 Okay so welcome everyone to today's Mars guest lecture. The topic is leveraging your education and certification in the zoological registrar profession. This is not an environment in which I think most of our students naturally think about being employed but it's a fascinating environment to work in as you'll learn from Ray. Our presenter is Ray Lynn Holiday. She is the registrar at the St. Louis Zoo. She began her zoological career at the San Antonio Zoo in 1985 working in different capacities. She accepted the newly created position of registrar at the St. Louis Zoo in 1991 and will celebrate 30 years working for this amazing zoo in January 2021. You'd never know that from interacting with Ray. She's as enthusiastic I think as she was when she started. She has a long history of leadership service and key organizations including Arma International, the St. Louis chapter of ARMA, the Institute of Certified Records Managers, and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums serving in multiple leadership roles in all of these organizations over the past 30 years. Ray has a bachelor's degree in business management and an MBA and she earned her CRM in 2003. Thank you very much for that introduction. It's an absolute I'm so proud to be able to work with Dr. Franks. I call her Pat but for you guys that's Dr. Franks and like she said we have been working together since 2016. Initially to do this they were the second academic partnership that the ICRM was able to achieve and it has been so successful. I don't let me forget to talk about internships so when I get through this PowerPoint I want to talk about some potential partnerships and internships specific to the zoological registrar profession. But anyway so you know we do work closely together we co-percent many of the exam prep workshops for all of the various partner events that we're involved with with the ICRM with all the REM associations that we all interact with. As she said it is it is a tight-knit community and it has become really my life's work over my total career at 37 years but for the St. Louis Zoo 30 to do a number of things. Increase awareness in the zoological profession of the records and information management holistic process. So yes industry specific is important but you need that framework of global best practices. We have worked really hard as some of the associations that I'll talk to you about today. It's been a village of the work not just me but work of a lot of different people a lot of different teams a lot of different stakeholders to elevate REM in the zoological profession. We now have some really important key programs in place. We have standards new standards that came out in January which I'll talk about. It's going over the next five years I see some really great changes coming to elevate the zoological registrar position not only in terms of accountability providing those positions with the resources that they need to develop REM programs and as you know all of that you know as certification starts to be more prolific in the profession. We share all the education programs we share all this information like the MARA program the various universities that are providing credit for the ICRM exams all of that stuff is a part of the overall roadmap to elevate a professional position. So that's really what I'm going to focus on today. I'd like to start with talking about the North American community of zoological institutions and when I say zoological institutions not just zoos but aquariums and there are some other organizations that might not be a typical zoo or an aquarium but they they're in the niche of zoological institution. Of AZA, AZA is an advisory organization. They accredited zoos and aquariums operating in North America over 6,000 sorry have to move this so I can see over 6,000 zoo and aquarium professionals organizations suppliers worldwide their mission their commonality and their mission is wildlife conservation education science and animal care. AZA also welcomes public members who support conservation in the work of zoos and aquariums. So this is a very important organization in our profession. It's not the only regional association but I wanted to talk about it first so that you know this is something that if you live and work within the United States we want you to know how to get to this organization review potential jobs and just get a better understanding of you know the zoo profession in general. One of the things that I wanted to highlight here today this is a strategic initiative for AZA and it's it's a very important initiative that they they want their member organizations to embrace and that is diversity and inclusion. This link actually goes to their policy on that but I'll skip to the next slide so we can talk about it a little bit. So they recognize that zoos and aquariums operate as businesses providing their communities with unique and valuable learning and recreation opportunities while supporting local economies their employment opportunities money spent in the community on goods and services and its tourism destinations of significant economic impact. Therefore it's critical that we embrace a strong you know diversity and inclusion programs. I know I can speak for the St. Louis Zoo. It is a huge part of our community. The people that we draw to our city the jobs that we provide all kinds of jobs. The zoo is like a city in itself. We have marketing positions, records management positions, animal care positions, veterinary positions, food service, construction, development. I mean that it just goes on and on. We have at RSA we have 87 departments. There are also smaller zoos. You know there's a big range of the size of zoo and how they're structured politically but the bottom line is there's a ton of jobs and a lot of opportunity and I'm happy to say that zoological records management is one of those positions and it's a professional level position. There are other regional zoo associations around the world. So depending on where you you know where you live since you're participating in an online program you could really be from anywhere. So if AZA is not the entry point for you it might be any one of these other you know I want to talk about the Canadian Zoo Association as well because you know we have a lot of members from Canada both in AZA and also even though they're a member of the Canadian Zoo Association many of them are also a member of AZA because it's North American but really they're all through Europe all around the world. So these links will take you to their sites and you can explore that information as you wish. There are role specific associations and we're going to jump in a little deeper to at least one of these but I wanted to talk about these three because because of the diversity of the types of organizations that are members of AZA in particular we have some very small zoos some smaller aquariums we have some really large ones and we have medium sized ones some of those zoos still have the the records management the record keeping duties might be structured in conjunction with other core duties such as being an animal keeper. So you might have to do you might have to care for an animal collection manage the records for the zoo or aquarium and any number you might also manage veterinary records so there's there is though there aren't a fair number of situations where a person is just not doing registered work they're also doing animal care and other things. It can be very difficult to understand and grasp the holistic process associated with records under that setup. So you know we partner ZRA in particular the Zoological Red Star Association we partner with these other two associations every year so that we can provide records training to those folks that may not get it otherwise because they're doing all these other things in addition to records management. So let's get into talking about ZRA for a little bit. So ZRA started in 1984 it was 12 people from mostly in the year all and I think they were all in the US but they were at the larger zoos where their position may have started out as a historian type position some of them had degrees in library and information science some of them were archivists but they were the people that started the path to professionalizing the Zoological Red Star Association. Then in the mid 1980s AZA created the standard because the reason why that happened we'll just back up for a second is the latter part of the 1970s the majority of all of the wildlife laws international and US that regulated the trade of wildlife because wildlife was being exploited and so these laws were brought on board to regulate international trade but also the Endangered Species Act which is a US specific regulation. There were also laws and regulations with US Department of Agriculture Centers for Disease Control and so with the proliferation of that on those regulations zoos realized they had to have a position within zoos and aquariums to deal with the legal compliance aspect in addition to the impact to record keeping requirements so that's how this position came to be once they created that standard that they zoo or zoological institution had to have a specific position having oversight for the records process ZRA's membership doubled over that next decade so you know we needed help and I'm saying we because I was I was in that position at that time there was no training everybody was self-taught the ICRM resources that we now are aware of and everything that ARMA does and all these different programs that are record centered that wasn't on anybody's radar I virtually discovered the ICRM through the process at my own zoo or I was trying to get a grant to microfilm all the historical animal records that we had and that's how I discovered ICRM certification I got the grant and then I realized holy moses I don't know what I'm doing I I know I need to do something with these records but I don't have the skills at this time to do that and that's when my journey began you know I was able to get certified and then that led to me finishing my education and so on so that is the mentorship that we do through ZRA now is a result of some of that early work and that early discovery so ZRA is recognized by AZA many of our members participate in the AZA committees and training courses AZA's first what they call the institutional record keeping course or ERC course that was developed in 1998 and many of the people that developed that course were members of ZRA. ZRA is the recognized professional association for advancing the registrar position within the zoological community so I would say that over the last 20 years its profile has really expanded it's a very mature organization it's well respected within the zoological community and you know the last five years it's developed its own training program and I just see this association doing a lot more partnering and internships is something that I would like to see ZRA explore to be able to provide a little more of and that's kind of what I wanted to talk about when we get to the end of the slideshow. So some of the resources that ZRA provides is job descriptions which we promulgate to AZA organizations and any other organization wanting that guidance so it sort of represents 200 collective years of experience with ZRA members in establishing best practices for the core duties of the registrar role. We worked on this and a lot of the descriptions are now based on the core competencies that you see across the exams with the ICRM exams with the what they call the generally accepted record keeping principles which is something that ARMA International has copyrighted and distributed and it's basically the same kind of situation that you would see with a certified public accountant they have generally accepted principles of accounting it's the same kind of thing there is a well published established set of principles and standards for the core competencies of REM and for managing records and I know I'm preaching into the choir a little bit here because you guys are in this program and you're learning all that but that has been the catalyst for improvements made with this position you know structuring the position so that it can have the senior management support and understand the core tenets for managing records in the zoological profession but not just an isolation not just for industry specific but more from a holistic standpoint. So that bottom line in green there is the mission of the ZRA so the zoological registrar's association connects trains and empowers the community of zoo and aquarium registrars and that is truly what they do scientific based information is extremely important and valued in zoos zoological institutions some of the core business activities result in the creation of animal husbandry records which include training enrichment and animal welfare and also veterinary records zoological activities with wildlife as I stated earlier is highly regulated so legal compliance for animal transactions and parts thereof which means biological samples or biofacts they carry the same requirements so for instance if an animal is endangered and those activities are regulated at the international and interstate level if you had a sample from that endangered species the same requirements would apply and so this is a huge core job duty of the zoological registrar in learning how to achieve compliance with all these different regulations every time you do an animal transaction you have to toss your net your scope to make sure that you're not violating any local state federal or international legislation or regulations so this is just a couple of there's a couple of slides here that are basically I'm not going to go through every one but you can see I wanted you to look at the duties and you can see you can relate that to what you're learning in the MARA program if if you happen to already be working in a REM job you can kind of look in this and see how this relates so yes we have we have retention schedules in particular our position is more focused on the industry specific retention schedule so the zoo specific retention schedule there's a whole lot of records that are created specific to that core business and that's really what we're in charge of managing to date I don't know of a zoo wide records management position if there were one I would probably be applying for it because that's ultimately where I want to end up I want to be managing records at this point in my career for the entire zoo not just for the animal records but that that's an evolution that is I think it's going to happen I don't know that it'll happen before I retire but that is going to be an opportunity for people doing this job down the road it's it's that development of that career path you know where you might start out managing records for a animal division or an animal collection but with those other positions down the road when they're created you could eventually elevate to a director level job um this position managers that manages and monitors animal transactions they they coordinate with the curatorial staff again to ensure legal compliance um they are the primary liaison between the institution and government agencies so all those ones I kind of mentioned CDC USDA Fish and Wildlife um we also have some of them aren't just vendors they're more like a member service organization but a species 360 being the primary example of that they develop all our animal record keeping software it's global web-based software and it's their software in place to manage institutional record keeping their software in place to manage medical records their software in place to manage some of our captive breeding programs there's a whole lot of lingo and terminology with that so we'll get into that but the programs have to be able to manage scientific information and so they're pretty complex and training is really important um and we do have training in place through AZA for a lot of these positions the the vendors the member service organizations they provide training as well but one of the areas that I feel need to be improved with the new standards this is a key area is all the people in the zoo entering records and doing records need comprehensive training so this is an area that I think is going to be expanded over the next five or so years um these are a few more duties here so you know zoo registrars are managing the inventory of all the animals that are held some of them also have inventories for biofacts again that training is really important it's important for the zoo registrar to have the training and it's important for them to have oversight for other people that are managing records and have some accountability with that process so I think we'll see more and more of that happening the larger zoos have that it's really the smaller zoos that with the new standards they're gonna they're gonna have some work to do so within ZRA uh this is one of the hats that I wear we started this committee in 2007 at the time I was president of ZRA we created quite a few committees but the professional development committee was one that really started this process of being able to provide a flow of much needed information like the icing room certification different ways to get professional development so that this island that we had for industry specific training you know you could get in the boat and go over to shore and and learn all these things that were relevant but we were essentially cut off from it because we can only afford to be a member of so many associations so for people like me that started this journey early on and all the contacts that I made and all the networking and the people I knew and all these other associations we basically invited them to speak at the ZRA conferences not just in the exam prep workshops but also in the general session so providing information about how to do retention schedules how to do business continuity plans how to set up an archives and over the last 13 years many of those presentations have led to increased awareness it has led to many of our members looking to to get their certification it led to module two of the training certificate program that ZRA has in place now which is records and information management it's all the whole loss holistic global best practices for records management that people can now use in conjunction with and use it to establish the industry specific part of all this so ZRA has the ICRM mentorship program every year with its annual conference we have a pre-con where we do these workshops this year we're doing our first ones virtually I think the virtual exam prep workshops are going to continue both at the ICRM level but also at it's with its partner associations there's a lot of people that don't get the funding to go to conferences unfortunately hopefully that'll change but you know not everybody has the funding to be able to go to a conference if we can provide we've now got this online training program and we've got the virtual workshops so I think that is going to be just a huge help to many people so I've talked a little bit about the training certificate program that says something that we actually worked with Dr. Franks and Dr. Dolby they they reviewed our content gave us some really good input on making sure that at least for module two that we were covering the right things and of the six modules these were all the program itself was released in October of 2018 we've had just under a hundred members and non-members so it's open to non-members as well purchase this program so it's a great program for people just starting to do this job in zoos and aquariums but it's also helpful to those that have been in the profession for many years and sometimes you get complacent about keeping your your skills and competencies up you know I see your certification has a very rigorous strenuous certification maintenance program associated with it that forces you to maintain your skills if you don't have a sort of certification that does that and your institution doesn't give you a lot of funding for professional development you know you might you might be lacking in these skills and so this is very important you know especially with the paper based systems our profession is still pretty heavy in paper based systems so it's very important that with the new standards in place through az a that we we acquired the skills needed to transition to electronic records management paper based systems are no longer considered best practice you might have legacy systems in all kinds of different media but for managing the information that we have to manage we really do need to focus a hundred percent on embracing electronic records management systems not just for animal records but for all that supporting all those file systems and all the supporting documentation that goes along with that so that is what this program at least module two is focused on that the other modules cover all those other core duties so we're moving away from the self-taught situation to where we have more comprehensive programs for training so it's an exciting time for anyone entering this profession they will have more support more training more professional development to get started and be effective in this role we like I said we started the exam prep workshops in 2008 we've done one with every annual conference since that time so 13 years and this year was the first time doing it virtually which will be next week so we have three half days that we're doing very the same exact process that we do for all the other partner events whether it's ARMA or the NAGARA the various other associations that we work with so I think this might be the last slide there this is just for you to use after the presentation if you want to check out some of these sites AZA does provide a really comprehensive job board I mean there's just hundreds of jobs on there all the time and the zoological registrar job is one of those we do have a lot of people that are at retirement age in this job so I would say in the last couple of years we have seen a lot of positions open up for the job so I think that's going to continue for a while we also have seen the increase of assistant registrar jobs so for those larger and medium sized zoos where the volume of information is just too much for one person to manage and in conjunction with the change in our technology where these systems require an administrator it's not just one person entering information in the system anymore it's someone administering that program someone doing quality control doing training of other people doing direct entry in the programs and that has resulted in you know a lot more of these assistant positions being created the zoo registrars association the third link there you can join it's not a lot of money at all I think it's $30 for an associate membership $30 a year and what happens is if you join at the associate membership level you don't have to be a full-time registrar you just have to have an interest in ZRA and in records but that listserv is really really helpful you get you can just learn the whole job basically by monitoring that listserv and that's where we share and post job opportunities I think ZRA is looking at incorporating a job board through its website but until they do that it's listserv where those jobs are posted so I want to open it up to questions first and then we can kind of involve Pat in the discussion about some potential things that we might be able to do to open up more internships specifically like what Faith was talking about exclusively for Mar or applies to MLIS as well oh that sounds like a private this is to anyone who's interested in working in archives and records and wants to pursue that type of career yeah and let me just touch on the standards that I was referencing with AZA so in January of 2020 came out with five additional standards for accreditation for records one of those requirements is that you have a retention schedule for animal and veterinary records another one was that you have a business continuity plan for animal and veterinary records so you know this is going to be a huge area where zoos are still primarily paper based I think we're going to see a lot of evaluation happening on how they can make that transition to electronic because if 99 percent of your records are born digital and you're still printing stuff out to put in paper systems you know you get into the situation where okay which one is the official record copy and how do you know that they're always exactly the same and and the paper has been updated with what's been created electronically so that it's going to be a huge area another area is because a lot of our vendors probably all of them now species 360 tracks and some of the other ones that provide our animal record keeping software they are now cloud hosted so that it's no longer on-premise systems for that it's cloud hosted and so zoological registrars need to understand those cloud hosting agreements the service level agreements so that they can speak to the business continuity plans that these vendors have in place for our animal records and then one of the other ones is as we do animal transactions especially with animal dispositions we're we're shipping animals to other zoos having a complete history of that animals records is really important especially not only with all that husbandry information I talked about but for documentation like if you imported an animal previously there's certain paperwork that you need to be able to provide to show that you legally acquired that animal and once that animal is imported and that paperwork is established any transfer that that animal might do to another zoo that's always going to rare it's head that's always going to be important to know otherwise you know if the zoo importing can't show they legally acquired it then the next zoo that gets the animal they're not going to be able to show that either so the new standard now requires our position to assemble all that animal history information and paperwork and make sure that it goes with the animal to the next institution and then the other standard was again centered with training so if you are a zoological registrar you need to be able to demonstrate that you acquired the training they give the resources you get to choose where you get your training from but you need to be trained and if you are allowing other employees such as animal keepers to enter information to create information on the animal collection they need to be trained as well so the standards are really great they're really important because it's kind of it's it's providing senior management support that up until now may not have been provided it's providing hopefully some budget and some resources and the ability for zoo registrars that have not had access to professional development to keep their skills up they can now be supported to get those skills so this is huge and I'm really excited about it and I think that any of you that you know primarily zoos and aquariums are not for profit there are some some corporate level ones like Disney and SeaWorld those are all corporate level and you know the pay is very just like any other job depending on where the zoo is located the elevation the promotion of the position itself in that particular institution all that impacts pay structure position and all of that so that's no different than anywhere else you would work it's the same and Pat you might be able to speak a little bit to that as well but I agree with that I was just going to ask while you're answering that question if you're monitoring the chat because we have a few other questions coming in and if you're not I can read them to you yeah if you don't mind that would be great okay I see one from Sylvia here and she wanted to know if you need to have a biological science background do you have one so I do I mean when I first went to college I wanted to be I wanted a degree in animal science and I wanted to be a curator and I went to the school that I went to for two years came back about a minute started getting bills couldn't get on as a full-time keeper at the zoo and that's when I got the record's position well once I got in that position I loved it and I ended up finishing finishing my education with a degree in business management and an MBA which I have found extremely useful in this position I mean I have used every single aspect of everything I learned in college as well as a certification so that job description that I referenced I linked to it it is available on the public side of the ZRA website it's sort of like what ZRA promotes as the best job description for this role I think degrees are listed as preferred not required and most people this is so typical that yeah you might have a degree but the likelihood of it being a Morrow program degree very rare within our profession usually someone's going to have an animal science degree they might have an MLIS degree but you know and we've seen that increasing more recent in the early years there was a handful of people that had those degrees and of course they were charting the way and leading the way for this for this job but many of them have psychology degrees or animal science degrees and that's why we work so hard to share all the information that the ICIRM is doing with partnering with PATS program and the other programs out there so that if members are at a stage where they can get this education they can get access to it we also indicate a preference for certification either ICIRM certification or maybe museum studies certification archivist certification any of that is going to help you in this job and for you all who are graduating from what I consider to be the best master's degree program and records management archives and records management you would obviously have a pretty good leg up entering this profession they're saying a related question about certification process and so you mentioned several different types of certification what maybe would be their best option I would wreck well I'm going to recommend ICIRM just because it covers everything I mean you could get a you could be a certified archivist and that would serve you pretty well because most of our records are permanent retention so being able to establish a digital archives and all of that is really really important but you need those other skills too and I just think that the ICIRM certification gives you the biggest bang for the buck. A number of our courses for the students that don't know both 10 in the MARA and five in the MLAS program are pre-approved by the Academy of Certified Archivists as well so we do have 15 courses that if you took and you wanted to sit for that certified archivist exam you could say I have the preparation in order to sit for this certification exam. We do have a couple of other questions so do the duties and responsibilities for your position align with the ones you showed us from ZRA so you personally your own duties and responsibilities do they align with what you were talking about? Yeah so the professional development committee is the one that developed those job descriptions and I mean I will say I provided quite a bit of input on being able to describe the duties specific to records management I provided a lot of that information as a result of my certification as a result of 30 years working in the profession and understanding the most effective structure for this position blue skying it this is how this would be the most effective if a zoological registrar was part of the animal management team they have oversight for developing policies and procedures specific to records management they understand how to manage active and inactive records they understand how to do archives they understand the life cycle approach to managing records so absolutely the job description in my role at the St. Louis Zoo is hardwired in that framework absolutely. Very good so this going along with what someone would need to know what sorts of competencies with someone in an entry-level position need to fill so Erin says she doesn't know if you'd be able to answer this but are there classes at SJSU that would match these so from the classes that you know of being taught at SJSU do they allow students to gain the competencies to be able to work in an entry-level position yes yes okay absolutely far beyond what is needed for the entry level and specific courses I think Erin Ray is very familiar with the MARC courses because she's reviewed them all so the basic ones that are taught there that are required would fulfill that but you also if you're looking at the MLS program have very similar courses there I'm thinking of info 249 electronic records you have a fantastic info 256 with with archives and in manuscripts I believe and there are a number of others too so I believe we have a number of courses that would prepare you there's another question is it is the profession easy or difficult to find employment in well yes there was the day where the generation of friends I'm 57 years old I have been working as a zoo registrar since 1985 so I and before that I mean I started at San Antonio Zoo when I was 80 in 1982 so 17 years old so literally I've been in this profession my entire adult life so even though I've been in the business 37 years and you know I've still probably got at least a decade before I retire I can't retire until I'm eligible for Medicaid or Medicare whatever it is that so we have a lot of people that fall in that niche we also have a lot of people that are ready to retire now and so ZRA has over 200 members now and the demographics of the membership we're starting to kind of see the number of people retiring getting ready to retire it's getting closer now it's more balanced with the number of new people entering the profession either because someone retired and now we have a person that took their place we have someone that was promoted we have you know a lot of times when people retire that is when they elevate a position and they add assistant positions it's it's a good time if someone's been in position for a long time it's good to evaluate the needs to make sure that that position is still aligned with the business needs so that's what we're seeing we're seeing a lot of that happening right now so I think the opportunities are better right now than they've ever been and I think that's only going to increase I think the next five to ten years there's going to be a lot of opportunity for people already in the profession but also for people like you they're going to be graduating from these programs and looking for job opportunities again you know if you're interested in working for nonprofit a lot of people are a lot of people don't want to work in a corporate situation your your pay is usually better in corporate especially with records management if you're talking pharmaceutical energy utility the pay is outstanding but they own you lock stock and barrel I mean you know you're the hours that you're going to work or you have to be ready for that what I love about the jobs in the zoo profession is that you do have a pretty good work life balance you know you're expected to be high quality top notch a lot of high standards for the work that you do but you do have a good work life balance that's what I would say you might like to make a little less money but your work life balance is typically going to be better than what it would be in a corporate situation that's also something yes that's very important to consider I there is a someone oh Sarah wants to know if you could repeat the recommended certificate name I think you talk about the ICRM first but not the certificate name are you talking about the the training program that ZRA developed the training certificate program Sarah can you clarify what that was in response to is that the specific zoo related certification you can just hit in the chat area if you'd like and I don't see that so I imagine we could say too that generally something from ICRM like the certified records management certification would be good but then the zoological certification is which yeah so let me just make a little bit of a clarification so the ZRA certificate program it's it's not a certification it's a certificate program so it's going to give you a snapshot in time view of the core duties of the register position it's going it goes beyond what we do as records managers it covers all the core duties of the register role which is you know the core tenets of animal record keeping records management biofacts biological samples animal transport and permit compliance so those are all the core duties so we do many many things records management is a huge part of what we do but we also ship animals import animals export animals we manage biofact inventories we import and export biological samples and we have to know how to use these industry specific record keeping programs I think Sarah clarified that and she said I she thinks it started with an I so I think it was the ICRM you mentioned but you didn't specify the certification title yeah yeah yeah and you know because you're in a program I'm speaking to an audience that has an opportunity to get credit for the ICRM exams parts one through five I mean you know I encourage you to do that because you're investing all this time to get the degree program why not leverage that same investment in time instead of you know getting your degree with the MARA program and then having to start the process all over again with getting the ICRM certification taking the exams applying this is a really great partnership and it's just a wonderful value add for you as a graduate of this program okay I think there's something else someone wanted to know is there do you see an increase in virtual opportunities yes yes good yeah the training program in particular so we launched that the ZR training certificate program we launched that in 2018 it was it's really the first comprehensive online training program for this position in the how about for work great how about for jobs do you see any of the registrar's duties being done virtually or partially virtually oh okay maybe I misunderstood your question um well I'll say this being fully converted to digital records management has definitely ensured that I could do my job from home during this pandemic I would like to think that when the dust settles and we are able to get back in the workplace more fully that we will be able to demonstrate that we can work from home an acceptable amount of time maybe not full time like we are right now but you know that's going to help work life balance because I mean we haven't missed the stuff I mean we are fully digital I can pretty much do my entire job from home so I do think that hopefully the situation that we've come through as hard as it's been for everybody I think that it has forced us to make improvements forced us to be more flexible forced us to be more accommodating and we've really discovered that we really can do remote work successfully so I mean we've seen it with conferences we've seen it with a lot of different areas so I I think so I mean that's my best that's my opinion that it will increase and I think it's going to open up some interesting employment situations I think we see that in a lot of different industries people are learning that they can do work from home and they've invested in the technology they need now to do it so some people are saying gee I could be more productive if I could even work home three days a week and go in the office you know yes I think we'll see more a move in that direction one of our students said the ICRM also has a mentorship program so you there is a program to help students who are preparing to take the exam I think there's one exam everybody has to take its key studies that's probably the most difficult because that relies on your practical knowledge and there are mentors that would be available to help you prepare for that yes they have a comprehensive mentorship program if you go to icrm.org and under the about page when you scroll down to board of regents the contacts for the mentorship committee are listed there and they are also working on some mentorship for parts one through five historically we've only done it for part six the written case study but they're expanding that now so the exam prep workshops also are a tremendous help to anybody trying to prepare to prepare for these workshops some people are okay studying in isolation and you can get all the information that you need to study and prepare for the exams off the icrm website but not everyone is comfortable doing it that way they want to be either in a virtual room or an in-person workshop where they can hear other people's interpretations they can get advice from all different kinds of speakers and things um so we have found that you know where people prefer that method we found it very valuable and very successful I think it helps you if you want to prepare in a hurry I did not take a prep course for the icrm exam so I had to read all of the materials but I just took a certification exam for a new uh certificate um a certified information governance officer so I decided I'll just sign up for the week long prep it was just three days four hours but boy did that help focus that helped me know what I should really be spending my time on rather than grabbing all these books that you recommend and reading books you know right wondering which part of the book is going to be the most important for whoever made up the exam so I think it helps focus you on the right uh content if you're going to spend your time studying these we'll do it on the right right pieces definitely I don't see any other questions uh so one last call out there does anybody have any other questions even if you want to open your mic feel free to do that we're about at the top of the hour I have a question for faith since faith is um faith I don't remember when you took the job at milwaukee county zoo but I would love to hear your input on some of the stuff that I've presented here today um just another person working within the zoo profession to add some context to some of the stuff that I've said you know from someone other than me certainly um I'm kind of on the other end of the spectrum I started as a registrar at milwaukee county zoo in 2018 so I've only been here for a few years uh and essentially that was my entrance into the the zoo field I had had several internships um one as an animal keeper and one as with directly with a registrar at the dallas zoo um and it was that internship that really kind of my desire to be a registrar um unlike you we are not completely digital and so one of the biggest sort of difficulties in my job right now is bringing our zoo to a digital system right I I hate the paper bigelies I really do and you know some some keepers take to it like a duck to water and some are dying screaming into it COVID has made that additionally hard because I really like to do one-on-one training yeah when it comes to um into record keeping um it's not the most efficient way but it's a good balance between the people that get it really quickly and those that don't um I also I took the institutional record keeping course through AZA and I have taken the ZRA training certificate program and they were both very helpful for me great first I want to thank everybody for attending we could remain on but I I know that other people have other commitments so uh