 So Elsa Huxley. Elsa? Thanks, Susan. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Elsa Huxley from Heritage Preservation, and we're so glad you're joining us today. I see a lot of new names there in our participant list, which is exciting. Just a couple notes of introduction about the initiative and the online community. Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Times. And Manning is from Learning Times, so you've been speaking with already. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the Connecting to Collections initiative, including the Connecting to Collections bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. And links of these resources are filed under the topics menu on the site. We will also file a recording of today's webinar there. About twice a month, the Connecting to Collections online community features a particularly helpful free online preservation resource, and we host a webinar to it related to it. The resources we posted for today's webinar can be accessed by clicking the link on this photo on our web page. And we have just announced the series of next seven live chats, and I'll be putting a link up later to make sure that everybody has access to that list and can mark them on their calendar. So let's see. Today, we want to welcome Wendy Jessup and Tova Brandt. Wendy is a conservator in private practice, and Tova Brandt is the curator of exhibitions at the Danish Immigrant Museum. So I was hoping you both would tell us a little bit about yourself. Tova, do you want to go first? Sure. As it says, I'm currently with the Danish Immigrant Museum focusing on the interpretive end of our work here. We're in Elkhorn, Iowa, which is halfway between Des Moines and Omaha. Prior to that, I was curator at Westerheim Norwegian American Museum, where I was both responsible for both the care of collections and interpretation. And so that's a project that I did there, is what I'll be describing later in this program. Great. Thanks, Tova. Wendy? Hi, it's Wendy Jessup. It's great to be on this. As Elsa said, I'm a conservator in private practice in Arlington, Virginia. And my practice is really very much of exclusive to preventive conservation. I haven't done treatment in years and years and years. And it's good to see all of these folks who I've met over the years in Omaha as well. And a lot of the work that I do now is with smaller museums and historical museums, occasionally a larger university museum. Many times they're involved in construction projects. And so a lot of what I'm available to talk about today are what is based upon some experience that I've had with protecting collections from construction projects, either for relocating them or packing them up and trying to protect them in tissue. That's great. All right, I'm going to pull over some poll questions that will give our experts some idea about who we have with us today and what kind of problems you've been addressing. See here. Here's our first poll. How much do you know about the objects that you are going to need to be moving? And this is a little bit bigger. Susan, let me know if you see this. Showing all? Here we go. While on my other computer, it's showing all of it. OK, great. OK, so we said check all that apply. It looks like it's all changing so much. Let's give it another minute. Is this what you would have expected, Wendy and Tova? Does it seem anything like this? My sense is that it's probably pretty accurate. I would have liked to have seen some higher end of inventory catalog and photographs. But I think from my experience, if you can put it into the new process, this is an opportunity where you can start taking care of it. And taking care of the photography and condition assessment and entry into a database. Kathy's pointing out that we don't have an option there for some of the items that are going to be moved to be inventoryed or cataloged. And that's a really good point. Yeah, and of course, we don't ask specifically here, do you know enough about the collection to at least have some reasonable estimates of what you're dealing with? And so I think we have a good sampling. I'm going to take this one away and bring up our second and third polls. I'm going to start doing this couple at a time. Save some time here. How many items will you be moving? And is this move to temporary or permanent housing? A number of these are more than 5,000, and both. And I think we expected that it would be both temporary and permanent. Or is the distance of the move that you're already working on or considering? OK, it looks like about 15% are within the building. 34% are within a few blocks. It's probably to a storage or an additional facility. I think we can pretty much count the crosstown as a similar answer. And then out of town about 20% pretty even. Next question. How imminent is this? And I probably should have had something there that said, is it already going on? But we can count those in the next two months. How about that? Next few months, next six months, 2012, 2013, 2014. Are you planning really far ahead? I'm hoping that we'll be able to get some feedback on what, if anything, people have done with particularly those that are moving within the next two to six months. Because that's going to always be a very interesting prospect. Because in previous experiences, it's taken six months of planning before I've moved anything. And I want to encourage everyone to make sure that at any time during this webinar, you're putting your questions into that Q&A box. I know Susan explained this already. But if you don't see your question popping up right away, it's a moderated chat. We might be holding it for a little bit later in the hour. And if you see it twice, it's just that you see your own comments posted, as well as publicly. Nobody else is seeing your comments twice. What I'm seeing from this is Sharon with the artifact movement several times back and forth between collection storage and exhibits. So this is a regular thing. So this would be a regular movement back and forth. And I think that may be more of a trend, because I know I'm working with a number of organizations that are going to have offsite locations for their collection storage. And they have their main exhibit location is in town. So it's an ongoing prospect. So I think we have to remember what we've got to talk about that, as well. OK. That kind of makes sense for the size of the building. All right. Well, I'm going to go ahead and collapse these polls. And we can go ahead and start moving forward. Tova, I'll pull your presentation over. OK. And there we go. Now, Tova, you've got those arrows at the bottom to use, and let me know if you need anything. All right. Well, it looks like from the comments coming in with our participants here that there's a lot of different scenarios that people are thinking about that will potentially involve packing objects, transporting them, either a short distance or a long distance, either a big one-time move or several times as a regular part of operations. I'm going to give a little case study here of a project at Westerheim Norwegian American Museum. And that's in Northeast Iowa. And although it might not perfectly fit what many of you are anticipating or planning, hopefully there will be some parallels that you can liberally steal from. Please do steal whatever might be helpful. The Westerheim collection number is about 24,000 objects. And it's really a mixed collection. The pieces that were particularly addressed in this project were three-dimensional, small and large objects, largely representing the folk art collection. A lot of painted wood, a lot of carvings, as well as domestic healthwares. And you see some of that here. This is what prompted the need for a major collection move into a new storage facility. This was small object storage, which is basically, you see here, three aisles out of the five, which were just stuffed to the gills on one side being painted plywood shelves filled with artifacts. On the other side, being a wall with windows cut in so that visitors could see the collection. There were no labels. There was nothing interpretive. There were no object ID numbers available. But it did provide some degree of visual access to the collection. But when this was first installed in the 1970s, there was ample room on those shelves. And this story that we're all familiar with, the collection just keeps growing. So as you see in the middle, my colleague Allison, who has had to tiptoe over those very fragile doll carriages in order to retrieve an object, the option being moving all of those doll carriages out of her way in order to retrieve those things. It was just not a good scenario. This was a primary space that we wanted to empty out. Another space called the vault. Again, three-dimensional objects, folk art on these lovely shelves that were bowing through weight and age that had been mined with really beautifully striped acrylic carpet. So that also was part of the project. And then there was a basement area that we called the trunk room. And it was literally filled with trunks. In this photo, you actually see it when the process had already begun. And so you actually see some empty shelves. But you can imagine that in order to retrieve some of the smaller boxes on the right-hand side, you would have had to remove the large trunks in front of it just to gain access. And it was, again, beyond capacity for these items. So those are the main three areas that we really needed to address. In 2003, we began really the internal conversations of what our priorities were and what our options were. And the main goal was really to add a new storage facility that we could move these items to and then repurpose the space they were leaving. So 2003, we really began identifying which collections would be affected, trying to get estimates of how many pieces that was and seeing what some of the feasibility options were. 2004, we brought in the Midwest Art Conservation Center. That's MAC. They're based in Minneapolis to do a general preservation assessment, which is a really important step for a project like this because it gave us a third-party assessment that would agree that, yes, our top priority was defining a new storage facility to properly house these collections. We developed a detailed plan for that year. We submitted an application for NEH funding. And the building that we were hoping to acquire, we did actually get the purchase funds donated. So we were able to do that. 2005, I see a typo on my timeline there. 2005, we received the NEH grant. We were able to leverage that for state funding. We renovated the building. We got our project staff lined up so that by the end of 2005, we were finally ready to move the first artifact in this whole process. So that's three years of planning for this whole project. Just to give you some sense, the current museum you see on the campus plan was the four-story 19th century building that all of these objects were housed in. And they were all being moved to the big purple square, at the BLC, which stands for the Bouter Landsguard Collection Study Center. We were fortunate that we didn't have to cross any streets. We didn't have to leave the block. But everything was going to have to be carted outside down the sidewalk. And what you can't see on this plan is that there's a significant downhill slope between the current museum and the BLC, which also involved going across a gravel driveway. So there were some physical challenges in that transfer. And then the building itself that we were moving into, it was the video warehouse when we purchased it. And then we did need to make some significant changes to the facade, both for security purposes, to create some office space and workspace. But by and large, this was a concrete block building 40 feet wide, 100 feet deep. And the bulk of it was outfitted to be climate-controlled, compact shelving units. And that was its main goal. But to develop that plan, we did have to ask ourselves and then answer a lot of questions. How many shelves do we really need? If you remember, the small object storage area was all on shelves. But things were way too close to each other. Things had started to be stacked on top of each other. The floor had been colonized as a storage location. And so I literally went through and counted every shelf, measured each shelf, and figured out how many square feet of shelving surface area we were already occupying. And then I figured that, well, if it's already crowded now, things really need at least twice as much space to have ample elbow room between artifacts. And in some cases, three times as much space as we were already using in order to accommodate those things on the floor, those things that were stacked, those things that were still in boxes because there was no room to really unbox them. So it took between two and three times of our existing shelf square footage just to accommodate the collections that we already had. And then we had to accommodate some degree of expected growth of the collection, which is going to be a different formula for every museum and every collection. But certainly, we all need to anticipate that there will be new things coming in. And we don't want to find ourselves totally out of space within five months of moving into a new place. We did get different cost estimates from a couple different compact shelving suppliers, both for the rail system and also for the shelving themselves. We knew there were other materials involved. We didn't want to put things on just the steel shelves. We ordered Velara as a form in bulk in huge rolls, about over 100 yards long and four feet tall, that lined every shelf and drawer. And we needed to figure out how much time it would take, who would do this, and what other resources would be necessary. So part of the planning was just dedicating a day to test this process. A colleague and myself spent a day just finding out what seemed to be an average box or shelf of artifacts and timing ourselves. How many of those artifacts could we physically retrieve, list on a packing list or inventory list, pack in a way that they would be suitable to roll down that sidewalk and go bumpity, bumpity, bump over the gravel driveway, bumpity, bumpity, bump. And then rehouse them in new storage location. And just by dedicating a day to do that, we came up with the calculation that two of us together could process and move 40 small objects in a day. Work that out by month, it's 800 pieces a month. Times of 12 months would be about 10,000 pieces, which was our goal. We estimated 10,000 pieces to go. But I think we all know that there is no such thing as being able to spend 40 hours a week doing nothing but moving artifacts. Besides, there were other things we wanted to accomplish during this process. Just as we asked you all in the first question, we had object ID numbers for all of these things. But we did not have digital photography. We didn't have condition reports. We didn't have thorough measurements. Maybe there were two dimensions in our records, but not three dimensions, but alone detailed catalog descriptions. So we wanted to take the opportunity to really get a much more thorough record of these artifacts. And so we also knew we would need to include interns, both paid and unpaid, some of our existing volunteer corps and student workers from nearby Luther College, which would mean having to train and orient and supervise all of those people. So there's some give and take there. So finally, we figured that this would be a two-year project of actually moving and processing the pieces. We planned to hire two full-time project staff who themselves would be responsible for training and supervising a corps of volunteers, interns, student workers. And we needed to average about 500 objects a month. Some of those extra resources that we used for this project, as you see on the right, one of our summer interns, we included in the project budget summer stipends for paid internship. And so we were able to attract really skilled graduate level interns during the summer months for this project. On the lower left, you see some of our local volunteers who were thrilled when we said that it was OK to actually wash some of the glassware and make it all nice and pretty and shiny again, because there was just grunge on some of these things. And on the upper left, you see, actually, that's Nicole Grebo from the Midwest Art Conservation Center. Throughout this project, we maintained a relationship with MAC so that every time we started moving a new type of material, for example, moving from wood objects to glass and ceramic objects, one of the MAC's conservators came down for a site visit to help us evaluate what kind of condition issues we might expect to see, help us learn triage some of those conditions if it's something that we could say, yes, this is just grunge, and therefore our volunteers could wash the glass. Or is this something that needs to be set aside for more serious consideration? So that was a really important ongoing part of our process. Another element to this whole project is constantly making the case, making the case argument, both to funders and to the public and your audience. On one hand, you're asking for a lot of money for really expensive shelves that are going to be behind glass doors, and people can't see them anymore. Especially in our case, when you're moving things from what could have been described as visual storage, and they were leaving that scenario. So we had to flip that on its head and make the case that the objects would be more accessible, not less. And that would be in a lot of different ways. First of all, the space that we were vacating in the museum was going to be turned into another changing exhibition gallery. So those very artifacts that were coming into a new storage facility would rotate back through in exhibitions, where they would be presented in a context with interpretation and in relationship to one another, so that it would actually be a much more educational experience than just visually looking at things with no aid to see further. The digital photography was a huge part of our case statement, because for the first time, we would be able to provide research tools for people who could not visit us in Iowa. We could apply these to web applications and start developing website exhibitions or other tools to share the collection with a broader audience. And we also did a lot of conscious PR about this project. It was a big project, and people were seeing it unfold over two years. And it could very well look like we were just carting objects from the museum to this locked building that they would never be seen again. We took every opportunity we could to offer tours, to bring people into the building. And in the brief window between when the shelves were all installed, we were ready to go, but there were no artifacts yet, we had a town-wide open house with food, even. The only time when we would allow food and beverages in the storage facility, but to invite people to see the facility, ask questions, and get a better sense of why we were doing this. We also posted regular updates on the project, both on our website and in the museum itself, right off of the main lobby. Using kind of a thermometer of how many objects had been moved during the process before we reached our goal of 10,000 objects moved, the sharing pictures of the project so that people could get a sense of what it was taking, why it was taking so long, and what were all of the things we were doing with these collections. And of course, we used all of our membership newsletters, other print media options. And so finally, this whole project was wrapped up in the spring of 2008. And I'll just remind you that we started our internal plans in 2003. So that's a five-year time frame for planning and funding and implementing this whole move. The total was about 9,000 artifacts. We do have a new gallery in the space that used to be small object storage. And in fact, it's the largest gallery space available for changing exhibitions. So that's now permanently part of the exhibition calendar. All of those students and interns and volunteers who helped us with the project move now were very experienced in the proper handling of artifacts and understanding why we followed certain procedures. And so once that project was done, it turned out that the museum received a gift to install a wetline fire suppression system in the main galleries, which hadn't been there before. But it meant that all the artifacts in the main galleries had to be moved out of the installation way. Well, we already had a trained collections volunteer corps who could go right in and do that. So it really had some nice unintended consequences there. And overall, institutionally, the whole museum in every department became much more aware of why the collections department did things the way they did. What were some of the considerations? We had a project that we were really proud of, something that we could really share with our visitors, with our donors, with each other. We had a much better intellectual control over this part of the collection. And that will just enhance so much more of the museum. So overall, a successful project, but it certainly took a lot of time, a lot of planning, and thinking through to make sure that we made the most of the opportunity that this move granted us. That's it for me. OK. That's great. Thank you, Eva. I wonder if we could address Stacey's question first. She said, it'd be great to know how staff shared or distributed duties of moving and offering the tours about the move. Sure, sure. We ended up dividing up some of the different steps of the process. And that had to be revised as we went along. As I mentioned, we hired two full-time staff just dedicated to this project. And it ended up that it worked best if one of them was really in charge of retrieving the objects from their original location. We gave them an initial kind of vacuuming of whatever dust and grunge was on them, and then packing them to bring them into the building. The other staff person was in charge of the photography end of kind of getting all of the data then inputted into the system, so kind of the back end half of the process, and then assigning a new permanent storage location. Because of the location of the museum in a relatively small town, visitation is not huge. So what we did for public tours, those just had to be scheduled kind of in and around what the other staff were doing. Sometimes I would lead particular tours because I was doing all the other territorial things that I had to do as well. So I could take some of them. It became something that if we knew there was a bus tour coming that had enough time on the museum facilities, we might offer the option of having the behind the scenes tour of this collection study center. If there was a folk art class who was studying a particular technique, we would really try to encourage them to look at the corresponding collections in the collection study center. For some of the big festival days, especially for the July festival, that's really the biggest event in town, we actually posted sign up sheets for scheduled public tours at the collection study center. So they were always staff guided. We always had to plan them in advance. But they were never so much that it really held up the overall progress in the project. I think we should address the point that Anna and Kelly are bringing up about having a much shorter timetable and smaller moves. I think some of the questions that they would bring up here will be addressed when we talk about the practicalities of packing these smaller things. But specifically when Anna talks about using movers, Wendy, maybe you want to address this. Is there anything that you would say you've seen people do that was a mistake, or you think people should be sure to cover when they're using professional movers? My sense is that it's going to be very critical for you to clearly establish what you expect the movers to be doing. Do you expect them to do the packing, removal of the artifact from the current shelving and packing it up and then taking the whole thing? Or are you going to do the initial packaging and then movement? My experience has been that you need to be very clear in establishing what the parameters are, who will handle things, how they will be handled, and also as part of it, when you're trying to do things very quickly, it's so critical to have your collections inventory and catalog under control. So before you move anything, you need to know exactly what you've got and what's going in which box. Because in the heat of the move, things could get lost. The other thing is that there are legalities associated with the transit and the packaging. And things you have to make sure that you've got all of your insurance issues covered with it. And that has to do with custody, taking custody of something and where the liability is. There's some nuances here that I don't fully know, but I know that in the experiences that we had, we had to have very clear proof of custody. So we did the, we were with the movers at all points, tracking what was there, and as it was moved, and we had a chase car going, we were moving an antiquities collection. So we had couriers with each of the moves. But we had accounts of things on one end and on the other. So I know that I saw this. We've got only two weeks to move things. That makes sure that if that's going to be your window, make sure that all of your prep work is done in advance. I would maybe add to that, with a really short moving time frame, there is only limited things you can do from maybe a collections management standpoint on the front end. The inventory for each box is going to be critical, and just knowing physically which objects can be found where. What you might consider then is how much time will you have then to process the unpacking, if that's part of it? And maybe it's in the unpacking that you can really think about what are some of the things, since this is one of the few times when you're going to physically handle every object in this project, what are some of the things you want to accomplish in that? And you might have more leisure once it's in its new location, if that's a long-term enough stopping point for it, if it's a place that you do want to unpack the things. That maybe thinking about setting up a photography process on that end might be worthwhile. Emily is wondering if you had any security concerns. Well, on some degree, we certainly benefited from being in a stereotypical small town where we didn't really worry about strange people snatching things off of our carts from the sidewalk. We never left anything unattended. Certainly, we had to be probably more concerned about the weather than security issues. We were moving things into a much more secure location, the fact that there were two sets of locked doors that things had to move through to get into the main new facility. But it certainly would have been very different if we were in an urban area. I think everyone involved would have just been more used to being aware of security issues. So I could certainly, we could probably be blamed or accused of being pretty complacent. But fortunately, we did not have any problems. It was just the physical handling that was the main concern and making sure that the weather was reasonably suitable for carting things outside. I'd like to go back a little bit if we could. Pete Serban had asked about moving small objects. He said, how can a multitude of small objects, five by five or even 12 by 20, be moved? Each pack separately, and then many small packages packed in a larger case, what do you suggest? I don't know if any of the photos that we have, Wendy, and that other presentation, I could pull any of those up? Yeah, actually, some of the photos that I had, the individual photos that I first sent you. And actually, one of the photographs from Tova's presentation was, I think, the plate. I think if these objects are all around the same size, then I am a firm proponent of cavity packing. I'm also, if you can standardize your modules so that you've got everything that will fit in certain sizes and you can put them into trays and then pack the trays into boxes, that is really good. Let's go to the one back, where I'll pull that. Nope, that's not the one. These are prepared, can we, this one, prepared objects? This is the prepared objects one. Can you say that with this? Prepared objects, I think this one is a good one. These were lots of small things that were cavity packed using phones that we cut out and replaced. We actually had some standard size cutouts and then we put the object in it with some additional padding around behind it and then each of the small boxes would go into a grid and then placed onto a tray and then the tray would be stacked. I have another slide of cavity packing for those of you that need to see something a little bit closer. These were not a lot of small objects, but it's the same type of a situation. I'm a real proponent of a lot of the grid systems that have been set up that a lot of the manufacturers are now making and put an inset that are foam in. Sometimes it can be a time consuming operation, but if you can standardize as much of the cutout as possible, you're better off. I wanted to draw people's attention. I just posted the URL for the featured resources that accompany this webinar. And there are seven of them up there. Now there are some conservograms, something from the Smithsonian, something from NEDCC that address packing different kinds of objects. I don't suggest that you go there now, but if you go later, you'll see those are some really good resources for more specifics as well. And I'm going to do a shout out to Jack, who's currently on the line here for moving the mountains. I think that that's a really good case study of what they've done, of what they did in relocation to the Science Museum of Minnesota. And I think that there are some types of packaging approaches that they took. One of the things that I've also found to be helpful is to think about what you're going to be putting your objects into in the future. Because if you have a standard size, that's all those drawers and service presentations, you have a number of similar objects that are going into those drawers, is it possible to pack, to create, as part of your packaging, to create a storage mount that would then just slip into that drawer so that you don't have to overhandle the object? That's something to think about. We did quite a bit of that with the Antiquities group that we did. So we standardized, we knew what size we were going to be putting these things into, and we knew that we could fit 30 of X types of materials into the drawer. And the packaging was then created for the move so that it was automatically on the other end of the receiving end of once it's been moved, it can go into the drawer without having to undo and fiddle with a whole bunch of stuff. Early in the webinar, Kelly had a question about what differences there would be in transporting deep-sessioned items to another institution versus transporting them for internal purposes. I'm not sure that I totally understood the question. I didn't know if she was saying, when she said transporting them for internal purposes, she meant that they weren't being deaccessions. They would stay within the same building, or she was, I don't know, Kelly, if you can give us any clarification on that question, or if anybody else had a better understanding of it. Tova or Wendy, did either of you thought that? I think the only difference I would see between deaccessioned artifacts and things that are still in your collection is just slightly different types of paperwork, especially if the deaccessioned items are moving to another institution. You still wanna take professional care of the physical handling of them. You still wanna track all of those pieces until they are formally transferred to that other institution, so you're still gonna need the inventory lists. And you probably still want condition reports just so that if there's anything that happens in transit and there's any liability issues, or if the receiving institution wants that kind of information that you have it from your end at the point that it left you. One of the things that, two of the projects that I've been involved with, where they have decided as part of this to not relocate their deaccessioned materials is to isolate those and move them out of the existing collections area, put them into a separate place for packing and going through the deaccessioning process and then packing and either send off to Austin or sent to another institution. But it's very helpful to be able to separate what you're not gonna pack and go back into the museum collection from those materials that are going to have to go elsewhere. And you're right, Tova, it's very important to have a good paper trail and to have good procedures and caring for that material because ultimately, if it's going to auction, the funds from that will go back into the institution or the next institution coming along has to have something that's in this. Okay, Emily is asking, how did you ensure that materials ended up where they were supposed to, like on the particular shelf? Well, Tova, you wanna answer that? I mean, I can just say a lot of planning and thinking this through to begin with, but I don't know if you have some more specifics on that. Well, part of that for us came in in just figuring out what kinds of shelves, what kinds of shelves we were installing, how many and what the heights and sizes of those would be for some of the artifacts that we were moving, we had to be really careful on the front end. We really needed to know how many trunks, big, big immigrant trunks were moving in because those were gonna be shelves of much different dimensions than small bowls or spoons or other items. So we did as kind of our best guess on the front end in terms of the relative distribution of shelf dimensions. But we didn't, partly because we didn't know a lot about the collections when we started. We were collecting so much information during the process. We didn't get detailed enough to actually pre-assign storage locations. We knew we wanted to rearrange things, and some of that actually had an interpretive end to it because we knew we would be taking tours of special interests, so we wanted to group objects that we knew a particular constituency would be interested in seeing together. So a lot of it was actually subjective kind of on the spot. And we were fortunate that we just, we had enough time and we had built in enough shelves to give ourselves the flexibility to do that. I tried to be kind and decide where trunks go on the shelf before they actually got there. I don't think there were too many instances where I asked the staff to take them and rearrange them again, but it was really a combination of planning the dimensions we would need, and then having the flexibility to arrange them once we actually saw the collection. Kelly's asking who typically pays for the transportation costs associated with moving them, when you're doing a deaccessioning situation. Wendy, do you? I have no idea, I think that's a, sorry. Maybe it depends on the particular situation. I would think so, I don't know, and maybe maybe someone else, the attendees, knows if there's a standard protocol or not. Is there a registrar in the room? But I think it will depend a lot on are you transferring objects on your timetable or the receiving institution's timetable? And in whose best interest is it to move those items? If it's in your best interest to clear the space, then maybe you bear the bulk of the costs associated with that, but if time and space is not as critical, then maybe you negotiate a half and half arrangement. But I can't think off the top of my head that there's a set expectation. Okay. Now, Kathy in Ohio is saying we are planning to recreate our current storage area. We thought we might take photos first. Any experience with this technique? Photos of the storage area or photos of the artifact? Kathy, can you type in there? You're talking about, I would guess she was talking about the objects. Oh, she's typing in now, let's see. Oh, of the storage area, okay. I think it's, I don't know, Toby do you wanna say something? No, go ahead. Okay, I think, I think I haven't, I have, sorry to bomb this. I think it's important to have some really good long shots of the entire room and then individual cabinets or shops. And if you are trying to replicate what goes into each of the units, when I tend to look at collection storage areas, I think of the housing of the object. And then I think of the module, which could be a drawer or a shelf. And then I think of the unit of equipment as the cabinetry is either a shelf or a rack of some sort or a shelving unit or a rack or it's a drawer unit. So that depending upon how detailed you want to be or you need to be, it's good to have some very good photography there. And if you can couple that with your database so that you understand what's in each one of those locations with your accession numbers, that would help you as well. And I just think it's great that you have a storage area that's working well enough that you wanna replicate it. I think that's probably pretty there. Okay, we have a question from Emily. I'd like to address, and I just wanna mention to our participants, we have about 10 minutes left in the live chat event. So if you have any more questions, please go ahead and start typing those in. Emily says, can someone talk about the packing transport temporary storage for unglazed paintings? We will not have a frame rack till post renovation. Wendy, do you wanna fill that one? No, boy. What type of paintings? They could be acrylic, they could be oiled on canvas, depends upon the type of boards that you've got. I think it's really important to bring in a conservator to take a look at them in advance, to talk about, you know, to assess the condition of those paintings and to determine whether or not they need to have some special type of frame built for them. And as we talk, I'm trying to think of what it's called. There is a travel frame that I know that we use for some unglazed materials where it is attached to the structure of the frame or of the framed object or not framed object, unglazed object, and it really creates an exterior travel frame for handling of this artifact. And that could actually be then used for longer term or temporary storage of the materials because it is pretty stable, particularly if it's housed properly. But I really do want to refer you to the American Institute for Conservation. The AIC has a referral list and there are lots of resources that can be found there and have it looked at by a conservator to make sure that it doesn't require some sort of special packaging. Okay, and that website is up on the screen now. Okay, we have a question from Connie. We are moving 15 cabinets of extremely delicate fossils and paper shale. Any recommendations on how to pack and move them? Would you recommend organizing the cabinets before moving, while moving, or after? We're moving 10,000 individual specimens and over 60,000 archive documents and historical objects. Oh my goodness. How long, what's your timeframe on this? Connie, can you type in your timeframe? My first comment is that it sounds like with any really delicate collections, you want to actually move them as little as possible. So it doesn't sound like reorganizing the cabinets before or after, in addition to the move, would be the ideal scenario. I think if you can basically make the plan of where things are going and use the transportation as the only time when things are physically getting moved, that would minimize the risk of just the handling. Yeah, I think moving once if you can, that would be great. There are a number of very good natural science conservators out there that I would certainly refer to again, find them through the AIC website. And it looks like that move is going to be at the end of this year. Yep. I think there are a couple of things to think about when planning any moves like this. I don't know if it makes some sense to bring up that little bit of presentation that I gave you, Alfa. I'll pull it over. Yeah, I think I'll pull that over because I think there's some things to think about as you are planning the process. You are going to be moving or any type of collection. It's really important to understand what are the risks and to assess what really needs to be done to protect the collection. And if you're moving out of a historic building, it's really critical to be done. And what type of risks do you have and where are they? For instance, vibration, especially for very fragile materials like the fossil. Vibration is a tricky subject and you have to account for that. But during this process, what are these artifacts going to be exposed to as a part of this process? And what are your material types? Where is it? How has it been currently installed? And what are the current conditions, environmental conditions to which it's been exposed? And then what are all of the conditions associated with the building? And what are your floor plans? And then to really understand the environmental information. And the big question is, do you move it or not? And then are the risks of moving outweighing the risks of leaving something in situ? And this is more specifically toward the construction projects, but there may be instances where you may not want to move something because it is too damaging. And then who's involved? All sorts of folks that are involved there, ranging from the museum staff on up to the facilities and administration and any contractors, and the communications has to be done so well with it. And all, there are a number of different ways to communicate this information and about the relocation, the process, the project, and then build your team so that there are no misunderstandings as a part of that. There are not quite a few other things that will be there. We will be able to talk some of these risks, what we'll do it. I will be happy to share with Heritage Preservation and AASLH, Connecting Collection, the list of risks, but they're also pretty well published out there on the conservation literature. Okay, thank you, Wendy. I'll just take a minute here to mention that we'll post anything that you give us that you think would be great for the participants on the archive page with the webinar listed, the featured resources. And they'll be searchable under our list of topics and I'll certainly put a little post in the group discussion boards when they're up there so everybody knows how to find them. I think that one of the things that Tova mentioned was very important, really understand that you can't work 20 days a month on moving collections all the time because there are going to be people pulling you away. There are also sick time and injuries for family events and a good collections move and passing really depends upon the team that's involved with it and you have to understand that as we are, we're all human and we have families and we have and we have lives that are on the outside of this very high pressure move situation so we have to take that into consideration as a part of the plan. Yes, just from an institutional perspective, we all have staff meetings. We have to spend time on the computers answering emails and reordering supplies and all of those things so a realistic assessment of the time that each individual can really spend on the actual move is critical. I've just looked over a link to an evaluation and if you click on that link, it will open up behind this meeting room and when you shut down the meeting room, it will be there and we'd really appreciate it if you could take us just seven questions, I think six or seven questions and we read these evaluations really carefully and anybody with any suggestions, that would be great. And we have a door prize today. It's a book from the Connecting the Collections bookshelf so if you would kind of have to answer that door prize question, afterwards we randomly pick one of the people who's responded and send them a gift. Are there any? I'd like to just say one thing that is brand new that's out there is a collections care network. Which has just been established by the American Institute for Conservation. It's open to everyone, not just conservators who are involved in some any aspect of collections care. We have reached out to PACEN, we've reached out to the Registrar's Group and it's something that's in development. If you go to the AIC website, you can find out more about it. There is a charge to the AIC. So what we are trying to do with this. And we encourage anyone to participate in it. It will also, it will be a portal through which you'll have additional access through to the resources that Heritage Preservation and many of the other organizations have provided to make them available. Because we're all in this collections care preservation business together and we're here to help you all out. And Wendy, I just posted the length you gave me earlier. Thank you. That shows you what the charge is from AIC and what we are supposed to be doing. And if anyone is going to be in New Mexico, can go to the AIC in New Mexico, there will be an outreach to allies session where we are going to be talking with and working with folks that are Registrar's and PACRS and preparators and Mount Makers and trying to bring all of us together on this. Jackie's pointed out that the collections journal has an entire issue, or has entire issues, I think, it's better to move in collections. One issue there, volume seven, number two, 2011. All right, well, we've hit the end of our time. If any other questions occurred to our participants or our experts think of other things you'd like to share, I'd like to encourage everyone to visit the ConnectingToCollections.org website and see those group discussion boards. And I will be posting in a number of places, I think that people see them on the Connecting to Collections Facebook page or the Group Discussion Boards or the Heritage Preservation Facebook page once we get the recording of this webinar up and we'd love it if you shared that with your colleagues and also it's a great place to continue this conversation. So I wanted to thank everyone. Thank you, Tova. Thank you, Wendy. Thank you, Susan. I think this went well. And again, I'd like to encourage people to fill out that evaluation for us if you have a minute. And we hope you all will join us next time. That will be on the 23rd and it's gonna be about storage. So that will be great. We'll be with Laura Hort, Stanton, and Julia Clark. In the meantime, thanks for joining us, everybody. Bye, have a great afternoon.