We have been facing challenges in providing disinfectants for use so we conducted our partner that is ICRC. We wanted them to buy us disinfectants from the shops but as experts they came up with an idea of introducing the chlorine production. We are using just a simple salt from the shops and clear water from the tap. The process goes like this. We need 25g of salt. And then another 25g. So 50g we also need water. This machine has to be completely immersed in water. We are now trying to focus on such projects where the ZPS can in the future be independent enough to do things on their own. The idea being that we introduce the production of chlorine. We see whether this sea is sustainable enough whether the prisons can manage the project and in the future if possible replicate in other stations. These guys come to us and they teach us how to produce this concentrate. And this was good. They just teach us how to make it and how to distribute it. And they give us papers for manuals for doing the concentration. So what do you do? Well after we produce our concentrate we distribute it like we give ourselves. We still give it up but we say nothing new. Then we give another one to our kitchen and to our tellers. Before we started using chlorine there were times when inmates would complain quite a lot because of the order which was coming out from the bathrooms and toilets. It was a very bad order. But these days the order is sweet smelly. We have been producing chlorine for the past three months. But we are facing challenges with electricity cuts. But we are so grateful to Red Cross Boys they introduced solar. And now the production of chlorine is smooth flowing. So as a pilot we encourage that he through the officer in charge and those that are going to be trained or the lessons that you are going to be learning challenges or whatever you are going to recommend in the use of this machine is he put down and then we discuss together. We want to leave them with something that is much more sustainable because giving them cleaning agents yes we can give them but they use today tomorrow they don't have. But if they have equipment on site then they can produce for themselves. It is much more sustainable than buying from shops.


Welcome to our highly organised and very serious end of year podcast. Happy Christmas! Yeah, merry all the Christmases. Well, we're going to look at some of the things that we've learned this year and some of the favourite books we've read, some of the things we've learnt and some of the things that we would like to do for the year ahead or for next year. So, as our regular podcast host is Bren, and he's way better at this than any of us, although I've hand over to Bren and he can be our host for the most. Okay, thanks Chris. So, happy Christmas to everyone. So, our kind of structure is we're going to talk about three books, three-ish books that we really liked across the year, maybe not released this year, but ones that we enjoyed this year and three things that we've learnt this year. And I think, because Jake is the biggest bookworm among us and learns more than any of us all put together probably, let's start with Jake. So, Jake, what were your book highlights this year? So, it's always so tough to go first. Thank you. Yeah, very difficult to choose three from all the books I've read this year. I think my first one would probably be a book called Richer, Wiser, Happier, How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life by William Green. And I enjoyed it because I'd just been trying to educate myself a bit more about investing this year. And I'd read quite a few books on investing, and this was the first book I thought that was actually really, really good. And I think it was because he gave such a good overview of the different ways of approaching investors or investing from all these kind of incredible investing minds. So, obviously, there's more ways to do investing than just one approach. And I love that book because it looked at all the greatest investors and kind of broke down how they operated. And as the book title suggests, there was a lot more in there than just investing a lot of the rules and principles applied to life. Is that a recently released one or it's like a classic text that has principles that you can apply forever? I feel like it was released this year. I'll have to double check that. But I'm pretty sure it was out of all the three I chose. I think that was the only one that was released this year. But yeah, I'm pretty confident it was released this year. But yeah, if you're going to read a book on investing, I mean, I must have read 20 odd or something this year. That was the standout one for me. Okay, so the killer question, does it mention crypto then? Good question. I can't remember if it actually mentions crypto specifically or not. That's a very good question. I can't remember the answer. I don't... If it does mention crypto, it doesn't go into much detail. I mean, if you mentioned crypto in an investing book, it's going to be out of date the minute you publish it anyway. So what's the point? That's true. Yeah, pretty fast moving world. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, that was my first one. What's everyone? Is anyone on the call got cryptocurrency or what's your favourite cryptocurrency? The only cryptocurrency I have is Bitcoin and Ethereum. He bought it in 2005, so he's... That's why I've got such a big smile on my face. Yeah, Jake and I, when we first made that fintech course with Barclays, when we were designing that course, we had to learn all about cryptocurrency and both of us were like, we should probably invest in Bitcoin and at the time it was about $100 or something, and we were like, it's really expensive. And we're just starting the company, so neither of us had any money. Every cent we had went into 42 courses. And we were like, I don't know man, we just can't afford to do it. We were having a chat about it the other day, we were like, oh God, if I only read nine. I mean, the sad thing is we kind of knew that anyway. We both were kind of confident it was going to do well. We just didn't have the capital at the time, which I think is... I wouldn't change it. It's still a bargain now at $50,000. Yeah, depending on who you listen to, it's still potentially going to the moon. I mean, I think I watched one video the other day where the guy was saying it's going to be, Bitcoin's going to be $12 million in the next three years or something stupid, so yeah, it's still early. It's the message. Yeah, as a company, we've invested a tiny bit into Bitcoin and a tiny bit into Ethereum, but we're not Elon Musk levels. I think the one though that seems interesting at the moment seems to be Solana, which is kind of like Ethereum in that it's a smart contract-based one, but it seems to be much easier for developers to work with and much faster. So that's interesting. Yeah, and I think that's only about £140 at the moment. Maybe that's where your... £14 pence at the moment is. It's one of those... When we're recording this, it's one of those moments where it's by the dip.  I read today it's $148 because Melania Trump is selling images of herself for one soul for $148. You can buy them as a Christmas gift today. Oh, wow. Interesting Christmas. There you go. If anyone's boss for ideas for Christmas gifts, there you go. We'll have to get this podcast edited very quickly so people can get them. Melania Trump, Solana image. Okay, I think the way this is going, we shouldn't stick on Jake, but we should go around the table because we're going to run out of time. What do you think? Cool, definitely. So Irene, what's your top book of the year? Oh, so for me, it's always like I love to read nonfiction and fiction. So I really do love to have like a combination. I think probably if I was to go fiction, I would say it would have to be this book that's called 10 minutes and 38 seconds in the strange world. It's beautiful. It's set in Istanbul and it was the first book that made me cry in a very long time. So I think that it was really beautiful. I highly recommend that. And then I would say for nonfiction, I would have to say I reread Malcolm Gladwell's Blink book this year. And I just thought it was amazing. I read it years and years ago. And then, you know, I kind of like forgot all about it. And then when I was reading it again this year, I was like, this is brilliant. So it's definitely one of those all time classics that I'll probably return to in the next five years. I'll probably read it again. It's funny how it's like when you reread, you kind of fall in love. Different things. And yeah, so very interesting. Because I literally reread it and finished it two, two nights ago. But just going back to 10 minutes, 38 seconds and the rest of the title. Is it like, so it made you cry. Is it like sci-fi? It's a romance, right? No, so I wouldn't say it's romance either. I would say it's about friendship and how these people in Istanbul, they sort of like outcasts and how they sort of all meet each other and form this like beautiful kind of friendship. That's the same as family because none of them really have family. And basically, I don't want to give anything away, but I don't think I'm giving anything away, but the main character actually dies. And they say that you have...  No, no, no. I think that's like the whole point of it. So it's basically the brain activity that's left in a person after they die. They say it's between eight minutes and 10 minutes and 38 seconds. So it's all the things that she remembers throughout her life. Oh, wow. Very interesting smells. How they trigger like different memories. Is that really a thing? Like when you die, there's about eight minutes of brain activity left. Yeah, supposedly, I didn't... Yeah, so you wonder how do they figure that out? Yeah, I wouldn't like to tell that out. ECG on the screen. Someone died in an MRI scanner or something. Probably, yeah. Yeah, with an ECG or something, yeah. Okay, so we'll put all these books. We'll put links to them in the description as well, so people don't have to write massive notes as we're going through. Okay, so let's move on to the next one. Aliza, what is your topic? A bit like Irene. I read fiction and nonfiction. And in the pandemic, I wanted two things, either to be educated or entertained. I'm going to start with the question of who is the most important person in the world? I want to start with Dostoevsky. I really love this year. It was The Spy and the Trater by Ben McIntyre. If any of you have read that, it's amazing. It is a history book that reads like a thriller. It tells these parallel stories of a Soviet spy who was working for the British and a CIA agent who defected to the Soviets. And it is the most amazing story of how he gets out and all the things he prevented. So highly, highly recommend that one. And another one I did this year, The Tyranny of Merritt by Michael Sandel. I kind of love everything he does. He is just one of those people that's incredibly eloquent. And I think actually with this year as well, the fact that you're talking about the elites in society thinking they're there as a product of meritocracy, I think it has a remarkable resonance. And he makes a lot of valid points about working for the common good, which I find quite reassuring because so many people have come out for whatever cause it is this year. So yeah, those are a couple of my favorites, but like Jake said, it's so hard to choose. Just narrowing this down for this one. It is, yeah, Ben McIntire is fantastic, right? I'm very, very jealous of his talents. And he, I think he wrote that, I mean, he's written quite a few books hasn't he? But he wrote the one that you've got a connection to, Bren, with the name of your dogs. I think it might have been his first one, Operation Mint's Meat, which is a true story from the Second World War. But I read it because my dad was in a film, jumping out of an airplane from a parachute. And it was in the opening credits of the film, The Man Who Never Was, which is the story of Operation Mint's Meat. And in that book, there is a new film coming out of it. Yeah, The Remake. So my dad's looking for a starring role again, obviously. In that book, one of the characters is a real life person called Sir Bentley Purchase. And when I read that, I thought that's just such an awesome name. So I named my dog. Yeah, I think he was the coroner in King's Cross, wasn't he? Yeah. And he was the one that lived in the body. The funny thing is, when Bentley was a puppy, I used to make videos and put them on YouTube and called it, you know, Sir Bentley Purchase. And his grandson contacted me and said, why did you call your dog Sir Bentley Purchase? That's my granddad. Oh, well, I told him the story and he said, that's amazing. He said, because the dog actually looks like, exactly like the dog we had when we were a kid.  That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, it's the most incredible story. I don't know if you've heard come across it, Elisa, but if you enjoyed the other book, then you'll absolutely love Operation Mint's Meat. I mean, it's one of the most mind-blowing stories, I think, of World War II in terms of the level of planning and luck and, you know, the role of luck and chance that played its part. Yeah, it's incredible. It's an amazing thing at my street. I'm reading that soon. And Agent Sonia as well is also absolutely amazing. And I think you just can't believe these things happen in real life.  And yeah, it's just incredible that it even happened. Talking about amazing bits of planning, Chris, have you completed your list? Yes, definitely not last minute dot com. Yeah, it was really hard to choose as well. I mean, I think I read a lot. Again, probably mostly nonfiction, but to read a few fiction things, I think that my three favorite of this year, I've got five listed down here. So I'm trying to figure out what my three favorite were. But I think if you put a gun to my head, it would probably be four of them. How can I take this down to three? I really, really, really liked the No Rules Rules. I think it's an oldish book. I just never got round to reading it until this year, which was the one from Reed Hastings, The Chappie, Started Netflix, and Aaron Mayer. He's brilliant at kind of talking about the differences in culture and where you are in the world and how that relates to how you work and your work processes. And it was, it's just a really interesting book, I think. And I think there's lots of lessons that you can take out of that that are very practical as well. But if you're sort of running a team, whether it's big or small, there's some incredible stuff in there. And it tells lots of fun stories. And it's, she gives you a really interesting overview of how Netflix has grown and how it works. Because it seems like, I mean, I'm not sure. I don't work at Netflix. I know some people who work at Netflix, but it seems like basically you've got to be really, really good at your job. And it's kind of brutal in a way. But at the same time, if you are good at your job, you're given a lot of freedom to kind of make decisions yourself, which I think is what we all want, right? Like everyone kind of wants autonomy in there, in their world. Was it autonomy, mastery, purpose? I think they do a good job at putting their purpose across and I think they give people a lot of autonomy. So yeah, it seems to work. And they seem to try and hire people who are already masters. Yeah, that was a great one. And then the other one, which I, it's done by a guy who actually did my favorite, one of my, well, is it my favorite? Ken Robbins is probably my favorite. But one of my favorite ever talks is from a guy called Aaron Dignan. And earlier in the year, we launched a creative leadership course. And so when we were doing the research for that, one of the books that I read was Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan. And it just was full of so many amazing things. And I think there's a couple of things in the book as well that he had found in his research that we ended up using in the course as well. So there's one great thing which I thought was really valuable was that user manual of me thing. I think I was banging on about a lot at the beginning of the year. So what it is is the brief explanation would be, normally when you work with other people, you don't necessarily know how they like to work. You normally learn by trial and error, which is kind of stupid in a way if you think about it because there's no need for us to do that. If you just ask someone, how do you like getting feedback? What makes you really happy? What really annoys you? So this user manual is basically a document really easy plain English that you can fill out as an individual and then you can share with your team and it tells you the kind of pet peeves and all the things that people really like so that when you wanna say if you're in a massive organization, I would imagine this is very, very helpful in a large organization and a small company like us, it's probably quite easy because if I wanna ask Elisa something, I just say, hey Elisa and then we can have a chat about it. But if you're in a large organization, you've got to get, if Jake was CEO of whatever a massive company, Google and I didn't know Jake, but I wanted to ask him for something, it would be amazingly helpful if I could look up his user profile or that he's filled out and then I would know how to interact with Jake. Does he want the long email or short email? Does he want, what's gonna be my best way of working with him? You'll be able to find that on the blockchain ledger for each individual. Good thing. But yeah, I thought that was really helpful and then the third one, I'm gonna go for my other, my other team were Nudge, which I read again, brilliant. I just, I loved it more the second time. I thought that was like what you were saying, Harry. Bomber mafia, Total Mom Fiction, loved it as my favorite audio book I've ever read or listened to. Very good as an audio book, don't quite the book. And then humankind was my favorite book. So the humankind one was, if you like humankind, there's Rutt, Goodbrenn, Brennan, Brennan. Root Goodbregman. Root Goodbregman, sorry, it's so bad at pronouncing names. Thank you, Dutch. Yeah, Dutch chap. And he became famous I think because he stood up at Davos and said, you're all kind of hypocrites coming here saying that the world is terrible and you flying in your private jets and a lot of the problems in the world would be solved if all of you who are here actually just paid taxes. So he got out of sending evasion for that, I think. But his book is nothing really about that. It's kind of like, it reminded me a bit of Savians in a way and that there's lots of really great stories and it's just sort of talking about how I guess in the world we often think that things are always really bad and that people's behavior is really bad, probably because it's in the news' best interest to say that everything is terrible because that gets our attention much more than happy things. But as someone's literally, we started this company to make learning more enjoyable. So we're all about happy. Reading that humankind book filled me with warm, happy stories because it's basically showing all these examples of how things are actually really nice and good. But the stories are brilliant and the message is lovely in it anyway. I've done a terrible job of reviewing that book but please forgive me. No, no, no. So was it a bit like factfulness then, that hands-rosling one? Yes, yeah, definitely. Definitely, yeah. Factfulness is, I love that book so much. But not as an audio book. That's terrible as an audio book, factfulness, because it keeps saying in the downloadable PDF. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I noticed that. There's so many charts and data that it must be very hard to explain. But at the end it's really nice because they do have, it's read by his daughter or his son or something, I think. And then at the end you've got his kids saying, what happened? Because he died just after the book was finished so he did get to see what it was like. And I was in tears at the end of that book, listening to his kids talk about her dad. Not a bit remarkable. Yeah, I think he passed away a similar time to Sir Ken Robinson or... Yeah, both last year, I think. Yeah, I think both last year, which was really sad because they are both hugely influential people. Yeah, for us, hugely influential as well. I mean, I don't know whether I would have got into education stuff if I hadn't listened to that. Ken Robinson talking whatever 2014 or... Yeah. It's hugely influential. Yeah, anyway. Okay, so going from a little bit of sadness to happiness, my top pick of the year. Yeah, so my favorite book of the year is actually an audio book and it's called Absolute Pandemonium and it's by someone who's a very famous person in the UK but maybe not outside. It's by Brian Blessed who has had an incredible life.  He's been on every stage around the world. He's been in so many amazing films and he's been up Everest and he's an explorer and he has a very large on life personality and he narrates the book and it's like hugely enjoyable. It's a riot, in fact. I read it too. It's so, oh, listen to it too. It's absolutely incredible, brilliant.  What was the most surprising thing that you discovered he'd done? Well, he starts the book and this tells you the vibe of the book as well. He starts the book with a story about him taking a poo on Everest. Oh, wow, okay. But it's incredibly funny. It sounds vulgar but it's incredibly funny the way he describes it. So yeah, I mean, it's just like that the whole way through. It's just like your jaws are aching from smiling and laughing and stuff. It's so funny because he's met so many other famous people, worked with so many other people, famous people, so he just tells you all these incredible stories about other people. And then the favorite thing, I think from that book, which I think I was telling Ejake the other day was he said that there was a big difference between actors and musicians. He said that actors go crazy but never normally full crazy because they're surrounded by normal people at a film set who lead regular lives whilst musicians are kind of totally surrounded and in their own little bubble. So they're never really around normal people. They don't need to do anything with the public too much whilst actors generally do. So that's why he said that musicians are normally batshit crazy or can be batshit crazy. Yeah, maybe it helps us to understand Kanye West a bit more. Yeah, I mean, because you're all influenced by the people that we spend the most amount of time with. So if we're incredibly crazy and we spend all our time around other crazy people in a way we shield ourselves off from the public, which is kind of what a lot of them do, then no wonder they seem to be slightly eccentric often, it's such a brilliant book. I love that one too, great, great choice. And my other books, so I have two dogs and I run a lot. So I consume a lot of audiobooks. So it's more audiobooks than reading books but so a great book for running. If anyone's a runner out there, 26.2 miles to happiness by Paul Tomkinson. He used to be a comedian in the 90s and he has got a real way with words just fantastically constructed descriptive sentences. Really brilliant and describing the journey that you go through when you're training and actually doing a marathon, really great. From a work perspective, how not to plan. It's really for marketing and advertising people by Lesmanet and Sarah Carter. It's so accessible the way the book is set out. It's like little chapters and you get a quote and then you get the thinking of Lesmanet and Sarah Carter. Then you get a checklist of what you should be doing about this particular topic and the case study. And it's just very deep, in a ball and out of a ball and it's like, it covers everything you shouldn't need to know about strategy and planning in the marketing field. Super book. And from doing the podcast actually, which has been a real joy over the year, Simon Lancaster. Well, I had to read like three or four books almost every time for each guest. But Simon Lancaster's books really stood out to me because they are about leadership and the words that you use. And Winnie Mind's Secrets of the Language of Leadership is a fantastic book, great audio book read by Glenn McCready. Fantastic voice. And this one I actually read the next one. How words kill, you are not human. Which is all about how metaphors are used by mainly politicians. But it's really insightful. And if you are interested in humans or you're interested in the humans that are leading you, the politicians, you should read that book because it shows how words can be extremely manipulative. Very important book, I think. And Invisible to Being Valuable, Unleashing the Power of Midlife Women from Jane Evans and Cara Russell. We had those, we had Jane and Carol on the podcast. Really blew my mind about the history of black women in America and England. I mean, it's not entirely about that, but that's a part of the initial part of the book and really extraordinary stuff. And then if you listen to the podcast with Carol and Jane, they are absolutely a hoot. And the audiobook of that is, they just have so much fun doing it as well. So that was a stand-up book for me as well.


Hello, this is an additional presentation to understand how to make and reproduce IMO, or Indigenous microorganisms. So what are Indigenous microorganisms? They are microorganisms that have been adapting and evolving in the native soil for a very long time before we even came here. So I said diversity in the life that lives in the soil and connects the trees under the soil for them to share nutrients and communicate. So there are mainly, well, there's many and probably many that we don't even know about, but there are fungi, bacteria and yeasts. Within these ones, they kind of, some of them look like this in the piece of bark that I'm showing. And the important thing here is that the more beneficial biodiversity we have in the soil, the less chance for non-beneficial microbes to reproduce. They also will add a big web like an extension on the roots of trees so that they can be more drought tolerant. And we can boost their immune systems and resilience to this ecosystem that we are, if we harvest them here so that our crops and plants can grow a lot better. So we're to harvest Indigenous microorganisms. So the best shot would be in nearby forests that you can go into a functional ecosystem close by, hopefully that you have access to that, the closest, the better, so that you can go and find them there. So it's going to be an expedition for sure. It's going to be a nice way to connect in the nature. So you want to find something that looks like a micro-risal, something that looks, something like the picture I showed you in the bark. They normally appear in leaves like this white webs, barks, pieces of wood.  That's the fungi. That's the mycelium that you're looking for. A quick recommendation is that you shouldn't harvest in the rainy season. You should at least wait for two days with no rain so that you can harvest the IMO. So the benefits of IMO, indigenous microorganisms, is that they're drought tolerance. They have adapted to this place, so they will benefit your plants to be more drought tolerant. This is a picture of how they look like. This is a picture of when we already have reproduced them, but that you can understand how is it that they look like. This kind of white web in the soil. They also boost the immune system, as we said. So these filaments, they add to plant roots and they increase the ability to get more nutrients in the water. So the IMO, there's many steps on how to make IMO. So to start with the IMO-1, the first process is that you cook some rice. I normally make one kilo of rice, but you can make as much as you want. That will depend on the size of your natural container. I'll show a picture of that, but you want a natural container like a wooden box that is not plastic. However, if you're reusing plastic, I guess it's okay as long as it can breathe that it can have some holes underneath that on the sides for the biology to grow. So it can be a canasta also, something that breathes that is made for palm leaves or a natural material is most convenient. So what you're going to do is the cook rice, you're going to put it in your container and then you're going to cover it with a paper cloth on top.  So if you can, you can dig a small hole and you place your container there and I would recommend put some of the branches full of the fungi on top of the paper cloth, never in there, never in the rice. So what's going to happen is that the biology that lives in the soil is going to travel through the paper cloth and through the holes of the box and it's going to go and reproduce in the carbohydrate in this case is the rice. So you're going to leave it for five days without getting wet, that's very important. Make sure that it's in a dry spot and in case that it rains or it's a rainy area, maybe you want to cover it a little bit so that there's no rain on it. So what's going to happen is that the biology is going to reproduce in that carbohydrate and it's going to heat up and then you're going to have a big big colony in that rice. So that would be IMO1 to harvest them and after five days it's going to look something like this where this webby stuff is reproducing. It is important not to add organic matter in the rice. That was my first mistake and then it was very difficult to get rid of that. You just want the pure rice with the ecology, with the biology. So avoid doing that, adding the leaves and stuff in the rice. The biology will spread in any ways in the carbohydrate. So it should smell nice and fresh. If there's a smelly odor I would dispose it, I would throw it in your compost but it should smell very nice, very fresh like the forest. And then once you have your rice full of the biology I would say that you leave just one hour until you start doing IMO2. So you want to harvest it when it's full of life and you don't want to take too long because it can heat up way too much and you can lose part of the biology. So with the Noi hour, one hour, we move to IMO2 and basically IMO2 is mixed the equal amount of that rice full of fungi with brown sugar. That's the only thing you have to do. So the sugar will absorb the available water that is still in the rice and it's going to make it non-available anymore. So the biology go into a dormant state and they release some spores. And this way we can store IMO from the forest for a very long period of time. As you can see I have many samples that I have taken in different forests that I have found and it was not necessarily a forest but it was a very abundant natural site that I found one of them so to have the most diversity possible. So you just grab that rice that you have with the same weight, the amount of brown sugar and then you mix it in one bowl. You don't really want to press that hard on the rice once you're mixing it. You just kind of want to gently and evenly mix it. You don't want it to be too liquid. In case it's looking very liquid, I would add some of the brown rice on top of that IMO so that you avoid that there's a lot more water because if there's a lot of water then it's going to react and the bacteria is going to start eating all that sugar and it's not really going to store very well. So I wouldn't use that as a primary IMO in case that happens. Just make sure that it's not too liquid, that it's consistent and it's more solid. So always I use a brown sugar cap once I'm finished mixing the rice with the sugar. Just add a little bit of brown sugar on top to make sure that there's not going to be excessive moisture. And this you can store with a breadable lid. You can store in a place without direct sunlight and it can be good for a long period of time. And you should have many of these. And this is the way that you're already relating with the natural biology and implementing it in your soil is the best fertilizer. So once you decide you already want to take your biology out of the dormant state, it's called IMO 3, step number 3. And I'll briefly go through how to activate and reproduce 10 gallons of IMO.  They're going to help that reproduction. So FPJ is the first one or fermented plant juice and you use 0.3 ounces for that. You use brown rice vinegar, same amount, sea water. So if in case you don't have sea water it would be great to go on a little trip to the ocean and otherwise I guess you could order it online. A little bit of sea water or just the best way that you can get sea water would be okay. 5.3 ounces. Humic acid in liquid form is best. So the IMO 2, I just use one finger and then water 1.24 gallons. So what you want to do here is that you want to make a kind of a tea. So in the water you're going to add all your inputs and you're going to mix it gently so that the sea water and the humic acid is going to enhance the fungal activity. It's going to give them enough nutrients to reproduce. So I'm going to briefly say how to make fermented plant juice. So in this case I used moringa because it's produced here locally, organic. So I got a lot of it fresh. So what you want is to harvest your plant and it can be a local weed. If you want a weed that you know that has a lot of potassium and magnesium, a lot of nutrients, one that you see that is thriving in the environment that you live in. So what we want is to extract those nutrients so we can give them back to our plants, to our biology. So I used moringa and I used brown sugar and so I cut them and I mixed them. I cut them very small so that the juices can come out and I added the sugar. I just mix it in a bucket with my hands and once you do that already there's some moisture coming out. And then what you want is to let it sit for two weeks. Maybe a week is enough but just make sure that it remains liquid, that it's going to stay liquid so that the fermentation can start. And when I did this I had to extract, it didn't look very liquid although it had some liquid I had to take out the moringa and just really, really press it with my hand so I could get all the liquid out and then that's how I started with a breathable lid. So this is briefly how you make FPGA or fermented plant juice. You can use a plant that you see that is thriving and with the sugar you're going to be able to get its nutrients and ferment it so you can give it back to our biology. So along with the inputs of the IMO3 you need five gallons of carbs and five gallons of carbon. Maybe you can check what is available locally for you. What I use in this case is five gallons of wheat bran that is very easy to find here and five gallons of cacao shells. It's a very good smell. I mix them evenly because the wheat is going to cause a carb and it's going to make the biology heat up a lot. So I try to stabilize it with the cacao shells that is not only the wheat bran because if your temperature goes above 120 Fahrenheit then most of the beneficial biology will die because of the heat. So when it's dry you mix your carbs and your carbon, you mix them well and then you add your liquids including the IMO2. So once you add the liquids you really try to mix it thoroughly and you want to use a natural box for that because if you use plastic then the part of the IMO3 that is against the plastic can become anaerobic and this is something that happened to me as well. So you really want a breathable box whether it's a wood or a cardboard something like that. So this is when I already mixed my inputs with the carbs and the carbon and it looks like this. This one smells like chocolate cake so it has to always have a good smell and so after five days you have to turn it every day so that it doesn't heat up, that it never goes past 120 Fahrenheit. So mix it every day. I do it with my hands, you can use a shovel you just really want to move it for it not to become anaerobic and you can keep that iration stabilization. This happened on the second day, this photo and it looks so beautiful you have to see that much ecology, biology just thriving right there but yeah it will look something like this. If you're in a very dry climate you may need to regulate the moisture. It happened to me that I use cardboard because cardboard absorbs a lot of water. It dried up in three days. You really wanted to be at least five days that it's reproducing so it can really colonize all the grains. So you may add a little bit of water not too much just to keep that going in case it's drying up and you feel that the moisture is not correct. The moisture should be you can press it with your hands but it doesn't really stay like a ball. It just has like a little bit of compression but it falls apart. That's what you're looking for. In cold climates it may take a longer time than five days just stay vigilant and then be open to make mistakes and do it again just always keep an eye on them. They look something like this they're very very beautiful. So in the end after the five days it should look something like this so you get these chunks of they will colonize these chunks and if you open them up you shouldn't open all of them but if you open them up they should look something like this very webby in there. It looks very good it smells great and those are good biology for soil the native biology. And you can store that in a wooden box in a closed wooden box you can store that for some weeks. And from this you can make certain things you can make liquid IMO or you can just mix the IMO 3 the finished product with your native soil and the same inputs so that you can build soil. That's how we really build native soil. Again you mix your native soil with the biology and then you have that soil full of that microorganisms you know that are going to stabilize that are going to help with the restoration of our soils. And to make liquid IMO which is very easy to add you just need these amounts of FPJ, same brown rice vinegar, sea water, humic acid, IMO 2 or IMO 3 is okay to use when making liquid IMO and your water. Important that when you're making liquid IMO since we mainly have fungi you need an irater something looking like this. I got something like this with at least two tubes giving oxygen you can use your stones you can add the end of the tube to a stone you can make that oxygen rock and it goes in the bottom so that you can always have this stimulation for 36 hours and then you have your liquid indigenous microorganisms that you can add to your soil and to your plants. So I hope that was helpful on how to make and reproduce indigenous microorganisms that is has been very helpful for us it's super fun to do and that way you make sure that you're working with the available native biology which is most important. Thank you.


Ukraine. Iran has crossed the line and we are ready to break diplomatic relations. Iran has crossed the line and for this reason Ukraine is ready to break diplomatic relations. This was said by the head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Dmitry Kuleba in an interview with BBC News Ukraine. The diplomats said that the decision to end relations with Iran has already been submitted to President Volodymyr Zelensky and can be taken at any time. Kuleba also noted that the Iranian government overstepped its bounds when it began supplying Russia with kamikaze drones for its armed forces to use against Ukraine. We inform Iran that no matter how useful cooperation with Russia against our country seems to them, we assure that the negative consequences of this cooperation will be many times greater than the benefits they get, Kuleba emphasised. Depending on Iran's next behaviour, the decision to cut off diplomatic relations with this country can be made at any moment. Kuleba also added that he did not know who was behind the attacks on Iran's military facilities on the night of January the 29th of this year. We have not done any harm to Iran throughout history. It should be noted that the Ukrainian mass media published information about Iran's secret supply of kamikaze drones to Russia in the summer of last year, which began to be used massively on the front from September and the country's energy sector later the Iranian officials did not accept the accusations about the supply of arms to Russia and declared that they are neutral in the war in Ukraine. It should be recalled that on January the 28th of this year, in the evening hours, unknown unmanned aerial vehicles attacked a number of Iranian military facilities, including the country's UAV manufacturing plant, and official Tehran blamed the Israeli side for this attack but also blamed Ukraine.


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