 Susan Barker, go ahead Susan. Hi, hi everyone. I have a few slides to go through. The very best way to keep informed with about connecting to collections care is to join the announce list. And this is the email address for it. Or you can follow us on Twitter or like us on, you know. And if you need to reset your password, this is the email to use. If you need to contact me, this is my email. And John asked me to mention, if you're interested in getting the Credly badge, which is an electronic badge that says you've taken this course. So it would be like going to a meeting and getting a certificate that says you participated in some professional development. You need to listen to all the webinars and you need to do the assignments. And the webinars get, the recordings get posted usually within a day of the live webinar. And if you go on the educational website, you'll find that it changes from live content to recorded content. And you need to listen to the webinar before you can go to the next stage. So just keep that in mind. And I will collect all the questions for John at the end. And I have one more slide. These are the things that are coming up. Next week we have a webinar on copyright. And then we have one on botanical collections and natural disasters. So even if you're in a historic house and you have historic garden, this one will be of interest. Both of those webinars are free. And then we have the Planning Your Reorg project, which is a course that's going to start the end of March. And Reorg is an international program from ACROM. This is being co-hosted by ACROM and CCI and us. And it's the first time we've done something like this in the U.S. So you can go to our website to look at that. And without further ado, I'm going to hand this over to John. So thank you very much. And welcome everybody to week two of Collections Management for Small Rural Cultural Institutions. Last week we talked about the definition of collections and collections management and the significance of selecting objects for collections and what it means when those objects that are musealized and become part of the collection. This week we're going to concentrate on the day-to-day management of collections. And we're going to take a look first at where you start, if nothing has been started yet with your collection, as well as registration and cataloging, storage environments, enclosures and supports, inventories and housekeeping. So that's a fair amount to cover, but I believe we can make it all happen here today if you bear with me. I do encourage everyone to participate in the weekly discussions on the website. There's been some participation, but not a lot. But remember, the more you participate, the more you will get out of this course. This week's assigned readings include three selections from museum registration methods. There's marking objects, marking specific kinds of objects and numbering, and then there is a selection from museum magazine on taking a fresh look at provenance. As far as the project, as Susan said, you need to make sure you listen to the webinar first, but don't forget to post your short essay on the needs assessment of your institution based on the topic that we talk about each week, and I will mention that again at the very end and give you a little more specific idea of what I'm looking for. One of the questions I get frequently is, where do you start if absolutely nothing has been started? This is frequently what happens with smaller institutions as collections accumulate, but no one really does anything about cataloging them or doing inventory. And we are lucky there's a very good resource out there called Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections by Angela Kipp, and it's a very helpful book, plus Angela has a great sense of humor. She can tell you how to get started if you have nothing. You have no policies, no inventory, no procedures, no catalog. And what she says, her basic message, is keep the big picture in mind, but start with a series of small steps so that you don't get overwhelmed. And she also points out that it's really important when you're first getting organized not to let yourself get distracted by worrying a lot about particular individual objects that you may think are more important than others, because that will just distract you. That part can come later. What Angela recommends is start out by counting the objects you have. And if you have the space, separate those objects into logical groups. But even if you don't have that kind of space, at least start with that count, and then start out whatever documentation that you have that goes with the object so you can tell what they are and where they came from. And you have to remember that again, registration, you have to get organized. So there's a series of other things that you can do, and one of them is you want to document what you have. So one of the easiest ways to do that initially, if you've got nothing else in the way of an inventory or catalog, is begin by arranging things and taking photographs of them. And if you're inheriting a room full of objects, my recommendation is you take photographs of the room and the objects where they are in the room when you start. And this way, if it turns out that things were associated in some way, you'll be able to reconstruct that from your photographs. Angela suggests making a sketch map of the room of where things are so that, again, you can make those correlations later. As you do your inventory, you should look over things for anything that poses an immediate problem. So that might be something that is broken, an object that you think is too dangerous to leave out, something that is very fragile, something in danger of being separated from its documentation. Once you've got that done, you can begin sorting objects into broad categories and then do your inventory and from there move on to catalog. So if you have spaced a good idea is to sort the objects out in the logical categories, but sometimes we're faced with a situation where we're still crowded. We don't even have that kind of space, but you do try to provide on your inventory list a name for every object. If you don't have a name that's okay, you can just describe it. The object in this picture is an example. This is an object that I acquired some time ago and I have no earthly idea what it is. I do have a catalog of objects that I use in teaching, so I have this described as a green metal box, but it surely has a better name, but that's enough for now. As you make your inventory, you'll be looking at this collection and it's a good idea to put on the inventory because you do not intend to keep because you do want to make a record of everything that you had when you got started. So you don't have to know what everything is. You just need to figure out a name or short description you can use and get an inventory list and from there you can proceed with getting organized with your collection. So I mentioned provenance. We had an article on that. Before objects are accessioned, most museums do what's called provenance research and this is referring to creating a chronology of the history of the ownership of an object from its place of creation through the current ownership. And if you have very little documentation, you really won't be able to do that, but this is a way to figure out how much documentation you have. The word provenance comes from a French word provenaire that means to originate and kind of helps you remember what that means. And this is a way we differentiate authentic objects from fakes, we prove ownership, and we can also use it to study the past. In some collections, provenance research is extremely critical. One good example of that is art collections where art can be stolen and hidden away for long periods of time and then reappear on the market. If you have good provenance research, you can detect these problems before they occur because you don't want your museum to acquire a stolen object. Provenance research has been in the news a lot lately because of the emphasis on Nazi-era art. This was art confiscated by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 in World War II. And it's provenance research that has labeled many of the original owners or the heirs of those owners to find these objects when they wind up in museums. And so the majority of museums that acquired these objects did not know they were buying stolen art, but good provenance research can help elucidate who the original owners were. So one of the readings this week is by Tracy Bernd Fulton. It's called Taking a Fresh Look at Provenance. And I think you'll find it very helpful. Tracy is very tech-savvy, and she has some ideas for sorting things out. And as she says, ultimately, provenance research is the tool that can help us talk to our visitors about the humanity and the objects. And this is an example of an object I just saw a few weeks ago at an exhibit in Qatar when I was there in it. It's a sarcophagus relief that was added from the Paul Verum Museum in Syria. The exhibit was about Syria and some of the loss of cultural treasures that country has suffered recently due to warfare. And in this case, the provenance research had gone on to say quite a bit about what this object showed. An aristocratic warrior mounted on a camel with a particular kind of saddle. So it's a good example of how this kind of research can help make the object more meaningful as well as give you a path of ownership. Our main thing we're going to talk about today is registration and cataloging. And because of the registration and cataloging, registration is an overall term that refers to accessioning, cataloging, labeling, and marking. You'll find in the literature a lot of terms are used as synonyms like registration and accessioning that really shouldn't be but registration is the overall term for all of these things that you do to establish your right of legal ownership over an object. And this is the thing that preserves association of objects and information. So this is a photograph of my wife, Julianne Snyder, who is the assistant director of the Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum and Art Gallery at Penn State. And she is doing registration in the collection room. She has her computer on a portable cart. She can wheel in and work with the objects there in order to record all the information that she needs. So this is one way that it can get done. What registration does is because it preserves the association between the object and the information about the object, it helps you by enhancing the interpretation of the objects in the collection by giving you this amount of detailed information. It also helps you in the preservation of objects as you record critical information about the objects where they came from, their condition upon arrival, and how they've been preserved once they've been in your collection. The registration system also provides you a means to identify each object and account for each object in the collection, and this helps fulfill your museum's legal obligations to care for the collection that you hold in the public trust. And sort of the reverse of that is that an inadequate registration system will cause objects to actually lose value because you will separate them from the information about them that gives them their value. So one of the things you want to think about is how that information is going to be recorded. So we're going to discuss the details of documentation next week in webinar number three, but here I wanted to point out that the way we record information is important. It should be recorded in a permanent manner using archival quality stable materials, historically that meant acid-free paper and an ink that matched the paper and writing the information down in a bound ledger book to provide a permanent record of the collection. I still think that is an important step, although many museums skip it and they go directly to recording digital information. And my issue here is that although that digital information is extremely useful, it is not permanent. And we will talk more next week about why digital information is not permanent. My personal belief is we need both. We need to keep a handwritten registration book where objects are logged in by hand on acid-free paper with good ink in a bound ledger that cannot, so the pages cannot be rearranged. But we also need those electronic databases that list the objects because they are extremely useful. So we can say that there's a simple test of a registration system and it doesn't matter what kind of registration system you have, whether it's manual or whether it's electronic. But my version of the test is that, number one, any intelligent person should be able to come in and use the system without you present. If your system is so complicated you have to explain it, it's probably not a very good system. Secondly, using that system, you should be able to find any object in the collection by looking at the registration system and finding an object number. And then you should be able to do the opposite. If you have an object with a number on it, you should be able to find all of the printed documentation about it. So if you can do all three of these, then however your registration system works and whether it doesn't matter if it's manual or electronic, then it's a good functioning system. From there it comes down to a matter of detail and that depends on how you want to do things. So this is an image of an exhibit on the old registration system at a wonderful museum, the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And this exhibit illustrates several important characteristics of registration systems. In the original museum they had a bound ledger book that they used for cataloging and they later replaced that with a series of cards. And you see one of those pre-printed cards here with information typed in. They also have out materials they used to mark the objects. They put down a white undercoat of paint and then they labeled them with an ink pen using an acid-free India ink and then they covered that over with a thin layer of varnish. And so they had then the registration number and you can see it in the upper left-hand portion of the card and they will mark it on that saw and so that linked the documentation up to the object. So that's kind of a nice visual of what registration does. One thing unusual about the Mercer Museum and the reason I picked them as an example is that most museums hide their registration numbers on a part of the object that will not be seen while it's on exhibit but they actually use that as part of their exhibit. So they label their registration numbers or accession numbers in great big letters on the objects. And as you went through the museum you could jot down the number of any object you were interested in and then go down and in the old days you could go down and actually look through the original catalog to look up information. This is later replaced by a photocopy and is now being, is now been replaced by a database where you can look at a computer terminal so it's not as much wear and tear. But it's still, I thought, a very interesting way to do it. This way they don't put many object labels in and they put in thousands and thousands of objects in their exhibits. So if you ever get a chance to see the Mercer Museum it's Doyle's Town is suburban Philadelphia and it's quite worth a visit to go take a look at. So a little bit of vocabulary. I want to give you some definitions of some key words that we use in discussing registration because as I mentioned there is a lot of discussion in the literature about what these mean. If you want to check on the exact meanings of words there are a couple of good glossaries. One of them is in Museum Registration Methods Number 5 and there's also one in Things Great and Small Collection Management Policies. So we'll begin with Acquisition. An acquisition is something that is acquired by a museum but that does not necessarily mean that ownership has been transferred. Accession is an acquisition that the institution has taken legal ownership. And accession may be composed of a single object or it may be more objects than more than one object. For instance in Natural History Museums it is common that an accession is anywhere from tens to hundreds to thousands of specimens that all come in collected at the same time and in the same place. History Anthropology Museums tend to do the same but with smaller numbers of objects in their accessions. Most art museums acquire objects one by one and they typically have each accession for one object. So generally speaking an accession is one or more objects received from a single source at a single time. So that could be 400 specimens collected on a field trip to Canada. It could be a single fossil. It could be an entire library or it could be just one painting. So this is one used in many different ways. Accessioning is that process of transferring the ownership of an acquisition to the museum and so this means recording the information. Acquisitions cannot be added to the collection or cataloged until they have been accession until you have taken the accession of them. The accession number is a unique number assigned to an object or to a group of objects that comprise the accession. And again in some museums, particularly art museums the accession number is the only number used to identify an object. But in other museums particularly Natural History Museums or with archaeology collections the accession number refers to a large number of objects so a catalog number is used to identify individual objects. So we're doing the same thing. We're giving objects an identifying number. We just tend to call them different things. The accession record contains the information, the documents where the accession material came from, a brief description of it and how the museum came about getting ownership, whether it was a gift or a donation or what have you. Registration is the process of recording the accession records in serial order and the registration number is a synonym for accession number. Those are frequently used interchangeably. Now the image in this slide is an interesting one. This is an entry in the National Park Service master catalog and that master catalog contains cards like this for all 45 million objects that are held in 380 park collections around the United States. And the catalog is kept on these cards. They're printed out and housed at the Park Service Museum in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. So people who think their collections are too big and cataloging them would be too complicated. I like to point out that the Park Service has managed catalog 45 million of them from 380 different collections. So nothing is impossible. A catalog is a list of the objects in the collection. Cataloging is the process of organizing the accessioning information. And to remember what that means, think about the fact that to catalog this means to place into categories. So it's a way of further refining your accessioning information. In most museums, the catalog number is a unique number assigned to a particular individual object when you're cataloging. And as I mentioned, not all museums use catalog numbers, but many do. So your number on your object could be an accession number. It might be called a registration number. It might be a catalog number, but those numbers all do the same thing. They all keep track of the objects in the collection. And here we have a photocopy of the catalog of Tradescant collection from London from 1656. So not all of those objects are still around, but the catalog is. So we actually know what was in the collection. So often your catalog will outlast your collection. Well, once you have that number assigned, you need to mark it on the object. So this accession number or catalog number needs to be on the object in some way. There are many ways to mark objects, some good, some bad, some that are downright destructive. We're not going to go into all the details about how to mark objects, because that is covered in today's readings. There are just too many variations to do it. But in general, the numbers on the objects should not interfere with the regular use of the object, and they should not cause damage. So this is a photograph of how not to do it. This is a specimen I found in the collection where I work, and it's a very small mineral specimen that has acquired two different numbers that are pasted on the mineral, so they're going to be very difficult to remove, and they actually obscure a good part of the mineral. So that's not a very good way to do that. There are much better ways to label that object than the way it was done. The identifying number must be unique to that object and preferably part of a numerical sequence. And in some museums, they use letters along with numbers, so it's an alphanumeric way to mark the accession. I've put two examples in here from Natural History. One is a fossil that has the number written on it in India ink on a spot of white paint that's laid down and then covered over with lacquer. And in this case, they have added in a locality, which normally isn't done, but they had lots of space. This is a mammoth's jaw, so there's plenty of space. The other is a small frog, which you see already has two labels. One is a tag put on by the field collector, which was me, and then the second tag was the catalog tag when it entered the museum collection. And so both of those numbers take you to documentation about the specimen. So, numbering and marking, and this comes down to what system you use. The most commonly used identifying number is a compound sequential number recommended by the American Alliance of Museums. And this is probably the most widely used in the United States, probably worldwide. So this consists of a number year, the accession number, and an object number. So for example, 2018.23.5 here means this is the fifth object, and the 23rd accession collected in the year 2018. So only one object will get that number. So this is widely used, but it also means you've got to put seven digits on an object. And if your object is very small, then that can get complicated. And if your object is one that contains parts, for instance, a teapot and teacups, then you can, you have to start adding even more things. And in this case, traditionally, we add letters behind it. So your original number, 28.23.5 might go on the teapot, but A might go on a cup, and D might go on a saucer, and so forth, until you've cataloged the whole set. So you can get some fairly long numbers this way. But this is, as I say, the most common system to use. It's not uncommon to find accession or catalog numbers that have alphabetic prefixes to designate the collection, such as, in this case, A7173, A indicates for this museum the archaeology collection. And some museums use very complex compound numbers that incorporate a collection designation, accession number, and catalog number all together. So in the case of this extremely long number, 14 is the accession number. H signifies that it's part of a history collection. 2018 is the year that the object came to the museum, and 212 is the object number. And so this is interesting, but it also is a very long number. Back in the days before we had computerized systems, it was important that your accession number carry some kind of information with it, because it sped things up as you were looking for objects in the collection. But now that you can get this information at your fingertips with a computer, I think we can use shorter numbers and drop a lot of the complicated numbers that we've used in the past. But I've had no luck at all convincing people that we should just use simple numbers. Most numbering systems are the result of tradition. And because of the complexity involved in renumbering objects and because of the chance of making mistakes, most museums keep their old systems, whether they're a very good system or not. And this is probably wise. Renumbering objects can be extremely problematic. It takes a lot of staff time and resources, and as I said, you can make mistakes doing that. So if you have the opportunity to start a new numbering system at your museum, I would try to use the simplest system possible using the fewest digits possible. If you've inherited a numbering system that works, you will probably better off to keep using that rather than change it. And remember that all of these dates and prefixes were used before we had electronic computers where we could pull these numbers up. And this is an interesting use of an accession number. And you'll note that the number, which is inside the red circle, is written backwards. And I was puzzled the first time I saw this until I realized what was going on here. In this case, the accession number is written on the object twice, once correctly and once backwards, because this is the back of a painting. When the painting was hung on the wall, this way you could check the accession number with a mirror without having to take the painting down. So this was in a collection of over 300 paintings that were on more or less permanent exhibit and the curator could just hold a mirror up and read his accession numbers through the back to confirm that each painting was there when he did inventory, the clever use of the number. So it is important, as well, to use standard nomenclature taxonomy because to properly classify objects in the collection is an important way to reduce confusion. So what we want to do with this is reduce confusion in the collection. And for an example of this, is that there are 20 approved variant spellings of the name of the composer, Peter Illichchikowski. But if you put those 20 names into a computer unless you specifically link them together, the computer would see that as 20 different composers. So this is one reason that we try to use standardized names. And if you look at the objects in the picture, you could call this just about anything. It could be a couch or a Davenport or a Devan or a lounge or a seti or a chesterfield, any number of names. And depending on the name you use, you might or might not be able to find it. So this is why we need to use standardized names within our collection. The list of standardized names will be different for each collection, but it is going to work much better if you standardize your list of names. So here's an example from cataloging. Suppose you acquire this object. And in this case, a flower system. You're going to catalog this as part of your registration process. So cataloging is the process of organizing the accession information. So it's a descriptive process because you need to write out a description of what this object is. So you would write out the characteristics. And so there are many ways to do this. In this example, you might write down flower sifter, 10, single-screen type with one beater, painted cream with flower design or red wooden handle, a flat 10-handle attached to the body with rivets. That is sufficient to identify this object in your collection. And so that is one way to do it. This is commonly used in museums. This is an example from Peru from the National Institute of Culture. And I picked this because it isn't Spanish, because the trick is you don't need to read Spanish to see what they have done. You can see how the information is grouped. You can see where the numbers are. You can see the measurements. So this is a fairly standard way that collections used to be cataloged before computers, and in this case, they include a black and white image of the painting that is cataloged. So this is, again, a system commonly used around the world. Cataloging is very different, though, for systems that already have standardized nomenclature. And one of those is natural history. And in this case, it's a standard system of names for plants and animals. So anywhere in the world you go, the names used are the same, which makes it a dispositive process rather than a descriptive process, because cataloging now becomes dispositive. You put things in order. You don't have to describe them. So the specimen, when it gets a name, is assigned to an existing classification. So here's an example. I was working in Paraguay, and one night we collected this viper that I'm holding. And once we knew what the viper was, once we got a good look at it, we realized it was a both-drops-new-it-eye. Well, the minute we had a specific name on the snake, we knew the entire classification history of it. And so if you wanted to look at the details, it would go into our catalog with this information, ranging from the animal kingdom, it's a coordinate, it's a vertebrate, going on down through, it's a reptile, it's a viper, it's in the subfamily that includes rattlesnakes, and then there is the scientific name, and then there is also a common name. But most systems do not have a hierarchy built in as this one does. So in actual history, it's a little easier to catalog things because you have this handy series of names you can use. So there are a number of vocabularies in taxonomies out there that you can use. And there's a number that are offered from the Getty, and there's a nice one from Canada Parks, Classification System for Historic Collections. There's a, in your handouts for today, you have the URLs for these, so you don't need to write them all down. But the Getty has the Art and Architecture Phasaurus, it's very widely used. They also have geographic names, the Union List of Artist Names, Cultural Object Names. There are others out there as well. I just picked these as examples, and not everyone uses these. This is one of the problems with lack of standardization. What is being emphasized now is a system called Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging. It was originally developed by Robert Chanel in 1978 to classify human-made products. It is a hierarchical system, so it includes hierarchical classification, so it's designed to mimic the classifications used in natural history. However, it doesn't give you a specific name for every object, instead it gives you categories for classification. So as you might imagine, to try to come up with a listing of the name of every object worldwide, even in English, would be impossible. But by giving categories for classification, it can greatly simplify cataloging. The current version, the last most recently published one, has about 14,600 object categories. The system is set up so that objects are grouped into 10 principal categories, divided into classes and subclasses, and the objects are organized by their original function. So these are your 10 categories, the built environment, furnishings, personal objects, tools, and the tools relate to materials, science and technology and communication, there's distribution and transportation objects, communication, recreation, and of course the category for unclassifiable objects. You're not always able to classify every object, like my little green box. So our sifter would fall into this, it would be under tools and equipment for materials, in the classification of food processing and preparation, in the subclassification of food preparation equipment, and in the object term group of tool for food separating, and the secondary object term there is sifter. And so that would help you classify this object. There is a list serve for people interested in developing the system further. It is now available online. This is also, some of you may recognize, this is the same system that is incorporated into past perfect software if you happen to use that. So it can be a very useful system, depending on your collection. It does take a while to get used to it, and there are all these problems about where things go, but there is, I say there is a list serve where a group can help you figure those things out. So it's been developing since 1978, but it is a usable system, and will help you quite a bit. Related to standard nomenclature is your collection storage array, how you arrange things in the storage. So this refers to the arrangement of the objects in storage, and again, you want to use a consistent system so that you can figure out the location reliably. This speeds up retrieval of objects and helps you provide a proper storage environment. I once saw a museum that arranged their collection, this was a history museum, based on the Chanel system, which is a terrible thing to do because they had very large objects next to very small ones, so space was not used wisely, and they had objects together that did not have the same requirements for the storage environment. So you don't want to do that, but you can base your storage array on your classification that you use, and your taxonomic system. There are many types of ordering systems in museums. Typically, in art museums, that ordering system is by artist's name or maybe time period, more commonly by media, so you have paintings together, works on paper together, sculpture together. It can also be genre, location. Natural history, as I mentioned before, they tend to use the hierarchical system because of the nature of that system. This tends to group objects by things that are more or less the same size. Geology gets a little more complicated. It depends on how those collections are used. History can be all over the map by material, by topical class, date, style, and as I say, some collections use the Chanel system for arranging storage array, which is probably not good. Anthropology can be my material or origin or cultural association. There are many, many, many other variations out there. I just wanted to give you a brief idea of what some of them are like. So what do we want? Well, ideally, we want the objects arranged according to their storage environment requirements because wooden objects do not necessarily need the same storage environment. As metal objects, some things can be exposed to more light, others cannot. Oil paintings can be exposed to more light than watercolors, for example. So you think about the storage environment. You also need to think about size and shape to make the best use of space and ultimately in practice. The system of order is always a compromise between the size of the collections, the space you have available, how that collection is used and how often objects are used, and the resources available to maintain it. So you're probably going to be hard pressed to find two museums that use exactly the same system for ordering things, but you do want to make sure that yours is a logical system that another person could come in and figure out very quickly how to find the objects needed. You don't want a system that's so complicated. One person has to be there to explain it for its work. And part of storage environment is, of course, exhibits. As my friend Sally Shelton likes to point out, exhibition is a form of storage. In many cases, objects will spend a large part of their life in the museum on exhibit, and this is something we will talk about again next week, but you should look at your requirements for your exhibit environment should be the same as those for storage environment, particularly for objects on exhibit for a long time. So at this point, we need to pause briefly and talk about conservation. But conservation refers to the things that are done to prolong the useful life of objects. And by useful life, I mean the length of time that we can obtain information from a musealized object before it loses value through deterioration or loss of documentation. So conservation can roughly be broken down into three general areas. The treatment of damaged objects, which we often think of as restoration, but conservation, research on ways to conserve objects and preventive care of objects. And so the first two require quite a bit of professional training as a conservator, and they're way beyond the scope of this course. But preventive care is part of collections management, so we are going to discuss that. So based on my experience working in collections for about 50 years throughout the U.S., Latin America, and quite a number in Europe and Asia, I'm guessing that probably 90% of preventive conservation is simply controlling the storage environment. Because the truth is most objects are either in storage or on exhibit or most of their lives in the museum, and it's exposure to that environment that is willing to determine their long-term faith. So it is the storage environment where collection management meets conservation. It is very important to keep in mind that collection management is not conservation, and conservation is not collection management, but they have an overlap, and that overlap comes in the area of preventive conservation, and particularly in the storage environment. So by preventive conservation, we mean taking steps to prevent deterioration of objects. And this means we avoid the need for treatment or repair to objects because they don't get damaged. And we do this, we prevent this deterioration by providing a stable storage environment. So in the end, it is far more cost-effective, not to mention better for the objects, to prevent deterioration than to have to fix it. So preventive conservation is very cost-effective. It might seem initially like you're putting a lot of your resources into monitoring the collection storage environment and getting things all set up, but in the end, over the course of 20, 30, 100 years, it is very, very cost-effective. And so in order to do this, you need to understand the factors that affect objects to deteriorate in a collection. That has made much easier thanks to the Canadian Conservation Institute who have developed the 10 agents of collection deterioration. So they have grouped the forces that affect objects into 10, fairly easy to look at and understand categories. And so we're going to go through these categories fairly briefly one by one and take a look at them. The Canadian Conservation Institute has a fabulous set of web pages on these agents, and I've given you the URL for those pages in your handout today. So if you want to explore anyone or all of these in more depth afterwards, you can do that. So the first is direct physical forces. These are things like impact, shock, from something being dropped, vibration, which could come from heavy machinery, construction, a nearby railroad track, pressure, improper handling, the kinds of things that occur like earthquakes, and of course something we call inherent vice, which is the tendency of organic material to break down, or in some cases, unorganic materials to break down the cause of materials they're composed of. So things like plastic and silk are not permanent because of the chemical nature of their composition. There is no way to save those objects forever, but other things such as things that are made of wood or cotton can be preserved much longer. So these images show two ways that direct physical forces have damaged objects. One of them is a fossil dinosaur bone, which is very heavy and very fragile, which is a bad combination, and it was handled improperly and moving it and snapped in two pieces, and it can never be repaired because of its weight, so that is permanent damage. The second thing is an overcrowded storage condition, and you can see damage has already occurred to a vase lying on the floor. It's been broken, that big clay jar, and other things are undoubtedly being damaged as well because of the bad storage environment. So what you can do is determine the physical forces that your collection might be subject to and figure out what you can do to prevent damage, make sure each object in the collection or exhibit is adequately supported to protect it from shock and vibration, write down instructions for anyone on your staff and handle the objects, so they have those to read and train your employees properly. And in this image, what we see is a series of photographs waiting to be hung in an exhibit, but rather than set them on the floor or on top of the plinth, they have been put on foam pads in order to protect them from vibrations that they might incur while they're being installed. The second category is thieves and vandals, and this is damage that comes from intentional actions by thieves or vandals, and here we see a taxidermy out of a grizzly bear without where the public could get to it and someone has snapped off one of the claws and then they have actually broken the bear open by touching it to see if it's actually real. And for this, what we need is to improve security and we can use barriers to separate people from objects. We need to train our staff to be vigilant and we need to do regular inspections. And so some things for security are very complicated. Some are very simple. Here we have stanchions in an art gallery and those work both as a physical barrier to keep people back and also as a psychological barrier to remind people that they are not supposed to touch the objects. The third agent is dissociation, which comes from misplacing objects, removing tags or labels. It comes from illegible writing, so you can't understand it. The documentation was recorded using materials that weren't permanent and got lost, or you failed to get the right permits, you failed to upgrade your computer software, there were errors made in transcription, anything that results in loss of data which results in loss of value to the objects. So here you have two instances, a tag without a specimen, so that is now a meaningless tag. And you also have a label that was covered with mold. And so the mold is so bad you can no longer read what that label says. Those are both losses of information. So you should keep written records when objects are moved in or out of storage. You should establish a policy that prevents removing tags and labels. You should actually check your handwriting when you hire new staff. At the University of Kansas I hired a lot of students and in order to be hired they had to pass a handwriting exam. And I made them write the words, I like to handle dead animals 10 times. I told them to print. And if their printing wasn't clear on the 10th time they did not get further consideration for the job because I had too many instances where notes were left that were illegible. You should use archival quality materials in your documentation and we'll talk about those next week. You should upgrade your computer software on a regular schedule. Failure to do that will result in loss of information. And you should train your staff about the importance of avoiding dissociation. Fourth object is fire. And this of course can destroy, burn and contaminate objects. It's got heat, flame and ash and then of course residue from smoke. It's usually a problem with building integrity or lack of fire control, lack of detectors. Our carelessness, so combustible materials are left around. These are two photographs that were in the news recently. This is the National Museum of Brazil that was on almost total loss. One is the fire at night and the other is the museum the next morning. You can also though have damage from fire suppression. And you can have more damage caused by cleaning up after a fire by the chemicals used than you can from the fire itself. I have met curators who did not want sprinkler systems in their collection because of the force of water when the sprinkler systems are activated and their fear that the sprinkler heads might be accidentally activated to failure rate on those at extremely low. And if you have to call the fire department, the amount of pressure in the hoses they use will be at least five times that coming out of a sprinkler. And this is images yet another Brazilian fire. This was a number of years ago and this was the Bhutan Ten Institute where they lost a collection of extremely valuable specimens of snakes that had been accumulated over 100 years. They were just two weeks away from moving into a new building with the sprinkler system and this fire broke out. So you should keep electrical connections out of storage. The reason I like to ask people is how many electrical outlets in storage have? The correct answer is none. You should have portable fire extinguishers in the storage and work areas. The reason I say no electrical outlets is because if there is no electrical outlet, no one can plug anything in like a hairdryer or a radio that might cause a fire. Train your staff in how to use extinguishers. Most of us have been around them all our lives. Very few of us have ever actually taken one out of the parking lot and tried to fire it to see how it worked. You should have smoke and fire alarms because some things burn hot, some burn with a lot of smoke. And particularly if you're a small institution, usually your local fire department is happy to come over and do a walk-through and discuss fire safety with you. They would much rather have you avoid a fire than have to come to your place and put one out. This brings us to water. Water damage can come from floods, drips or leaks. It can stain objects. It can cause extraction of chemicals, oxidation of metals, delamination and warping of many materials, shrinkage and swelling. And one of the things I point out in water is you should do your own inspections of the roof, the windows, the drains, and piping. And you may have a facilities person who does that, but as a collections manager, you should do your own. What you're looking at in this picture is mold that has grown and plaster that has fallen off of a wall say they clogged gutter in a roof. Several stories up, and the water came through the wall and all this damaging is now affecting the collection. So you should do your own inspections of that roof, windows, gutters, downspouts, floor drains, indoor pipes and tubing, and check faucets for leaks. And then you should certainly monitor any construction going on nearby that involves digging holes where water pipes might get broken. So here we have two examples of water damage. One occurred in our museum back in May, and it was an exhibit case flooded in the middle of the night when an overhead pipe broke. The pipe broke because it had been damaged by an asbestos abatement through the day before, and they hadn't noticed they'd cracked it. And it broke during the night. Another one is a roof gutter that is completely clogged with plants and debris and is going to flood the building sooner or later. The sixth agent is pests. These include insects, other arthropods, mold, bacteria, rodents, any organism that causes damage to the collections or serves as a food source for other collection pests. And in many cases, other agents of deterioration will affect pests such as humidity and temperature. For instance, the books on the right were damaged by silverfish, which is a pest, but silverfish require very high humidity to live, and you shouldn't have silverfish in your museum. You should not have your humidity that high. And in general, most pest control is done through a program of integrated pest management, which we will not get into. There are many other places you can find information about integrated pest management on the web, but it involves regular inspections using traps, sticky traps and light traps, and habitat modification, and then, of course, control of your other agents. There are many kinds of traps, and the placement on some of these is critical. For instance, you have a violet, so you don't want to use those where the light can affect your collection, and you want to make sure that sticky traps and flypaper are kept away from places where they might actually come into contact with your objects. The seventh one is contaminants, and there are three classes of contaminants, organic gases, inorganic gases, and particulate pollutants. And particulate pollutants may be acidic, or abrasive, or both. And a good example of this is cigarette smoke. Cigarette smoke contains ash, and the ash is abrasive, and it's also acidic. There's also dust, acidic vapors, acidic particles, automobile emissions, and then chemicals within the museum can cause contamination. And in this case, the shot of the dust is a dust storm that was going on when I was in Qatar. And by midday, you could not see across the bay to the big island. And, of course, all of this dust was infiltrating through into the museums there, and all had to have that special filter to keep it out. Your sources of interior contamination in museums come from combustion products and human activities and cleaning materials, particularly products used in exhibition and in renovation. And these are things like paints, adhesive solvents. Here we have several moth balls contained naphthalene, which can be utilized on your specimens. Old containers will often go bad as that leaking container of santa flush is done. And those open cans of paint are producing volatile organic compounds, VOCs, which can do great damage to the collection as well. So you want to check all the products used in your building. Make sure you know what they are. If you smell an odor, find out what it is. It may be something all right. It may be something producing contaminants. You should store your chemicals, including cleaning supplies in a safety cabinet where the fumes are contained. Should not keep old chemicals or paints around because the containers will deteriorate. You should change your heating and cooling system filters regularly and make sure that you have the right kind of filters and impose a regular housekeeping schedule. The eighth agent of deterioration is radiation. This includes heat and light and ultraviolet. And of these ultraviolet as the most energy and does the most damage. It is not to say that heat doesn't do damage, but we worry more about ultraviolet because it is so much more damaging than other forms of radiation. But radiation can cause disintegration of material, discoloring, darkening, yellowing. And radiation damage in objects, just like it is in humans, is cumulative. The objects cannot recover from it. So here we see deterioration of a high density polyethylene container. Normally, high density polyethylene is inert and pretty stable, but this one is exposed to sunlight and the ultraviolet as having this effect of making it crack later. So you should reduce the amount of light in storage and exhibit areas as much as you can. And in storage, of course, you can keep it in the dark when people are not in the room. If you reduce the ambient lighting in your galleries, the exhibit lighting can be reduced. If you have a lot of ambient light in your galleries, you'll have to crank the light up so people don't see the objects. That's a good argument for having dark galleries. And, of course, you should pull the ultraviolet filters on all ultraviolet producing light sources and keep sunlight, or at least direct sunlight, out of exhibits and storage areas. And, of course, we could talk for a day about any one of these agents, where you need to go through these fairly quickly. Agent number nine is incorrect temperatures, and these are one temperatures that are too high, too low, or fluctuate excessively. So you should select your temperature set point so you can achieve them with minimal fluctuations with the heating and cooling equipment you have. This may mean you have a warmer temperature for summer and a cooler one for winter. That's okay as long as that warmer and cooler one can be kept a lot more stable. And because the one thing you want to reduce is the fluctuations and in temperature. Because these fluctuations can cause cracking and peeling and a pain in all sorts of other damage. Here we have three examples of temperature that has fluctuated too much and the damage it's done. The first of these is a piece of ivory that is cracking. The second one is teeth, which, of course, are also made of ivory, and they're cracking. Ivory is going to crack no matter what, because the outside of ivory drives out faster than the inside. But if you can keep it in a more stable temperature humidity you can slow that damage down. The third image here is a the door of a painted metal case that had been in the museum for more than 20 years and it was moved into an area of unstable temperature and the expansion and contraction of the metal caused a 20 year old paint layer to pop off. That was an expensive to replace. The last agent is incorrect relative humidity and we tend to look at this in three categories. Humid, which is above 75% relative humidity. Humidity that is above or below a critical value, which is where our set point or we try to maintain it, and then, of course, the fluctuations. Relative humidity is temperature dependent because warm air holds more moisture than cold air. So that means if your temperature is going up and down, your relative humidity is going up and down as well. So humidity affects chemical and physical stability of many materials. If your relative humidity gets above 65 or 70%, it can trigger mold growth very quickly. So here we see images of a failure of a lap and clustered ceiling from high humidity and oxidation of metal shelving, all caused by too much humidity. So what you want to do is make sure that your air conditioning systems and dehumidifiers, if you use those to reduce relative humidity or in good working order, and you want to make sure that filters get changed regularly, you can also, if you have a, especially a temporary high humidity situation, lower the relative humidity by increasing air circulation, by moving the air with fans. Of course, all three of these, air conditioning, dehumidifiers and fans, mean you're moving electrical appliances into storage, which increases your risk from fire. So there are other ways to control humidity, and one of them is micro-environments. So here are two examples of micro-environments. These are both fairly low cost. On the left is a box that is a polyethylene box, it's clear. It contains in the bottom a layer of silica gel. There is an inert layer of I recall exactly what kind of board was used, I believe it is let's see, I believe it's polyethylene foam over that to separate the specimens from the foam. The upper part contains specimens of pyrite, which is very humidity sensitive. There is a simple relative humidity card inserted in the box, so you can see what the relative humidity is, and know when it's time to refresh silica gel. And if kept closed, and this is of course closed and then taped shut, it provides a very low cost, very stable micro-environment and of course you do have to keep an eye on this over time, but it will provide a nice micro-environment. On the right is a system that I found in use at the Museum of the Inca in Cusco, Peru where they had very limited electricity and very little money. They were able to buy some indicator silica gel in a microwave and they kept all of their metal objects in closed cabinets with indicator silica gel to keep the humidity below 60 and when the indicator silica gel changed color, they could pull it out and dry it in the microwave. So those are fairly simple micro-environment solutions. This graph comes from the Image Permanence Institute, which has done some great work on storage environments and this is a good visualization of what affects the storage environment within the building and this begins with the outside climate, the integrity of your building envelope, how well your heating and cooling systems function and how well you manage that storage area itself. So what do we want? In general we want cool rather than hot and our set points, the exact temperatures will depend on where we're located in our building. We want dry rather than wet, so preferably below 65. We want stable temperature and relative humidity with only minor fluctuations and we want to get rid of ultraviolet light. So it's actually pretty simple what we're after. Does not necessarily take a lot of resources to improve the storage environment. For instance, you can improve the capacity of the building to buffer the outside environmental conditions, which is cost effective because buildings have a longer maintenance cycle than control equipment. So you might install, for instance, thermal pane windows, which respond to changes in temperature differently than your building's heating and cooling system. You can review your operational procedures to find ways you can improve environmental control, such as keeping all the doors to the collection area closed. You can make sure your filters stay clean and you can store things in closed cabinets because it's easier to control humidity in a small cabinet than a big one. We see here a set of louvers on which dust is accumulated, which should be a big hint that you need to get behind those louvers and check the filter, which is undoubtedly dust covered. You can keep your heat very low in the winter. You can add weather stripping to storage area doors to help keep a more stable internal environment. You can keep your heating and cooling system at the same level day and night to reduce fluctuations. Keep food out of storage to keep pests off. You can install cloth curtains on open shelving by using Velcro or magnets or something like that. You can put new gaskets on your cabinets and the trains. What you want to avoid is the situation we're looking at here where we have a leak in the roof and the emergency response has been to dash in and drape plastic over the cabinets, but that's going to solve the long-term problem. In your storage design, if you have a chance to affect storage design, you can do some things that will make your life easier. Storage areas should be at or above grade because below grade they are more likely to have moisture penetration. Storage areas should be in the center of the building because that is more stable than a room of an outside wall. If possible, avoid storing collections in acts because they get too hot or basements because they get too damp or any rooms of outside walls because that causes more fluctuation in temperature and humidity. You should have secure areas so that means limit access and of course avoid any kind of overhead pipes or tubing which can leak and don't let anyone insert a work area or a desk into the storage room. The storage room should not be a place where people sit to work. Things should be brought out of the storage room to work on them. If you have a chance to affect building design, you want wide hallways and doorways that do not have sharp corners, blind corners or bottlenecks. By wide I mean big enough that you can move your biggest storage equipment. Your biggest cabinets are cases or shelves. Up and down the hallways is no problem for those times when you need to rearrange storage. If you have a loading dock, if you are going to get a new one, try to get at least 16 to 20 feet of clearance. The loading dock should be big enough to house the equipment you use to unload. If you bring in heavy objects that means a lot of big equipment. The storage, the collection storage should not be near the loading dock because the loading dock is a source of incoming tests and of course rapid to procuring humidity change. I recommend in storage painting the walls and ceilings white. There are two reasons for this, one of which is the white reflects light so you can use far less light and see better and the other is you can see evidence of tests or other problems better on the white. If you pick a paint with titanium oxide or zinc oxide that will help absorb any ultraviolet. And of course no carpeting because carpeting is harbors tests. I do not like drop ceilings in storage, suspended ceilings because again these are avenues for pests and they collect dust. And you want your storage facility in the center of the building. If you are looking at compactor shelving, movable shelving, that can save you a lot of space but make sure before you make that commitment you check your floor loading because compactors of course save you space by increasing the amount of things you can put in a room which doubles your floor load and not all buildings can hold those. You can get compactors that will hold massive loads but you've got to make sure that your building floor will sustain those. Part of this too is your storage furniture. It is cost effective to buy the best storage furniture you can. A lot of people want to save money by buying lesser quality storage furniture but in the long run the better storage furniture, the better made, the better finished with the doors that close tighter is going to last longer and perform better and take better care of your collection in the long run. So this is one of those penny wise pound foolish solutions. So spend the money for the better equipment it will last much longer. The furniture should be acquired in modular units so that will make it easier for you to rearrange as time goes by or if your museum moves. You should look for low maintenance nonreactive materials. Generally for metals what we want is a powder coat or electrostatic finish. This is the kind of paint that is on, for instance on cars it's very hard to damage and doesn't fog gas. Your storage furniture should be elevated five centimeters above the floor. The reason for this is it has been discovered that insects and other collection pests don't like to move into open areas and they are far less likely to move from one cabinet to another if those cabinets are off the floor. And you should avoid cabinet designs that have crevices or open channels in them because those are also areas that can harbor pests. So those are all things you can do when you look for storage furniture that will save you money in the long time. We also want to mention housekeeping because this is a big part of preventive conservation. So the National Park Service has an interesting definition of clean. They say that clean in museums means that enough collected dirt has been removed so that deterioration will not take place. It does not mean spotless or white glove or squeaky clean. So that's a pretty good definition of clean. I think that would help most of us in museums decide what to do and notice that clean does not mean gleaning, shining, shimmering or polished. Either it just means clean. And so given that definition what do they mean by housekeeping and they define housekeeping as all of the ongoing actions or tasks to preserve museum objects, archives, and museum records. Housekeeping requires looking as much as doing, knowing when not to clean as just as important as knowing when to clean. So people don't like to think about housekeeping. We certainly do this enough at home without having to do it at work as well. But it is critically important. It's one of those ways that we actually fulfill our legal and ethical obligations to care for our collections. If we do regular inspections we will wind up doing less cleaning because we can clean things when there's still small amounts of dirt rather than large. You should always inspect each object carefully before you clean it. You should use non-invasive techniques. Cleaning and for all many objects, patinas actually add protection and some they don't, but some they do. They are often part of the integrity of the objects. And then in cleaning I like to recommend the principle of least which is use the least amount of chemicals for the least amount of time when cleaning. So this is another picture of my wife, Julianne. So she has the exalted title of assistant director of the museum and here she is down underneath cleaning and exhibit case. So you might ask, why is the assistant director of the museum cleaning an exhibit case? And the answer is it needs to be cleaned and there is no one else available to do it so she does it herself. And which is the attitude I think we should all have in our museums. We take care of what needs to be done. But cleaning techniques should be reversible. For example, wax can be removed but rust can't. We don't want to do damage. When you're cleaning, particularly cleaning objects, you don't rush, take your time, speed can kill or in this case damage objects. You don't want to bring dirt inside your building unnecessarily. Less dirt coming in means less cleaning which means less cleaning agents and equipment and less handling on the objects. So you can clean your high traffic areas such as entrances and exits and around windows more often. You can get formats that are designed to pick up dirt from people's shoes so that they track less dirt into your collections and that will help. So we've gone through a lot of stuff. I'll sum this up so we can get to some questions and so we can review some of the key basic things that need to be done to take care of any collection. So stabilize and preserve each object as it is accession. Move those objects into a stable storage environment where they will be kept long term. This means you need to allocate each object to a specific place in your collection storage array so there's only one place that an object goes so you know exactly where to find it or where to put it back. You want to support the objects physically in storage and that of course, how you support them depends on the objects but there are ways to support these things. You want to inspect the objects regularly. This means daily or weekly do walkthroughs of your collection storage and your exhibit areas to make sure everything is okay. You want to monitor monitoring and you want to also monitor the storage environment and exhibition spaces and this means keeping an eye on temperature and relative humidity and lights. And you want to ameliorate or if you can eliminate the agents of collection deterioration. So if you can follow these basic seven steps you are going to go a long way towards preserving your collection into the future. So the assignment this week for those of you that would like to do the friendly badge of this for fun, what I want you to do is describe very briefly your registration procedures at your museum, accessioning and cataloging and say whether you think they're adequate or not or whether you think they can be improved or whether they're doing a good job. Similar are your number and marking systems and ditto for your collection storage environment and your collection storage furniture. So I will read all of the essays you send in and if appropriate I will send you some comments back on them but the main thing is for you to start thinking about whether these four systems in your museum are working well or whether you think they can be improved. And so if you can do that that would be very good and post those to the website. Before we get to questions I would like to mention our next two webinars. Next week webinar three we will talk about use of collections, documentation of objects in the collection, exhibition and loans, research and access to collections and in the following week in our last webinar, webinar four we will talk about collections management policies, legal issues and then look at some resources and programs for collection management training. So I think that brings us to the question period for today and it looks like quite a number of collections have accumulated over here in the parking lot so I can just start at the top here. Susan is that correct? Yes, and before you start I just wanted to say that you should check our webinars. We have a whole series of webinars on integrated pest management. We just did one on silica gel and we have upcoming a webinar on light, we've done light before. We have one on fire coming up. We have a course on housekeeping that's coming up this model and there's the reorg course which deals with a lot of the storage collections, the storage issues that you brought up. And if you have problems caring for your collections you can always go to the Connecting to Collections Care Community discussion and if you look on our website it will tell you how to get to the new location of the discussions. There are always conservators there that are monitoring to answer questions that are appropriate for small and mid-sized cultural institutions who we deal with. So John, take it away. Yeah, and it's a great way to get free advice from some really well-trained and very well-known conservators. It's a great setup. Okay, first question from Katherine Hayes. How can you pursue the return of an object found to be stolen from a collection? First thing you want to do is gather together the documents that prove that it should be assuming it's from your collection. So prove that it's yours. And then from there here on it's going to depend on the value of the object, the market value and where it is if it's turned up somewhere where you can comfortably approach whoever has it you can approach them and make your case and say that legally this is yours and here is your proof. If that doesn't work it's going to be a matter of calling in either law enforcement or getting a lawyer. And that will depend on how long ago it was stolen under what circumstances. But the first thing you need to do of course is prove it's yours and that's where you go back to your accession documents. John, you missed a question before that which is what did you do if there's a known stolen object in your collection? Oh, I see it here. Okay, what should you do if there is a known stolen object? Okay, if you know where it was stolen from it should be returned. If you're not sure you can try to investigate and find out. And in most of these cases we read about these in the paper all the time that a museum has returned a stolen object and of course part of that is the museum actually takes a loss when that happens. There is no fun to compensate museums for doing the right thing and returning stolen objects. But it's also illegal to possess a stolen object because it's stolen therefore you did not acquire it legally even if you missed it. So things do need to be returned but I would begin by if you know where it came from try to contact the rightful owner and return it. Okay, the next is doesn't the large size of numbers at the mercenaries in devalue the objects? Well, yes and no. It does devalue and accept the purpose of that collection. It was a collection that was made in the turn of the century by an archeologist named Mercer who was concerned that the crafts were disappearing from America because of industrialization. So he went out and collected all the tools used in crafts and this is everything from making tortoise shell combs to tile to printing. He collected all of these things for the purpose of showing how the tools were used with crafts. So most of these don't have great provenance on them. They don't necessarily have historical associations and these were made to show people the tools and so for that reason he put the big numbers on them. But yes it does in a way devalue them but if you look at the purpose of the museum it actually gives them value because of the way they're arranged and it is marvelous. If you're like me, if you like tools it is fabulous to go through this place and see these complete sets of wood shop and metal shop tools or complete kitchen setups with all of these objects in them. But that is a consideration to be made and that's why of course other people don't put great big numbers on their objects. Okay, Carlos shouldn't the teapot in the 6A I was just trying to use an example of adding the letters A and B and if you ask the question like that on the collection stewardship list server, museum L you will wind up in an all day discussion with four or five other people arguing about how the letter should be applied. So it depends but what you want to do is pick a system that you use in your collection and use that system consistently. That's the main thing. Some museums might take that same T-set and catalog each object individually and get each one its own number. It depends. So there is no absolute right and wrong on that. So yes, past perfect does have a version of the nomenclature built into it I'm not sure which one to use but it is very helpful and it's also a good way to see how the nomenclature works. Let's see how do you get a handwriting test past HR. HR never raised it with me. I had a series of questions I asked students and I had written into the job description that legible handwriting was required for the job and they accepted that as a job skill and it's just like lifting heavy objects or being able to drive a stick shift these are standard skills and I never had a question but probably because I had it in the job description and I believe that that was also in the job description when I left and was replaced by another person. So the thing is you need to discuss that with HR first and that is a necessary skill for the job of me. The explanation is very simple but handwriting will result in loss of information. I had many notes that I found from my predecessors and from students that were illegible and they would be critical information like the locality where a specimen is collected and we can't have that. That doesn't count. That doesn't work. Let's see I have to type everything but through the handwriting issues it is much easier to read. I will confess here that my cursive handwriting is awful. However, I print really clearly but when I write letters I tend to write cursive which even I have trouble reading sometimes but if I'm working in the museum I print everything because printing is much clearer. Let's see are there UV issues with LED lighting? As far as I know there are not and Susan you're a conservator so you might correct me on this. There are and you can get you can get shields for them and you can also check in the specs for the light and I think we may have something on that in our archives. I believe this came up on Museum L last week as well or the collection stewardship list one of the lists. As I said we are going to do a webinar on lighting in museums in the fall in November I think so keep an eye out for that. It's not all LEDs is that correct? That's right. We had our exhibit lighting used to be par 35 and we were able to take advantage of a university cost saving program and have those changed over to LED spots and then we also have some LED lighting that we purchased at a hardware store that we've installed in our exhibit cases and I checked all of those with a UV meter and a light meter and I got no UV out of the ones we have but that's only two or three kinds and there's a lot of kinds of LEDs. Yeah that's right and we did a course in the fall on exhibits that included a webinar on lighting that's going to be made available soon but that's something that you'll have to pay for but you'll have access to all the materials from that so keep an eye out for that. Another aspect of that is I don't trust any specs to a certain degree so I happen to have a UV meter and any time we change lights at the museum I go in and check on them because I have seen lights mislabeled before and the specs that are printed wrong and things get in the wrong box and I have found more than once people using a light they thought was safe or produced very little light that was completely wrong so if you can afford the meter and you can get a decent UV meter for not all that much money around $150, I would check them I just don't trust labels. UV meters are usually more expensive than that but a lot of state museum associations have UV meters that you can borrow. Yeah, if you get the combination UV meter where you're reading microwatts, preliminates are expensive if you get a straight up UV meter though you can acquire one adequate for testing lighting not much at all but in order to calculate your microwatts, preliminates you also have to have a visible light meter and do the math. Should staff monitor storage rooms daily? I think yes you should. I made it my custom when I was in the two museums where I used to work to do a complete walkthrough of the collection rooms every day and at first it seemed like a waste of time but over time I got to know those rooms really well and I began picking up the slightest little thing that was out of place things that were shelved wrong cumulation of dirt on the floor or needed to be changed, movement of tests so I think you should work through every day. I know that in we did a webinar the beginning of last year on security and one of the things that we've had as handouts in that are opening and closing checklists and they're very helpful so that if you have a procedure when you close that part of it is going through the making sure the lights are out making just walking through the storage it's really helpful. That's a very good point Susan because that also then gives you a document that you have done the checking if you've gone through a checklist. And who did it? And who did it? On overcleaning at the Tina's when how do you know when to clean rust off what would ask a conservator? That's not the kind of question you should attempt to figure out on your own. And it's going to depend on the type of metal and the thickness and how you're going to do it so that's one where you need definitely consult with an expert before you try. We've got a problem now that there's too many of these TV shows where people go out and buy antiques and quote-unquote restore them and they usually do this in a very brutal way to copy the objects in the course of it and they don't use good materials and a lot of people have picked up the idea that this is how it should be done so be careful, make sure your expert is actually an object conservator not that someone has set them up in the business of restoring things. Is there a recommended list of cleaning products? I do not know of one there probably is. I am not seen one. Okay. And I think the Park Service has one. I don't know. I'll look and see. We may even have one on our website, I'm not sure. Okay, great. And then Carla points out that Pack-in has great resources for practical collections care and that is true of great organization. Let's see. Cleaning everything with Murphy's Oil. Well, we won't go into that at this point. Let's see. Yeah, and Murphy's Oil of course isn't an oil but it is not very good for your objects either. Has anyone had luck getting institutions to understand that good collections storage is expensive but that it saves money in the long term? I am at a university that has refused for years to address the condensation problem in the museum itself which is a purpose built museum. That is a really tough call but I have found that rather than make the case that it is damaging your objects which is of course it is, you can make the case that it's damaging your building. If you have a leak in a roof physical structural damage is occurring to the building which will shorten the life of the building and the university will have to tear it down and build another one. That will resonate with the administrator far more than the collection. There's another thing you can do with the collection storage environment particularly if it's affecting your interior humidity. There is a great device if you go to the I.P.I. the Image Permanent Institute website called the DuPoint Calculator and you can plug in actual numbers for your temperature and relative humidity in storage and it will show you it shows you when you reach DuPoint but it also gives you a generalized index of collection deterioration based on combining data and collections and you can sit there in front of an administrator or a facilities person and change those numbers and they can watch the graph go up and down and see the effect and I have found that because of the way they're trained a lot of facilities managers can grasp what's going on in that graph a lot better than they will understand what you're talking about when you try and tell them. So you might look at that physical resource but you do need to make a case. Yeah. Sometimes it helps to let I did a cap once where the people had a horrible moth problem all through the museum and the board just wasn't interested in it and I was taken into one storage area where the museum director said I don't know if somebody left all these corn flakes on the floor but what it was was moth larvae that had eaten a rug and so I put together a quick PowerPoint we invited the board within two weeks they had gotten the state university insect people to come and they attended the whole house this was a historic house they threw out things that had been just totally destroyed by the moths so that's what I noticed if you have evidence to pest you might physically collect that evidence and take it in and put it on someone's desk in front of them if you've got mold growing you can point out that it can be a very serious health hazard if anyone in your building has a compromised immune system it can make them very very sick we have a few more minutes so I think we have a couple of questions yet still here let's see another one stacks of paper okay I believe those are just comments okay go ahead Susan yeah so tune in next week let us know if you have any problems you can always contact me at my email and and look at our website because we do have a lot of these things I'm in the process of also making a directory in our archives that will be by topics so by agents of deterioration and that kind of stuff so thanks John thank you Mike thank you thank you Susan and Mike and thanks to all of you for sitting through this and we'll see you next week