Hi everyone, we're gonna go ahead and get started. My name is Alison Suzer, and I am the technical host for today's about welcome thank you for joining us, um, before we get started I'm just going to go through a few tech things, and then we can go ahead and get things kicked off. If you are going to put in a chat, please use the chat function to report technical issues to the event host which is me. If you're having audio or video issues. Most often the best solution is just to exit out and rejoin the event. If you get disconnected. Please log back into the event, while we relaunch it. And we are going to be recording this so that you can see that up on the screen, but we just wanted to remind you guys of that. Unknown Speaker 30:44 And then also closed captioning is available. If you want to activate that you can click the live transcript, and select Show subtitle for your meeting controls to offer. Now I'm going to hand this over to Joey to kick off the program. Unknown Speaker 31:01 Thank you, Alison Hi everyone and welcome to lessons learned, adapting collections care and a global pandemic. Just a couple notes before we get started. As Alison mentioned, please feel free to type in questions at any point in the q&a box, we should have some time at the end of today's session to review and discuss those. Our presenter today is Diani fugu and Diani, is the director of preservation services at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, cc H, A, and works with libraries, archives and museums and other cultural organizations to conduct needs and assessment, risk assessments, assist in disaster planning, and help develop policy and planning documents for collections. She also develops and presents education programs on conservation and conservation concerns. Before joining the staff of CCA H A in 2010 as a preservation specialist Diani worked in the Brooklyn Museum libraries and archives. She's also worked in the New York Public Library's preservation division for the Conference Board, and in the Special Collections and Archives at Kent State University. Jani received her MS in library and information science with a certificate and archives at Pratt Institute, and her BM and music business, from New York University. She's a native Ohioan and is delighted to be able to present. Bring preservation resources to her home state through CCA H A's, and E funded regional heritage stewardship program. I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Danny. Right, Unknown Speaker 32:49 thank you. So let me go ahead and attempt to share my screen. Okay. With that, I'm also going to turn my video off, I will, I will try to remember to turn it back on, when we get to questions. Unknown Speaker 33:19 Okay, so as Julie mentioned thank you for the intro, my name is Diani fika My pronouns are she and her, and I'm the director of preservation services at CCA Ha, or the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, a little bit about the organization that I work for. We are based in Philadelphia, but we do work all over the country. We're a nonprofit conservation facilities specializing in the treatment of works on paper, photographs, and books through conservation and state of the art digital imaging services. We also offer a variety of other services such as fellowship opportunities fundraising support and disaster assistance, and the department that I work for the preservation services office is that outreach and education arm of the organization. Julie let you know a little bit about what I do in particular, but just want to let you know we we serve, nonprofit cultural institutions private individuals and other collecting organizations. The reason I'm here today in this society of Ohio archivists meeting is not only because I'm from Ohio and love Ohio but because of an initiative that we have called the regional heritage stewardship program, where we have National Endowment of the humanities funding to bring preservation resources and training to the Appalachian region. So, in person work for this would be focused in southeastern Ohio, but the nice benefit of a virtual program is that we can welcome everyone from the state. If you are interested in getting more information about that program in particular, please reach out to me directly. Today we are going to talk about achievable collections care solutions, it's framed around lessons learned from the past year and a half but a lot of the information I'm going to be sharing with you, particularly in the latter half of the program isn't COVID specific. It's kind of just the idea that this major upheaval in the way, all of our collecting institutions operate has given us a chance to pause and reconsider approaches to what might be considered unmanageable, best practices or standards do have time at the end. I have some questions for all of you so I'd love to hear about experiences from some of the participants here, what has worked, what hasn't, if you're willing to share. And generally, lessons learned, but here's just a bit of a overview for the day we're gonna start out talking about some kind of COVID specific stuff or at least last 18 months, specific stuff, and then go a bit broader to Collections Care considerations, overall. So first I'd like to share observations from some other institutions in the field. And these have been gathered through just anecdotal conversations, surveys, and personal experiences, back when we first had to leave our sites in March 2020 Some of the most significant collections care related concerns are listed up here on the screen. Most of these are pretty straightforward and I would suspect that many look familiar to some of you here at least in terms of things we were worried about. For example, I won't go through all of these in detail but if you were in a site that had specific environmental controls I know many folks were very concerned about facilities, shutting off or dialing back systems without alerting collection staff closures happened to coincide right at a prime time for insect activity so pests were certainly a concern, and lack of regular housekeeping is not only a concern for the immediately obvious reasons but for longer term implications as well including the relationship of dust and debris accumulation to past presence, the concern about contaminants resting in collection spaces for a longer period of time, etc. A preventive conservation fellow we had working at the Conservation Center at the time, Ms Geraldo conducted a survey of institutions in our network in September, 2020, so just about a year ago now. At a time when we definitely did not think it would feel relatively so early in the course of events. But here were some of the concerns expressed by survey respondents that she received, and you'll see again, environmental monitoring and pest management grouped in together they're at the top of the list. Unknown Speaker 38:22 Here are a few quotes from that cch a survey and one from a survey that lyricists conducted. You'll see here that some respondents definitely tried to find silver linings, but the third point here is I think very reflective of the reality of the situation during that time period. So one respondents and one silver lining is that maybe the lockdown was a moment for people to assess what they were doing and how they were doing their job. Having to slow down made me rethink about the way our preservation team can operate and how much work we can handle one respondent from, I believe this was from a museum sites and one of the advantages was that without visitors in the space we had full range to perform routine cleaning treatments and repairs. Projects that usually take a long time we were able to complete in a short amount of time because there were no visitors in the space. Some of the disadvantages were that it was really difficult to work on projects that required more than one person because of the safety aspect. And then of course this last one, I mean it's it's short and not so sweet, but very I think, very common Lee held reflection very upsetting not to be able to care for the collection, especially when we are out of the building. So from the anecdotes I have been collecting I would say perhaps the biggest theme that echoed over and over again was it pays to be prepared. Perhaps followed at a close second by the importance of maintaining good communications with facilities staff or whoever it actually is that's able to be on site on a regular basis if collection staff are not being away from one site of course leads to risks of emergencies like leaks or mold outbreaks going undetected longer than they normally would, some success stories I heard were from sites that did have these problems but had known their buildings, areas of vulnerability in advance, and had, for example installed water alarms draped shelves with plastic sheeting or even relocated really vulnerable collections from those areas. Having a preventive maintenance plan in place for the building and site, that those responsible for facilities follow and collection staff are aware of, can reduce risky situations as well. If potential problems are addressed proactively rather than reactively, you're less likely to get into a situation with a seriously looky leaky roof or inadequately sealed windows, etc. We'll touch more on this a bit later but the importance of monitoring, just about everything that can be monitored temperature, relative humidity, light pests, water cannot be underestimated, especially if physical access to the site is limited. There are wireless monitoring systems where a designated person can get an alert on their cell phone when conditions go out of a set range and initiate quick response as relevant. We will also talk more about integrated pest management, or IPM later as well. But again, a relatively low cost investment that can give you a lot of information about and potentially provide good protection for your site. And finally, keeping those lines of communication open are key. Not only informing facilities staff of the particular needs of collections and working with them on monitoring programs, but making sure they're fully aware of any emergency preparedness initiatives you have in place, and if not, setting a plan to collaborate on those initiatives going forward. As far as what we at the Conservation Center experienced I can share two different quick stories on the way we shifted some of our services, our digital imaging department started seeing an increase in requests to not only have collections digitized digitized outright, but also to engage in planning efforts around longer term digitization project, collecting of digital materials, increased across the field, according to one study by lyricist, at about 15% of institutions. Unknown Speaker 43:00 One archivist at an academic institution that I spoke with noted that some of her staff used the time working from home to learn more about web crawling, a task they had been interested in taking on but just kind of hadn't felt like they had time to prioritize. And then, with, with all of this, my one preservation nag here would be of course as with any digital content, whether it's collected or newly created, make sure you build in a plan and resources for digital preservation. Perhaps the biggest change that my department, implemented was shifting all of the assessment, site visits that we do to virtual meetings during a set time period. It's not perfect, and it's not an exact replica of the experience of spending a day walking around on site, but if I do say so it has gotten better than we initially may have feared. You can see here on the screen some of the methods that we use to try to make the experience as productive as possible, including collecting a lot of information from the site. We definitely have no interest whatsoever in shifting all assessment work back to the computer screen, but I will say there are some lessons learned that we'll be carrying forward, Even after world, we are able to regularly be back on site for search for visits including, particularly this idea of scheduling multiple meetings with different key stakeholders in order to dilute the potential for burnout and get to hear from as many different voices as might be helpful. So that's just kind of, that was a snapshot of what we experienced what I heard and found. And now before we get into some bigger picture collections care suggestions. What are some specifics related to this particular pandemic and what they mean for archives. So this is, is surely review I will not spend much time on any of this stuff but according to the CDC COVID-19 is thought to spread mainly through close contact from person to person, including between people who are physically near each other within about six feet. This is a little bit different than toward the beginning of the pandemic when we were all wiping down groceries and mailed packages. Although there is definitely still some risk involved in touching high touch surfaces, such as public doorknobs or handrails and then touching your face, eyes or mouth. The primary driver of transmission is, of course, person to person. And this as you can imagine has significant implications for how we need to deal with and protect collections, toward the beginning of the pandemic by far the most frequent types of questions we were getting had to do with disinfection disinfecting high touch surfaces rooms themselves and even collections objects, but really as we came to learn it's that factor of human interaction itself that can actually impact the collections as objects, where we are not disinfecting objects. For more information on any of these types of this type of information hopefully, hopefully you're at least familiar with the existence of realm. The reopening our camp archives, libraries and museums project funded through IMLS, that's focused on doing a lot of intensive research on the exact nature of the way that the virus particles can actually impact collections, physically. At this point they have done numerous studies on different material types, and the information is presented in really approachable understandable, charts, graphs and bulletins, I would definitely encourage you to check it out, especially if you're interested in learning about how a particular type of collections material might need to be handled. Unknown Speaker 47:25 And another kind of small side note here about hand sanitizer so the Library of Congress, studied the effect of hand sanitizer directly on paper, and found that it did have some detrimental effect alcohol based versions, more so than water based. So bottom line for this finding is that clean, dry hands are always the safest for handling paper based collections. We knew this before and this confirms that even when hand sanitizer is involved and that's still the case. And we already knew not to apply say lotion after washing our hands if we're going to be handling collections, now we know ideally not to apply hand sanitizer, either and if we are using hand sanitizer in our institutions. Water Based formulations are recommended over the alcohol based. And again we can all recite the content of this slide in our sleep and I won't linger on these points, but just to make it painfully clear. The same protocols go for spaces within collecting institutions, as everywhere. But in order to get more towards the collections and cleaning the spaces so right we said earlier, we're cleaning we're focused on, focusing on cleaning and clearing the spaces, not the collection so these the tips up on this slide are not only pandemic related these are for any clean environment in general. The main point I want to emphasize here in this slide is the third one which leads to more content on the next slide, of being very careful when cleaning and proximity to collections. And again the points on this slide are not specific to COVID related cleaning these two are general guidelines. But now that everyone has cleaning on the brain. Let's make sure we're on the same page. Remember, I'm a broken record, we're not cleaning the collections themselves. Use isolation and quarantine of collections objects, if necessary, the virus will deactivate naturally on surfaces disinfecting solutions themselves can seriously damage collections materials particularly fragile and vulnerable ones. So, we are cleaning and potentially disinfecting the space and the safest type of disinfectant to use around collections is a simple mix of water, and ethyl alcohol at the percentages identified here on the screen. Know if Your collections have just been sitting in storage or even if they're on exhibit in cases for the past 18 months it's not like you need to do anything differently they have essentially already been quarantining. This would be much more of an issue for a Public Library's circulating collections, an organization sending collections out on loan, or at an archive, dealing with collections after researchers may have used and handled them developing quarantine guidelines is unfortunately not at all a one size fits all solution, but using examples from other institutions like this really great one up here on the slide from New York University as a baseline for reference would be a great start. And the final thing I'll say in this section is, it has been a hard 18 months for all of us, and an excruciating 18 months for some. Fortunately, there are some resources specific to archivists, where you can look for help, the archival workers emergency fund through the Society of American Archivists foundation is still accepting applications on a rolling basis through the end of this December, all US based archival workers affected by the COVID 19 crisis are eligible to apply to this fund and recipients can receive grants of up to $1,000, as well as a complimentary year long membership to SAA so definitely check it out if you are truly in need of assistance. Unknown Speaker 52:17 Okay, so with that with, with all of the kind of COVID stuff, setting the stage. Let's lead into some ideas of what we can and should be doing to take care of archival collections. During this time. To begin, this part, let me remind you that it would make sense for you as archivists to feel important and empowered in a time like this, archivists, in making decisions about what to collect and then allocating resources toward those items preservation or literally building history as you go, a role that does not become less important, in a time of crisis but some would argue even more. The statement that this quote here on the screen is from went on to also affirm that archivists perform an essential service during this pandemic and access to quality information is key to combat fake news in times of such uncertainty. I know most sites aren't still fully closed at this point but there are chances that like my organization, some of yours may have become more flexible about or even started requiring a certain amount of work from home. There are a few great resources out there that go into some depth about archived projects that can be done from home, several of which are accessible through this s a resource link. But I just wanted to call out on this screen some that are directly connected to preservation. And if I had to pick just one. To focus work from home effort on. I would advocate for doing research around and work on developing or updating an emergency plan. If you already have a great plan in place, put together some training resources or programs around it. So focus on those ways to mitigate future problems we can't always completely stop or control them, but we can mitigate the damage. Many institutions with the National Library of Medicine and really coming out in the beginning, launched collecting initiatives, specific to the moment in order to document what was and is happening in the communities they serve. A number of these were, at least partially inspired by the lack of contemporary collecting that happened during the 1918 pandemic, and the corresponding gaps in the record, a memory scholar wrote about this past year and a half. It is the first worldwide digitally witnessed pandemic, a test case for the making of global memory in the new media ecology, and well the process of collecting itself is not directly part of preservation. Obviously it ties in as what we collect, of course impacts what we will eventually have to preserve. So I did just want to spend a quick moment to look at some of the ways in which the pandemic influenced archival collecting. While some institutions halted physical collection for a variety of reasons, such as directly connected with the last point about pandemic, collecting set off on rapid collecting initiatives concerns and the actual physical transfer of collections from donor to institution or person to person, were of course, slightly altered as practices like mask wearing and social distancing had to be introduced. And finally I'll mention just one interesting anecdote from an archivist at an academic institution that student workers who were previously on site doing basic preservation work like creating housing enclosures dusting shelves, etc. Were actually redeployed to be campus liaisons to student groups to keep them informed about the archives collecting processes. So I thought that was an interesting reemployment of student workers. And now, let's zoom out a bit and look at the part of my talk that is about finding scalable adaptable solutions to work toward, best practices, Unknown Speaker 57:01 what are best practices anyway. Basically, they are a set of standards for the care of collections in the public trust, they are not in any way rules or laws but suggestions of care based on knowledge of what can harm collections, but really there is a difference between field wide best practices and best practices for your institution and that's one thing that I would really encourage you to kind of try to embrace that concept. I want to recognize that finding feasible solutions to preservation problems that fit within your budget time and staffing limits is an ongoing issue. And again, unfortunately I'm not here to offer magical solutions. However, what we can do today is talk about how we approach preservation in a more practical way. From our perspective, best practices can seem like far off unachievable goals, a behemoth that keeps organizations from making tiny steps forward because it seems so big. So rather than present impossible standards, we're going to instead look at preservation as a series of benchmarks and reaching each benchmark can be broken into smaller tasks to do that while we do need to recognize what the best practice is, we can. I wouldn't say forget it, but we can kind of set that aside, down the road and establish our own benchmarks to success. So I am here today, liberating you all from the ultimate best practices. I think that often people start to think about preservation and get lost in in literature and terminology and articles and it can be a lot of concepts or theoretical ideas but I want to try and give you things that you and your staff and your colleagues can actually do. So I'm hoping to try to break down preservation ideas into smaller tasks, instead of these large concepts and ideas, incremental steps. So we'll go through some ideas today using this model and focus on thinking about preservation incrementally. It's not all or nothing. It is, it doesn't have to be the best in order for you to start taking care of your collections, you can definitely achieve great collection stewardship and make great storage environments for materials on a shoestring budget, part of it just by being aware of kind of the options that are out there. So I split everything into three steps, getting started. This is the minimal level of care necessary for responsible stewardship. It may be the first step that it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy or inexpensive but it is where you have to start. Good, is a little bit better than the getting started but we'll still have room for some improvement. And then, better is the best we can do right now with our resources and the current research that's available. Notice that I didn't include a best category here at all. We need to move away from that idea and understand that there will almost always be room for improvement. I've worked with some very large institutions with lots of resources in terms of money in terms of staff in terms of materials and even they have room for improvement. So we don't want to let the, excuse me, we don't want to let the best be the enemy of the good so I've left it off this list, entirely. So we are going to talk about incremental solutions in two topic areas. This afternoon, housings and enclosures and environmental management cautionary note, both of these could be full day workshops. So I will I will be scratching the surface. But let's start out with housing. We've all heard or familiar with this best practice before rates in a perfect world, everything would look like this picture all collections would be housed in uniform boxes made of archival grade and museum quality materials, everything would be customized, the materials their housing. But of course this is not what almost any of our storage areas look like and that is okay. It doesn't mean we're bad stewards of our collections. As long as we are making our way up our ladder, we're doing a good job. So what are those benchmarks Unknown Speaker 1:02:03 in our Getting Started phase of this area, we have things in any box and or some kind of primary enclosure. Anything is better than nothing, enclosures do all sorts of good things, and we'll see their value reiterated throughout this webinar. They offer a buffer layer between your object, and environmental factors such as dust fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity, light exposure and pests. Basically they are an additional layer before any of those things can start affecting your objects. This would have been particularly significant during COVID related closures as items in boxes are going to be exposed to and react to problems in the environment way after collections that are just sitting out there on the shelves. Foxes, keep objects from rolling around or off shelves, they can protect the object from the shelf itself, if it's of a detrimental material, it can keep them from bumping into and damaging each other if each object is bought separately or the box has interior packing and they have the added benefit of being stackable if they are strong enough in cardboard boxes as my co workers cat is demonstrating will do in a pinch, as I said, something is better than nothing. This is obviously not ideal, but it is something. Now, there is some concern about the damage that might come from these less than ideal materials but at least we have some basic protection from things getting crushed or smashed plastic bins are a fine solution on all of these fronts as well Sterilite tubs or bins are actually very stable and inert, and often a lot cheaper than the primary archival boxes. You do want to make sure if you're using plastic boxes that you aren't creating a microclimate inside of there though, so it's important to either keep the bin unsealed or have lids on the box but punch some holes in the side, etc. And on the slide here is just this, this idea of kind of what lasts for what types of solutions. So if we're looking for short term solutions. Just cover it just protect it, mid term solutions you know those Sterilite tubs aren't perfect forever. And honestly, frankly, neither are archival board boxes as they will sooner rather than later become acidic themselves. I shouldn't say sooner rather than later, they will eventually potentially become acidic themselves depending on what is housed within, but they are a more expensive solution to be sure. So while we are considering enclosures. What, what I would like to emphasize to you here is to be a informed consumer. Now I'm not saying that in order to be at the good benchmark or step that you are using these very high quality materials all the time, but you do understand the difference between archival and non archival and you're choosing archival when you can. And I also have to mention that archival. I'm just using it as kind of a placeholder for all of these other terms, the word itself is meaningless. There is no set standard or anything specific that makes something archival things are typically called archival when they exhibit exhibit these other factors such as lignin free acid free, these actually mean something. And I will go very quickly through these terms, again, I can point you to resources afterwards on where to get more information on these but Unknown Speaker 1:06:27 lignin is a polymer which is found in all vascular plants, including trees so paper that comes from wood pulp is going to have lignin in it, it breaks down and becomes acidic, so anything made of wood, has the potential to become acidic as the lignin breaks down, if something has lignin is lignin free. It means either that the lignin has been removed chemically or it was created using materials that do not contain lignin, such as cotton rags, so the cotton cloth based paper versus wood pulp based paper. Acid Free refers to material that was pH neutral at the time of production. This does not mean that those materials will not become acidic over time, because the term acid free does not tell us whether or not a certain product contains lignin. So you want to look for something that is labeled both acid free and lignin free up on the screen here these are pH testing pens, They're pretty inexpensive and you can use them to test whether your housing for collections is or has become acidic there, it'll, it'll, if you purchase it'll, it'll tell you what colors to look for and what those mean but it's a really good quick test to see if something is acidic or not. The next term is buffered. Which means that materials that are buffered have an alkaline reserve so they actually have calcium carbonate added during manufacture. This is the buffer which gives the housing material, not only an acid free a neutral pH but an actual alkaline pH, and it helps to actually protect paper objects from acid migration or acidic pollutants in the environment. There are certain items, particularly some photographic materials that you specifically do not want to use buffered collections, or excuse me buffered materials in direct contact with. So definitely a little bit more research based on the exact type of collections that you have would be highly recommended pa t which stands for photographic X acidity test. Sorry, it does not Photographic Activity Test Excuse me. This is a test that explores interactions between photographic images and the enclosures in which they are stored, I won't go into detail but basically if you're housing photographs, you want to look for materials that are labeled that they passed the pa t, so that means that it is safe and ideal for housing, photographs, and then finally on this screen I have the three pieces of plastic. There are many types of clear plastic enclosures and to be honest, they all look fairly similar to the naked eye. So, these three up here are plastics that are okay for using in conjunction with material collections materials. These are stable and good quality and will not harm your paper collections, polyester, polyethylene and polypropylene Mylar, you know, commonly referred to by a by a brand name, that's it's it's polyethylene Unknown Speaker 1:10:35 and getting to the better. At this step, you're already ordering and obtaining housing supplies systematically for the purpose of rehousing objects, You should even have a reserve of suppliers for those last minute things that might come up. But what I still want to even though we're at the better phase I do want to encourage you that you don't have to order from the most specialized high end vendors, other places have hevel quality supplies, if you know the words to look for. So check product descriptions and call manufacturers. The vendors such as Gaylord or talus. Yes, they may have customer service representatives who know more about cultural heritage collections but if you are an informed consumer. You can easily go to craft stores, staples, order through Amazon and look at product descriptions and be able to purchase things that are going to be safe for your collections. Unknown Speaker 1:11:54 And at the final kind of better stage. Using intentionally purposed supplies to create really customized housing solutions, you could either be retrofitting the interior of pre made boxes to really snugly hold and support the items within or even make your own boxes to fit your exact storage areas and exactly fit the specific artifact. In this part I wanted to draw your attention to the resource up on the screen as well. Stash C, which stands for storage techniques for art, Science and History Collections. For more ideas about customized storage and for even more tips and tricks about lower cost supplies and materials, definitely check out this website it's it's really interesting it's put together by collections specialists, and they if, if you have a weird object in your collection they have probably figured out a way to house it. Okay, so my next section on embracing incremental progress in collections care, Again, really big topic for our next section and one I could spend an entire day discussing, we will just raise the surface in this webinars we begin to break things down into our benchmarks. So here are the ultimate best practices have a very middle range temperature that holds completely stable. Little to no light exposure and practicing integrated pest management to get ahead of pest Unknown Speaker 1:13:43 problems. Unknown Speaker 1:13:48 The Getting Started Here is knowing what, just what you are dealing with knowing the environment, to which your collections are exposed. So the first benchmark can simply be that, Understanding your situation and your environment. I should also note that again as I mentioned briefly a bit earlier, monitoring proved to be very helpful in times of institutional closure during the pandemic, as it gave collection staff more of a chance to observe what was actually going on with collections in a building they potentially could not access for temperature and relative humidity monitoring would typically include purchasing and installing data loggers. I often work with institutions who are not monitoring at all because there is a perception that there's nothing they can do to change the situation. That is not true. Okay, maybe you can't change, maybe you can't overhaul your H back tomorrow. But there are, there are many things that you can do for grant applications, having that information on your environment will help support your request being armed with data can help you better advocate for upgrades to your building's H vac system. And you may be surprised after a period of monitoring to find out that certain areas of your building may just be naturally better environmentally than others and therefore better places to store collections. And you can certainly hand record readings, off of thermostats, but that is, it's a time suck and it doesn't give you quite enough information to make informed decisions. As an ongoing monitoring program would be data loggers are actually surprisingly inexpensive and give you much more comprehensive information, and we at the Conservation Center do have a quick comparison chart of various types of data loggers on our website which is listed up here. Late monitoring is a little bit trickier but at least you can see it. You may know where light hits and when in your buildings, but of course recording that information will be more beneficial and help you to make decisions. You can get textile fading cards, like those you see on the screen and leave them out to see how light might be affecting your artifacts. What you do is you, you would cover or store one completely in the darkness and then store another out on an exhibit case or something and compare to see the rate of fading. Um, but you can actually use construction paper for the same effect. We've probably all experienced how quickly standard construction paper fades. So you can cut little pieces off and place them around your storage area keeping one in the darkness, and then a few weeks later take them all out and compare, you may see that some areas just naturally stay darker than others. And there you go you have monitored your light. So the same thing goes for pests, you have to know which pests are problems for you before you can do anything about it. This, this might be work that you may have contracted out to external vendors or service providers and that's great, actually I'll be noting it as the better step later in fact but I'm there, the risk there in contracting this work out is that collection staff might not necessarily communicate as much with those contractors, about their findings. So you might not actually know whether there is an issue or not, Unknown Speaker 1:17:56 pest monitoring for yourself is not hard or expensive and it's probably a better first step to start getting a handle on what your situation is before you start contracting things out. And once you know what kind of pests you have and where they might be getting in from, then you can start taking action, including talking to those vendors for a service contract. Another Getting Started step for each of these areas, temperature, relative humidity, light and pests would be again to put things in boxes. Once again boxes protect against fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity and make it so even if your environment is not well controlled your artifacts will still have a little bit of protection. Boxes block light, so you don't have to worry about that exposure. And lastly boxes will give the pests one more layer of stuff to eat through before getting to chow down on your artifacts Unknown Speaker 1:19:03 in the good days for temperature and humidity, it's important to be able to block fluctuations from happening when you can, keeping things stable is actually more important than staying within a very tightly defined range. The damage, the greatest damage anyway that comes from temperature and relative humidity comes from when they are wildly changing back and forth. So instead of going nuts trying to be within a perfect range we're better off spending our efforts to keep things as stable as Unknown Speaker 1:19:36 possible. Unknown Speaker 1:19:38 You'd be surprised what is possible with just a fan, to circulate air using your data loggers, you can see what might be the best times of day to turn on and off fans to keep things stable standalone dehumidifiers and humidifiers are also quite helpful but again must be accompanied by good monitoring and making sure that the dehumidifiers are empty, and a low tech way to bring up the RH in a room without a humidifier is just to put bowls of water on top of your floor or baseboard vents to allow moisture to evaporate and therefore raise the relative humidity for light exposure, You want to block light, however you can. This can be as simple as adding curtains to Windows as you see here. But if it's just in a storage space you don't even need anything nice. You can just use cardboard over the windows if it's not a publicly accessible space. Putting UV filtering on Windows and bulbs is not expensive but it is a pain to change out and it does break down over time so honestly it's easier to just block the visible light. If you can, if that's not an option you can cover your collections. Hopefully, in a box in storage, or but if they're on exhibit you can cover with a sheet when the institution is closed to reduce exposure and pests, you can also take this blocking what you can approach, sealing doors and windows will not only help to keep out pests, but will also help with temperature and Rh regulation. So potentially killing two birds with one stone. And also once you know what you have you can know how to specifically block for that pest. And then in the better category, no real cheap or easy solutions here unfortunately nothing can really replace having a good H back system. If you are in a building where that might be possible down the road I often advise institutions to create a sinking fund or savings account that the funds could be used for maintenance projects for replacements or for an emergency. For light really achievable goal to reach this better category. It would be switching to LEDs. They emit less UV light and are more energy efficient so you can usually make a pretty good case for this to board or administration, the initial investment might be a bit but it tends to really pay off in the long run, and in some regions you can actually get breaks for making the switch from your local energy provider so definitely look into that, if it might be applicable. Unknown Speaker 1:22:47 And then to take Unknown Speaker 1:22:48 this section, full circle as I mentioned before having a contract in place with a pest management company is a great thing to do but it has to be done correctly. In this better step you would have a contract with a pest company that is familiar with cultural organizations where you are communicating regularly about not only the findings of their monitoring. But what treatments they might be using assuring that they will not harm collections. But these vendors can set up a system for inspections bait or trap that won't use harmful chemicals, etc. And this is tacking on a little bit but I would also strongly encourage you to incorporate pandemic preparedness into any emergency efforts you have in place. Once again, I'm a broken record, there's a lot more to say about this particular topic but in short, please let me know if you're interested in specific resources on this and I can point you in their directions. Many organizations organize pandemic preparedness plans around phases, which does hopefully help allow for a more orderly effectively communicated response, as in any emergency disaster it helps determine what everyone should be doing when to know for example that we're in a pandemic alert level three versus pandemic, level five. And then finally my final point, underlying all of this I want to call attention to something that I haven't really focused on yet but definitely warrants recognition. In a pandemic, as in any emergency or disaster, human health and safety is of the utmost importance. Yes, we all love our collections but we can't take care of our collections if we're not healthy and safe. So please be conscious of guidelines like these up on the screen. These are from the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, everyone responds to disasters in different ways. We are still living within a disaster. So look for signs of behavior changes and try to respond accordingly with patience, grace and forgiveness. And that brings me to time for discussion, but I would rather than I mean I'm super interested in what y'all might have to say, responding to these questions but I'm actually I do want to make sure that I have time to take your questions as well. If anyone has specific questions for me about this presentation. And while, while I'm waiting if there's anything anyone even if you don't have a question if there's anything you want to share with the group responding to any of these questions. I would be really interested to see in the chat. Unknown Speaker 1:25:53 So I will just leave this up here and wait for a minute or two to see if I get questions. Unknown Speaker 1:26:08 Jani, I just wanted to thank you. That was an excellent presentation. And while we're waiting for questions to come in, I thought I could start with one if that's all right. Unknown Speaker 1:26:17 Please, yeah. Unknown Speaker 1:26:19 So you had mentioned earlier in your presentation, some information about quarantining collection materials, which I'm sure we're all still thinking about so I was interested to know if you're still recommending doing that at this point and if so, how long is the quarantine time. Unknown Speaker 1:26:39 So I would recommend doing that in only only in the case of as I mentioned like highly trafficked materials like in, you know, perhaps, you know heavily circulating library system or something. Um, you know, I think the, the research has shown that it's definitely, there's little to no possible transmission and the surface of collecting materials, but I know that some folks do still have core quarantine protocols in place just to be, you know, kind of better safe than sorry I definitely also know some have had significantly reduced quarantine times from maybe 14 days, a little earlier to five to seven days now. So again, I might. The point that I made in that that slide about quarantine about how it really has to be a workable solution for your institution but also kind of based on the use and the needs of your particular institution for something like a, an archival situation where researchers, you know, it's not like the same collections are necessarily going to be used, day after day after day by different researchers. So probably just having that time where the objects are sitting in storage is completely Unknown Speaker 1:28:17 sufficient. Unknown Speaker 1:28:20 Great, that is, that is reassuring. I just saw a comment come in, I think in response to your discussion questions, Ronald Marvin says one of the greatest benefits of the shutdown was going through a deaccessioning program and tailoring our collections, more to our mission. Unknown Speaker 1:28:37 That is so good to hear. I love that I'm really glad I mean that's, you know that that is right such a such an important task that can completely understandably be de prioritized or pushed to the backburner because it does take a lot of work. I understand. So that's, I'm glad that that was someone's experience. Unknown Speaker 1:29:10 It looks like we're getting very close to the end of our session so I just wanted to wrap up by saying, again thank you Diani. Thank you, Alison and oh H C. And just a quick reminder that you'll receive a recording of this session later this month. And I look forward to seeing you all at the directors roundtable at 4pm. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 1:29:35 And if I could just say really quick thank you everyone, thank you to the society of Ohio archivists for having me. I was really pleased to be able to present. I definitely, I like I said so many times there's like so much more that I can say about a lot of the small pieces in this presentation so if there are pieces that you have further questions about, Please reach out to me. Email is best. And I will I would be more than happy to, to help or at least point you to resources. Unknown Speaker 1:30:15 Awesome, thank you guys so much I'm going to go ahead and end the session. So thank you all for being here. Transcribed by https://otter.ai