this volume comes in that we've really contextualized this conservation brings it forward with all the nuance that doesn't but just benefit us benefits all of the people working in cultural institutions. So I'll just move to the quiz. So in the chapter on risk assessment risk assessment was defined preservation was defined. If any of you have an answer there, are we getting some answers already? Well, you're going to have to read the chapter. It's actually preservation is defined as a system and the project. So there'll be some interesting stuff to read about in that chapter. I'm just going to move on to the next question. Which of the following are not central adverse effects of introducing heaping ventilation and air conditioning to a historic building? I trust you more. Yeah, I think most people have got it yet. But yeah, condensation is a big problem. External appearance on the roof can be a problem in addition of internal but the solar gain isn't necessarily connected directly to and then for the final question which of these is an output of the dramatic design phase of the building project process and if you've read the book, this is from Walt Crimm's the schematic design phase. Oh, wow, this is split. Oh, I made this one too hard. Well, again, definitely worth the read. But it's actually the data sheets on room requirements. So this goes before design. This is the schematic design phase. So this is where requirements and things go forward. So, yeah, so we get a majority majority in that area. But without further ado, I shall hand over to the next section. Thank you very much. Thank you, Joel. Our next speaker is going to be Jeff Hirsch on creating and renovating storage facility sections. Jeff serves as the director of Ewing Goals Cultural Practice as a museum planner and project principal for the past 30 years. He fosters cooperative and creative project teams that explore sustainability and collection care. Jeff, it's all yours. Don't forget to unmute yourself. Thank you, Mary. So this section delves directly into the design and renovation of collection storage buildings themselves. And the authors delved into quite a bit of detail about the different design and engineering disciplines associated really with any building project. The protagonists, what their individual responsibilities are, the kinds of questions they'll ask museum professionals as part of the design process. And most importantly, I think the level of detail that they're expecting to engage in order to develop the type of design that's necessary to solve an institution's problem. And I think that's really important because I think there's a tendency to simplify this whole process. The museum hires the design team, the design team than designs in the museum. And it's much more complicated. The relationships are more complicated. The design team may be led by an architect, but their team is likely to be comprised of a number of consulting parties, engineers like security design, lighting design, mechanical engineering design that are described in the chapter. People with expert knowledge about the various components of the building that are needed for this type of building type. But the museum is more complicated too. In larger institutions, it's likely to be a facility department that's involved. There's a whole cast of characters, hopefully some of which are involved with collection care, but not everybody is. And my feeling is that the most important point of this chapter is one that Walt, in terms of the architecture and Michael, in terms of the HVAC design bring up, which is that you should be involved in the project. If your museum is starting a capital project, please take the time to be involved. Use this chapter to familiarize yourself with the types of questions that will be asked to do your homework so that you feel comfortable. But the design team hopefully is an expert on museum buildings, but they do not know your collection the way you do. And they do not know your institutional goals the way you do. So Joel alluded to the whole process of cooperating and seeing yourselves as part of the team. And I think that's the real takeaway from this particular chapter. The detail is important, but the technology is likely to change over the next 10 or 20 years if that's the time frame that your museum is thinking about building a building such as this. So just to talk about what you might expect to see in the next 10 or 20 years. From an architecture perspective, things are highly unlikely to change much. There are advances all the time in installation technologies and glazing systems. But essentially what you're looking for from an architect for a collection storage building is a robust envelope that's blood insulation, it's watertight airtight and is basically designed as carefully as possible to be that first level of the sort of preventive conservation barrier for your collection material. And that's not likely to change what you're likely to see and the design teams are sort of variations on that theme based on aesthetics or other aspects of the project. What's likely to change though over the next 10 or 20 years are the building systems which are also addressed in this project. So from a mechanical engineering or an HVAC design, I think you're going to see technologies that are essentially about not using active systems as much as possible. Where you do need active systems that use energy, you'll see teams trying to create zones where the specific needs of the material that are in collection are met and that essentially the energy intensive spaces are as small as is practical to solve the needs of the collection material that's in storage. So they are using as little energy as possible but when you need to use energy you're using it effectively for the collection. What this gruesome slide talks about is I think you'll see a strategy that's been advocated by Jeremy Linden and others which is that sometimes it's worth considering turning off HVAC systems overnight or at various times during the day for a couple of reasons. One, obviously the same energy and that reduces the operating costs for the museum which is important but paradoxically we find a study after study that turning systems off sometimes results in a more stable indoor climate. And that's true if you can eliminate the energy or the loads on the material that's in storage. So if you have a robust envelope that effectively becomes a cooler it has a lot of insulation you're isolating the collection material from the temperature and humidity changes outside. Remember that people give off heat and people give off humidity so if you're going to try this sort of tactic you need to keep people out of your collection vault you need to keep lights off and you need to keep computers off because they also generate heat. But it's an effective strategy. It's more effective if I mean the rub against this has always been great and turn off the systems and then how do you deal with filtering VOCs that might accumulate in the space because of off-gaps in the collection. So I lifted this slide from last year's AIC presentation by Leslie Hale and Kathy Hawks from the Smithsonian and a couple of engineers from NASA who explored coatings that NASA is developing that capture molecular contaminants that sort of trap the off-gassing without the use of an active system it's simply the passive coating that's on the wall. And as these types of technologies are developed over the next 10 or 20 years I think that the idea of shutting down on a regular basis the active HVAC systems in a collection vault would become more palatable to more and more people. I think I'm missing a couple of slides which is fine. You'll see them in the PDF if you care to look. When you take a look at the electrical systems if you can imagine a lot of the technology that we see is about turning lights off. So the use of occupancy sensors so if there's nobody in the space the lights go out we see the advent of card key systems. So when a person enters their office or their lab and swipes a card the lights that she needs in order to get to her office or lab are eliminated and the rest are not. So that's interesting to keep an eye on. I think what's really important to keep an eye on is this idea of color tuning LED light fixtures. So on a fixture by fixture basis you can now control the color temperature and some of the spectral qualities of a lamp. So that means that you can tune each fixture based on the light fastness or the light sensitivity of an object that's being eliminated or you can change the qualities of the light to help observer the researcher see that object in whatever environment it's really intended to be. So that's an important technology that I think has a lot of applications in the museum world. From an energy and saving perspective, I think we'll see more and more battery arrays in museums. This is sort of, you know, hand in hand with this idea that you're using photovoltaic lights or photovoltaic systems to generate electricity. That's really, really helpful. You need to store that energy and as you recall when we used to fly airplanes, what the batteries are a fire source. So if you see things interested in using what's called an energy storage system, there are NFPA E55. It's a chapter about how to manage that risk safely. And from a fire protection standpoint what we're seeing is the advent of camera technologies. So the idea that there are cameras that are available now in the market that see very, very minute traces of smoke. They see small heat profiles from a flame and identify very early the possible ignition source. And so this technology is interesting because it's going to be associated with security systems more and more so that a camera is tracking not only fire risk but also people's behavior within the space. So something to keep in mind. Oops. And this is my quiz. So sorry. So going into the quiz, first question which you've had lots and lots of time to think about is which of these is not a component of the building's climate system? And almost all of you got it right. I would not in my life be able to tell you what a pressure reducing valve is. It's a component of a plumbing system. The point I was trying to make is that Michael Henry makes an interesting point that the building envelope, the architecture I claim that is an architecture component of the building is really part of the climate control system. The second question is about security. When are collections most vulnerable? Or why are collections and storage vulnerable if you buy that? This is a question that comes out of Steve Keller's section I think and may have lost my feed. So I'm going to say that the right answer here and I'm just going to blurt it out and I'm sorry is and Ruth I don't have an internet connection but the questions are okay the answer is both of those. They're vulnerable and collect in collections storage because they're not easily visible and they're not readily accountable for. The last question is when are fires most likely to occur in museums? And I'll luxuriate over this for a minute. Hopefully the numbers are changing and I will admit that this is something of the shameless plug. I have a paper that I'm getting some type in August about the risk of fires when museum buildings are under construction. So the answer to this one is Steve. But thank you very much. I can't advance the slide. I'm sorry I had some kind of power interruption so I will log back on Ruth. Thanks so much. Our next speaker is Rachel Erinstein who's going to pick up for facility management. Rachel is a principal in AM art conservation at LLC specializing in object conservation and preventive care. Rehousing collections spark joy for her and as AIC's eEditor she also enjoys the zen of wiki coding. Rachel it's all yours. Don't forget to unmute. Thanks Mary. Ruth I'm not seeing the additional slide deck yet. Great thank you. Everybody should see the new section slide on facility management. The introduction to this section of the book written by Katherine, Jude, and Mary states no matter how well designed, constructed, or renovated no facility can provide an appropriate space for collections unless it is managed and maintained properly. We now recognize that developing sound policies and procedures to tackle big issues such as air quality, environmental control, emergency response and pest management are essential in promoting collection care. This section of the book covers topics that come up frequently in my preventive care work with museum clients. Sometimes in my work I'm offering knowledge and insights that the staff do not have but not infrequently I'm identifying challenges, assigning priorities, or amplifying solutions that the staff may have already faced. It is an unfortunate although often recognized issue that administration will sometimes give more weight to my recommendations because they paid extra for them rather than listening to their own staff. I recognize that as a consultant there's only so much I can do. At some point I file a report and move on to the next project leaving the real work for the staff. But at all but the smallest of institutions the tasks discussed in this chapter require collaboration diverse stakeholder participation and broad support to be successful. A consultant can hire highlight issues, provide resources and training and establish paths forward but the staff have to walk down these paths together to reach their collection care goals. One of the things that stands out in this section of the book is the reliance on other professionals and colleagues within our institutions. Dr. Giff Norris has already talked about partnerships. It is important for us as conservators to recognize that we can't make real progress in these areas without strong collaboration. Thinking creatively of how we do this especially now when we have to rethink so much of our standard operating procedures is essential. The overdue re-evaluation of how our institutions must better promote diversity and inclusiveness is a call to rethink and collaborate with colleagues within our institutions. In a recent AIC online community thread discussing the Black Lives Matter protest, Karen Pavelka highlighted the work of our colleague Patty Silence, director of conservation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation where they incorporated the maintenance and custodial crews into the conservation department and created teams like the historic interior collections care staff. Karen highlights how this was a move as it gives a segment of the population that generally gets less appreciation and respect than they deserve higher professional status while conservators and others developed more understanding of the work that the custodial staff does. The COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns have also spurred creative approaches to collaboration. In May, ArtNet News highlighted how the Banton Museum in Texas managed to avoid job cuts by redeploying staff or a tooth job to defend at their own risk. The Banton Museum has also launched a new project on to other projects that were often pushed to the back burner before. After surveying staff about skills not related to their regular job responsibilities, the director is able to match facility, security, art handler and event staff to 30 lockdown projects that promoted accessibility, collections research and donor relations. It's inconceivable that these projects have increased understanding, respect and collaboration when people are back in their building. Other, more prosaic crises have also resulted in growth after a disaster. Becky Fifeld's chapter on emergency response drills into the importance of relationships with first responders. The creation of alliance or response groups in cities across the country have forged new relationships to keep our staff and collection safe. And did you know that AIC is the first pandemic that's been in place in the last year? Without the pandemic, we wouldn't be able to keep ourselves safe at work. The pandemic has highlighted our reliance on health and safety information as it applies to the workplace, a topic that's expanded on in chapter 17 of the book. The other thing that the pandemic shutdowns have highlighted is the need to understand and harness the needs of people. If there are fewer jobs in our institutions, how do we work with people outside of our professions and our buildings to get the things done that need doing? How do we increase our ability to monitor remotely? Can we get our heads around the internet of things? Can we tap into our building management systems? Did you know that remote monitoring for rodents is a challenge? The authors of the chapters on integrated pest management, air quality and environmental monitoring highlight the importance of understanding that collection care monitoring programs are not just about capturing the right amount and type of data. The data is merely a means to an end. The authors stress that the monitoring is not a preservation measure unless action is taken on monitoring, like indoor air quality and museum pest working groups, memory and IPI sustainable preservation practices initiative. Just look at the website, even the images appear to highlight collaboration. The goal is to develop the relationships that will bring about improvement in collection care for the preservation of the collection and the organization. I hope that you'll find these chapters help you reach out to the community. Now, let's test your knowledge of some of the things in this section. Ruth, can you take us back to the master slide deck? Okay, so we're at quiz number 11. Some pollutants are a characteristic of the storage environment rather than outdoors. A good example would be, this one was easy for people, but I still recommend that you look at Peter Grimblecombe's chapter, but the chapter is, as most of you know, formic acid. Good work. Quiz number 12, vibrations are monitored using sensors known as the correct answer of A accelerometer took off after a slow start. Good work. My favorite topic is of IPM, which of the following is not a common museum pest? So while some people are tending towards the mold in A, the correct answer is terphyopsis from CODIS because we don't have many problems with bottlenose dolphins in our collection. So thank you very much, and I'll pass it back to Mary. Great, Rachel, thank you. The next section on specialized collections, environment and care has been recorded by Nancy Odegaard. Nancy is a conservator and head of preservation division for the Arizona State Museum. She is also a professor in the Department of Anthropology, Materials, Science and Engineering, American Indian Studies, and the Heritage Conservation Certificate Program in the College of Architecture. She is a fellow of the AIC and co-authored Chapter 27. Nancy's recording should play the audio, but if you want to see her slide, you're going to have to go to the link box and open the fifth one on the list. Hello, I'm Nancy Odegaard. I'm the conservator and head of preservation division for the Arizona State Museum, and a professor in the Department of Anthropology, Materials, Science, and Engineering, American Indian Studies, and the Heritage Conservation Certificate Program in the College of Architecture all at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Thank you. Thank you. I'm a fellow of the AIC and co-authored the chapter, Unhuman Remains in this book. I'm going to share some information from section 5, Specialized Collection Environments and Care. I've been working in conservation for over 40 years, and remember when my first graduate class with Carol Rose was called Preventive Conservation. The topic of Specialized Collection Environments has been hot throughout my career. Determining the correct temperature and relative humidity specification for all museum objects has been challenging to pin down. The 1960s and 70s gave us 50% relative humidity and 21 degrees Celsius with fluctuations of plus or minus 2. This was the standard rule, but we all learned that museums could only offer controls based on the building and the HVA system that was available to them. That already stressed objects would become more vulnerable. That quick fluctuations could occur in power outages or loan transports. And that the prior history of damage and previous conservation treatments for an object could be a predictor of further damage caused by environment. Later, the results of a study from the Smithsonian in 1994 indicated that museum objects could safely tolerate as much as 15% relative humidity fluctuation and 10 degrees Celsius and temperature. I work with many collections that have survived thousands of years under extremely dry archeological conditions and are in near perfect condition. The promotion of standard guidelines for environmental control has continued. Environmental organizations, including ICOM and ISC, have ongoing debates about this topic. Everyone wants a simple, straightforward guideline for everywhere and everything. ICOM noted that most museums in the world have no climate control systems in their exhibition and storage spaces and suggest that flexibility should be allowed for loans. Alternative strategies such as microclimate containers or specialized containers that are identified in this section of the book are obviously useful. The international guide guides have continued to recommend a stable RH range of 40 to 60% and a stable temperature range of 16 to 25 degrees Celsius with fluctuations of no more than plus or minus 10% RH per 24-hour period. I find the use of standard guidelines tend to ignore the ambient conditions where a museum is located and the historic environments that a collection may have to become adjusted to. The specialized collections discussed in this section identify considerations that go beyond recommending the same conditions for everything. Section 5 includes five chapters. The goal of this section is to present and discuss the challenges of providing a sustainable environment while promoting preservation for certain types of collections. Chapter 21 is authored by Stephen Weintraub who studied conservation at the NYU graduate program. His company, Art Preservation Services New York provides services and products for preservation environments. His chapter provides a series of decision-making steps for developing climate control solutions. Steve has helped numerous museums around the country by assessing the environmental needs of their collections. This chapter suggests that a key concept for collections is to take advantage of succeeding levels of isolation. Chapter 22 is authored by Frank P. Simeone who works with the American type culture collection. A nonprofit organization which collects stores and distributes standard reference microorganisms, cell lines, and other materials for research and development. His chapter explains the words cool, cold, frozen, ultra, and cryo and to clarify the rates of chemical reactions, the types of facilities and equipment and the health and safety issues. The types of low-temperature storage for biological specimens, imaging media and ice cores are also presented. This chapter advises that warming rates from low-temperature storage that are too slow or too rapid can be detrimental to that collection. Chapter 23 is authored by John Simmons who is a consultant with museologica and he is also an adjunct curator at the Pennsylvania State University. He has authored a book on fluid preservation and another one on collections management. His chapter here discusses the types of fixatives and preservative fluids used with wet collections as well as types of containers, tags and labels, ambient storage environments that offer best preservation as well as the importance of monitoring. He has attributed additional information through numerous presentations and publications, particularly through Spinach and the Journal Collection Forum. Chapter 24 is coauthored by Linda Edquist retired conservator from the National Postal Museum and Claire Larkin, retired exhibit designer at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum. Their chapter provides the criteria for visible storage and they offer a diversity of examples from various types of museums. Chapter 25 is authored by Doris Hamburg a retired conservator at the National Archives and Records Administration. She studied conservation at the University of Delaware. Her chapter clarifies the advantages and disadvantages of offsite storage. Preservation concerns including environment, energy efficiency, sustainable design, construction materials, layout, security, emergency preparedness, inventory control, access and collection growth are all discussed. She highlights that well-defined goals from the start of a project are critical. The appendix offers considerations in a useful format. She continues to provide collection preservation consultation services. Chapter 26 is authored by George Pretulak who is a consulting conservator for industrial heritage and public art in Ottawa, Canada and previously worked at the Canadian Conservation Institute. He studied conservation at the Queens University Program. His chapter discusses vulnerable components, settings, visible signs of deterioration and the agents of deterioration in outdoor environments. Suggestions are offered for improving preservation by considering location, orientation, supports, weather-proofing and the use of semi-enclosed or temporary shelters. He has co-authored numerous CCI conservation notes on the topic. And finally, the last chapter in this section is Chapter 27. It's co-authored by Nancy Odegaard who studied conservation at George Washington University, the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Canberra. And Vicky Kassman who studied conservation at the University of Delaware. Both authors have worked together and separately as consultants for numerous human remains projects. Several of these projects are highlighted in the chapter. The chapter also provides historical background and discusses current issues related to the sensitivity of human remains collections. Sidebar case studies offer examples of problem solving. Finally, issues of access, handling and consultations are presented. They have previously presented and published on this topic as well. Thank you. Great. And even though Nancy's not on, I would like to say thank you to her. And we do have some quizzes. I... No longer on my screen. Great. And even though Nancy's not on, I would like to say thank you to her. And we do have some quizzes. Ruth, is there a way we can get the quiz back? Perfect. Thank you. So, a room within a building is considered... And everyone got it. Looks like... Okay, I don't have one person talking. The room within a building is considered a... One couple more seconds. The answer is actually a macro climate. Next one. By far, the most important agent of deterioration for outdoor storage is what? And I think water is the clear winner and it is the correct answer. And our final quiz for this section, when considering the site for off-site storage, it's important to consider what. All of the above. And we're going to come back to Rachel for a section on storage equipment and materials. Rachel, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. So, while I was filling in in the earlier section, I am one of the co-authors along with Lisa Goldberg and Etini Melroy on chapter 29 in this section. Just shy of 200 pages, this is the longest of the narrative sections of the book. And it is so dense with important information that some of the tables in these chapters are alone worth the purchase price. IMLS's 2019 Heritage Health Information Survey documented that the conditions in storage are critical to the health of the more than 13.2 billion heritage items held in trust across the nation. 45% of the institutions reported damage due to improper storage or enclosures in the prior two years alone. I'm certain that a considerable percentage of this damage would have been prevented or mitigated by appropriate storage furniture and housings. As conservators, we often treat pieces that are going on exhibit, but we know that less than 5% of our nation's collections are on public view, meaning that improvements to storage are the most effective means for improving the care and treatment of the vast majority of our cultural heritage. Many of you will be familiar with diagrams like this one, showing how we protect our collections by using the box-within-the-box-within-the-box concept. This section of the books gets to the nitty-gritty of how to consider the choices you need to make on storage furniture down to the enclosure or support of individual pieces. A couple of years ago, at a symposium on museum collection storage, Walth Crimm, who's an author of one of the earlier book chapters, blew my mind when he said that we shoot ourselves in the foot when we talk about storage improvements in terms of dollars and square footage. What we really need to be selling isn't storage, which seems static and sort of hidden away, but we're selling preservation and access. Our institutions aren't mere cabinets of curiosities now. We want a need to be pulling back the curtain and emphasizing that well-organized storage promotes risk reduction, access, and use. And we know it is impossible to use your collections if you can't find them or physically get at them. These are images from last year's Angels, or now it's called the Community Collaborations Project, which was done in conjunction with Simon Lambert and using the reorg methodology. This work was all done basically in one day by a team of volunteers. This section of the book provides guidance on selecting storage furniture with in-depth descriptions of both open and closed systems and detailed technical information on fittings such as gaskets, hinges, handles, and more. The chapter gets tips on how to identify your furniture needs and project implementation. There have been significant improvements in storage furniture over the last decades and manufacturers now understand the need to partner with their museum customers to meet accessibility and environmental needs. In what I think is, of course, the book's most spellbinding chapter, we discussed how thoughtfully designed storage and housing, storage supports and housings can reduce risk of damage by the 10 agents of deterioration. We cover the philosophy of rehousing with important questions to ask as you consider what kinds of containers or supports, facility, preservation, access, and use. There are tips on design, materials, and work flow. The chapter introduces important resources like a CROM-3-ORG method and SAIC's GASH site and emphasizes that there is no one best way to house collections. The right solution will be based on some core principles that will take into account the collections use and resources of the institution. The next four chapters cover the universal challenge and how we choose materials to store our collections. Pam Hatchfield, Finella France, and Scott Williams have provided information on evaluating wood, paper, and plastic materials for use in collection storage. These issues are being further investigated by AIC's material selection and specification working group. I also encourage you to listen to the collection care network session on the use of plastics as storage materials coming up as part of the virtual meeting on August 5th. If you don't know the answers to all of the upcoming quiz questions, then you're welcome. Nora Lockshund's chapter on marking collections focuses on the methodology with an emphasis on decision-making while also highlighting important resources that discuss the details of materials and methods. I know that it will be something that I share with future CAP clients. So let's see how well we do. Ziplock bags, Tupperware, FFOM, and Tyvek are all examples of what class of plastic. I thought this might trip up more people, but I'm happy to see that everybody recognizes almost everybody recognizes that this is polyethylene. Most cellulose fibers are in a crystalline state, and therefore not easily available for chemical reactions. Which of these materials has the highest percentage of cellulose? Okay. There's a little bit more diversity in answers here, but most of you also recognize the right answer was D cotton. Similarly, which of these woods is the greatest vapor corrosion hazard? Well, I should have made some harder questions, but it is great to see that most people recognize that the answer is C. And so I knew a softball question for the last one. Which of these web resources has useful information on storage organization, housing, and materials? Okay. And I think if you didn't know before, you should know now that the answer is H. All of the above. Thank you so much. Back to you, Mary. Thank you, Rachel. That was awesome. And there we go. Our next speaker is going to be Sarah Satterman on storage of digital collections. Sarah is director of collections at the Horsher Museum and Sculpture Garden, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution. She works with talented conservators, digital managers, registrars, archivists, and librarians every day to preserve modern and contemporary art. Sarah, it's all yours. Don't forget to unmute. Thank you so much, Mary. Now, when we were developing the chapters for this new volume, we early on settled on the idea that there had to be a section to address the fundamental ideas in digital preservation because digital collections are ubiquitous and growing. Whether you are a full practitioner using digital photography to document your work, creating digital surrogates is part of a digitization project involved in electronic data sets for research, getting on a committee, worried about preserving emails or conserving time-based media arts. We knew that many of us needed an introduction on how to manage these collections through the lens of storage. Sarah Slade and her colleagues from the State Library of Victoria in Australia tackled the topic of overall digital preservation, making an analogy between physical and virtual storage. Ricardo, or Rick, Tarante, of the Smithsonian Institution Archive wrote down the tasks of digital preservation, outlining actions that are taken to assess and manage these virtual objects to established systems and changing standards. Essentially, the steps to put things into storage so that you can find them later and the ways to retrieve them from storage safely and reasonably. Both of these authors use the OAIS reference model which you can see here on this slide. OAIS stands for Open Archival Information Systems. It is a model and it is in fact a standard. A standard ISO 14721 that's ISO 14721. And even since the publication of this book, it has expanded its definitions to include the mental steps it takes to manage objects in storage, digital objects in storage and the context for decision making for the long-term preservation of digital objects. And so this diagram has in it all of the different partners to ingest information for it, manage it well and then to access it on the receiving end. The bibliographies in both of the chapters provide a history lesson on the rapid and enormous growth in this area for the last 20 years. Now, the collaborative and cross-professional nature of digital preservation is perhaps the biggest takeaway from these chapters. Whether you are one person managing a repository of information or one of many people across many departments, the language of risk management is an important part of your toolbox. Assigning the responsibility and determining the implementation of standards or best practices is a first priority for the preservation of digital collections. This example illustrated in an important case study provided by Glenn Morton in a sidebar describing approaches to preserving software-based artwork. So what is this? Here you go. Finally, a common and shared vocabulary is a very important part to participation in this work. We asked the authors to ensure that the terms of art for digital preservation were described in plain language. Fixity is one example. Fixity is a digital preservation term referring to the property of a digital file being fixed. Determining the value of this property allows future analysis to verify whether the file remains unchanged. When checking the file at a later date, the inability to generate the same fixity value indicates the file has undergone alteration or corruption. An example of a fixity action is to check some generation, which uses algorithms generated by a file to establish the benchmark for this file and give you a definition for XM and algorithms as well within these two chapters. I'm sorry that people are having a hard time hearing me. Hopefully this will be properly recorded for posterity. That's a very brief overview to digital preservation. And now I'm asking questions that are really to bade your interest and abilities in the area of digital preservation. As a conservator, are you involved in questions about digital preservation at your institution or with your client? Interesting. Yeah, so sometimes, just enough to make us really anxious. That's good. Hopefully these chapters will help relieve some of your anxiety around how to answer those questions. All right. So, what do you think? How well does the analogy work for you that storage of virtual objects has a methodology similar to that of physical objects? Yeah, all over the map thinking about it. Well, let's see. Well, I think that hopefully this chapter will help you see that there are some really strong analogies to putting someplace safe and be able to get it out safely. The next part of the quiz, how many of you are familiar with the OAIS? There's a very robust website for OAIS that describes the whole system and actually has several quizzes that you can take on how to think about the way that a digital object can be put into storage and retrieved from storage. And that's all I have. Thanks so much, Mary. Great. Thank you, Sarah. Our next speaker is going to be Rob Waller on the Storage at a Glant section. Robert Waller is a Ph.D. in Cultural Property Risk Analysis from Gothenburg University. He has 35 years experience as a conservator at the Canadian Museum of Nature and is now the president and analyst at Protect Heritage Corps. Rob, it's all yours. Great. Thank you, Mary. Okay. Am I unmuted now? I think I am. Okay. Thanks. So, thanks, Mary, and good afternoon to all our participants, and thanks for joining us for this. I'm going to be speaking about a section called Storage at a Glant. And this section was really Lisa Elkin's idea after we had put together the bulk of the book and had dealt with a bunch of the underlying theory of modern preventive conservation and building issues and systems and management. And then as Rachel described right down to protection of the items. And we did have some special collections like type culture collections and food preserve collections. But the vast majority of collection types, we weren't providing any information on their risk vulnerability or their kind of hazard vulnerability. So, we wanted to do that and we did that in the storage at a glance. We realized that different kinds of collections can range or have vastly different vulnerabilities. On the left is a Blashka glass model of a cactus and flower, just exceedingly fragile. While on the right is a piece of industrial mining equipment that's sitting outside and doing just fine. Now, we came up with this set of gosh, I should have counted them, but I think it's about 20 maybe a little bit more collection types that we wanted to consider based mainly on the material type. We considered hazards based on the 10 agents of change with the top 2 adverse relative humidity and adverse temperature being further subdivided into levels too high, levels too low, or seasonal variability excursions and fluctuations. Then, we developed subsets of collection types so we could picture how variable a kind of collection is across the various subcollections within it. Ideally, we first looked by composition, so textiles were divided into cellulose and vegetable fibers, protein, man-made, and then specific items. Whereas keratin basically being a material was divided by structure or preparation, in this case by structure. We had fur with hair, feather, quills, horns and scutes, scales, claws, nails and beaks lumped together, baleen, hollow hairs, and then specific items. Here's just a picture of one of these collection vulnerabilities. I go with my old favorite, the mineral gem in meteorite collection. We can see down the left side are these hazards based on agent of change. Across the top, we have subdivisions of the collection based mostly on materials for the first six. It's by chemical composition. Then, we also have gems and meteorites. Like all units, we end with specific items if we want to highlight something in particular. To come up, I'm not laying what these color coatings are, but to get at that, we need to get at this idea of what we mean by moderate care. How we might expect the most basic of collection care to be applied. Because we know it can vary hugely from simply providing a roof for sun and water shielding over, in this case, agricultural equipment to some very specialized, quality field cabinetry in modern rooms, very specialized. What we decided on was a basic level of moderate care for something. In the case of light, it's moderate care implies avoiding all unnecessary exposure, like windows in collection rooms and that sort of thing. That led us to this set of vulnerability levels that go through the typical traffic light colors. High vulnerability is red, then moderate, then low vulnerability given moderate care, then simply low vulnerability based on the intrinsic nature of the collection items. And then finally a grayed out if the subset that we're looking at doesn't really add any information about the vulnerability. Now we then ranked these by how much damage they might do to the collection. We might expect they could do to the collection or sub-collection. And that goes for whether it's based on a few items suffering high damage or many items suffering modest damage. We won't have to look through all that, but let's look at one of these fingerprints in particular. And this is one Kathy Hawks and I did on skin, leather, and parchment. And we see that well at least for adverse temperature all of the sub-collection materials whether it's un-tanned skin, parchment, Todd's skin, tan skin and so on. There's really no temperature sensitivity to those materials. Most of the sub-collection units are in what we call low risk given moderate care that yellow and there are a few reds. And let's look at what some of those are. One of them are specific items and in particular we talk about stretched skin materials over constrained framework so that with low relative humidity there can be a tearing open as they shrink. And another example would be tan skins exposed to water causes damage as shown in the picture. Well that's the idea just before I get to this the idea was really to show between collection types how vulnerable they tend to be but even more important how the vulnerability is focused in certain parts of the collection. Going way back now if you recall Jeff talked about the importance of limiting special environments to only the part of the collection that requires those to be cost effective in how we provide preservation. And to do that we really want to be focused on this idea of variability in the vulnerability to different hazards. Now just before our quizzes I'd like to do a shout out to all of our storage at a glance authors they really were our heroes and worked very hard to fit a ton of information into a two page spread. Now let's write a quiz if we can and I apologize for this waller type question. There's a bit long detail but it's kind of necessary which of the following collections materials has the largest proportion of either low vulnerability or low vulnerability given moderate care indications in its vulnerability fingerprint and I see people are racing ahead and they think that all my life spent on minerals really was wasted but it's curious and we come up with skin, leather and parchment as the second most but actually that came out as our having the highest proportion of low vulnerability and low vulnerability given moderate care. Minerals, gems and meteorites was a little bit higher. Curious I actually showed both of those I didn't realize that in this presentation but they were close. Minerals was second to skin, leather and parchment so you want to read that two page spread on minerals for sure. Okay now which of the following collection material types has the largest proportion of either moderate vulnerability or high vulnerability indications in its vulnerability fingerprint. Well you guys get through before I even read the question and it is honing in under photographs positive print materials and plates and that is indeed the case. It was a kind of far away winner in vulnerability. So good job but I do invite you to look at this. I think it's a very valuable section. I use it in my own work very routinely almost every week I'm looking at it. Okay check, back to Mary. Great Rob, thank you. And we're going to move back to Lisa to get a survey of people involved with the book and others about considering the past and imagining the future. So Lisa it's all yours about the survey. Great. Thank you Mary and can you hear me? Thank you again Mary and thank you to all the speakers and particular thanks to all of you who are listening and putting for this marathon session. We really appreciate it so let me just get going on this survey. Let's see upon completion of this massive volume we began talking about next steps. How do we get the message out? How do we keep our audiences engaged? How do we keep content for this ever changing field? How do we keep our audience engaged? With somebody and most significantly I feel how do we define ourselves as a field going forward? To answer these questions we felt it might be useful to have a clearer understanding of the advances we made since the last publication and a more focused assessment of the needs of preventive conservation looking forward. And so the survey was born to begin to better understand these issues and define or perhaps redefine ourselves as professionals in this field. All there's editors from the new book as well as selected subject area experts were asked some broad questions about how the field has evolved and what solutions they might like to see it take. We allowed for text-based responses and there were no predetermined options. This so that we didn't guide respondents and their answers but instead challenged them according to their own perspectives and experiences. Admittedly I started to regret that decision after hours and hours of reviewing these text-based responses and trying to make connections, pull trends, analyze potential relationships filled with a lot of work. But in retrospect, I do think it was the right decision and I hope that you'll agree when you see some of the results. 160 people are invited to participate with 60 people responding. For a survey, that's a pretty good response rate of about 38%. For the sake of time reservations, I'm not going to get into details of respondents' backgrounds or affiliations or things to say, we try to widen the net as much as possible to wound up mostly with conservators and conservation scientists from museums and with large institutions responding. Where we did get representations from other fields I've worked to highlight their responses. Still, if there's a next stage to this effort, it will definitely work to diversify our goals. So the first question asked, looking back 20 years how has preventive conservation perceived and what was considered state-of-the-art or advanced thinking? This is by no means a method to create a comprehensive timeline, but specific milestones stood out in the responses that began to provide some insight into the group's perspective. The last 20 years showed increasing development of models for preventive conservation. It really seemed like it was our golden age. We learned to think more analytically and objectively about what we were doing. We saw the advent of risk assessments. Resources and tools were being developed in museum studies and conservation programs were including preventive conservation in their curriculums. Preventive conservation appeared to have firmly established itself as a key asset to preserving collections. Jumping a little bit ahead to question three, respondents were asking what they considered state-of-the-art or advanced thinking. There was no shortage of advances provided presenting examples of new ideas, resource development and enhanced professionalization. Technological advances are allowing for shared databases and improved analyses, sustainability emerges as a priority for collection care, preventive conservators are a profession in their own right, and collaborations within and outside the discipline are happening with more and more regularity. Still, concerns about the future of preventive conservation were also being voiced. It'll take some more shifting through the responses to allow us to focus in more clearly on the source of the respondents' concerns. What's important is that they are there. I'll provide a little more detail in later slides. Respondents were asked more directly, what is the most notable progress you have seen over the past 10 to 20 years in preventive conservation? This can be technological, material, procedural or theoretical advances. This question was asked in order to rank advances and understand their relevance in relationship to one another. Reading through the responses, they began clustering within categories, but began tagging answers according to the category that they most directly represented, and you can see them listed along the horizontal axis. As you can see, some categories are beginning to emerge as quite notable concerning progress. Once responses were logged, another higher level grouping began to gel. For example, professionalism, education and resource development naturally clustered into a larger category of increased professionalism. These larger supercategories began to stand out, and they were labeled increased professionalism, widespread collaborations, climate and sustainability, quantitative approaches to preventive conservation, technological advances, and policy, protocol, and best practice. This effort to categorize is certainly not perfect, and there is definitely overlap between and dependencies among categories, but it helps corral the information a bit to try to highlight important trends in milestones. The majority of respondents are telling us that in the past 20 years, they see increased professionalism as the most stand out supercategory concerning notable progress. Examples of progress in this supercategory included recognition in AIC of the profession of preventive conservation, dedicated positions being developed, conservation scientists focused on preventive care, development of a preventive conservation major, at the University of Delaware conservation program, and other dedicated internships for specialists and non-specialists. Also related is the development of resources such as STASH, the preventive conservation collection storage book that we're all here listening to, the Museum of Fine Arts cameo database, the CCI framework for conservation, and a non-moral article, publications, and websites on the subject. On the heels of increased professionalism is the development and implementation of more quantitative approaches to preventive conservation. Responding states that analysis is now more accessible than ever as is evidence-based research and modeling. Better materials such as desiccants and acid-free products have been developed and made available. And finally, approaches to planning for collection care using risk assessment is becoming more commonplace. For the sake of time, I can't detail out the other supercategories, but we'll include information on those responses and a more complete report on the survey results to be posted on the preventive conservation wiki. I do want to note that the impact of climate and sustainability does show up as notable progress, certainly to a lesser degree than any others, but it is significant. So let's keep our eye on this. If you were able to see 20 years into the future, how do you anticipate progress in the field? And look at that. Issues surrounding climate change and sustainability stand out subjects for respondents, at least when evaluating results by subcategory. In summary, respondents felt the field needs a broader consideration of the impact of preventive conservation on sustainability. We need to engage in discussions about what sustainable access means to different groups. For example, preventive conservation objectives may be different to different ethnocultural or indigenous groups. We need to create more reusable products, specifically less dependency on plastics, and redistribute materials better, particularly for things like crates, exhibit cases, and mounts. And finally, we need more attainable environmental standards, wider acceptable ranges, and less rigidity taking regional climate into account. The general consensus is that we are not thinking ecologically. A lot of our work is resource-intensive, creates a lot of waste, and requires unrealistic expectations for our buildings. Interestingly, looking at the same question, but grouping into supercategories, other important issues emerge quite close in ranking to sustainability. These involve quantitative approaches to collection care and increased professionalism. A significant portion of respondents expect to see focus on risk assessment, particularly refinement of the strategy and development of a more user-friendly model to get a consistent, risk-based preventive conservation message across to decision-makers. Respondents would also like to see improvements in materials testing, more accessible instrumental analysis, and in general, a greater investment in scholarly research and the applications of theory and modeling into actual practice. As one respondent states, if the aim is to preserve things for the future, conservators should be more literate about the future. Currently, our language and our quotes do not give us the ability to really engage with or reflect on the impact of our own work. I see this as fairly unrealistic. And finally, standing out, respondents showed particular interest in emphasizing the glills of professionalism in the field, particularly the continued cross-pollination between conservators and partners in related fields. In the words of another respondent, we need to be committed to keeping a foot in two realms, one being professional collection management and conservation, and the other being any other host of other fields, such as emergency management, cultural heritage leadership, architecture engineering, sociology, data science, the list goes on. Advancement will depend on our collective ability to bridge between fields. We would like to see improved integration of presented conservators into museum practice, but the hope that this role will galvanize an interdisciplinary approach to conservation that is mindful of the collection, the building, a changing exterior climate and environmental, social and economic sustainability. As optimistic as all this seems, there are significant challenges ahead. When asked what they see as the biggest hurdles for continued progress and preventive conservation, the majority of respondents state that funding and lack of resources stand out as the highest concern and that the current global crisis due to COVID-19 will amplify the economic pressure faced by cultural heritage institutions. And of course, we've all seen this already. They feel that we will see changing relevancy of museums, deferred maintenance of buildings and equipment, decreasing funding for research and collection improvement, and job loss. The lack of financial support may mean that fewer people will be attracted to the profession and those already in the sector will feel undervalued and underpaid and become hard to retain. The survey wasn't intended to deliver solutions. However, many respondents couldn't help but provide them and they are enlightening, inspiring, and hopeful. A few of the themes for solutions that have emerged include the critical need for powerful leaders in our field who are creative thinkers and problem solvers. The demand to follow the successful models of past working meetings for debating new and innovative ideas that could help to drive the field forward. Such think tanks must require diversity of participants. The need to educate and advocate as to the importance of preservation of shared heritage. This includes our museum administrations and boards, our visitors, the public, and our politicians. As one respondent, we must think big and connect our work to societal challenges. This is not just about the preservation of cultural heritage, but also about advancing joy, well-being, cultural understanding, economic prosperity, and literacy. Sorry, I went forward to slide for some reason. So we have come to the last question of the survey. What do you hope for concerning the future of preventive care heritage collections? I'll put it out there. In analyzing these results and pulling together this presentation, I likely brought my own bias to the table. It was hard not to. These were all qualitative responses that required some interpretation to develop what I saw were interesting groupings or trends. All that's been analyzed and evaluated comes from my own perspective. My hope is that this data can be shared with others and reevaluated bringing other perspectives to the table. I think pulling together a group of preventive specialists representing conservation as well as related specialties would be needed to further evaluate these results and discuss the future of the field. What do we see at the horizon? How can we ensure that progress in this current political and economic situation? It would be a think tank of sorts. That would be my hope for the next steps. But for now, I'd like to end with statements from some selective respondents on what they hope to see in the future for preventive conservation. If only we had time, I would share all of the responses to this question. Because they were all provocative and meaningful. Those that follow word for word and they're completely removed from me and my relentless bias. Maybe we need to think about a different way to work as a field. One that promotes more dialogue, more diverse voices and collaboration and which has clear objectives. I hope for the day when more people understand and celebrate what we do. In the end, preventive care is about passing forward the past so it can enrich and inform the future. I hope that preventive conservation can be seen as the way we make resources available for the future. I hope it's society and it's individuals, institutions and governing bodies value and appreciate culture and history and are willing to support it ideologically and financially. I hope for broad dissemination of knowledge internationally. This is not just a North American or European problem. For all of our budgetary restrictions and communication issues, it's much more challenging in other parts of the world. So continued research, not just into the best way of doing things, but into accessible strategies for a range of institutions is critical. I hope that we get people of all sorts involved at all economic levels and engaged. They're personal, local, regional, national and international heritage of the human record of creation. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time and back to you, Mary. Thank you, Lisa. Great job. This way to take this moment to say thank you for all of those who are involved with the creation of the book and for the content presented today. Ruth, I'll turn it over to you for a second now. Yes. Thank you. Yes, we're not done yet and we will go a little bit over three for Q&A if needed. Thank you to all of our presenters and I just a special thank you to SpaceSaver. As you know we are mixing in either live or recorded exhibitor presentations as a way of recreating at least somewhat of our in-person exhibit hall. So for this session SpaceSaver chose this session to have their video displayed. So I'm going to go ahead and play it now. And this is a great time to post your questions for our presenters in chat as well. I'm Ben Atomaitis, SpaceSaver's museum specialist. It's too bad that we can't see you in person at AIC this year but we appreciate your tuning into this virtual event. Here at SpaceSaver we understand that in this new reality museum staff are being asked to do more of this but two collections needs remain the same. We still need to create and maintain the best possible preservation environment for objects of new care. In this brief video I'll walk you through how we can help you do that. Our products are made in the USA and we're a total solutions provider which means you can get everything you need from us with one price and one transaction. We can help make the most of the space you have by creating the best preservation environment for your collections and a more streamlined workplace for you and your colleagues while also reducing resource use. First, let's talk about some common collection storage challenges that our clients face and how we can help. This is by far the most common challenge that our clients face. They must store collections properly and keep everything organized and accessible but their collection storage areas are full and they can't afford to expand and they don't want to rent storage space. And here's the solution. High-density mobile storage. You might know these systems as compactors. They eliminate wasted aisle space to give you about twice as much storage volume in the same space and everything is organized and easy to access. Art racks are another form of high-density storage. Like shelving, they move on rails to optimize space specifically for hanging art and can also be used for spears, swords, and other artifacts. Textile racks also allow you to store more and less space. You can avoid decreasing that forms long folds by rolling quilts, flags, and other textiles on tubes and storing them on configurable racks. These racks can be stationary or mounted on high-density systems to save even more space. Another common challenge is the fact that it's often difficult or even impossible to predict how collections will grow over time. Reservators are concerned that the purchases they make today might not be appropriate in 10 or 20 years. They want something they can expand on or change right along with the needs of the collection. Our preservation cabinets provide the versatility and modularity you need to make sure that your cabinets are always working for your collection no matter how it changes in the future. The inserts that support drawers, trays, and other accessories are removable so you can swap them out later. These cabinets are available in full height or counter height as well as custom sizes and with a variety of options like handles, vents, and door styles. They're stackable, gangable, and they can be stationary or placed on high-density storage systems. So you can add new cabinets over time as your budget allows. Your future colleagues will certainly thank you. We see this all the time. Our clients come to us with the weight of the world on their shoulders. They know they need to improve collection storage and the writing of grants or they've already acquired funding, and they feel a tremendous responsibility to spend that money wisely. They want to make the best use of their space and invest in solutions that will last for decades. It's a huge responsibility, and yet this type of project usually only comes along once in a person's career. So although they know very well what the collections need, they've never done this before, and they aren't sure how to figure out the best way to fit everything together. Although this project is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for you, keep in mind that we design collections equipment and collection storage areas every day. When you work with your local space-aver consultants, you're tapping into their expertise along with the knowledge and expertise of the entire space-aver group. I work with your local consultant, along with our in-house engineers and project managers, to make sure you're getting the best product for your collections and the best layout for your space. So now let's shift gears from challenges that have to do with your collections area to challenges that our clients often face in their work spaces. Conservators in particular need to keep a lot of things on hand, things like archival boxes, materials for constructing housings, and tools and supplies for treating objects. And I'd like to show you how we can help you build space and streamline workflows in these workplaces. First off, you need to store archival boxes and other supplies in a way that protects them and provides easy access. When you're in the middle of a project, the last thing you want to do is hunt down supplies. But these materials are often bulky, and your supply of them changes as you work on different projects. You might also need to store them in different places. Here's an example of how we can help. The Atlanta-based space-aver consultant helped this University Archives design a storage space where everything organized and accessible. This shelving can be reconfigured as the staff's needs change in the future. Storing extra-large items in bulk supplies is always tricky. These items are valuable, and you need to keep them protected and organized. Here's how conservators at an actively collecting museum organized their bulk and oversized conservation supplies. Widespans shelving provided the unobstructed access they needed to large items, and installing doors on the wide span created a cabinet for smaller items. Handling delicate objects is time-consuming and somewhat stressful. Some institutions prefer to perform some conservation functions in the storage area. Conservators at this museum prefer to construct housing near the item's storage location. We collaborated with them to design a custom cart that holds their supplies and can be moved anywhere in the collections area. The last channels we'll talk about today, again, involved doing more with less. As your institution seeks to cut operating costs and become more environmentally sustainable, you're probably looking at reducing your energy use. The high density solutions we've discussed earlier reduced the footprint of new construction, meaning the facility will have less volume to heat and cool. In existing structures, high density storage creates a more compact thermal mass. That's even more important in cold storage. You've probably heard that keeping your freezer full at home helps the freezer operate more efficiently. The same principle holds true for coolers and freezers and museums. Cabinets can maintain a stable preservation environment that mitigates temperature and humidity fluctuations. As museums experiment with rolling power shutdowns to save energy, they're finding that cabinets can maintain internal conditions for several days with no significant decline in preservation conditions. Third-party testing has shown that our Viking cabinets typically rate at over a six-day halftime air exchange. Thanks for joining me today. I want to remind you that we're a complete solutions provider with in-house engineers and project managers who can team up with your nearby space-aver distributor. We're here for you for nearly 50 years and we're still based here in Wisconsin to help you out and answer any questions you might have. Thanks again, and I hope to hear from you soon. Great. Thank you. And before we get to the book winner, we do have a few minutes to do some questions and answers with our speakers. I'm trying to track. Rob, one came in for you. It says, I noticed that you made reference to agents of change rather than agents of deterioration a few times. How come? We just feel that it's a little bit better for a risk-based perspective to consider agents of change. It was actually introduced by Mattia Sturlick, Dave Fickett, Joel Taylor, who's on the line with us too and makes our paper damage functions in heritage science in 2013, studies in conservation. And I think that they were right actually that agent of change is a little bit more what we want if we do want to include things like misfiling an item, having something stolen from a collection. Those things are a little bit harder to see as deterioration. It's simply change. It's not that agent of change is wrong or anything, but we just feel, sorry, it's not that agent of deterioration is wrong, but we feel agent of change is a bit better from a risk perspective. Thanks, Rob. Joel, did you have anything to add to that since you were involved in using that phrase too? Just to say, I mean, we felt that it was consistent with Rob, what we're saying. Also, sometimes change can happen which isn't necessarily a bad thing. And if you read Roche chapter or any of his work, you'll see that it's very well thought out that the probability of something happening isn't necessarily always tied to a loss of value or what could always be described as deterioration. And to a certain extent what Chris Norris was talking about earlier as well. So I think there were various elements where we felt it was just a term that captured that thinking. And the paper that Rob's talking about was just an assumption. So it was really kind of thinking about how damage, how change affects objects and their values. Interesting. Great question. Thank you guys for that. Chris, let's pull the back to the beginning. Did someone else have something to add? Chris Norris, I'm going to pull back to the beginning of the session. Can you explain why fire was just such a larger risk than the others at your building? And Chris, if you're speaking, I think you're on mute or perhaps you had to step away. And that's okay. Hi, Mary. It's Lisa. I think Chris had a hard stop at three o'clock, unfortunately. I'm sure many people did. But I think fire for, I think many people would find similar results in their buildings, particularly older buildings. Once a fire starts, it can tend to be particularly devastating. And there are construction efforts going on, and you need to be sure to have construction watches, fire watches in place. Old buildings don't always have sprinkler systems, though all of ours do have smoke detectors. I'm an AMH also, so I can speak to that a little bit. But really, I don't think it would be a surprise for a lot of institutions to find that it's the highest risk for them as well. Rob might be able to speak to this. Thank you, Lisa. Sorry, Lisa. I was jumping back and forth wondering how I mute my speakers from my phone. I wasn't listening. Could you, if you think I can add something useful, can you just cue me in again a bit? I'm just, I'm wondering if you might, just from your experience, having worked with so many different institutions, do you find that fire ranks high for most of the institutions that you're evaluating? Oh, yeah. No, that's yeah, that's a really good point. And interestingly, it often comes up as a kind of threshold risk in our risk assessment, where anything greater than fire, we really want to mitigate as a priority. Anything less than fire is probably fairly far down on our list of priorities. But depending on the difficulty with the American Museum of Natural History is that it has a big collection of buildings of greatly different ventures and that may have been renovated and brought to code or maybe not yet. And so it was difficult. Some of the older buildings had kind of open stairwells that really served to spread fire rapidly through various levels of the building. So that was the problem. There is often a problem in historic buildings. But if you don't have good compartmentation and you don't have some automated fire suppression, then chances are your fire risk is going to be pretty high. That's it. Thank you, Rob. That makes sense. Another sort of bit that came up, Sarah, when you were talking about the open archival information system that seemed to get people's attention or they wanted maybe a bit more information. And I didn't know if you wanted to take a moment to speak anything more to that than you were able to do in the presentation. Sure. When it was first proposed 2018 or so years ago, it was a plot about or it was developed by archivists and librarians who were thinking about ways to manage digital information. And it has since sort of grown up and it's moved into a standard. And the website I put it into and I can put it into chat again is O-A-I-S.org And what's really cool about it is they have a little quiz if you go around that space you can find a little quiz and it gives you if you read through the website but then you take the quiz. It sort of provokes a learning curve. So it isn't a way of thinking about how you manage things. It doesn't actually tell you how to do it necessarily. There are also these other systems that are how you would actually verify or authenticate that a repository met a model. So it gets into theoretical pretty quickly. But it's just another structure upon which we hang our digital preservation efforts. Interesting. Thank you, Sarah. I think because we're five minutes after three and in case our book winner isn't on we're going to move on to that. Remember if I announce your name to take a response in the chat box so that we know you're there and if you don't respond I'll give you a little bit of time. We'll move on to another name. And just a reminder if you're not the lucky winner and you don't already have a copy of the book you can buy it on AIC's online bookstore and there's also a link available on the AIC site and the Spinach Wiki site. So let's go to our winner is Juliet Baines. Juliet Baines if you are still on please type in the chat box. Juliet, I don't know. If someone can't hear me is that a consistent problem are we okay? I'm going to type her name into here. Okay, I don't think Juliet is on. Okay. Oh yay Juliet, congratulations. So someone from the AIC office will get in contact with you what this victory and win means for you. But congratulations. And again, thank you all for speakers and attendees. This was an enjoyable session and we appreciate everyone's time and efforts on this. Thank you guys. Thank you everyone.