 to you, our hosts today, Dr. Susan Berger from the FAIC, and Heather Riggs from NEMA. Please go ahead and begin whenever you're ready. Hi, everyone. This is Susan. And I just want to welcome you. We're so excited that we can do this Connecting to Collection webinar with Lunch with NEMA. So I'm going to go through my spiel, and then Heather Riggs is going to give hers. And we'll get on to the webinar. So please remember to put your questions, and I'll catch them. We'll answer them at the end, and we'll get going. So Connecting to Collections has a lot of different aspects, and they're all free. So take advantage. You can register to post questions in our discussion forum. There are links to resources for smaller and mid-sized cultural institutions, and all the past webinars are available on the archives. And they will all have closed captioning soon, but they'll be linked to a different website to get the closed captioning. So we're on Facebook. We're on Twitter. And if you'd like to keep up with what's happening, we have the C2CC Announce List, which only gives announcements. It's not a discussion list. And if you'd like to subscribe to that, you can use this web address. And if you need to contact me, this is my email address. And if there are people that have emergencies, FAIC has the National Heritage Responders List, which used to be AIC-SIRT. And this is their 24-hour emergency line. So don't hesitate to call if you need help. And in Connecting to Collections Care, we have coming up a Credly badge course on Management 101, Getting a Grip on Collections Management. And if you take all four of them live, then you can get a badge. Or you can take one, two, or three of them, depending on your desires or your availability. And so if you look on the website, you'll get this Management 101. If you want to register for all four, or you can register individually. Now I'm going to turn it over to Heather and take it away. Welcome, everybody. My name is Heather Riggs. I'm communications and operations manager here at NEMA. Welcome, everybody, that is outside of New England. This is pretty exciting for us to be actually working with Connecting to Collections Care on this particular lunch with NEMA, just a little bit more about lunch with NEMA. It is a free webinar the last Wednesday of every month at 12 noon Eastern time. So I would like to say good morning to the West Coast out there. It's more like breakfast for you guys. I also want to say thank you to Connecting to Collections Care for partnering with us and for Ben and Nicole from Historic New England for speaking about a topic that we probably really don't want to be thinking about at the end of August, but probably need to be thinking about it pretty soon. So after that, I just want to mention that we do have some upcoming events, some onsite workshops, and then our annual conference in November at Missick, Connecticut. So I wanted to keep it short because we do have a lot of information to go over with Ben and Nicole. So I will hand it off to them. Hi, welcome. Today's topic is called hibernation, not just for bears, putting your house museum to bed for the season. And today, I will be speaking. My name is Ben Havoc. I'm the team leader of Property Care, and I'm joined by my colleague in our Collections Department, Nicole Chalfon, who is our collections manager. So our agenda today, I'm going to give you a little bit of background on just who Historic New England is, and then we'll kind of get into the details of closing up buildings and landscapes for the season. And then we'll discuss interior collections work we might do as part of that closing up. And then we'll try to allow lots of time for questions at the end. Now in full disclosure, you'll see a lot of winter pictures because that is we're based in New England. And the majority of our closing out is related to weather, snow, and ice. And so you'll hear a lot about that today. So my apologies, I saw someone from Albuquerque. Some aspects might not be totally appropriate, but you can just thank goodness that you're not up here with some of our issues. So Historic New England is a heritage organization. We have been established in 1910 as the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. And we changed our public name to Historic New England, for those of you who don't know, somewhere about 10 years ago. We have many different program areas. So we have collections, we have archives and publications, educational program, preservation services. But we are here to talk about the intersection of preservation and collections, which is focused at our historic properties. And our historic properties, we have 36 from Rhode Island up to mid-coast Maine. They range in date and style from the 17th century timber frame houses up to the 1938 Walter Gropius House. And of course, we're all here to talk about house museums and closing house museums up for the season. And that's what our properties are. Not all of them, about 10 of them don't have furnishings in them, but the majority do have furnishings in them, the objects, the furnishings. And of course, we interpret them to specific periods of time. And the care of these properties is very important. I should say that only about 8 to 10 of our properties, it kind of depends on how you define open for the winter might be, but only about 8 to 10 are open year round in some capacity or the other. So we're actively closing 26 properties basically every year. Our open season is from June 1 through October 15. So a lot of these activities happen kind of late October through November and maybe even leak into early December, depending on how busy things are. So I will now talk about building and landscapes. And my agenda is kind of shown here with inspection, cleaning gutters, secure openings, secure outdoor art and objects, turning off and draining water lines, maintaining active environmental systems, shutting down systems, and then preparing for snow removal. You are welcome. We have a handout that includes a link to our website, which has white papers. And there is a white paper on winterizing your historic house museum. So a lot of this information is found there. So those of you playing at home are certainly welcome to download that and any other way paper we have to learn more about our approach. So starting with inspection, I feel it's kind of important to take stock of what's happening with your buildings before winter. They've been open for the season, so it's good to know kind of what happened over the course of the year. But it's also good to kind of understand where there might be problem points for the winter and also just to kind of document the existing conditions. So the survey of the property is very important, but you don't have to be. We're lucky enough to have preservation staff, preservation professionals on staff, but that's not a requirement for this. It's something, a basic inspection is something kind of everyone can do. And I'm really focusing on securing the exterior envelope, so all of the kind of features on the outside. So if we start at the top, what you're really just looking at in the chimney, for example, is whether the mortar looks to be intact. And of course, the mortar is in between the bricks. Now, are there all the bricks intact? Because sometimes you might have spalling. And you can see in that highlight that there's some brick damage evident. And although not chimney related, you can see right next to the chimney with the black circle, there's a piece of the roof that's lifting up. So you're kind of looking at anywhere, really, this is anywhere water can get into your building. On the roof, are the shingles lying flat? Are there gaps in the shingles? Is there biological growth on the shingles? How are all the different components fitting together? Gutters are a pretty critical component. And so starting at the roof line, are the gutters intact? Is there damage around the system? Are there downspouts intact? Or even on the picture from the right, we're obviously missing a downspout. So those are all things you might want to call out part of your inspection. And even if you have gutters and downspouts, are they functioning properly? So on the left, we see an image of a scupper that's overflowing in a rainstorm. And that's obviously an indication that there might be a clog somewhere in the system. And those are all things you want to address before winter comes when you're going to have additional rain and bad weather. Once it hits the ground, is the water just being dumped at your foundation? And is the grading at your foundation is the ground pointed back at your house? So any water that gets kicked out pours right back? Or is the water being funneled as far away as possible from your building? Is the siding intact? We can see here are some missing clappards. Hole in the wall is not an intact envelope. And it allows water in, obviously. Missing paint, not a great thing. And then with the windows, certainly traditional in New England are glazed windows with putty. And that glazing definitely deteriorates over time. How is that holding up? Do you see any major areas where water can get in to the building? And then how is the vegetation doing? Are the bushes kind of crowding out the building? Are there trees in close proximity to the house? Or, say, historic trees that have large branches kind of looming over the house? All things we kind of look at. Now, admittedly, if you're just looking at this in October and November, there's not that much room to make a major change to any of your system. You're not about to just contract out a roof replacement. And I'm sure most people are not in place with funding to do that at that point. But it is pretty important to make sure your gutters are clean. Gutters are a nightmare for all of us. I think, certainly for us at Historic New England, they are very important to clean, but are very difficult to get clean. When you have a 40-foot tall building in the gutter on the front gets clogged, you have to bring in contractors to clean that. So how many times are you going to bring the contractors? If you bring them in in October 15, then your gutter is going to get clogged from leaves before snow flies. So we have to think about that, and we have to think about the timing of when we clean gutters. And so these are often kind of the last things we'll try to cycle through and put up with the fact that they might be clogged for some fall rainstorms, and they might not work ideally. But what we really want to do is kind of clean them all out before the snow starts to fly, when they can get super blocked up. And that's when ice and snow can kind of work their way back up the roof line and under the roof and get into your building. Also, we generally schedule a lot of our tree care for fall and early winter. It's a good time to kind of get in. The sites aren't open to the public, so you have a little more access. And we are able to kind of prune a lot of the trees, and make sure their canopies are lightened for the season before ice and snow start to weigh them down, make sure things are safe. We also have white papers on tree care. But in general, we have a kind of prioritization process where we start with the kind of historic buildings and structures as a top priority. Another top priority is anywhere visitors might be found to congregate, like parking lots or paths to the properties. And then we kind of cycle away. If you have a large property and lots of trees, sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start, but that's kind of how we approach our tree care. Securing doorways, windows, and skylights pretty much just as it says, if some places we have storm windows, then we'll make sure the storms are down for the season. Some places we have historic storms, so wooden storms that predated our ownership and go back to historic ownership. And we're always happy when we have that, because it gives us a good excuse interpretively to do that. Some of the sites I've worked with in other locations had paneled shutters, as opposed to louvered shutters and paneled shutters you can close for the season. Here we're seeing an image where some of our houses, some of the doorways and openings we can kind of close up with. In this case, we're calling it a storm door, but you can see it's a wood, really a wood door that we're installing to keep snow and ice away from the historic front door. And the picture on the right shows a skylight and the wooden panel cover is kind of lying on the roof, but that's about to be installed on top of the skylight. And so again, when snow starts to fly, it keeps the snow off the window and helps protect it from the elements. Securing outdoor art and objects. We have sculpture. I mean, we have picnic tables and chairs that we might bring in. You want to kind of clear your landscape of objects, because again, with us in New England, winter storms also can come with high winds. And so we want anything loose, secured. In the case of sculpture like this, this sculpture that's being removed has actually a couple of seams to the sculpture, some previous break points. And once the water gets in there and it freezes, of course, you're talking about the freeze cycle and the freezing water will expand and just continue to deteriorate a collection item like this or even a historic pot for plants. And so where we can, we bring those objects, we dismantle them and bring them indoors for storage. And many of our sites, we have barns or basements that we can kind of move objects into. At some sites, we don't have that luxury or the object is not able to be moved. And so we've been known to box in objects for the winter. We have made boxes that kind of fit over, so we're not making new boxes every year. We just deploy the same ones. Or the picture on the right is a fountain that has been partially dismantled, but the kind of center post section has to stay in place. And so that's wrapped for the winter just to keep the weather off of it. Turning off and draining your water lines, it really depends on what type of property you have and where the water issues might be. So in the landscape, you might have an irrigation system or you have hoses or exterior hose bibs for your water system. And those certainly in New England are prone to freezing. The water inside might freeze and burst the pipe. So we need to drain those. Some of our sites might have outdoor bathrooms and those need to be drained down if we're not heating them. And even inside the buildings and even in houses that we might actually put in a small amount of heating through the winter, we might still drain or kind of freeze-proof some of the fixtures. The process, there's kind of different processes. We always bring in a plumber. We don't have a plumber on staff, so that's part of our kind of maintenance, operational costs every year. Some of them are easily drained by gravity. So you open a valve and water drains down. That's the ideal. Some more complicated systems you might need to blow out with compressed air. So you bring a kind of air machine and make sure you're blowing all the water out of the system. But that's not a full proof. If by definition you have a system that's kind of complicated enough that you need that, and it may also mean that water can still be sitting in low spots within your system. And the biggest example is if you have a radiator system, it's very difficult to blow and totally clear water out of a hot water radiator. And so in those situations, you're better left to keep those in operation unless you're totally committing to not having heat ever in that building. And then the final step, not a big fan personally of adding glycol or antifreeze to a system. You can do that even just to a radiator system, but it has a high kind of maintenance cost. It's a very corrosive material. You have to continually kind of maintain your system. But antifreeze does have its purpose. And for like toilets that you might be shutting down for the season, you can add glycol to the tank and you can add glycol to the water trap and that will help prevent water that is just naturally in those low spots or in those areas, help keep them from freezing. And then in the spring, you can clear it out again. So the big question might be whether you're gonna leave on your heating or your environmental system or not. And I don't have a global answer for that because every site really is different. So the key is monitoring your conditions and have you been doing that all along so you know what typical conditions are and will you monitor it when you try and experiment? So for us, we're very fine in our house museums of having a range between 30% and 60% relative humidity. We have sites that have heat for the winter. We have sites that have heat only in the basement for the winter. We have sites that have no heat. And some of this is just kind of learned over the years. There are sites that we can shut everything down and they seem to be totally fine. And then there are sites we shut down and mold grows almost immediately within the building. And so you really just have to be patient and kind of understand and take the time to understand your building and experiment. And I'm always in favor of doing a little bit at a time to experiment. And so you don't wanna go too crazy with any step you take, but this is an experiment that we have done at many of our houses. If you are gonna have your system, of course you wanna maintain your system. We have pictures here of, well, certainly sexy HVAC maintenance going on. But we do bring in outside contractors to do a tune-up of all of our heating and systems. So that's our oil-based systems, our natural gas-based systems. And then on the right is a dehumidifier. So that's just underscoring the need to make sure you change filters, both for those and your heating systems. At a site where you're not going to have heat, you certainly wanna think about shutting down like computers and other sensitive equipment. So we now have kind of internet-based phone systems and so those are hooked to computers and computers don't do well in really cold temperatures. This image is showing the reverse happening, which is in a house or two, these are showing two different houses that don't have heat. But in order to keep, say, the alarm system functioning, we put it in one house, we put kind of the alarm computer panel in a closet, there is a light bulb in there that generates just enough heat to keep that system going and the picture on the right shows kind of a little boxed-in room that we built in the basement of one of our houses and there's a little just electric radiator in one of those, in that structure to help keep that equipment warm. And in there there's more of a network system than others. And then kind of the final step is just actually preparing for snow removal. Those were a lot of the steps we've taken, but then we wanna make sure we're staking for snow plows. We wanna make sure we're installing snow fences and kind of protecting any sensitive vegetation. We wanna purchase our snow removal supplies, update emergency kits, open cabinets under sinks, that's where heat never gets the cabinets under sinks and that's where water might be, so it's always important to open those, put some sort of weather block where we know it snows inside, protects fireplaces, generators. So these are kind of backup generators. If we lose power at a site that needs heat, we wanna make sure that if we have a generator at that site, it's not in a location that's gonna be snowed in. We wanna make sure we can access it at a different time in heat tape. And I'm gonna kind of run through some of these, not all of these. And the first question might be why do we wanna remove snow if we've shut down the house for the winter? And the answer is fairly simple. We wanna maintain emergency access throughout the season, so we wanna make sure fire trucks can access the building if there is, hopefully there will never be a fire, but if there is, we wanna make sure they can get in. If you have a system, you might need fuel, delivery, and some of our houses, we have tenant access, and of course we wanna be able to access it to inspect the property after storms. So an example of just staking for snow plowing, this is a driveway. You can maybe see the wooden stakes on either side of the driveway to mark the driveway. Very simple concept. They're there for to guide the plow trucks once the snow comes, and this is just an example of the house. You can see the stakes kind of peeking out of the snow, but it gives you the sense of when snow is on the ground, you don't know where the roads are. Very quickly, sand versus snowmelt versus salt. What I will tell you is salt and snowmelt of all of its different types are all just in the end, damaging to masonry, vegetation, or both. We have used snowmelt a lot. We're seeing the impact there with our masonry, and the ideal for me would be to use sand if you need traction of some sort during the winter, and but the problem there is like out of sight that's open in the winter is that sand can be tracked into your museum. So there are challenges anywhere you go with these materials. Another peril of ice and snow is that a snow plow might knock down, say, a masonry pier. That's what you're seeing kind of right here in that image, or in some of our communities, the town may snow blow the sidewalks and the image on the kind of right-hand side is showing a fence column and an urn. The woodwork on the fence column has been knocked off by the giant snow blower, and the urn has got a giant scar on it. It's harder to see that from the kind of the big section of the equipment just kind of grazing by that and just knocking it off, or similar on the picture along the bottom, the fence getting knocked out, the pickets being destroyed by a similar piece of equipment. So again, underscore is the need to kind of inspect your property before the winter, take some photos, and then after storms make sure you pay attention because you need to know if these kind of things are happening to your sites. I mentioned you should know where the snow generally blows into your buildings and maybe you wanna take steps to prevent that in the future. These are just two images showing wind-blown snow. When it snows, you might wanna reduce the load of the snow on top of your building. So whether it's occupied or not, snow load is always a major concern. I would never advocate anyone going onto the roof except someone who's trained. In that, it's very dangerous, especially when it's snow and icy. But the long tools you're seeing here are called snow rakes and they extend quite away and they allow you actually to very quickly and easily grab big chunks of snow and pull them off. And the picture on the right shows ice dams and ice dams are formed when perhaps water melts on your roof for whatever reason and then hits the gutter, which is projecting out into the cold, the gutter is cold itself and then giant icicles can form, the gutter fills up and then water forces its way back up into the house. In this case, an icicle fell, hit the roof on the left and caused enough of a hole and break in the system that water then could get in and that's the water damage you're seeing on the right. So again, inspection throughout a process, always important. Things you can do to mitigate that. On the left are kind of snow guards that we installed in one of our houses. There is an interpretive aspect to this and we discuss interpretation all the time. The snow guards don't belong on this house, but in this case, there is a public sidewalk right on the other side. So having huge chunks of ice fall onto the sidewalk. Trumps everything sometimes. And on the right may be hard to see but there's actually something called heat tape that we installed to help keep the kind of bottom courses of that roof free of snow and ice as well as we might apply it just to the gutter system. Snow and ice laden trees can break and crack, causing tremendous damage. Again, needing to inspect after major storms to find that there's damage and then the happy tree crew that spent a better part of a week at this site after a major ice storm cleaning up the site. Or the final issue I'll talk about is just that when the ground is frozen, water has nowhere to go. And so in the late months of winter for us, the ground is frozen, but it may just rain. And when it rains, all of the water then has nowhere to go. It can't get absorbed into the soil and so it tends to go into the basements of our houses. So an additional thing is you have to keep your eye again, inspect after major storms and look for areas where water might be getting in. And now I'm gonna pass it over to my colleague. Here's for several of the winter months. And all of the work that Ben has described not only protects the fabric of the historic building itself but also which is a large collections object which you eat the buildings as collections objects but it also helps to protect the collections that are housed inside the building. So we do this closing work from mid-October to mid-November, sometimes into the summer. Sorry to interrupt, Nicole. You were actually muted right at the time that Ben passed it over to you. So if you could please start again. So sorry, I forgot to unmute my microphone. So as Ben said, most of Historic New England's 36 house museums, which are located across New England are closed to the visitors for several of the winter months and all of the work that Ben has described not only protects the fabric of the historic building which we treat as a large collections object but it also helps to protect the collections housed inside the building. So we do this closing work from mid-October to mid-November and sometimes into December if we are a little bit behind but we try to get it all done before the water to the house, the bathrooms are shut down and it's too cold in the unheated properties for staff to work comfortably. So to ensure the safety of collections during these months we take steps to prepare the interiors as well as the exteriors to reduce potential damage from pest infiltration, temperature and weather changes, moisture infiltration and light exposure. We also take this opportunity to give the house a thorough cleaning and assessment. So each historic New England Historic House is thoroughly cleaned and assessed in the fall to make sure that the objects are stable and prepared for the winter months. Daily cleaning, vacuuming and dusting is undertaken throughout the open season by our guide staff but they're not expected to do deeper cleaning on a regular basis so twice a year the collection staff tries to visit each site to give a group effort to go over each room. And while we're doing that we dust and clean the woodwork and interior architectural elements. We vacuum historic textiles including bed covers, rugs and carpets, window hangings, vacuum the more hard to reach places like under large pieces of furniture and beds. Possibly wipe ceramic and glass objects if it's needed and if training has been given by the collections team. With clean windows and plexiglass UV covers paying special attention to keeping the windowsills clean. This is a list of supplies that we at Historic New England use. This list is in the handout that you can hopefully download on the left side of your screen. It includes the basics that you'll need to keep your historic house clean. Also in the handout, this is a list of the products that Historic New England uses to deep clean our collections objects. Just handy bits of information for you. So this twice a year cleaning is a good time to assess any onsite collection storage spaces usually in attics, closets, sometimes in basements. We always clean and replace any sheets or dust covers. We cover things with plastic if there's any chance of water infiltration. And this is a good time to make sure that everything is nice and tidy. So this twice a year cleaning is a good time to take a really good look at your objects and examine them for signs of mold, of any surface instability that may get worse over the closed season. And largely, very importantly, any pest activity that needs to be addressed before you close up for the season. Through your thorough cleaning and assessment of the collections in the Historic House it will help you make decisions about where to focus your efforts for the next few steps. Museum pests are an ongoing and unavoidable problem for the Historic House Museum. The dark undisturbed spaces provide the perfect environment for pests to live and multiply without attracting attention. And the nature of many objects in our collections just call to pests and provide wonderful habitats for them to thrive. For their larvae to survive, pests lay their eggs in proteinaceous materials, horsehair mattresses, featherbeds and pillows, wool rugs, window hangings, silk gowns, and old wood, which are things that largely make up our museum collections. The months when a house is closed up and not regularly full of people and activity provide the perfect time for pests to multiply and get out of control. To prevent that from happening, sources of pest food should be checked extra carefully during your cleaning and suspicious materials should be quarantined and treated. It's very important during this cleaning to pull back bed covers, look in upholstered chair crevices and places where window curtains fold or drape is these create hidden spots that pests love to live in. And then you have your treatment options when you do and you probably will find pests. Freezing is a good technique for treating pests in textiles, but this must be done in a very controlled way to be effective. The National Park Service has a conservergram that outlines the procedure. There's a link to that in your handout as well. And here's a mini commercial. Another option is a controlled atmospheric treatment which is a high carbon dioxide low oxygen environment inside a special tent. We at Historic of England have one of these facilities we call it the bubble. All living things inside that tent die after two to three weeks at that high carbon dioxide concentration. Historic of England is the only facility in the country that offers this service to outside museums and institutions. And this service is especially critical for objects that don't lend themselves well to fitting in a chest freezer such as upholstered furniture, mattresses and large case furniture. There's a link to more information about our bubble in Historic of England's website in the handout at the end of the commercial. Vertebrates are also a really big pest problem. So squirrels are trying to find a nice snug place to pass their winter months and you need to be vigilant about closing up exterior holes to prevent re-entry. I highly recommend contacting a professional exterminator who can prevent animals from being trapped inside your building. They can cause a lot of damage and will eventually find a way out even if that means chewing through many things to find it. Ice are another very destructive pest problem. They like to build their nests and mattresses, upholstered furniture and even floors. And you may want to contact a professional there also if you're squeamish about trapping them yourself. Water infiltration, I think water leaks are the stuff of nightmares for all museum professionals. Using Ben's tips and tasks to secure the exterior envelope of your building is the best way to prevent unwanted moisture infiltration to the interior. However, despite your best efforts, disasters can happen and collections can be affected. There are a few steps that we take to try to mitigate the possibility of damage in places that are likely or known offenders. One simple step we take is to remove the fireplace equipment from the hearth in each fireplace in each historic house. The tools, fenders and irons, et cetera, are all laid out on a piece of plastic sheeting away from the fireplace. But just make sure that that place that you lay the fireplace tools are out of the expected foot traffic for the room, that they don't block access to windows, doors or other areas that you may need to get to. We then place several water absorbent mats which we call hogs or pigs based on the brand name that we purchase. There's a link to newpig.com in your handout which sells a variety of hogs, pigs and snakes to keep things interesting. And they're just water absorbing materials so you can place them under the chimney in each fireplace as a precaution. And the same thing can be done for windows with a history of water infiltration or the blowy side of a building where you know the water, I believe in the picture on the right, this is the water ocean side of this building and we know that the wind comes off of that ocean and can blow snow right up into the windows of the house. So we would move objects away from those areas and proactively place the water absorbent pads, the pigs in those windows. Light exposure can easily be controlled with old sheets and window shades. The finished woods, paintings and textile objects are the most concerned when it comes to light exposure causing damage. We cover furniture and textiles that cannot be moved away from the sources of light. I do not recommend covering framed paintings or mirrors as the gilded decoration is often very fragile and could easily be damaged by the covering or uncovering process. If it's necessary to remove paintings from the wall to get them off of an exterior wall or to prevent light exposure, just make sure you have a very safe place to put them before you take them off the wall for the season. If a table or a piece of case furniture has small objects on it and we want to cover that piece of furniture to protect it from light, all of the small objects are taken off and either stored inside a drawer of the piece or placed back on top of the piece after it is covered with a sheet. You never want to cover small objects with a sheet as you won't be able to see what you're uncovering in the spring and you can cause damage to objects that you don't know are there. This is also a good time to snap a quick photo with your smartphone or a digital camera so you know how to return the objects to their places in the spring. For objects that can't be moved away from light sources, you can install room darkening roller shades or simply drape black or dark fabric over the window openings and hold them in place with tension rods. So the basic takeaway of preparing your site for the winter is to know your building, know your collection, prepare for all possible problems and hope that it is a quiet, uneventful winter. We hope that everyone has a less nice weather staying outside the building and your collections, snug and happy inside your building. So is it time for questions? I think it's time for questions. Okay, first of all I want to tell you then that it does snow in Albuquerque, not like you but it snows. Okay, we have a question. This is for Ben. In terms of outdoor sculptures, are you ever worried about microclimates within the boxes or under the wrappings? Yeah, I think that's a, excuse me, I think that's an interesting question. I think we are always concerned and I think that's part of our kind of criteria. It's not set up very well to monitor those conditions but I think over the course of years we've had our object conservation staff is actually the ones in charge of putting our sculpture to bed, our buildings and landscape staff help and so there are I would say generally always doing condition assessments before and after to make sure the objects are certainly not visibly deteriorating. And that's also I think in one of the images you could see that there was in the box there was a ventilation system built in because we weren't trying to create an airtight environment. We were allowing air and moisture to travel in and out of the space. Okay, I wanted to remind you that the evaluation is up in the upper left hand corner so please take a minute when this is over and fill that out, thank you. Is there preferred material for wrapping outdoor sculpture that can't be boxed or moved inside? That's a good question. I don't actually know the answer right now. I'm gonna, Nicole, do you have an answer to that? I think we can certainly look that up. Again, it's our object conservation staff have done that but we can check on that. Okay, if you wanna give that to me I'll post it with the recording. So that'd be great. Let's see, how often do you check environmental conditions for all of your homes monthly? So our environmental conditions, we certainly, unless we know that there's an issue or we are like doing an experiment, we are certainly kind of in the long view and we download our data probably about quarterly and we have a cycle of meetings with our collections team where we highlight certain properties that we wanna focus in on and do an in-depth review. If anyone anecdotally said, boy I feel like it's moist in a site then we will target that site but we do not look on a monthly basis at what every property is doing. That's a pretty exhaustive system that we actually are not set up to do. Someone asked, where are all these museum locations? Yes, our museums are located from Rhode Island up to mid-coast Maine in the New England, five of the six New England states. And Ben, are there particular issues to address with log cabin museums? I'm sorry, I didn't hear that question. Are there particular issues to address with log cabin museums? Log cabin museums, that's interesting. I might parallel that we don't, well we do actually have one structure that is built entirely of logs, that's the Gilman Garrison House. I generally feel like that house certainly hasn't distinguished itself separately from our other properties, whether they be timber frame or the Gropius House and generally how they interact and respond to the weather. I think a big thick log like that will actually probably fare pretty well because it's one material where we have problems at Gilman Garrison is that the plaster on the interior was applied directly to the logs, so now that's when you start getting into trouble zones because no matter what, the logs are gonna kind of respond to the seasonal changes and swell and shrink, and if your plaster is applied directly to that, you'll get a lot of cracking and failure and that is one thing we do struggle with. So the logs themselves, it's not a big problem, they're gonna move a little bit with the seasons but things attached to the logs, you might see some of the effects. On average, how much staff time do you allocate to closing a building? And then there's a related question, how many staff people do you have working winterizing the interior of a house museum? That's a great question. We work, I would say, from October 15th through December 1st, the collections team is getting to as many sites as possible and the core team is four to five of us plus interns that we drag with us to close up properties. I would say each property we try to do in one day, the interior cleaning and assessment and covering and prepping, and that's just the interior side and opens team does more time on the exterior. So I would say we try to get each house interior set in a day just because we have so many, we don't have as much time to spend at each one as we would like, but so four to five staff persons per day per house and that's very experienced collections team staff that come in and go crazy in the house. I guess from the building and landscape side, we have one regional person basically. We have four regions, so we have one per region. Each region has let's just say 10 properties, a couple or less and a couple or more, but the one person there is kind of will work with the collections team if they need it. He'll manage the contractors that need to come in, the plumbers, the HVAC maintenance people. We have a couple landscape staff. So again, I only have a staff of 12 for all 36 of our properties, so we're not stocked out with maintenance people for every site. These, we're based on kind of a regional and maybe if we're lucky, we have two people per region that might be able to lend a hand with a couple extra carpenters if we need something. So we have a particularly large house that has the skylights that I showed and so there we would deploy our carpenters to help button that one up. So we might have four people from my team doing that stuff, whereas the majority of our sites, it's really one person kind of coordinating some of the contractor work. We have a related question. How much do you spend on contractors to winterize? Well, it really depends on the house and the size. I mean, I guess if I were gonna speak in very general terms, a general house to bring in a plumber to kind of drain everything is gonna cost us $400 to $1,000, kind of depending on the site. I think we, I think one person threatened $1,000 and that's when we actually moved to a found a different plumber. But HVAC maintenance work is $250 to $300 for a service visit unless you have a high-end system for say archives or these are for systems that are like your more traditional home heating system if you have a more detailed system cause you have archives or you have other situations the costs really can kind of skyrocket for your system maintenance. Okay, there's a question on what sorts of electronic environmental monitoring do you use? Well, we use the onset hobo data loggers. This isn't a commercial for them. We certainly are exploring or constantly exploring different kinds but at one point those were established and so we've kind of continued those. Again, this is not either positive or negative towards them. They are our system and we're experimenting with some of their Bluetooth enabled ones to make downloading easier but generally there are one off data loggers that are not connected to any system so we have to go through manually and download the data for each one. With the paneled interior shutters Mike closing and unclosing 18th or 19th century shutters each season damage the shutters or the building fabric too much. Could you recommend another annual window covering instead say black fabric or something? Absolutely, I think if you have any chance of catching your window shutters and not being able to get them back open again in the spring or too much stress on them black fabric exactly is a really great option. You can pick up tension rods at the target or wherever you shop or the hardware store and just put tension rods on the inside of the window with black fabric covering the light that will be a really good light blocking. It doesn't adhere to the fabric of the building. It doesn't damage the fabric of the building at all. Very easy to put in and out. Do you mark objects for salvage priorities in case of a disaster? We do not physically mark the objects. We have in our each house has its own disaster plan and disaster binders several copies of it in various locations and in that binder are priority lists and so when new staff is hired for each property they're made familiar with the disaster policy and with the objects that are given on the priority list. Okay, do you, how do you cover carpets to minimize light exposures? Sure, so if we have small room little area rugs some of those will take and stack within the same room on top of one another. We don't like to roll carpets. It tends to stress the fabric especially hooked rugs too much. We have a lot of hooked rugs in our collection. So we lay them flat but sometimes stack them on top of each other. If they're going to be either in a place of getting light exposure or a walkway through the room our rooms are visited weekly by site manager staff or tenants resident overseers. So weekly we have someone walking through the building so we don't want wet boots or muddy boots tracked across carpets. So we may move carpets out of that pathway and then cover them with a sheet. If it's a large room size rug we might just cover the corners of the portions that are either in that walkway or in danger of light exposure. But sometimes it's easier to attack light exposure at the window source than it is at the object level with room darkening shades or blackout fabric rather than trying to do that. If you have UV filters on your windows do you still cover them for the winter with fabric? We do, yes. Is UV filters block certain, block usually UVA of the light spectrum any visible light is going to cause damage to the objects? So UV light filters are incredibly important really good step in the right direction but any visible light in the room is going to damage fabrics. I have a question, if you have a building that where you have basically no heat it doesn't that, isn't that another way to control pests? I know here there are some places that are like there's a historic mill that they basically turn off the heat in the winter to get rid of pests. Pests in cold weather will go into hibernation but they will not die. That's why the using of a chest freezer as a treatment option for pest eradication is incredibly challenging. It's a very specific, very quick reduction in temperature and it has to state a very specific stable temperature for enough time to actually kill but there have been many instances when things have been treated in a pest freezer and have survived the treatment. So any warming or cooling or if it doesn't decrease in temperature rapidly enough that's not going to eradicate pests. Unfortunately, I wish it did. Okay, this is our final question. How do you bring buildings back online? Yeah, I mean I think it's actually, it's simply stated, reverse those directions. We bring the water back on and of course you want to pay attention that there's no leaks so you walk the system. I think the same would be true with the collection side. You're going to uncover the objects. You're going to start to put them all back in place. You're going to look and make sure there was no winter damage and you put them all back into place. So reversing the steps. Okay, we have a couple of other questions but it's time for us to stop. So I'll collect them and if you guys can answer them I'll post them with the recording. So thank you so much. Thank you Heather for letting us be lunch with Nima. Well thank you for actually presenting lunch with Nima for us this month. Yeah, well we're happy to do it and you can go to the Connecting to Collections Care website and you'll find the recording probably tomorrow and along with the PowerPoint, the any trailing questions, the worksheets, everything will be there. So thank you very much and I hope we'll see a lot of you for the Management 101, getting a grip on collections management next in a couple of weeks, in September and early October. So thank you and don't forget the evaluation. We really need to have it. Bye bye. All right, thanks everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you.