 All right, hello everyone and well, thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar. This is the fourth in your AART series to complement person training for Texas Heritage Responders team. So after today's program, we'll be through. These programs are made possible through the generous grant funding support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. So today's program kicks off a bit of a marathon this month. Go ahead and move over your schedule as a reminder. And Andrew, if you don't mind, I'm actually just going to go ahead and mute you until. So you'll see from the schedule that next week we'll continue the series with more of these materials specific salvage considerations. Next week we'll be looking at textiles and then the following week we'll be looking at programs on working with wooden and upholstered furniture. So please refer to this slide as a reminder of the four upcoming programs. If you miss any sessions, I will email you after the program to the webinar recording. Simply email me when you have finished viewing the program. Sure to mark it in your... Before we begin today's presentation, just a quick refresher of technical notes. On your screen you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left hand side. And you can use that box, of course, to say hello and ask questions, share any information or resources that you'd like. If you post a question in the chat box, she'll receive a response from me. Again, I'm showing up as Eric today. So you'll receive a response from Eric for show. Any questions will be noted, collected, and then I will verbally ask them of Andrew during your break in the presentation. Today we have the return of the web links box at the bottom of your screen. Andrew has supplied some really helpful online resources for the group. Click to highlight the link in blue and then click the browse to button to visit the site. And with that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's presenter, Andrew Robb. Andrew is head of photograph conservation and the coordinator of the emergency team for a large research library in Washington, D.C. He also serves as a point of contact to the Natural and Cultural Resources Support Group of the Federal National Disaster Response Framework. He's on the steering committee of the Heritage Emergency National Task Force. He's been a conservator and consultant for a variety of institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Getty Conservation Institute, the National Park Service, and Harvard University. He is a member of the National Heritage Responders and deployed to the Brooklyn Recovery Center after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. He also assisted with recovery efforts in Hawaii, Japan, Russia, and Washington, D.C. Andrew has a past program chair and chair of photographic material specialty group and is served as the co-chair of the AIC Emergency Committee. He is a professional associate of the American Institute for Conservation. He majored in photograph conservation from the Winniter University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation and received a BA with honors in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania. And with that, I'd like to turn things over to Andrew for his presentation on photograph and electronic media salvage. Sure. Thanks, Jess. Can everybody hear me? You sound great. OK. So for about the next hour, I'm going to be going over a lot of different topics related to salvage of photographs and electronic media. It's going to go over, I think, what should fit for just about everybody in the audience, but it's a good group in the sense that there are a lot of different types of professions represented, different types of responsibilities people may have in an emergency. So I'm trying to kind of keep this at the right level for everybody involved. But it's interesting to see two photographer conservators that are at least on the roster. And so you have some folks involved that I know well. And this may be very basic for them. But I think it's going to be a good start to what I hope really helps all of you work together when you have these kinds of emergencies. And that's where we'll start. I think when we're looking at risks, one of the biggest ones is it's related to water and whether storms are a big source of that. And everybody in Texas knows this from this past fall with Hurricane Harvey and past incidents going back into Rita and Katrina. So certainly when you're looking at risks, you first start with what kinds of natural incidents can happen. They can be large. They can be small flooding. Water are common themes throughout wherever you are, depending upon the nature of the incident or the risk. But they also can be small. Sprinklers can be a source of water, plumbing, all sorts of pipes. The kinds of things that are in cultural institutions where collections are stored can also be a risk. And they can be a risk in a small way. They can be, you can have drips or other kinds of things. So the real focus of what I'm going to talk about for photographs and electronic media is it's really going to be about water. Most incidents will have water in some way and most of our collections are very vulnerable to water. And that'll be a common theme as you get into hearing from other folks like Randy about book and paper and David about paintings, among other things. Water is a common theme. So we'll go over that dealing with scale from small to large. And that's where you want to look at those web links and get into more detail about different materials, the photographic materials, article by Hendrickson Lesser is very good as well as the other resources from the Conservation Center and ADCC Library of Congress, the book from 1975 from Peter Waters about library salvage, they're all really helpful that I think we put into a context what to do in more detail that I can go into in an hour. But part of what I'm trying to do is to talk about formats, talk about their risks, talk about both small and large things how to organize yourselves. Oh, sorry, I keep pressing the arrow instead of that right part. So let's start with just some assumptions off to define some terms and some other things. And this may be somewhat repetitive, but from what is happening in other areas, but I think it's important to understand where I'm coming from. It's just the fact that when you're getting into any kind of emergency, people are going to come first, safety is paramount, then get into concern over our buildings, safe are they, how are they structurally, how are they doing and then things, collections are going to come third. So that can be a real challenge and particularly it can be a challenge when you're worried about things being wet for any length of time and we'll see with photographs there are some areas where you really do want to be concerned about any degree of water damage, any length of time, but it's important to recognize that this is just the way first responders are going to be focused. This is the way your emergency plans, if you have the major institutions will be organized, you really want to make sure that people including yourself are safe, your buildings are safe and then you'll start worrying about collections. So that's one thing to start with. From a terminology point of view, I'm going to be using four terms throughout the talk that are pretty much the definitions that you would use in any emergency context, in a FEMA context, not just a cultural institution or collection of context. Talking about preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation and this arrow and circle is meant to describe how this is really a cycle. It's a system of being ready for emergencies, planning for them, exercising so that I'm being prepared to respond to them. How do you respond to them? Hence the red, it's like that's where this really starts. Something's happened, how do you respond to it? Are you ready? What's happened? How do you get people involved? And then how do you start recovering? How do you start fixing those problems? And this is where salvage is essentially in between response and recovery. And the mitigation is the last step and it's of the cycle where you're assessing risk and trying to figure out are there ways that you can minimize risk, not just prepare for it but actually make it go away. So a helpful way or at least reduce it. So a helpful way of thinking about that is in the context of, say, medical or health context. So preparedness are the kinds of things you do to get ready. You're anticipating something, so something like a diet or exercise, things you're doing to get ready for being ready for something happening to you. Response is something has happened to you, so the classic thing within health context, particularly at a medical emergency, as you call 911, we have a system where we have a number you can call on a phone, ambulance will come and trained people will come and respond and help you and get you to a place where more resources can be brought to bear in the hospital or urgent care center. So emergency room starts being still into response where people are, that's why I've highlighted it in yellow. So response is really where you may start doing some things to stabilize the situation, but you may not go into full recovery or rehabilitation, and that's where recovery is really starting to get into, in the long run, rehabilitation. So a good way of describing this is if you have a stroke, response is involved with calling 911, having an ambulance get you, take you to a hospital. Salvation is related to, say, a stroke in the sense that you may start getting some treatment in the ambulance. It's really important to start treating things right away. And then, but even after you're stabilized and you're discharged from the hospital, you still may have a lot of rehabilitation if you have some paralysis, if you have some other issues. So we accept within a medical context these things can take a long time. It can be confusing, and I think it's worth highlighting within cultural institutions, often salvage is thought of as it's very time consuming, it's very lengthy. We'll have some examples of that where you're really just trying to stabilize the situation, and it really will take months, if not years of time, in large incidents to get fully recovered. And so that's where this is a helpful exercise. We know with different kinds of health issues that rehabilitation can be something that can take a long time. And that's where, as we talk about salvage, we're really talking to something that's sort of in that red zone. It's initial response, but it may not be full, it may not be full treatment, but it at least gets us into a place where we can stabilize the situation. And that's really what I'm going to focus on in this talk. And just a little aside, as we get into preparedness, this is an area I'm increasingly thinking about. And this quote from Dwight Eisenhower I think is really helpful, it says, in preparing for battle, I've always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. And I think that this preparedness cycle from FEMA is an aspect of that, where you're really going through a similar cycle just with preparedness. I'm not going to go into great detail about this. This is a very broad thing talking about within the context of all sorts of emergency plans. But you're planning, you're organizing, equipping, you're training, you're exercising, and then you're evaluating what you need to do, and you're doing it in a cycle. So one of my first question is, from the poll point of view, is when was the last time you updated your emergency plan if you have one? If you don't have one, you can answer zero. But this is a way, from just a preparedness point of view, you can gauge how active you are. Updating your collection plan is one of the things. But as what I like about the quote is that plans are really important, but they're not the only thing, and I think that's really what he's trying to get at, that you need to have a plan. But the thing that really helps you with the plan is that you've gone through that process, you have a lot of relationships, you have an understanding of what people are going to do, and you're as ready as you can be. But if you just stick to the plan, if you just say, well, I have a binder and I've done it, I have my emergency plan, it's in a binder, it sits over there, I'm ready, that's only one part. And it's probably not even the most important part. So it's good to see, I'm sort of getting these poll numbers back, that people that have plans have updated them fairly recently. And it isn't to say that if you haven't updated it within the last five years or over five years ago, that it's bad, but it's probably that there's some things that need to be updated or that staff need to be refreshed or there need to be some drills or exercises. And for those folks that don't have plans, that's where, particularly with the Northeast Document Conservation Center Disaster Resources, there's some really good resources for how to quickly come up with a plan. And I've got some other things if you want to talk to me at the end, I have some contact information. I can help you get started quickly. But from a preparedness point of view, whether it's for photographs or other things, you really want to put your, know what your risks are, put them into context and be ready for addressing those when you have an emergency, whether it's your photographs or other things. It can just, and hopefully it's integrating to some extent your plans for an emergency that involves people, as well as your building, as well as your collections. It's not just standing in isolation. Later in the month for Preservation Week, I'll be doing, being participating in the conference by tweets on April 26th. So if you look at the hashtag PREZTC, we're doing a mock drill on Twitter, which will be sort of fun. So if you get interested in preparedness, you can contact me. So just to go back to this water issue, these are all examples of different kinds of incidents that either primarily caused by water, such as a flood, exacerbated by water where you have now an emergency. It's really more of a mold emergency that it started with water. You have fire where, so you have fire damage and you have a lot of water because that's how the fire was put out. You can have floods from water main flakes. You can have floods from storms, hurricanes, and you can have water related to things that are from fire. So it's just, that's why I'm really gonna focus on water. It's really common throughout all emergencies that water is usually an aspect of it. And this is a concept I've been working on. It's related to sort of golden 100 hours for mold. We tend to kind of describe mold as sometimes you'll read in the literature 48 hours, to 96 hours. I'm just trying to get at something where you understand with say, stroke or heart attack, there's a golden, much smaller number of hours. And so I think 100 hours kind of helps you. It's easy to remember. And it's roughly the amount of time if you have things that are wet in the worst environment, how much time you have to really be worried until you start having mold growth issue. If you can control your environment, if you can keep your relative humidity under definitely 80%, not 70%, you really can start controlling this as a risk. But if you have wet things and they're in the summer in a place like most parts of Texas where it will be hot and humid, mold can start being a problem within 100 hours. So that's one of your biggest risks is that water gets things wet, particularly with photographs. Gelatin that's on most photographs is a really perfect environment for mold to grow. So you really wanna be worried about mold. And that's one of our biggest things it's not just the amount of damage at the water crisis, it's what will that happen in your environment? And then we've seen that within, particularly Puerto Rico, a lot of problems with mold because of hurricanes there. So that's where now you haven't stabilized your situation. It's getting worse. Now you have water damage things and you're getting things damaged by mold. So we're talking about emergencies. Another kind of contextual thing is what, how long are things takes? And that's where life safety, building safety, collection safety, these initial things in response to stabilize the situation can take days but increasingly weeks. So with collection safety, it often can take weeks to get to a point of really helping them as thoroughly as you want. Life safety is gonna come first, building safety is gonna come second. And so if you can't get into your building, if it's been closed or if it's not safe to go into because it's been damaged by an earthquake or something like that or if there's standing water inside it, it may be days, if not weeks, until you can get to your collection. And that's where this 100 hours starts being a problem. When you're really talking about, that's the, my dog barking at the mailman. So if you're talking about recovery, so that's sort of a response timeline. When you're talking about recovery, you're really talking about months to possibly years. And again, when will services come back online? When will buildings come back online and when will collections be fully accessible and recovered? So this is again where sometimes it can be daunting enough to just stabilize the situation for collections. It can take weeks if not months, a lot of money and then people get frustrated that you're still not done and that years later you still are working on collections. That's the reality and we'll talk about that a little bit. So let's start getting into photographs and this is a really condensed way of doing it but I'm basing a lot of this off of what is on the classic emergency wheel and trying to just divide things into places that make sense to people that are easy to understand. And particularly Deanna and Fernanda will just laugh because this is an overly simplistic way of doing it but it's a place to start. It's a common vocabulary and I think when you're looking at particularly emergencies with large scale, this is a good way to divide things out. So when we're talking about 20th century photographs, really inkjet prints are by far the predominant material. There are things that you're doing from your printers at home and work and most of your color photographs now are gonna be inkjet prints. It isn't exactly true but broadly speaking, you should be worried about inkjet prints because as we'll see they're very sensitive to water and that's your common 21st century material. In the 20th century, that is in the last 100 years, you have color prints, black and white prints, film and transparencies. The things that we're typically used to if you're my age, if you're growing up in the 60s and 70s, your collections will definitely have these things if you had photographs in the 20th century and they're more robust, thankfully, to water than inkjet prints. They have some sensitivities we'll get into that but they're pretty straightforward to take care of and as we'll see the solutions, you can really take the same approach and how to deal with all of them. Maybe it will be most likely the bulk of your collections if you have large amounts of material that have any kind of history. If you start getting into the 19th century, you're already talking about photographs that are mounted onto boards, collodion prints, of human prints and also possibly some more unusual things, negatives on glass, photographs in cases like daguerreotypes or amber types. Those things with stars, those asterisks are there to say they're unusual, they're rare, there are some things about them though that are important, they're early and you might need to take special care with those things but the common denominator with those two things is negatives on glass, photographs in cases is you really, really don't want to have them get wet in the first place. So that if they do get wet, there's some things you can do with them but the recovery methods are very time intensive and you really, if you're putting in your preparedness point of view, you really want to avoid having them get wet. Broadly speaking, you want to avoid having all of your cultural material get wet but there's some things that we'll see you can do with these materials. So if we can do our survey question for photographs, that would be helpful to see just to see what people have and how much they have, if you've done that before but I've tried to break this out into sort of what I, it's interesting because I'm already seeing that I was wondering if I should have more than even 10,000 photographs but this is a helpful way of kind of understanding scale and scale any emergency, whether it's for photographs or for other cultural material is always an issue but it's going to be a lot more simple to deal with an emergency, an institution that has less than a thousand things than it is for over 10,000 things but when you start getting into over 10,000 things it's going to be a challenge particularly in a large scale emergency to deal with all of them before you start running out of time and that's where one of the biggest solutions and I'll go into this in a little more detail is freezing things. So if you start getting into something that you can't handle with the staff and resources you have and the time you have freezing becomes, starts being an important thing. You may not need to use that so much for those smaller incidents but if there's only one person on staff freezing still might be a good solution for less than a thousand things and this is where the, as we get into there's some caveats we'll have to get into in freezing but that scale is an important thing regardless of the material but definitely with photographs even a small institution, small collection a small collector can have actually a lot of photographs that can be a challenge to take care of even in a say family situation where it's just your family things you can have a lot and these are some examples of just some different kinds of photographs, black and white photographs that we're familiar with. Color transparencies on the right photographs, black and white photographs in the 19th century that are mounted onto album pages that in this case have a lot of other writing and other associated materials with them. The album actually on the bottom left corner has photographs made from glass plate negatives you can see those in various ways just to the right of them and then other kinds of archival photographs sometimes mounted on board, sometimes not but one of the most difficult things with photographic collections and is just their sheer variety of the different kinds of photographs and to some extent the different ways they're stored they're different sensitivities and so this is just to give you sort of a flavor the generally speaking there are a lot of different kinds of things and you need to have some sense of what you have and how you might approach them what things are more sensitive than others and that's where particularly if you have photographs on glass you have photographs in cases those are things that you really should try to avoid having get wet at all then you may get into other things that are really important to you may be thinking about different kinds of housing furniture like gasketed cabinets or other kinds of things just to avoid having them get wet at all so one of our biggest issues with photographs and one of the things that we're really trying to avoid is having them block so this is a good example from some resources that I did list on the web links and I'll have to, the IPI Image Permanence Institute has a lot of resources on what happens to digital media and I'm using some of those resources here because it really is helpful research they've done in terms of, for example, showing blocking so whether it's 21st century prints whether it's 20th century normal what I would call normal photographs color of black and white photographs the materials on them typically gelatin when it gets wet will then as it dries adhere to other things and you can have a block together stack of things so one of the issues that we're worried about with photographs besides like where we have so much time before mold starts going on them which is a common factor with all sorts of organic material with photographs we're also worried that as things get wet and they start to dry as they dry they'll stick to things and gelatin really will do this in a way that can be quite difficult to undo later so one of the things that you're really worried about in a kind of perverse way is that while you don't want things to get wet once they've gotten wet you may want to keep them wet for actually some period of time so that you can dry them in a uniform way so they're or get them apart so this is an example of a project that Alicia Chipman who was an intern with me many years ago and is now back on staff with me she worked on a project of these are negatives that had been stored under a sink and they had gotten wet over many years totally blocked together and really people thought that they were completely unsalvageable but people were concerned that there were some unique images in there and if there was any way to find out if they could get them apart we might be able to at least understand what the images were of and Alicia figured out with some really ingenious techniques of freezing items and just and then how they were thought to get them apart it was not actually particularly complicated and it had really good results so this is an example of something where these things had been wet and dried, they'd gotten blocked it seemed really a problem but in fact there was something to salvage and that's a common theme is that while I'm pressing upon you the sensitivities of these materials and you wanna do this quickly soon you don't want them to get wet in the first place you often can salvage things with enough patience and time in the future so just getting something dry and stable even if it's not usable can be beneficial to you in the long run and there's still a lot of things we're working out I mean this is what she did about seven or eight years ago when she was finishing up her internship year but it was really impressive and so it's also where maybe you should keep something even if it has damaged it's not getting worse because you may be able to do something with it in the future this is an example of some agent material so it's from the IPI research and this is where water just was dripped on to the surface of the photograph and you can see all of those water droplets and this was within minutes of they're getting wet so this is from a risk point of view these modern materials you're basically your prints from the 20th century their inkjet prints to some extent they are much much more sensitive to water they may not bleed or do quite this badly in a test this is a pretty dramatic failure but they will be altered and they may it may be quite soon it may be quite soon in the sense of before you are allowed into a building so again you're getting into some preparedness things you want to know where those 21st century materials are you want to know for example if those are unique to you or if you have copies how important they are but some of these items are so sensitive that really at this point there's not much that a conservator can do except dry the materials, stabilize it but you're not really going to be able to get this print back into something that's at all like what it looked like before this damage has happened you can at least see what your image is now but if you cared about this from an artwork point of view it may be it may not be very useful to you on the other hand from a lot of documentary photographs this while not being ideal could be a very acceptable recovery method in the sense of you can still see that it's a glass you can still see the colors in it you could still use it for research purposes and as we'll see in one of the examples from Hawaii there can be ways of salvaging material that even parts of photographs can be useful so let's switch over to electronic media a little bit electronic media isn't exactly my area but it certainly has some similarities with photographs and it's why I'm putting it in here I think that it's important to know you have a lot of overlap now in collections whether it's that have informational things but even in an art context there are people that are using imagery that are using digital materials using digital machines so electronic media and photographs are often together in collections regardless of the context it used to be relatively easy to describe what to do with electronic media because for a long period of time you really were talking broadly about magnetic tape audio tapes and video tapes but as we started to enter into the digital world we started getting into things that are different from magnetic tapes at first digital media was still using a magnetic tape to store up, you started getting discs which are also magnetic media just in a different configuration but starting really into the 90s definitely by the turn of the century you start getting into optical discs CDs, DVDs and increasingly then digital things thumb drives, hard drives that can be quite problematic they're very sensitive to water but for very different reasons than photographs they're sensitive to water and typically all of these have some sort of metallic component there's a metal pigment in a binder that's on magnetic tapes you have components of these devices that are metal like hard drives that if they get wet they can corrode and make them very difficult to retrieve and then of course almost by definition electronic media are machine readable there are things that require so you have a diverse amount of material here are different kinds of tapes this is from UCLA that at the musicology collection lots of different kinds of material and that's again the challenge that similar to photographs you can have these materials in your collection and if they're diverse you may not completely know if you can even play them back if you don't know what's on them it can be overwhelming in scale too and the common denominator with them is that it takes a machine so it used to be that generally people would be acquiring these things because they wanted to use them they wanted to play them they wanted to, they had the devices they had the expertise to use them to, they were machine readable but they had the machines in this case a four track but now we're in a position where we have a lot of materials that we don't necessarily have those machines and then a lot of times those machines are increasingly obsolete and their capacity to get them copied or migrated is a challenge even without an emergency so one of the biggest issues in an emergency with electronic media is it's really difficult to figure out ways to salvage them particularly when you don't even have the machine so one of the biggest issues with electronic media is you really want to be prepared you want to have the expertise there to help you, typically an outside vendor that can help you with these formats because it really takes special equipment special materials and a real challenge but it can be something that can be integrated into how you're dealing with those materials broadly in your collection so let's talk, so we talked a little bit just about those materials a little bit about their sensitivities and now I'm going to go into what the salvage wheel talks about with photos and this is good advice it's good practical basic advice for how to start salvage if possible you want to get things out of frames and sleeves before they dry things will stick to glass they'll stick to different components of a sleeve or a component so one of the, or a frame so you want to, you may, you want to really want to focus on do you have things apart however, if you're taking things out of sleeves you want to make sure that oh, I skipped a question we'll come back to that in a second but you really want to make sure that if you're taking things out of sleeves that you're saving the information about that item sometimes a sleeve, negative sleeve for example is the only place that you have information and that information may be the most important part about how the item is organized and if you lose that you may save the photograph but you have no way of putting it back into a collection or organizing it so that can be a challenge of keeping these things together you really want to be careful about surfaces those gelatin surfaces, they're wet or they're humid, they're really sensitive they can get scratched things can transfer onto them like inks or other kinds of things so you want to be careful and that's one of the challenges that's different from say paper or books is that those materials are weak when they're wet but they're typically not as sensitive and they take up less space as you're doing recovery so space can be a real problem when it comes to photos and if you're air drying them you want to keep them from touching because as they dry it's not so much that they're wet it's the problem, it's how to dry them in a way where they're not sticking to things and they're not getting further damaged and it's really, really likely with a photograph incident that you may have too many for immediate attention and that's where that sense of the size of your collection and the number of people you have is important but you may have to do some counterintuitive things like for 20th century photographs that is those transparencies, negatives, black and white prints, color photographs you may decide that you don't have time to get them all dry before they start to dry and stick together so you actually would immerse them in cold water for if wheel says less than 48 hours if they're in good condition and the water's cold it's been my experience that you can do that for longer than 48 hours so that's where that asterisk is there it's like you could get away with more if you needed it but this is also where if you're really starting to think about that timeframe you really should start thinking about other options like freezing if you freeze them you want to make sure that you're interleaving your photographs so that as they thaw or as they dry it's easier to get them apart they don't block it's not that the freezing will cause them to block but it's just making it easier for you to handle them as they're frozen and if they're all frozen together you still may be able to thaw them to get them apart but you're left with things that are in really big groups so the interleaving is there so that you can get smaller groups that you may be able to thaw or manage more easily and then the wheel does rightly so you don't want to freeze glass negatives because there's a type of glass negative collodion ones that really can't withstand freezing they also can't really withstand getting wet so it's unlikely that you would ever actually need to freeze them because by the time you got to them collodion wet plate negatives would probably everything would come off the surface it is possible to freeze a later kind of glass plate negative called the dry plate it's been done quite successfully but it's time consuming and difficult so the asterisk is there to say that it's possible and you frankly may be in a situation where if you're at the scale where you're having to start considering freezing you may not have a lot to lose by freezing everything to begin with freezing is a good solution for almost all photographs so when you're at that scale where you don't have time to triage to find the things that you're the most worried about freezing can be a good solution and you may just have to accept that you have some types of photographs like those wet plate negatives that really can't withstand it but they're very unusual you'll probably know that you have them and hopefully you've taken measures to prevent them from being damaged so that's a big sort of run through of some very basic things you're gonna try to air dry them you're gonna try to keep them from drying and sticking together and you wanna be careful about your surfaces so for electronic media wanna avoid scratching them so you wanna get dirt off of things you wanna rinse them you know clear clean or clear water there'll be even suggestions for distilled water that can be a real issue in terms of not wanting to put material onto things and so that if it dries it may make readings say a magnetic media difficult so this is again where unless you have a really, really small number of things having a data recovery company having a contingency contract with a company that can help you really may be necessary and when you say large jobs it can be really even what might be for even photograph collections small you will need expertise in this area particularly if these collections are important to you and you're unfamiliar with them but if you really don't have a lot of resources and you have collections that you're worried about for like say tapes and disquets you wanna remove them from their cases you wanna air dry them you wanna get the components apart and then you wanna figure out once they're dry how you could get those copied and possibly reformatted disquets can be frozen but they need to be frozen relatively quickly and so that's again where you sort of get into this golden 100 hours with CDs and DVDs you can air dry them but they can't be freeze dried and that has a lot to do with the way that they're made up and how they respond when their vacuum is pulled on them and there's really not a lot of good information that I can find in the literature on hard drives and thumb drives so I would say basically you're doing somewhat similar things to tapes and disquets you may take them apart you may try to rinse them with clean water but you're really gonna want to have someone help you with this and to make some decisions and also from a preparedness point of view through a mitigation point of view one of the things with that kind of digital media is that hopefully there's some sort of system in place where you don't have a lot of unique material when they're only on one place that this is where while there's some other preservation disadvantages with say using the cloud different conversation, you know cloud, lots of copies can really help you on your digital materials and can help you in a sense of saying I don't care about any of that media over there all of that's backed up it's somewhere else I can focus on my unique analog things so that's kind of a summary of what the what's helpful for electronic media and these are some examples from the Florence flood of just like what's too many and too many is hard to quantify absolutely because it really depends on the resources that you have to bear the space you have, the staff you have they're familiarity with the problem but this gives you a sense of what was possible in Florence where you see on the bottom on the left side of the screen that these are large folio pages that are being dried over essentially your drying lines that are then rotated on vertically so they can be moved around sort of like what happens in a dry cleaner but this is like a multi-story space within the Bibliotek National and it was used for many months I think for drying these things so it is possible with enough resources people's space to do all sorts of things without freezing but this is where you start getting into too many this would not be the approach that people would take now and generally with things of large scale you go to freezing so it literally is putting things into freezers it doesn't have to be fancy it can be household freezer they're commonly commonly used in Japan it was amazing how many different kinds of freezers I saw this is a top loading freezer that a normal household freezer is fine and really what you're doing is buying yourself time with freezing and a lot of as I said photographic collections broadly speaking at scales should be frozen if you're running it into problems with time it's very effective and it's one of the great outcomes of forms as people are really thinking about what are ways that we could do this better how can we buy ourselves time and freezing really can help you stabilize the situation and buy yourself time so that you have the resources and time to do that we'll see some examples of where freezing can come into play this is an example of immersion with the incident I was involved in small incident I was involved in where some microfilm got wet and we got five gallon buckets and we immediately got all of those things that where the film had any if it looked like it all the microfilm had gotten wet we just put it into clean cold water and then we're able to stabilize them so we can take them to film processor and have them rewetted and dried consistently and that was very successful and that's again where it's kind of intuitive it makes people nervous but you really don't want something like particularly ground film like your microfilm or motion picture film to start to dry together because you really can't get it apart safely at that point it's really really difficult and it's one of those things where you just you need to get it and to clean water so it's overall wetted it's not drying together and you do have some time and this is where you then you need to work out so within that 48 hours to 96 hours can you get that material processed and dried? Because after about three or four days you're gonna start having delamination problems so you don't have an infinite amount of time with immersion as an option but for small scale things it can be really effective and I'll check on, let me just I'll check to see if that's the resource but I think that is the resource for the, yes that looks right and so these are some examples of drying so it can be very classic drying on a line we'll see another example we'll see some details of that in a second a freeze dryer that's the machine that says Roscoe on it that's a Canadian firm that does freeze drying you can dry in a traditional way on a line in a very large scale that's Florence on the left and then in the bottom right that's a very large freeze dryer that you can walk into that an institution won't have but certainly could be used at a recovery center and there are archeological conservators that use pretty large freeze dryers maybe not ones you can walk into but pretty big ones and there are some that are in Texas so that may be a possibility as you get into sort of how do I get my things dry that I've frozen freeze drying is an art unto itself but it is increasingly the way to deal with things at scale in terms of literature but these are two of the articles that I've left for you that the salvage of water damage library materials doesn't go into great detail about photographs per se but it is one of the few things that's explicitly written for say conservators and some of you in today's session are conservators so it's really helpful for helping you think through different kinds of things where often the literature will just stop and say when you get to this point you need to talk to a conservator and so the resources for conservators are somewhat limited in terms of how to approach different kinds of water situations and Peter's book is, it's a small book it's about 50 or 60 pages it's really good for putting you in the right frame of mind for how to deal with different kinds of things and then the article by Hendrickson and Lesser is in many ways an extension of Peter's article and really gets into what to do for photographs and it describes about freeze drying and how it can work and this is where a lot of the recommendations from the wheel come from and it's still an excellent resource it was done in the 1980s and I found very little in it to quibble with it's an excellent resource if you really want to dive into what can be frozen, how to freeze dry it those kinds of things so let's go through some case studies I think I've got just about enough time to get through all of them and I think this is just put into context some situations that you may find yourself in things to think about in terms of how to but what kinds of things are possible what kinds of things should you plan for what kinds of things might you face with these materials these are both things where I've been involved in them so I'm briefly gonna put them into context but if you have specific questions you can always bring them up with me later I have my contact information later so this is a flash flood in 2004 essentially let me try to use my pointer there's a creek that goes through the University of Hawaii campus suburbs of Hualulu and this bridge is I think right here oh sorry let me put my pointer the bridge on the right is right there so this happened very quickly on a Halloween Eve and then it got into campus and so this is where the water went when it was in campus and right, let's see I'm pretty sure that is the library so the library was built in a way of lots of libraries slightly below grade and a lot of collections definitely below grade so all of this water, oops excuse me when so those windows that you see here that is essentially in a light well that goes as the library was built into a hill there was a light well and all the water went into the light well broke the windows and then went into the collection storage space that held about 90,000 maps or 30,000 maps and about 90,000 photographs and the water went as high as four or five layers of map cases created a huge amount of destruction it was muddy, it was silty, it was an absolute mess and it's the kind of thing from a risk point of view having collections in that location was problematic having collections below grade, having them in a place where floods can happen is a risk and certainly this is an example where it created a lot of problems these are aerial photographs so those photographs were all kept in file cabinets and folders and you can see that in this part of the library that the water went up about five or six feet and people are looking through particularly these high cabinets to see if water got in them or not but down here all of these all got completely submerged by this really muddy, this really muddy water for about five percent of the materials they actually were able to set up a washing and drying triage for photographs and what they did for about 7,000 photographs was really quite good and shows you what you can do with a relatively small number of people but this is where on an absolute level unless you have a lot of sinks in other places two to four people working for two or three days can get through a few thousand photographs roughly speaking so if you have more than that you're definitely not going to be able to do this in a washing kind of way but you're really going to have to go to freezing route so what people are doing, in this case this is with the map cases but the same kind of thing happened with the photographs is that in this case all the maps were just taken out in the map case drawers they were taken out, staged onto tables and then put into freezer trucks that were brought to the campus within 24 hours of the flood they had a good plan, they were prepared and that really paid off they were able to get all of these things frozen well within that 48 hour period and with the photographs what they did is they just took them out in their file folders put them into plastic bags and put them into boxes, document storage or record storage boxes and froze them so this was in 2004 and in 2007, alright and Randy he'll be talking to you later about paper and books as well as some other folks went out to Hawaii to help them figure out how to at scale deal with all of these frozen photographs and we found thankfully that actually just following them worked really well that they didn't need to be freeze dried they didn't need to be any kind of special alcohol solutions or any other kind of thing for drying them or for washing them and drying them and separating them they really could just be thawed in water so we figured out a different tray system different levels of cleanliness of water and rotating the trays and really just put stacks in water carefully peeled them apart and this could be managed and that's where that interleaving and that sort of modularization of all of your collections is helpful where they were in individual boxes and each one of those could be dealt with separately and in this case a large firm Belfort Recovery Company did all of that work but we were consulting with them to just get that protocol worked out at the very beginning and this is an example where freezing really bought them time the incident happened in 2004 by the spring of 2007 they were ready to tackle this part of the collection after they tackled the map collection and so it took many, many years to get through this but they did and they did successfully this is an area where too a lot of these aerial photographs are important because they contain sometimes the only written information about place names or places in the photographs so even a partial recovery of a photograph or something where maybe the photograph was was still damaged, made recovery important so that's another aspect that can make particularly photograph collections tricky they're not just say pristine artworks sometimes you can salvage a collection even if it's heavily damaged because there's still research value or evidentiary value in it and that can be a whole other challenge regardless of format so these are just the different kind of phototrails in a large, large washing sink and then this is where they're air-drying this is just very classic air-drying which we'll see it's a very, it's a very cheap and somewhat space intensive approach but it works freeze drying, this was used at some floods I will go into great detail about but this is the kind of smaller freeze dryer where things can be put in and then inspected as you open it up occasionally to see how things are drying and freeze drying takes advantage of the fact that if you have ice it can be sublimed when there's no pressure air pressure and the vacuum is pulled it will sublime directly to a gas it doesn't go through a liquid stage and you're only taking advantage of that and that's why freeze drying is so effective it's time consuming because it's time consuming it can be expensive but it can allow you to salvage great quantities of materials relatively cheaply and efficiently So Japan in March of 2011 is an example of just a large regional if not national disaster which Harvey started to get into that kind of realm of a very large incapacitating event across a very broad region and also with surprising damage that lots of risk assessment had gone into where cities and towns should be and the tsunami happened caused a lot of damage, many deaths due to a tsunami that had not really been in people's risk equations said walls being overturned tsunami barriers being thrown around houses being badly damaged a mile or two from the harbor a really devastating catastrophic incident Tsunamis were to some extent felled across the whole Pacific region and the scale of it was pretty daunting this is about a six-story building in Washington, D.C. and there were wave heights higher than the building so truly daunting and beyond that there were issues with radiation as we know Fukushima radio activity problem of the reactors and all sorts of other cascading problems so the earthquake itself caused extensive damage but broadly speaking was managed well it was the tsunami and particularly the effect in Fukushima that caused all sorts of other cascading problems but there were a lot of efforts to deal with photographs and one of the sort of bright spots of the whole recovery effort in Japan was something done by a smell fishing city in the north of Japan called Okunatsu and this is a photograph from April of 2011 of recovery efforts of family photographs of things found in debris fields and this is, it turns out something that I ended up seeing when I went to Japan later in the year and this effort was really remarkable things were collected and salvaged for that town as they were found extensive damage throughout Japan it was affected libraries in Tokyo some of these pictures on the top right are from Tokyo where books were knocked off the shelves three or four times and those are by aftershocks in the earthquake so one of the things that can be a challenge we're talking about specific formats but typically libraries have photographs and books and unbound materials so at scale you have all sorts of competing formats and their needs and that's one of the things that you need to understand what's sensitive about your particular area maybe as a curator or as a conservator but as an institution you may have a lot of mixed things and Japan was an example of something that was a real challenge from a scale point of view I was there in September and there were still recovering photographs from debris fields and things were in varying degrees of being dried or wet but while that might be damaged they still were salvaged and this is months after that golden 100 hours so don't take that caution about mold don't take it overly literally you can still be salvaging things weeks if not months later things were found but were marked about where they were found in the date and then they were put into freezers bags into freezers and then as there was resources go back to this photograph of the recovery effort items were washed and then laid out to dry as you see here and then dried up on the line and this is a really ingenious they got really good at this so they were using lab chairs, strings and then each of those colored pieces are separating the clips and their straws that are cut at about an inch and a half in length so this kept the photographs from touching to one another it didn't require any kind of spacing it's very elegant it was just string together your straw pieces and your clips and then you have for a typical size photograph you're not gonna touch each other so it's very elegant it was done with resources that they had broadly speaking this could have been done by freeze drying but for a variety of reasons Japan does not use a lot of freeze drying when it comes to cultural resource recovery it's a little unclear why but this was the approach they took and it worked and I think that's where freezing is the example it's something that you can use in the years and months to come to stabilize the situation and then they're just dried in a very typical conservation drying stack polyester web, blotters under rigid supports and weights and then fans blowing on them to accelerate the drying so then they dry flat so this is Satoko Kono and she was working on the project in Ofinatu and she is the one that had the gloves in that first picture and when I visited her she still had those gloves and they taught me about this term the character of the year in Japan was Kazuna and it's sort of the bonds of friendship although it's not quite translated right it seems to be more related to the bonds of common purpose and friendship it doesn't quite translate quite right but it really is something that is good about what's going on with different alliance for response and different local groups of really getting to know each other getting to understand how you're gonna respond together and you really, for things at scale you need to have a lot of people involved you need to be ready so Kazuna is a good example of what you need to be doing so we go back to sort of Texas we look at Harvey we look at the scale of where the impacts were certainly was located on the Gulf Coast that you can have any number of other kinds of emergencies that might happen in other parts of Texas there's a certainly a regional emergency and it's something where it's good to see people from so many different parts of Texas because you can help each other in times of need one of the things that we're really working on broadly it's not so much a photo issue but it's something I've been aware of easily since Katrina is the need to do a better job of knowing how to both understand risk and then understand how that impacts our cultural resources and our institutions so Washington State has done a good job of taking information about earthquakes fault lines of serious issue of tsunamis and a subduction zone that could cause a very similar kind of earthquake to what happened in Japan could happen in Seattle and Portland and so we have risk information that we're increasingly mapping and what they've done is taken that risk information and that and overlaid so that's what we have here and so we're looking at Seattle up here so this is Washington State this is Seattle and this is a map over here of Seattle so they've taken all of that information overlaid it on a map let me get rid of my pointer and then given you some ways that you can look at different kinds of different kinds of earthquakes and then look at how that might affect in this case so risk areas so Seattle, the downtown Seattle is right here the Seattle Public Library is right there no, there, right there they have a lot of photographs and in this case these aren't cultural institutions but they're hospitals and what they've done is taken the structural information about hospitals what kind of risks they're in and then given you a color code of red for the most vulnerable hospital to the least vulnerable so here you have a hospital that's in a high risk area but it's blue just like this hospital that's not in any risk area because it's probably a modern retrofitted or retrofitted hospital that is not going to be that badly affected by an earthquake, it has low risk and it's this kind of thing that I'm interested in in working with other folks definitely at the regional level the local level I think trying to gather this mapping information we've started trying to do it I'll show you an example here where this is, so they can do it for hospitals in Washington they've also done it for schools so if you can do it for schools you can do it for cultural institutions so a lot of cultural institutions but here's an example where on the left is a flood plain map that the city of Houston or the county of Harris County has put together and then you have here on the right is an attempt by me to start color coding and putting cultural institutions on that map so it's something that I just throw out there as in terms of getting ready for risk getting ready for these things I frequently these kinds this kind of information is on maps that are provided at a local or state level and we need to start organizing ourselves so that we can understand better where our cultural institutions are possibly what kind of collections they hold and we can do a better job of mitigating risk and then recovering from it when they happen because it's really the type of situation where something like Harvey happens and you know that there's flooding and other problems going on and you're worried about institutions but you don't always know exactly how bad the situation is for them in that particular place and while generally speaking cultural institutions did fairly well in Harvey and we're examples of particularly theaters and other things that were in flooded areas that we can do a better job of responding and preparing if we know about that so I just throw that out there it's just something to be thinking about I'm almost done, I love, I'll be in Houston at American Institute for Conservation Annual Meeting and if you're there and you're interested in talking to me about your experience with Harvey or other things please do so this is how to reach me it's my email, my phone number particularly if you're in an emergency don't hesitate to call me or text me and you can also get me by direct message on Twitter with that handle so that said I think I'm done and I'm ready for questions A couple of questions come in the first one was from Jennifer while you were discussing salvaging photographs so you had mentioned interleaving as part of the process of managing do you have recommendations for specific materials to use for photos? Anything? Yes Go ahead Yeah, so Yes So I think the question was what materials to use you broke up a little bit there so what materials to use for interleaving? Yeah, so there are a couple of different things one of the things that we find works the best is different kinds of deli wrap it particularly with things that aren't particularly large so particularly for books and for relatively small things like file folders it's the kind of thing that comes in a box that holds like it's like a plastic bag dispenser it's just it's plastic interleaving sheets that sandwich shops use and other things you can get wax paper and the same kind of thing so the interleaving can also be it's a little better if it's wax paper or that kind of plastic because it really will not adhere as much but if you really have to use interleaving any kind of newsprint or other kind of paper can help you too and just in terms of keeping things separate and it's not something that you absolutely positively should do in the sense that you can't get all of your stuff frozen because the interleaving is taking too long you really should stop doing the interleaving but it is a helpful way to kind of keep things as once they get frozen they may not be permanently blocked together but they are frozen together and you're then stuck with a mass that can be bigger than you want so there are always ways to get around these problems and that's one of the challenges with kind of initial salvage is doing it in an efficient way that you can get it done but also doesn't create more problems for you later but I can send you some pictures or we can include it at the end of the sort of addendum to the presentation about what that is but essentially it's just sheets of plastic that typically deli wrap is absolutely fine or cut sheets of newsprint but I would say the deli wrap works pretty well and it's easier to get apart yeah I mean yeah I would I mean generally with interleaving that you might use for other kinds of things and Randy may go into this on the book and paper side you don't have to worry too much about the quality of the paper during the drying side but yes having using newspaper that has ink on it can you know it's possible that it could be a problem transferring or getting on your things but if you had nothing else and you had a lot of newspapers that might be okay but if I was stuck in that position I'd really try to use something more that might be more like artist newsprint or something like that that doesn't have printing on it yeah I mean wax paper is nice because it doesn't absorb a lot of water and wax as it generally doesn't really stick too much unless it starts to melt so when you're dealing with freezing and water wax is really good and so wax paper will work too and that's where essentially the plastic that's being used for the plastic deli wrap is very similar to wax so typically polyethylene or polypropylene it has a lot of similar characteristics to wax the website that you mentioned about seismic risk what was the name of that oh yeah while you're looking for that let me pull that up let me get I can find that don't take me just a second I have a project that Andrew was mentioning earlier in regards to inkjet prints so I think the URL I provided Andrew is the kind of bigger project overview and there might have been some specific resources within that that you were thinking of but it is a very interesting project and I would encourage you all to check it out if you have some time to learn a little bit more about inkjet prints and specifically how they're interacting in emergency situations they're interesting in that they're not only a risk to themselves but the fugitive inks can be an issue for other items nearby so I'll just think about that yes yeah and one of the things that was really a challenge for them I was one of the advisors on that in terms of evaluating what the work that Dan was doing and trying to figure out how to even organize it and present it is that it there is a large amount of variability across different kinds of inkjet prints the brands and the papers and so it makes it very difficult to quantify in the same way you can about say transparencies or color photographs there's a lot of variability so they tended to make the recommendations based on sort of the way that the least or the most vulnerable the least robust behaved and then but in practice even the ones that are more robust than the others are still much more sensitive than typical photographs from the 20th century so I think it's something just that essentially getting if they get wet they're really not going to respond well and and you may have quite catastrophic losses pretty quickly so it's a great resource it's a little daunting to figure out what to do with these things because they are so hard to characterize and know what they are but it's a really good resource and I think I've sent a link oh good yeah so that that that's the main page of what is called the Washington State Department of Natural Resources earthquakes and faults geological hazards website and the whole point of it is to kind of get into providing information about seismic risk for people in Washington particularly in terms of where they live and where their children may be going to school or where the hospitals that are nearby them and and and really trying to get ready for that that test gaitia subduction zone earthquake which sooner or later will happen uh... in in washington that there's actually this this kind of bizarre situation of a very similar scale of earthquake that happened i believe in the sixteenth century uh... in in washington that created enough of a tsunami in japan that it was recorded in japan and people have figured out from damage caused by some force that are now submerged in washington that you know what happened that it was a very similar kind of earthquake from a subduction zone that happened in japan uh... most recently so it's a good description i think of what can what can be done with maps and um... and what we need to be going with kind of mapping our own our own institutions uh... and certainly excuse me but in in there's a map that uh... for harris county that is very good at the county level of describing where the floodplain where the floodplains are at least understood by before the before harvey and uh... it's a good place to really start and uh... and that's the thing where right now i'm i'm trying to learn how to take the information we have of our cultural institution lists from from harvey and and get them into a place that we can use them in a more uh... proactive way to see the rest in responding to things that i think we're going to get there there's an article about the great amount of industrial pollution during harvey as well as sewage so yeah that was something it's been involved in some of those conversations about trying to figure out how to address those floodwaters that have been contaminated yeah so so yeah we're really lucky that after hurricane sandy and jess keister who's who was at the conservation center and is now a photograph conservator at um... at new york public library she did a lot of work and has done some presentations about how to assess the risk of of great water and and sewage and uh... because her dad that's what dad does uh... he's uh... he he does a lot of consulting and assessment of that kind of situation so uh... she was able to marry what the kind of work that he does with how to how to manage collections where you're worried about whether it's it's so much in terms of uh... waste water or like dangerous uh... toxic chemicals like some of this some of the concerns we have about what was happening in the in the houston area uh... because of the petrochemical plants they were affected by the flooding and getting into the floodwaters so you know that is a it is an area where it's a whole other level of complexity that those things may impact your your items so they're generally speaking it's really that those are presenting risks to people that are trying to do the salvage uh... and and that's the greater concern how do you know uh... what you're handling and it's been one of the things that was a real challenge uh... and i know it's all coming back to me with the uh... try to go through all of this after harvey of how to had explained to people what they should do for their own things how to assess risk how to explain to them what they should be doing and and what are common sense ways of of helping people uh... so that uh... they can take care of their things as and but not harm themselves and it it that's a whole that's that's where something particularly a regional level can be a real challenge uh... but uh... needs to and that that's where these having things in maps can be can be really helpful because a lot of information that we know about say the toxicity of water will come from a sample that can be put on a map so then you then you can start to understand what how concerned should i be about what happened in to my house or to my things are in my institution so that it there are a lot of advantages to to start to use these mapping tools uh... and for all sorts of different reasons and and that can be another that could be a whole other one to do a large-scale analysis was dealing with public health issues water contamination so visualization yes that yeah that there's a great book uh... about it yet dealing with the tickets color and wanted in the eighteenth century early nineteenth century that they have someone just visually put on a map like what where this is happening it was coming from different kinds of wells and so uh... it it's something i think you know i guess it it has real application can really help in terms of uh... i'm going to go ahead and how to approach uh... recovery particularly at scale at that time i didn't see one else had some great questions coming in the interesting conversation uh... so i just want to give it a big thank you to andrew for kicking us off with our material specific salvage uh... presentations and so it's an excellent way to start things so thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and uh... again thank you to everyone who was able to join us live for the session and new to work with great thanks everybody keep your questions