Seeing Elsa Huxley, who will take it from this point. So Elsa? Hi, thank you, Susan. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Elsa Huxley. I'm the Director of Communications at Heritage Preservation.  Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This site is designed and produced by Learning Times. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the Connecting to Collections initiative, including the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. And links to these resources are filed under the topics menu on the site. We will also file a recording of today's webinar there. About twice a month, the Connecting to Collections online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource and hosts a webinar related to it. The resources we posted for today's webinar were three videos produced by the National Park Service. And they can be accessed by clicking on this photo on our web page, which is located at ConnectingToCollection.org. Today, we want to welcome Brigid Sullivan, conservator at the Northeast Museum Services Center at the National Park Service. Brigid is going to share her expertise on housekeeping at historic sites with us. Thank you again for joining us, Brigid. Can you tell us a little about yourself? Yes. Number one, it's really delightful to have the opportunity to take part in these Q&As, these wonderful webinars. This actually is my very first webinar, and I'm all excited about it. I have been a conservator for the National Park Service for many years now. How many? I don't think I'm going to read that myself. But I started out as a conservator with ethnographic and archeological collections. But since about 1980, in the late 1980s, I became more and more and more and more and more occupied with historic house museum settings. And now I had been in the Western region, hence archeology and ethnography. And now I'm in the Northeast region, which has a plethora of historic house museums owned by the National Park Service. I cover the region, the Northeast region, of the Park Service. And that's sites from Acadia up in Maine, all the way down to Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. And many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with all the National Park Service sites in the system nationwide. And we do have a lot of historic house museums. And we provide in-house training for our housekeepers. And we have a pretty ingenious government agency. Of course, we have protocols pretty much for everything. And so I'm happy to have this opportunity with some of you I know are not from big, big large museums that might have many different departments and with us, museums that are actually a nationwide network where we have every resource in the world. So I just thought that I could share with you some of the guidance that we've used and developed over time dealing with a variety of different historic sites from the very, very fancy to the most heartwarmingly humble. So we have a little bit of everything. That's what we're going to talk about today. I'd like to know, Astley, are there participants? I see that there's five of you online. Are there participants from a museum other than a historic, interiorist museum, a historic fractures museum? Anybody from a conventional museum where it's not in a historic setting? No? OK, well, that's good. That's what we're going to talk about. So that's pretty much it in a nutshell. And because I've been involved for so long doing collections, doing museum housekeeping plans for parks, we really have evolved it into something that really seems to work both for the service of the museum and most importantly, not most importantly, equally importantly, the historic structure in which it is hovered. To come up with something that is really thoughtful of all of the different facets of museum work that accompanies really a housekeeping plan. So a housekeeping plan never is something as simple as, well, dust twice a week and do this and that. The plan really is the central component of a strong preventive conservation program that serves both the museum collection and the historic structures at any park or in your case, in any museum setting. When it's developed thoughtfully, an improved museum housekeeping plan really provides a framework for consistent care of museum objects and historic interiors by institutionalizing this more fundamental preservation effort at the museum management level. So if I split back and say park management, just know that it's in my blood. The green and gray portions of my blood. But anyway, so it's a real management tool and you have to really look at it that way. Conservation, as you know, has two aspects and that is preventive conservation. And the other one is remedial conservation. Preventive conservation is really the first line of defense against victory race in the museum collection. And that's what housekeeping actually is. It depends on the adherence of a plan by the entire staff over time, not just one single employee. No single employee is responsible for the care of all of the objects in the museum collection. And it really requires teamwork on the part of the curatorial division, the interpretive division, the maintenance, and the administrative staff to ensure that preventive conservation at the park or at times of say park, just read museum in your mind, is an ongoing process. So that's the true foundation of using housekeeping. And one reason that I'd like to point out that the various aspects that are involved is not just the housekeeper, it's not just the curator, but it is the maintenance staff, the admin staff, the curatorial staff. You have to look for and think that what the interpretive goals are of the site, above and beyond, that this is simply what the preservation requirements are for various kinds of materials in your collection. I've got some slides. I think I'm going to put some up, and we can talk off of the slides. Did you want to do any of those polls? Oh, polls, yes. Yes. Thank you for reminding me. Sure. Could you set them up with the polls? Yes, I'll do that. I wanted to also let you know, Bridget, that your audio was cutting in and out a little bit as if you were looking away from your phone. Oh, I'll be very careful not to do that. OK, so here's our first poll. Yes. The audience, just go right ahead and tell us about your experience. Just click on the radio button next to the yes, no, or don't know. It's possible that some of our audience is listening in a group situation, and so they're looking at their colleagues and saying, you push the button. OK, well, it looks like, for the most part, they don't know. Would you like to know about staffing, Bridget? Yes. OK. How many staff is at each site? Do you have full time? Do you have, for instance, I'd be curious of knowing who does the maintenance of the exhibit? Is it volunteers? Is it part staff? And are they trained? Do they have training? That all of the museums that are responding to this have one to five full time employees. How many have closer to three? And you know what? I'm getting some feedback from the audience that for some reason the radio buttons are not working, which might be why we're not seeing very many responses. Let's try that again and see if they are working now. They're working for me over on my other computer. Well, now, see, I'm getting some variation here. 20% has all volunteer staff, whereas about 70% have one to five employees. Well, now it just switched up to 100% has one to five full time employees. This is puzzling. OK. Well, so we're in the ballpark. Yeah. All right. Let's just keep going on then. So how many, I don't know if this is one of the poll questions, but how many of the participants are the ones that are actually doing the active housekeeping? Or are you directing others to do the housekeeping? You know, perhaps people could just type it into that Q&A box. Oh, there you go. Instead of putting the polls and then looking at an idea. In the poll, putting the phone down. Oh. No, no, no, the audience can type in the Q&A. They can hear us, but they can't talk with their voice. So audience, you have to use your fingers. Thank you, Connie, for getting us started. It doesn't feel OK when you. Is my voice still fading in and out? It sounds much better to me. OK. Because I know that Donna Miller complained about that as well. Not through the actual housekeeping. How many have trained, have training in housekeeping? Should I put that in the question thing, too? They can hear you, and they can just type into the. Oh, OK. I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking. No vote. No one has. OK, that's good. One thing that we have as part of this webinar is a downloadable information that's really going to set you up with discussion of techniques that are appropriate to use on a whole variety of materials likely to be found in historic site museums. And not only that, handling rules as well. Because handling is so important how you handle something. As a matter of fact, I think in one of the videos that you saw, I think it was the National Park Service one. And it was talking about how important a vacuum cleaner is in housekeeping. But I would say, with my years of experience, that the most important thing, the most important tool in your toolkit is actually you.  I remember that used to be a perjuret as years ago. But the tools that you possess, and those are your hands and your eyes, you see and you handle. If you don't have that ability, that sensitivity to approach a museum object carefully and knowledgeably, then the handling, no matter what the housekeeping is going to be, that the handling will just completely have an effect on the object. You could drop things, et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, so then I give a whole list of handling various kinds of things. General rules. How to handle furniture. Obviously, you would never in your own house push or pull furniture. Or you might. I, myself, in my own house have been known to do such a thing. But these are long-trying, true lists that I'm happy to share with you based on many years of experience. And these are also from a variety of sources as well. And then as a housekeeper, also, there is the distinction between preventive treatment and remedial treatment. And that's sort of the distinction between conservation in general. And housekeeping, as I said, is the primary goal. The primary fortress of preventive housekeeping plan, preventive housekeeping in any museum. The flip side of that is remedial treatment. And that's what conservators actually do in their labs. I've got a conservation lab. Then I have conservators working. And we're actually doing hands-on treatment. But housekeeping, actually, a little bit less now than it used to. But it also can involve what I would class as remedial treatment. And what remedial treatment is, to me, would be something like polishing silver. And the goal that I would set for any museum would be to rely only on preventive conservation and get everything up to a state that the preventive care, the housekeeping preventive care, can take the entire place of anything that might be construed as a hands-on, more aggressive treatment or a remedial treatment to optics. I'm going to show you some slides. OK, where shall I go? I've got a whole bunch from various parts of 2011. This slide, this image, is at a historic house museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. And when I keep preventive conservation, this is my, what's wrong with this picture slide? And we're going to be talking about placement of furniture right now, placement of exhibits. And when I understand that when you're in a historic house museum, oh, this couch was always here. Oh, this table was always here. But in certain circumstances, you can, within the spirit of the reconstruction of the historic interior, make some changes that will remove collections from certain harm like this. OK, what do we have here? We've got a inlay table. What is really sensitive to moisture in late wood? OK, we've got a plant sitting on it. Ah, the plant's been watered, hasn't it? You can see that the crusty salt rings, even on the pot that it's in. Oh, that can't be good.  It's right in front of the window. Ah, let's see. What is really sensitive to light damage? You know what? Inlayed wood. And you can see the sun completely on that. But hang on, there's more. What is very sensitive to changes in temperature and relative humidity? Any kind of layered object, and that includes inlaid wood. And if you look, you can see that that little table is right over a heat retrofit.  That's maybe not the place that we're going to put this old historic table. And we're certainly not going to put a plant on top of it that has to be watered. So those are the kind of decisions that you can make. You can make the decision that you would, you don't move it away, certainly away from that. If this is where the great man himself put the table, it can't be moved. Maybe you could turn off the register. And certainly, certainly, certainly, you can close the curtain. Because light is a really, really, really, really damaging thing to collection. And a lot of times, this is great. OK, OK, wait, wait, wait, nine. Here we go. So this is Edison. And this actually is where the great man's thought. And the light went off, the great man was there. You can't really move the chair. The interpreters would not stand for that chair being moved at all. But you can see the damage to the textile. Textile light, as you know from experience, really bleaches the Jesus out of dyed materials and the denatured silk. And it does all kinds of horrible things. But there's no reason, really, that you have to have the light pouring in like that. You could be, if this is the historic house, you could, if you have the luxury of having staff, do what the owners would have done. And if that is the sun, makes it a solid path around the house, close the curtain. You could do that. Or if you don't want to do that, there's a lot of our historic houses use. And I think the great effect, kind of spendy, but boy is it worth it, the shade that transmit light, but cut it down quite a bit. And you can see pretty much, you can see outside, you can see that, you don't see everything clearly, but it does cut down on that solar radiation, both the heat aspect and also the visible light aspect. That's something that I think all historic houses should think about, would be shade. And I know that there's sometimes, oh, well they never would have had shade. But you know what, you have to make, you have to make some sort of compromise that's gonna work. You probably can figure out something that's gonna be working. And then also, you know, with the windows, people used to use, and still do continue to use coding or film for UV, to filter UV. And so that's what UV is, of course, the most active element in the light spectrum in terms of destroying things. So that's something that I would recommend too, but as housekeepers of any kind of historic house, you need to be aware of the changes of the day. You need to know what's gonna happen, when, at what time, and beyond top of things. Just the way the people in the house who lives in the house would be on top of things. Now, this is great when you have a large house, but I sense from your poll that we don't have those kind of sites that have lots of people looking after it. But anyway, but just be aware, and if you have the frontline possibility, really consider if you really, really, really want to have the windows open at that time of day. Can you close them? Is there anything else that you can do to remove that aging to the theory that you can really throw out both an agent of the period of life away from the museum collection? And as housekeepers, you're in the trenches. You know exactly what's going on out there, and you can make the decision to close it or remove something from the exhibit. This is at Fort Vancouver, up in Washington, and this is the death of the key factor at the fort who was an ornithologist. And here, right in the light of day, is something that is hideously sensitive to light damage, and that is natural history assessment. Anything with feathers, anything with protein, things like that, bleach, and you've seen probably buffalo stuff, buffalo and birds and things like that, museums that have just achieved an old history, natural history museums who achieved a sort of color of a sort of faded out ginger snap over time, and that's what it does, the feathers and the fur and everything else. Now, what can you do about that? Oh, but he always, that was his task. He always had his stuff there. Well, one thing that you could do would be to take those slats, flat things. What I would do is I would turn them so the slats don't point down, they point up, and that's going to protect a little bit more of the mounted ornithology thing there, or also a shade, but since it already has the slats, I would use the slats first to see what you have. And also work with, when you're doing stuff like this, work with a light monitor so you can see what effect your actions have on mitigating a situation that you know to be troublesome to the objects that are displayed in this setting. Okay, where will we go now? That's in line. Let me go, go to, oh, I know where we're gonna go. No, we're not. Here, now this is Cape Cod National Seashore, and this is the Peneman House, which is the house of an old sea captain, very well entrenched on the Cape historically, and the house is wonderful, but the house is actually falling apart.  If I say what's wrong with this, choose five things that is problematic for display in this area, and you're probably gonna see the mold on the ceiling, the water damage everywhere, and that's gonna tell you that the largest object in the collection, which is what, the building, the building's always the largest object in the collection. You have to be very, very, very aware of what's going on with the building. That something bad is happening to the building. Now, what that's gonna do is translate, it's gonna transmit all of its bad energy to whatever museum collections you have in this area. Also, when you're looking at the environment of a historic house, if you have a moisture problem, you're gonna have insect problems, and that's gonna be a problem for your collection. If you look down at the baseboards on the Peneman slide here, you can see that some chewing insect has been selectively eating a certain color in the wallpaper, and we see that a lot in historic houses. And there's a lot of mold on the, you can't really see the carpet, but the carpet is chewed, chewed, chewed, chewed, chewed by insects, and it's essentially the west is gone and there's areas of just warp alone on the carpet. So that's the whole enchilada of everything that can happen there. All of the environmental agents of deterioration are working very hard at the Peneman house. Housekeeping, you want to be, what you wanna do is be aware of the whole effect of the microclimate and macroclimate of the house and how that's gonna affect the furnishings and that's going to dictate your walkthroughs and how often you're gonna go into the structure, et cetera. And then in a situation like this where the building itself is so, so, so unable to support even a decent climate inside, I would say that this would be, there should be no museum exhibit in this house at all. As a matter of fact, there's nothing wrong with doing a museum exhibit of the house itself because that's the history of it. Very few objects actually relate to Captain Peneman in the house. There's a bedroom upstairs, there's this and that, but that doesn't serve the purpose of preservation and it doesn't really serve the purpose of really informing the visiting public of what is going on, what had gone on, what is the historic significance of this house. So that's the Peneman, the Peneman parlor, it still looks like that lots of places don't look like this. The interpretive goals are very important when you do a historic furnished house. What is the, what are the message, messages that you're trying to give? What do you want the visitors to understand from the historic setting and how can you maintain that? Now this here is I think a really good one to illustrate that point. If you look at the image that's on the left, you can see right there, right by the kerosene lamp is a little mouse. And then what's in that laundry basket? Ah, I believe that might be a cockroach, you're right. Now this brings us to IPM issues.  This site is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. And what they're trying to do is to give a faithful, a faithful representation of life in the day. This is the Gumpert apartment. I don't know if any of you've been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, but it's fabulous and I think everyone can go. So that's part of the interpretive scheme, those things. So, but normally that would be something you couldn't move fast enough to get your IPM traps out and this and that and see something like that. So the interpretive goal is super important and that's another reason why the Pentamin House doesn't work is because Mr. Captain Pentamin never would have lived in abject squalor, which is what it is now. And you know, some of our sites are very, very fancy and some of them are not. I mean, we go from every place to, you know, the most humble of vernacular architecture and in our structures all the way up to like the Vanderbilt mansion and stuff like that. But one thing that, one of my favorite houses I think is probably Maggie Walker. And I don't have a slide for Maggie Walker, but I'll just tell you about it. Maggie Walker was the first black woman banker ever in Richmond, Virginia. And she has a house that she took enormous, enormous, enormous pride in. And the National Park Service and their historic furnishings plant. See, we have historic furnishings plant in this place because what that does is it really studies everything and says, well, this is what is significant. This is the significant area and this is what it's gonna look like. Now, what we say for Maggie Walker, the National Park Service, that would be me, you need to keep in mind that the home requires a high level of cleaning. Maggie Walker took great pride in her home. She recognized the value of her presence in their presentation, which were a vital aspect of how she saw herself and how she represented her success to her friends, clients, and neighbors. Cleaning should be maintained at a high level with silver polished, cut glass, washed for brilliance, textiles clean and pressed, influenced, polished and dust-free. And that says it all. That's actually the goal of the housekeeping plan at Maggie Walker. Now, would that be the same at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum? I would suggest that it would not be the same. You can go down to more and more humble sites and see where am I gonna end. Let's go look at some mold. Now, oh, why not? Okay, this is actually Adam's, you have to go ahead and write on Adam's, but this is in the servant's kitchen. And as you're cleaning, you have to really be aware of looking at that thing in terms of the housekeeping needs and everything else like that.  But actually, what you're looking at is mold. And mold can have all kinds of appearances and you're not really even sure that that is mold, but anytime you see something that is moldy, you really wanna get out there and do something about it. So if you go through your, if you do your housekeeping plan and go through and walk through the house, keep your eye out for all of these agents of deterioration and the whole phylogenetic scale of what can go wrong, starting from members of the third kingdom, phylogen, whatever, namely mold and things like that all the way up to clumsy housekeepers and tourists that come in and sit on a couch and break it, I mean, that kind of stuff. But in between there's impacts and that's why we have our IPM plan. Do people have an IPM plan? Hello? We'll ask the audience to put that into chat. Somebody gave up because they can't hear me. Every once in a while, I'm not sure what was going on with that individual. We didn't have an opportunity to troubleshoot. Every once in a while, it says if you're moving away from your handset and it becomes a little muffled. Oh, okay. Amy has answered that she has no formal IPM plan. Okay, I see that.  And typically in a historic house, it's gonna be, if you have wool carpets, it's gonna be domestic beetles, eating all of the protein wood, and I mean the protein wood, the wool and silk and things of that nature. It's gonna be creatures that just come and go if you have a whole bunch of spiders in your house, that means that you have an insect problem within the house above and beyond the spiders because that's what the spiders are feeding on. So traps and a really close eye out for instances of insect damage to collections let you know that in your housekeeping plan, you better get a program up there to go around and really inspect for insects and set up a trapping plan for insects as well and there's various insect traps that are out there in the public and there's quite a lot written in the literature about integrated pest management for museums. So that is part of your job really because the housekeeper is the one who goes through and looks at everything.  Is, are there rodents living up there? I mean, those kind of things. So you're policing, you're not just cleaning the area, you're policing it as well and making sure that everything is there, nothing has been stolen, nothing has moved around and things of that nature. So mold everywhere, where should I go now? Now, when it comes to bringing everything up to a spit polish, like Maggie Walker would have done, you can get into trouble with that too. And it's more, more back in the day, back in the day as they say that these kind of, I haven't seen anything like this for a long time. That's polish residue and that is damaging to the wood. It's very, very bad for the metal, et cetera. So if you're gonna polish anything, see polishing metal, to me, that straddles, I mean, you jumped over at that point into the remedial conservation camp. And I'm not saying that you can't go there, you just have to go there with knowledge of what you're doing, how to apply polish and things of that nature. Some of the guidance I gave you in your downloadables, we'll talk about that. But if you see anything like this, you just, and it's very, I can tell you it's very hard and actually a conservator should come and do the cleanup on that because once the silver polish settles like that, it becomes concrete. And so that's just something that should never have happened. Polishing, everyone says it's a feel good thing I wanna polish this up. But polishing really, really, really is something that is not reversible. And preventive conservation really wants to have something that is a little bit less treatment and more prevention than polishing. But yes, you do periodically polish, but just make sure that you have, you're using something that is okay to use on any surface, particularly specular metals like silver, particularly plated specular metals, which you can wear the plating off as well. So I don't know if in your smaller Historic House Museums, you do have metal that needs the polishing and things like that, but that's addressed in your guidance as well. That's right, we have a supply list that we'll be providing a link to both here and afterwards in the discussion boards and people can refer to that. Right. So now, Moll, know what you're looking at when you do your visual inspection. And how often do you think people should do those visual inspections? I know you said going up to the attic once a week. Is it once a week a good amount of time for someone to go through the whole house? Well, it depends on how large your house is. I would say definitely no longer than two weeks. Okay. And it depends, yeah. And it depends really on what your visitation is. How many visitors?  It depends on things like, are you open? Does the public have to walk through rural fields to get into the farmhouse or whatever your situation is? Is mud and dirt and water likely to be trampled in by visitors? How many, what is your tour group size? For a house like Adams, they have had a longstanding thing that they bring I think like 14 to 16 people through at once which is, it's horrible. And I can say that because I work for the parks. And we've been after them to lessen that too because that's all of these people going upstairs. All, you know, if they have backpacks or whatever and then there's trees of their code, it's rubbing along a wallpaper. You just have to be kind of aware of all of these, all of these situations that arise any time you invite a visitor into the house. Above and beyond them touching things. Well, just their presence there could be a problem because they could be tracking in this and tracking in that. And also the way the house is interpreted, does the interpreter stand on the front porch for instances while the screen door is open, you know, and all flies come in and everything else like that. You just have to always, always, always, always focus as the housekeeper on keeping bad stuff out and treating everything that's in there on with an appropriate treatment at an appropriate interval. And I do think that the guidance that I gave you was gonna work. And that means that, you know, you're not always gonna be on sort of a combat of relationship or whatever, you know, with the interpreters because it's a close partnership, housekeeping and interpretation. And if you get together and work together, I know that you're gonna be able to find something if you cook in an open fireplace in your historic house. I mean, that's something that has many, many, many issues related to it. But just know that when you develop a housekeeping plan, it's gotta be reality-based. It's gonna be based on who comes to the house. When, at what time of the year, does it close for winter? Do you have an open season, you know, all of those things and just plan accordingly. It's ideal for a historic house.  If you have rugs on the floor, you're gonna roll them up.  And all of this is available. All of this information on how to do that is available and in the literature that we provided you with names of, et cetera. But just be aware that it's not, it's not just one person doing the housekeeping. You have to be part of a team. Because if you're not part of a team, you know, it simply isn't gonna work, particularly if you have a historic house with structural, shall we say, issues. And then you want the chief of maintenance to be your best friend at that point. And I think I've talked enough. Do people have questions? What do you want me, what do you want me to go? Tell me where you want me to go I've been wondering about what the most common mistakes are that you see. And I wonder if you start talking about that if it might. The most common mistakes I see is overcleaning selected pieces. Okay, what kind of pieces? Selected pieces might be something of iconic importance. Like it could be the work basket of, you know, grandmother, whoever, that is dusted all the time. Things that are, things that are dusted, things that are visible to the visitor and well, two things I say, okay, overcleaning things that are visible to the visitor because it's easy to do. You sell what the visitor sees this, the visitor sees that. But then also you have to snap your brain around to see, well, wait a minute, what is in the visitor seeing and how does that contribute to my workload as a housekeeper, you know, is the floor on the porch dirty? Is it dusty, you know, these kind of things. And that affects the other part of the question. That's going to affect what's happening in the house. You know, if you have, in the summer, if you have the windows open and screens up and things like that, but just get to know your house and what its needs are and certainly think about what the visitor sees because, you know, you don't want to do everything if the visitor isn't going to see it. You want to do everything that needs to be done and need to do and nice to do really are two different things when it comes to housekeeping. For instance, we have, I'll give you one site and that is Marsh Billings, a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful house up in Vermont.     Does it need to have that done? Well, it probably doesn't need it every day, but what it does need to do is to be ready for a visitor according to when the visitors come. You never want anything to have a lot of dust on it because dust attracts moisture and it holds it against the object. It's very, very, very bad, for instance, on guilt frames. It holds moisture against the object and if you have something that is very complex and layered like gilding, you just don't want to have dust around. But do you want to be, you know, just completely, completely only dust-oriented? No, you know, you have to also look, you should go through the house at where visitors have been and, you know, the pathways and things like that and if visitors, you know, on banisters for stairs, we had this one situation. I almost put a slide in, a slide in to show you guys, but it was too repulsive. That main banister of John Adams' home in Quincy that had such a deposit of lipids, that's oils from your hand, lipids on it, that it actually added topographic texture. Wow. You know, I know that's pretty, that's pretty gross. And so we, you know, we do, and they say, oh, you know, we're cleaning it, but anyway, it just adds and adds and adds and adds. Now, also a lot of problems that you have with housekeeping is gonna relate to past treatments. Have people been, what have they been putting on the furniture for years? How have they been polishing it? Are they waxing stuff? Are they pledging? Are they using pledge?  But you never, ever, ever would use on a museum object in a historic setting. So, and those things can take their attrition too. So. That's a playlist will help people know what they should. Yeah, the supply list. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, and some things that are available, like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, I put them onto swifters. I love swifters. I love anything that keeps your eye, that has some sort of a long wand kind of thing. That, so you can keep your eye on what you're doing, rather than using a rag or something where you can't really see how it's affecting the surface. For instance, when I dust something like a chandelier, anything, you know, any piece of bocage, ceramic, or I always use a long, handled, soft painter's brush. And because I'm keeping my eye on what's there, you don't wanna have any cleaning tool that you're using that's going to, that's going to get in the way of your being able to do a visual assessment of anything. So that's what I see, your eyes are like so important and your hands are too. And neither, your hands never want to go where your eyes can't go. When you talk about a visual assessment, what are some key things people should have in mind when they're performing one of those? I would say change of a visual assessment would be change of a luster, you know? It does, if you get some sort of, you know, you can sense oily deposits or something like that. And then also another thing that I can readily pick out is if you have fly specks and things of that nature, you know? And a lot of it is gonna be, you know, you visually inspect for mold, always mold. And go up in the attic because the attic is, the house is the largest object in the collection. I just can't stress that enough. And do a walkthrough with your maintenance guys and don't be aware of that.  And never let anything get in the way of your visual access in cleaning anything. So, um... In the video they spoke about when you're doing these assessments, there are some pieces of furniture that are so large and moving them is in itself very dangerous. You have to, you have to have two people. And for a lot of things, and that would mean anything that's on a ladder, for instance, you really can't do that yourself.  But the guidance that I gave you has general rules for handling. Following, I've given you guidance for installation because installation would be as you set things out in your historic museum, can you put this directly on wood? No, you know, it would be better if you would put it on some unique barrier between this material and that material. For instance, between metal objects, such as silver and brass candlesticks on wood surfaces, put some mylar there. Between paper, like letters and documents in a wood surface, like if historic letters are sitting on a desk, you have to do that because these materials can affect each other pretty seriously, especially given the fact that you have a climate that floats freely generally in houses.  So be aware of the installation thing because I tell you what materials you can use and pretty much why. And it's a short list, it's only nine tenants of faith there.  Furniture, never push or pull. If it's made of composite objects, do this. If it's marble pots, do that. So it's what I tried to do and what other sources similar to this have done is to, you know, look at things with what normally a person would do to it and look at the object itself. And the cleaning depends really on the object as well as the skills of the cleaner. You know, the cleaning techniques completely depend on the object, I guess is one thing. And with the handling of it, you know, never move small objects by hand. Always put it in a basket or a box. Never put a light and heavy things in one box.  But it's nice to have them written down, especially as you will leave a housekeeping plan, hopefully everyone's gonna run home and do one.  When to wear gloves, when not to wear gloves, you know? How to handle fabrics. And on and on, it's all there. Okay, and I'm posting right now some links to those documents and we're posting them online to our general discussion section. Yeah, and then also I've given you the cleaning techniques, what you can do for your architectural surfaces, your walls, what you can use. How can you clean, clear, finished, and painted wood? Which you know, if you have a big visitor ship, you're gonna have kind of attrition on a lot of the, not just like remember the Adams, I don't ever want to remember the Adams banister. Oh my God. But you know, those sort of things, you know, the people leaning against and hand prints on brass escutcheons around doorknobs and those kind of things, any sticky wood. What can you use? And you have a lift now for architectural surfaces. And that would be the wood moldings, the vacuuming of the floors, the this and that. What do you do if the wood is unfinished or worn or it's wood that has an unstable finish? So what I tried to do is to think of everything that you're gonna encounter and give you guidance for that in the cleaning techniques section of your handouts. So, what else? Okay, I wanted to mention the manual of housekeeping that we're gonna give out to one of our participants here today. After we sign off, we'll pick one person at random and we'll be sending them a copy of the National Trust Manual of Housekeeping with our thanks for participating today. And I wanted to also mention that I posted a URL for our evaluation for today's webinar and we'd love to have your feedback. Okay. I'll explain in future one. I'm trying to think if there are any other, does anybody have any other questions? Before we wrap up, we have about five minutes left. I was sort of hoping, while we wait to see if there are any other questions, if you could say something about inspecting the envelope of the house. You've touched on it a couple of times. Yes, yes, yes, yes. How important that is. Is there anything you could tell us about that? Well, obviously, the main entrance when the outside comes inside is through windows. And you wanna make sure that your window hardware is in good shape and you don't have flipping and sliding and things like that. And look closely at the casements. If you have termites, for instance, always look out for termites. You're gonna see it in softwood that's been wet for a long time. And at that point, your IPM is gonna have to jump into place and you're gonna have to do something about that because that is definitely gonna affect not just the largest object, but the littler objects inside as well. So the windows are a big, big, big, big issue for me. Be very, very, very mindful of windows and that the hardware is okay and they're going up and down and things like that. Look around, always around baseboards too because you're gonna see insect activity there.   So you wanna make sure that that's your IPM plan is dealing with that. But also the dead insects. If you see dead insects anywhere in the house and that includes the attic, get rid of them because they're the protein source for the really, really, really nasty carpet beetles and the guys that are gonna move in and not just eat the cellulose, which is what the wood is, but they're gonna chomp down on the settee, the carpets, you know, and things like that. So that's your walkthrough should, and I say no more than two weeks should go by without a walkthrough and the walkthrough is gonna, you're gonna have your IPM hat on, you're gonna look for bugs, you're gonna look for signs of bugs, you're gonna switch out traps as needed and read up on IPM plans because there's a lot in the literature about that.  And you're gonna look at what do people often see, does the tour guide handle something specifically, hold it up? Well, this is the great man's wine glass or something like that. Just be aware of how the objects are used in the house and look at those objects and make sure that there's no attrition on them. If you also, a very important thing with housekeeping is do you have seasonal displays? Do you celebrate, do you decorate for Christmas? That's a biggie because you're gonna have pine needles and all berries and everything else in the house. Just to make sure that the housekeeping takes any trace of holiday displays or use, a special event use out of the house. So what else can I tell you? Anything else? Shoe coverings. Do you recommend that people wear those? I recommend that people wear them as needed. In most of the historic houses I've ever been in, you don't walk on historic carpets. There's always visitor pathways. You seldom would walk over an unprotected wood floor because there's visitor traffic, visitor parkways. It sounds like you're gonna drive your car. Don't do that. But runners, you mean? Yeah, runners, that's what I mean, runners. Most people have runners. If you have like a ballroom floor that is very fancy and inlaid and everything else like that, you might ask them to put booties on, but mostly that would be for high-style houses and the best defense really would be to have a confined visitor pathway because you never want visitors to wander like excited molecules inside of a container bouncing off the walls.  That makes a lot of sense with good visualization, too, for managing that traffic. All right, well, we are at three o'clock, so I think it is time for us to wrap it up. I did wanna mention also, though, just on the IPM front, we hosted a webinar a few weeks ago. Oh, Barbara Cumberland was there. Barbara Cumberland, yes. Barbara Cumberland, yes. Oh, oh, great. That's a great point. You had the best. We have that archived on the Connecting to Collection. Great, you had the best there, right? Yeah, so that's another great place and we posted a lot of resources that they shared with us afterwards, so I think people have follow-up questions about that. That's one place where they can look to get some more information. Okay. And I think that that is all. I wanna thank you so much for it. Well, I hope it was helpful. It was, it was, and this will be archived so people can refer other colleagues to it. And I also wanted to mention that we have two more scheduled webinars coming up, one on Thursday, the 27th of October. Yes. Care of motorized vehicles. Ooh! Wednesday, November 9th, flag rolling and storage, right in time for veterans. Oh! I hope it works. Okay, now what is the, the vehicles? Care of motorized vehicles. And what date is that? And that is on Thursday, October 27th. Oh, I'm so there for that, because we have a lot of sites that have seriously historic vehicles. Oh, great. October 27th. October 27th, and it's on. Thank you! Thank you, thank you. And we'll have a featured resource posted soon. Oh, good! Okay, well this is a wonderful thing that you're doing for the museum community. Thank you so much for your time. It really is. Thank you, well your information was wonderful today. All right, well I hope I said something useful that people will be able to take away with them. I am certain that you did. Okay, all righty, thank you. Thank you, thank you all. Okay, bye.


Hi, my name is Mac Davis and I'm known by a lot of people who are associated with the kidney cancer association by the pen name that I write under which is press on regardless. And I've been asked to talk about what I've learned in the 14 years since I was diagnosed with kidney cancer about surviving it and claiming a life for yourself after you find out that you've been diagnosed with kidney cancer because when I found out, and I won't bore you with the details, but there came a point when I found out I had kidney cancer and my world came crashing in on top of me. I have a happy marriage and I have three wonderful children which I could go on and on about if you'd like me to, but thinking you probably don't. And the youngest of them was six years old when I was first diagnosed and when I went from my five-year checkup expecting to be what I had been for the five years since my radical and for it to be cancer-free, I found out it had come back and had spread to my pancreas and my lungs, actually just one lung then. And I was told that I had it was inoperable, it was incurable, it's still incurable, and that average survival was 18 months and my chances of living five years was one in ten. And I remember being in that room and my wife broke down into tears and started crying hysterically, but I didn't. It was sort of like surreal, you know, it was happening around me. But there came a time when I figured out I was, if I didn't decide what was going to happen here other people would decide for me. And so I decided that somehow or another I was going to survive. No matter what, no matter who, no matter who I had to go to, no matter who I had to see, I was going to survive. And I have. And I'm living large, I'll humbly tell you, and enjoying every minute of it. And I post a lot to friends on Facebook and in other places still and I have gotten to where now most of the postings that I leave end up with and to thank you I might have missed this. Because that's basically what life is for me now.  You weren't supposed to get this. And I have. And I wanted to have happened what has happened exactly. I'm a very fortunate fellow. I don't say lucky. I say fortunate because a lot of wonderful things have happened to me and I wanted to hold on until the cure came. And I figured I would try high dose IL-2, which the wonderful Dr. Dutcher is about to present on here today. Or who was my doctor to have it. I'm not sure what she's going to present on today. But anyway, I tried that. It didn't work. By then the doctor that I had had heard about a new clinical trial, two new drugs, which I tried. I had to commute to Nashville, Tennessee every other week for two years, which I was able to do through the help of my family and my friends and my colleagues in the Virgin Islands Bar Association, who gave me between about half, three-quarter of a million dollars. I mean frequent flyer points. Three-quarters of a million frequent flyer points to help me do that. And a lot of other support to people cooking dinners for us, traveling. And you know, it was hard for me to accept help at first. And so one of the things I would suggest to you is learn how to accept help. Learn how to ask for it and learn how to accept it. It's hard, especially for men. And kidney cancer I think happens to men more than women. I'm not sure, but I believe that's true. And it's very hard for us to do that. You know, we're trained, at least American men, but I think most men are trained not to ask for help, not to need help. And I never needed anybody's help, really. Although that's a big lie, I told myself. I needed a lot of help, but I had to learn how to accept frequent flyer points and cash donations that people gave to me. And I was just telling myself, I just want to live. I just want to live. That sets it.  You know? Another thing that helped me and it can help you, you don't have to have to deal with what I had to deal with. And that is that I had a child who was born with a heart defect. And when I found out I had kidney cancer, he had just found out at about age 16, I think, that the heart surgery that had been a hated word we didn't even talk about or think about to something that was real, to something that could be on the horizon to something that we'd just been told was going to probably be within the next six months or so. He was going to have to have open heart surgery. And as a parent, I did do and always will carry a burden of guilt for having him having this congenital heart defect, which he got because, you know, my genes were not all kosher. But anyway, I told myself, he's watching you. He's watching how you react to this. You're going to have, all of a sudden, you're going to have surgery. He's going to watch how you deal with having surgery and the aftermath. And just like he's modeled himself from every other good and bad part of you at the, by this age, he'll do, he'll model yourself, himself on that, too. And, you know, I don't know whether he did or not. He ended up having to have open heart surgery twice then and once again, and while he was in law school, he was a second year law student and he had open heart surgery. And, you know, if he lives to comb gray hair, which I believe he will, he may have to have it again. And I hope he might have learned something. So just imagine yourself, if you're having to go through surgery or something like that, or even just for procedures and things. Imagine that your kids are there watching you and it will help you discipline yourself to deal with these things and walk through them and get on the other side of them. And, you know, that's basically what I'm here to try and do is tell you the important things that have worked for me and have enabled me to fly in yesterday from the Virgin Islands, where I have a job that I love, living in a beautiful home with the beautiful woman that I've loved for 34 years. Actually, I've been married to her for 34. I've loved her for longer than that. And I'm sure your life is just as important to you as it is, as mine is to me. So you have to fight for it, because if you just sit back and relax, the odds are that good things are not going to happen.  And it can have a VN page sooner or it can have a VN page later. And my life is having one later. And you have to just remember that people are going to react the way you react. So even though you have to, like I say, accept help and ask for help, you have to also make sure that you keep this buggy on the road headed towards survival. Because nobody is going to do it for you. So thanks for letting me share.


Greetings, friends. Welcome to CTUCC Conference Cast for May 15, 2014, the regular podcast of the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ. Whoever you are and wherever you may be on life's journey at this very moment, you are welcome here. We begin this week's conference cast with this meditation from Tim and Ann Hughes, co-directors of Silver Lake Conference Center. The text isn't from Scripture and it isn't really a text. It's this song. There's a road where you can walk and almost touch the sky Where you can let the troubles of your life pass you by When Bob Smith and I wrote this song, we were hoping to evoke the feeling one gets coming to Silver Lake Conference Center. The name came from a phrase that Alden Tyrell used to say every week when the new group of young people had just arrived. Since he said the same thing every week, every year, those of us who had heard it a million times began saying it along with him for fun. Alden would good-naturedly say, while you're here this week, we ask that you stay within the boundaries of Silver Lake. Those are low road and everybody would chime in with the road you came in on. After you heard it once, you would simply chime in and instantly become part of the in-crowd. When we were writing the song, we realized that it was more than a boundary. It was a metaphor for the path that brought you to Silver Lake. The way so many of us began our faith journey or heard our life's calling. One of the things Alden tried his best to ingrain in all of us is that here at Silver Lake, everyone is invited to be part of the in-crowd because there isn't supposed to be an out-crowd. Everyone is to feel welcomed and feel encouraged to be themselves and feel accepted while they are here. And it is everyone's job to make it so.  Many make friendships that are deep and lifelong. Whoever you are and wherever you are in life's journey, you are welcome here. Over the 57 years since Silver Lake became the outdoor ministry site for the Connecticut Conference of the UCC, literally tens of thousands of our UCC people, young and once young, have had this amazing experience of radical welcome. This is what we tried to capture in the song. I'll let you decide if we captured it or not, but the most important thing is that you, yes you, the person listening to this right now, go out and invite the young people you know, or those that you meet, to come to Silver Lake so that they too may have the chance to feel this belonging. This is too important and too available to our young people for anyone to miss out because they never got asked to try this outdoor ministry and take the plunge. Sometimes we all need a little push or some encouragement to try a new thing. We're asking that you be that little push or encouragement to a parent or a young person and potentially change a life. Here's a prayer for this week. Dear God, we ask that you bless all those who go off to camp. Help them make new friends and be themselves. Help them find renewal and spiritual nourishment and help them reconnect with fun and hope as they joyfully accept your blessed invitation to revel in the outdoors of your sacred creation.  Bless your leaders, your counselors, your staff, and all the families who prepare for the seasonal ritual of going to camp. May we all meet you there. Amen. Across the United Church of Christ, we continue to lift up the hundreds of Nigerian girls being held by the Boko Haram militants in our prayers. May they come home safe, sound, and soon. In the news this week, at the end of April, Julius Lester's book Day of Tears received a dramatic reading in Amistad Hall at First Church of Christ Congregational UCC in Farmington.  One character, Will, described the pain of seeing his sister sold away from him as like lightning through the chest. Amidst the anguish of the slaves, the callousness and unconcern of the white master and auctioneer, chill the spirit. The reading was the work of the church's Amistad Task Force, charged by the congregation to reawaken them with the spirit that energized their forebears who housed the mendicaptives from the schooner Amistad as they pursued their legal struggle for freedom. As Senior Minister the Rev. Stephen Saviti's put it, they are to keep the story alive. Over 20 of us have just returned from the very first clergy camp at Silver Lake, which allowed pastors to enjoy the experience of being a conferee again at our outdoor ministry center in Sharon. We took canoes out on the lake, climbed trees to light it in the meals, we sang at a campfire, and of course, we prayed together. We'll have more about that on next week's conference cast and in a new vantage point. But for now, remember that we've got open spaces for young people this summer, and we want them to come to this place where they can truly be themselves. Visit the new section of our website for a profile of the Rev. Frank Newsom, Senior Pastor of the first congregational church UCC in Norwalk, and a tribute to the life and ministry of the late Rev. Dwight Dutton. You'll find all the current headlines at ctucc.org slash news. We're delighted to welcome Conference Archivist John Van Epps to the studio today for a roots of our tradition, Touchstones with History. May 27th marks the 450th anniversary of the death of John Calvin, the great Protestant reformer. No, he never lived here, but his influence has been great in our churches. Calvin is the head of our reformed heritage, shared by Presbyterians and our United Church of Christ. Regarding worship, Calvin only allowed that which was provided for in Scripture. Therefore there were no organs, no set liturgy, and no elaborate garb for ministers. The focus was the proclamation of the word. Early congregational singing was the lining out of the psalms. Later there was accompaniment by a stringed instrument such as a bass fiddle or even a violin. Organs did not become accepted for use in our kind of churches until the mid-1800s. John Calvin advocated a weekly communion which was the practice in some congregational churches in the early years in our country. Weddings and funerals were considered to be civil matters and in the first hundred years or so weren't even held in churches or even officiated by the clergy. Calvin advocated a holy commonwealth with a close relation and cooperation of church and state. So the Puritans came to New England to establish the one true pure church to practice their freedom of religion and to force everyone else to do the same. We were the only recognized church in Connecticut and indeed any new congregational church required the approval of the legislature. In the time of Jonathan Edwards there were changes that split our churches and associations. There was the rise of the Enlightenment and a more rational Christianity with an emphasis on free will. Ironically these became known as the Old Lights. The followers of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards emphasized conversion. This resulted in the great awakening of the 1740s. These advocates became known as the New Lights, the New Divinity and New England Theology. But changes in our Calvinist heritage continued. Yale was prone to Enlightenment thinking in the latter 1700s until the coming of Timothy Dwight, a prominent New Light theologian around 1800. Later Nathaniel Taylor became the leading theologian at Yale with his view of Calvinism with a greater role for human freedom, free will. This became known as the New Haven Theology and did not go over well. Some felt Calvinism was in danger of being swept away. They formed a theological institute in East Windsor in 1833, what eventually became Hartford Seminary. Its first president was Bennett Tyler. So for 25 years there was the Taylor-Tiler controversy in our churches. Both Lyman Beecher and Horace Bushnell faced heresy trials for their departure from strict Calvinism. Congregationalists from around the country gathered in Boston in 1865 and produced the Burial Hill Declaration considered by some to be the last stand of New England Calvinism. We've come a long way from John Calvin in the 1500s, but the spirit of John Calvin lives on as we do worship decently and in order. Learn about nurturing a healthy endowment for a local church at one of two workshops, one tonight in Suffield, or again on May 21 in Bristol. On May 17 in Clinton we're offering creating a season of generosity, moving stewardship from blah to transformational. And join us on the evening of May 17 at the fourth annual Youth Revival to be held at Dixwell Avenue UCC in New Haven. That pushes my buttons is a workshop on handling difficult behavior in ministry. That will be May 28 in East Hampton, Massachusetts. The Connecticut Conference Choir, which includes you or anyone else who'd like to come and sing, will enjoy a musical retreat at Silver Lake May 30 and 31. You can learn about environmental hazards, keeping our churches and homes safe on May 31 in Deep River. An online book discussion about children's ministry in the way of Jesus begins on June 2. And golfers, go get your clubs ready for the eighth annual Silver Lake Golf Tournament on June 3 in Waterbury. You can always learn more about what's coming up in the Connecticut Conference by visiting us at ctucc.org slash events. We conclude today with this spirited Wednesday prayer from the Reverend Sarah Jane Munchauer, a frequent interim pastor in this conference. She notes the way some stones have hard edges and fit together well, while others have no corners worn by wind and water over time. May God grant us stones, the grace, she says, to be smoothed by the stuff of life and to enjoy the peculiar nature of our calling in Christ. And that brings this conference cast to a close. Thanks to Tim and Ann Hughes for their reflection and to GarageBand for our music. Primary funding for conference cast comes from your congregation's gifts to our church's wider mission basic support, changing lives to the United Church of Christ. Eric Anderson, the Minister of Communications and Technology for the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ, praying that your days this week may be filled with the presence, the guidance, and the grace of God.


Okay everyone, apologies. I think I should be okay, hooray. That means the wall clock and the echo all gone. I'm assuming so. Apologies, hopefully you have some sympathy for homeworking and being turfed out of the room I usually work in for family reasons. My daughter needs more space than me. The wall clock was fine. Okay, let's get up and running. What we're going to do is run through a demonstration of collecting police data for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Again, Julia will keep an eye on the questions in the chat. Fantastic. The link as well to the code we're using today, if you'd like to follow along, Julia should be able to post that into the chat. I think she's doing that right now. I won't waste any more time. Let's get stuck in to collecting data. So this lesson today is about getting data from APIs. So we're going to take a look at using Python for downloading data from the web. We're also just going to try and cultivate your computational thinking skills as well through some coding examples. So how do you define and solve a computational data collection problem using computational methods? Let's make that a bit more legible. So we're not going to assume any previous knowledge of Python or collecting data from the web. It would have been useful if you've participated in the first two sessions, but it's not a requirement. I'll talk you through everything we're doing. We're using police data, so it's social science data, but if you're from a different background from the private sector, that's totally fine as well. The techniques you're going to learn apply much more broadly. Yeah, and we're going to look at what an API actually is and understand the kind of key steps and requirements for going about collecting data from an API and being able to use Python for this particular task. So hopefully you'll get quite a lot out of today's session. So this is a Jupyter notebook. Some of you will be familiar with it now, so it mixes live Python code with some narrative, like you're seeing here, and the results of the code as well. So if you're following along with us just now, basically you just have to run or execute the cells that are marked by this IN square bracket symbol, and it'll be up here on the left. So for example, this is a piece of Python code. It's a very simple piece. Some of you will have probably seen it before. There may be a little bit of a lag in terms of accessing the notebook just because if you're all accessing it at the same time. So if it's not running right now, so sometimes the notebook might need to be reloaded. Okay, never mind. Thankfully I have a version on my machine. It's just because I think we're all accessing it at the same time. So let's give a quick demonstration of using Python code. There we go. It asks for my name and enjoy more about getting some data from the web. So very quickly, what an API is. So it's short for an application programming interface. There's a formal definition which is probably not terribly helpful. How I understand it is it's an intermediary between software applications. So in much the same way that a translator sits between two individuals who wish to communicate with each other. So you might have an English speaker and you might have an Italian speaker and they don't speak a single word of each other's languages. Therefore what we need is a translator. The person speaking English doesn't only needs to worry about communicating what they want to say in a way that the translator understands and then they do the hard work of communicating with the other person. Obviously that simplifies what you can say to the translator. The translator won't be able to understand every single thing you would like to say but they'll understand enough to allow the two of you to communicate with each other. So similarly an API simplifies how applications communicate with each other. So for example we have this quick look here. So a program wants some data. It connects to the API. The database talks back to the API and goes back to the program. So for example if I had a smartphone application that needed real-time traffic data. For example from Transport Scotland. I could go directly to Transport Scotland's database. But then I'd need to know a lot of really technical information about how that database actually works. What language it understands. How the data is returned. All sorts of really technical things. But if we put an API in the middle. That takes care of talking to the database and it takes care of talking to us. So we can send really simplified requests to the API for data. It communicates those requests to the database. It takes back the data and then passes it on to you in a format that you can understand also. So think of it as an intermediary or some kind of translator. So what's the general approach. So it's always good to map out what we call maybe the pseudo code or the algorithm or just the general approach for getting data through an API. So the first thing we need to know is the location of the API. So that's its web address. So where is the API found. So that's common. It's the same format as a link to a website. So the UK Police API is located at this web address. So that's reasonably easy. I just did a Google search for police data API and it brought up some data that looks interesting. Then we need to know the terms of use associated with the API. So a lot of APIs will restrict how many requests for data you can make in a minute or in a day or over a year, etc. They might have different levels of access. So there's a free level and there's an enterprise level and there's a custom level where you pay the most money, for example. With the UK Police API, you don't need to register. You don't need to provide any password when you make a request for data. It's essentially an open data portal, which is good. It does restrict how many requests for data you can make, which is 15 per second, but it's unlikely you'll be making so many requests. But you can imagine a more sophisticated app that is repeatedly and constantly making requests for data and that could overload the API. So we know where the API is. We know how we can use it. What data is available on the API. So we're interested in where the data is available through the API. And that's known as something called the endpoint. So the endpoint is the location of the data on the API. Again, a technical term, but the endpoint, as you can see here, is again, essentially a link or a URL or a web address. So if we were to click on that link just now, that won't work because we need to formulate the request more appropriately. But when we use Python to do this, we'll be able to request the data that's found at this location. So the location of the data is known as its endpoint. So then we have three bits of information. Then there are three essential tasks we need to perform to get the data. So we need to register our use of the API. In this instance, we don't, but for most APIs, you probably need to register. So we used the Guardian API recently. I needed to register with my email address and get a password that I can use. Then we want to actually request the data itself, the actual interesting bit. And this is known as making a call to the API. So it's just a slightly different terminology. Requesting data, making a call, mean the exact same thing. And of course, we want to save the data because we don't want all of our work to be done in vain. We want to save it for future use. So let's take a social science example quickly. So let's get some up-to-date crime data for England and Wales and Northern Ireland. For some reason, Scotland and the British transport place are excluded from this database. I won't make any comments. So let's find the API. So we've kind of established that it can be found here. And as I just showed you previously, there's not actually anything available at this web address at the moment. It's simply the stem or it's the base of the web addresses we'll be using to request data. So every request for data will begin with this and then we'll add on options. So for example, if we were interested in all police forces, now we can see that that's a valid web address. So here we've got the stem as far as here and there we go. If we want all the forces, here we get a nice list of all the police forces available through this database. So we're off to a good start. As I said, if you can click on it yourself, that would be really good. Before we delve a bit deeper, let's again just establish how we can use the API. The police API is reasonably well documented. It's not always the case at all. I think someone posted about the Twitter API and getting into a bit of a mess. Yeah, I agree. It can be quite difficult to navigate and, you know, that's got a lot of documentation, but it's not particularly helpful. So of course, with the police API, no authentication needed, don't need to register, do not need to provide a password every time we want to try and get some data. So we can make on average 15 calls per second with up to 30 in a single second if that's, you know, untypical or infrequent. It's highly unlikely you'll exceed the rate limit for this purpose if it's researched, but, you know, you may have an idea for an app using police data, so you don't want to be restricted either. And finally, we need to know the end points. So we need to know the location of the data that's available through the API. It's got over 20, I think it's got 21 different data sets, data resources on the API, categorized as information about police forces, so you can get a list of senior officers, crime itself, so different crime categories and events, information about neighborhoods. And what we look at today is, you know, stop and search data, which is quite interesting as well. And again, there's usually, well, for this particular instance, there's really good documentation. So here you have, again, a list of all the end points and instructions about how you would request data from this endpoint. But I'll do a lot of the hard work for you today. So we can skip this step, don't need to register, we can get straight on to requesting data. So let's get to the interesting bit. So let's focus our activities. Let's define a task that's reasonably interesting for us to complete. So my first step is I'm going to download a list of police forces in the UK. For each force, I'm going to download a stop and search data. And then I'm going to save everything that I've downloaded to various files so I can use them in the future. So the first thing is to get Python set up with what we need. Those of you who've used Python before will understand what's happening here. Basically, a lot of functionality and methods that you would like to use for computational research. They don't come as standard with Python, or if they do, they don't launch when you start up Python. So lots of things are available when you begin Python. Computation, whoops. So if I wanted to multiply two numbers together, I can do that already. It's not working at the moment because it's a little text. I need to make that code. There we go. So with Python, you can do things out of the box, so to speak. Calculations, print messages, all these kind of things. But if you want to scrape webpages, you need to load in the requests module. If you want to work with a certain type of file, known as JSON, you import the JSON module. Nothing difficult about this. You may have the experience of using R for loading in libraries, for example. Or in Stata, you might have installed some user-written packages as well. So we've set up Python with what we need, only a handful of packages, which is really good. So we're going to tackle Task 1, which is getting a list of police forces in the UK. So I'll run the code first before talking through. So basically, I need to define the web address that we're going to use to request data. So we know, for example, that there's a base URL, and that'll always be there. So it's handy to put that in a variable called base URL. And I could call that what I wanted. That makes sense to me. And then I know that data about police forces is located at the forces endpoint. So again, I just create a variable called forces, which stores that value. And then the web address that'll actually work for requesting data is a composite of the base URL plus forces. And you can see here, the plus symbol, if you have two bits of text joins the text together. While if those variables were numbers, they would add the numbers together to produce a result. So this is the URL we're using. Again, just as proof, you can see that it really does work. That's the URL we need. Then we start using the requests module. So first, from the requests module, we use the get method and we ask Python to get or collect the information located at this web address. And we store all of that in a variable called response. And then what we want to do is check whether we made a successful request for data. Thankfully, there's a status code attribute associated with the response variable. If it equals 200, fantastic, you've actually successfully requested data. If it's in the 400s, it means you haven't formulated the request properly. Maybe it's a typo, maybe the web address isn't valid, for example, but it's quote unquote your fault. If it's a status code in the 500s, there's something wrong on the end where the API is. So maybe the website is down, maybe the server is not working. Maybe the web address has been moved somewhere else, for example. So basically, when we request any website or an endpoint or something from the web, a status code of 200 means well done, you've successfully requested. But what have we actually requested? So we're not interested in status codes, we're interested in data. In the response variable, we've got a method called JSON. So that's a particular data type. JSON is a type of data. We can use that method to grab the data and put it in a variable called forces data. And then when we call that variable, it should list all the forces in the UK. So you can see it's maybe a slightly unfamiliar data structure. So it's a long list of forces. Each force has two variables. It's got an ID variable with a unique ID of that force. And it's got a name variable, which as you would expect is the name of the force in question. So even just a cursory glance shows that the data hasn't been returned in tabular format that we're used to. Every row is an observation, every column is a variable. So it comes back in a different format. It comes back in something called a JSON format. Thankfully, Python gives us lots of ways of manipulating that type of data. It's not that difficult.  So voila, very simple task. We've been able to get a list of all police forces excluding Scotland and BTP. So hopefully you'll agree that the requesting bit is relatively simple. You define a web address and you use the request module to go get the content that's stored at that web address. That's pretty easy. It's the data that's returned. It's kind of the difficult bit really of working with an API in my experience. So just to show you the importance of how data is stored, I'm going to define two variables here. One called my number and one called my string. So a numeric and a text variable. This should work if I add the number 50 to a number. But if I try and add it to a piece of text, Python kicks up an error. So you can't connect a string and an integer together. But you can obviously add two numbers. So how does that impact what we've just done? Well, we've gotten some data back from the API. It's good to check what type of data that actually is. So we can use Python. We can say, OK, tell me the type of data this variable is. And you can see that we have what's known as a list data type in Python. And you can also identify lists by the opening and closing square brackets. So if we go back, you can see that this variable here begins and ends with some square brackets. So that tells you you're working with a list. So now we have a list. We can count how many elements there are in the list. So how many police forces were actually returned? So we can use the length function, the LEN function. So how long is the list? There are 44 elements in the list. So there are 44 police forces contained in the list that we downloaded. OK, that's good. So what if we wanted to look at each police force in that list separately? So what we can do is use a loop. So we can say for every force in the list variable. I'd like to say that's a deliberate spot. So for every force in this list, print the value of that variable. So show me the actual information for each force. And then I just print a blank line underneath just for some separation. So again, we're just looping over a list. So a list has an ordered set of elements. And we just go to each element and we look at each element in the list. Again, when I said I had an error, I didn't really. This is just basically a placeholder for every L, which is element in the list. Print it. You'll be bored of this if you've watched me do it. I've used this example before. For every chicken in the list, you get the same results. Because it doesn't matter. I'm just saying this is a placeholder for every element in this list. And just show me every element. So that's enough chicken examples. The final thing we can do if we're working with a list is we can pull out a particular element by referring to its location in the list. Because as I said, a list is ordered. So there's element one, element two, element three, for example. So if I wanted to know which police force is found in position 10 in the list. So we can use some square brackets again and we can insert a number referring to that position in the list. So dorset. So dorset police is the 10th element in the list. Are you slightly confused that I've used the number nine to refer to position 10? Yeah, it can be a little bit confusing. Python counts, it begins counting at zero. This is in contrast to or, for example, which begins counting at one and humans who also begin counting at one. So the value nine refers to position 10 in any list and not just the list we're using. So a very simple rule of thumb because you may get caught out with this in future is element number n is located in position n minus one in the list. So that's just a bit of a rapid tour of the list data type in Python. And now that we've just gotten up to speed, now what we want is the unique ID of every force that's contained in the list. And it would be good to store those IDs themselves in a list that we can use later. So this neat little bit of code for every force in the list that we've downloaded and extract the value from the ID field. So there's nothing really difficult here. And then we store all of that in a variable called force IDs. And then by calling on the variable, it produces the results. So I'll just do it again to show. Now you can see we don't have the name variable anymore because all we've asked for is the ID variable for every force in the list. And because we've done that, then we can loop over the list of IDs and we can request each one of those forces using the requests dot get method. We'll see that in a moment. If I'm doing that, apologies, I think maybe pay fever is coming is coming home. So we've constructed our list of force IDs. And I just talked us through that. So we've got something we can use. So while we will loop over all of those IDs and get stop and search data for, you know, every police force that's contained in the notebook right now. I'm just going to simplify the task. So I'm going to say get me certain stop and search data for the city of London police force. So we're just going to keep it nice and simple. So again, we've got much the same process. We've got the base URL, which we always need. Now we're not looking for force data. We're looking for search for stop and search data. So the end point is different. So it stops a hyphen force. And then I want to search for a particular force, which is the city of London. So that's the unique ID from the force ID list that we just created. So again, I construct the web address. It's slightly longer because it's the base URL plus the end point plus a custom search term. That's what this question mark force equals is doing here. Again, we'll print the web address. We'll request the web address. We'll check if we were successful. We'll store the data in a variable called sas underscore data. And then for every element in that list, I'm just going to add a new field called force. And it takes the value of this here. You'll see why I'm doing that in a second. Basically, it's because if you request stop and search data, obviously, you know which force you've requested because you've specified it here. But actually in the returned data itself, it doesn't actually tell you which police force the stop and search data refers to. Good. So I just executed the code. This is the web address containing the data of interest. It kind of flashed up there. You can see that there's a lot of data for that police force. So there's 170 different records for stop and search. And you can get a look at what the fields are in this data set. So there's an age range. So they stopped somebody between 18 and 24. The outcome was nothing. Nothing needed to happen. Self-defined ethnicity, their gender. They were interested in an article for use in theft, for example. So some really interesting data to do with stop and searches. But again, we don't need to look at the data that way. We've downloaded it into Python. That means we can continue using Python to check the data. So this is just looking at the exact same information in Python this time. Again, this is the person we were just looking at. They're between 18 and 24, et cetera. And you can see, as it scrolls down, there's lots and lots of stop and search records, which is pretty interesting. So we'll just close the results. So how many stop and searches were there for the city of London? Remember that we're working with a list. So we can use the length method again to say, well, how long is the list? So there are 171 stop and search instances that we've downloaded from the API. So we've got some stop and search data. We've got a list of police forces. It would be interesting to store those for future use. So because the data comes in something called a JSON file format, it's good to export it in that format also. And maybe future demonstrations, or you can contact me if you're interested, you can convert JSON to CSV. Sometimes that's easy. Sometimes it's not that easy. But if you want to work with something in a different format, that is possible also. So the first thing we're going to do is create a downloads folder and just to store the results. So I've run the code there. I've created the folder. If I try to run it again, you can see that, hey, this already exists. No need to create the folder. Again, going to do some simple things. I'm going to collect today's date. It's useful to get today's date, I think, for naming your files. So we're going to create a file that'll store the list of police forces. I'm going to call it UK-PoliceForces. Today's date and it's a JSON file. And then we've got the city of London. Again, it goes in the downloads folder. I'll call it this with today's date and it's a JSON file. So in turn, I open each file and I dump the JSON data into each one. So in this instance, all I've asked the code to do is just print today's date. We need to actually check that I have saved the data. So the simplest way is to check whether A, the files were created and B, the data were actually written to it. So we can use Python to check the downloads folder. So basically show me all the contents of the downloads folder. That's what's happening here. Okay, it's definitely created some files, the ones I wanted. That doesn't mean there's actually anything in the files. So we need to check that also. So basically all I'm doing is importing the data back in. So let's open the police forces file. We're opening it in read mode. So we're not trying to write data to it. We're trying to read data from it. So we're going to read the contents of the file, store it in a variable called data and again, just call that variable and take a look at what it contains. And again, voila, the file does actually contain the list of police forces that we're interested in. So I just again wanted to control myself and stick to one example. So that's a quick tour of the UK police API in Appendix A. So I'll show you in just a moment. I've got a little bit more code, maybe that much, if that makes sense, of how you could search, stop. You can collect, stop and search data for every police force. But for now, before I take some questions, I just want to just briefly reinforce what we've actually done. So it's been quite quick, but we've learned how to import modules into Python. So you know that for certain techniques, you need to bring the functionality into Python and that's really simple. It's the import command. We've learned how to make requests or calls for data to an API. And that's worked really well, thankfully. We've learned how to handle and save data that's returned by the API also. You get data back in something called a JSON format. That's different from a tabular format. It requires slightly different data manipulation techniques than you're used to. But we've learned a few ways of pulling out the ID field from a JSON file. And we've learned how to save that data as well. And hopefully I've done all this in a fairly efficient, clear and effective manner. So again, very quick few thanks for putting up with the technical home working issues. I think interacting with an API is fairly simple. Easy for me to say, I think maybe at this stage, but I don't think it's drastically difficult. Handling the data that comes back for analytical purposes is challenging, certainly. But making the requests for data, I think you can get up and running. And I'm sure you've got lots of good ideas yourselves about what you would like to do if you could get that data. If you're collecting data from an API, you've got to think about, you know, data protection. So, for example, if you're collecting, you know, personal information from Twitter, you know, do you have to see consent for getting that information? That's one issue. You have to obviously comply with the terms of use. So you have to stay within the, you know, the number of calls you can make per second, per minute, per day, whatever that is. And I call them many other murky ethical issues. But hopefully I think you'll hopefully agree that it's quite an exciting area of social science and computational research in general. So hopefully good luck with progressing your own research on that. I'm going to take questions. I haven't been looking at the chat because now I'm on my phone because I don't have my second monitor. Okay, yeah, so I'll start taking some questions now. Fantastic. Yeah, so Julia will be sharing the link, which is fantastic to the GitHub. And so all this, I'll just come out as slideshow mode.  And there, you know, again, we suggest some further reading and resources, all free again. And some extra code for scraping stop and search data for lots of different police forces. So we've got a question here about when I extract the data from the list, it still includes HTML tags. So you I take you're probably scraping a web page rather than using an API, correct? You can reply back to the chat if you want. I'll keep an eye. So if you're scraping data from a website, you're not just scraping the content that you see on the website, you're scraping the underlying code behind it, which is known as HTML. So then it's not enough to just have the requests module. What you need also is the beautiful soup module for navigating a HTML data type. So in the way that we've used the JSON module for dealing with JSON data, you would need the beautiful soup module for working with the HTML tags that are returned when you scrape a web page. In this case, when we work with an API, because we're downloading the actual data itself, we're not scraping it, it's been designed to actually share data that should be usable pretty quickly. So yeah, the long answer short is basically if you see last week's demonstration, which is also on YouTube and all the code is on the GitHub, then you'll see how we can actually extract the HTML tags from data that you scrape from the web, if that's okay for an answer. And yeah, sorry, Julia has been responding as well. Can you show the answer for the task just at the end of section four? So somebody's been working through the notebook at the end of section four. Yeah, certainly. So in this example here, I've imported the data in the forces file. If I wanted the city of London, remember that previously I called it COL. So if I call on the COL underscore out file variable and I read in the data that's stored there, there you go, there's the city of London stop and search data. So yeah, just to go back here, there's a variable called COL underscore out file and that points to the location of the file containing stop and search data for the city of London. Fantastic, thank you for the question. Oh, okay, so the use of the Gov API. Okay, I'm taking us the UK government API probably easier to contact me after this just because it might take me a while to, you know, on my machine try and find similar data. So if I can address your one offline, then that would be fantastic. But I'm happy to help you figure out what's going on with that. I've got a question about the Twitter API. Yes, very good question. It seems slightly different than the police API. Yes, Twitter is, you know, it's obviously understandably protective of the data it holds. So it does ask you to register your use of the API. It's quite unfriendly language because it asks you to register your application or your app. Twitter is assuming that you're trying to build a smartphone application that uses Twitter data. And hence, you know, that's what you're trying to do. You know, as researchers, maybe you do want to build an app at the end, but you probably just want to get, you know, a hold of the data itself. But someone, you know, contacted me about this recently. It looks really onerous, but actually you just have to fill out, you know, some questions about the name of your app. So that could just be your research project. It'll ask you questions about whether you're sharing data with government officials. I mean, which again is almost never the case.  That would be if you use the Twitter API to get data and then immediately you transfer that data, you know, to a government department. You know, that wouldn't really be allowed. So yeah, so for Twitter and Facebook, it can be a little bit more time to register your use of the API. But once you do, I mean, they're quite open to academic research. So it should be okay. You should be able to get access to the data you need. Thank you. See if there's a couple more questions. A question I missed about Google. Oh yes, I did. Thank you. Okay. Do you have any experience with Google Trends? Personally, I do not. Google does have a lot of APIs allowing you access to some of its data. I'm presuming Trends has an API. Yeah, you probably can get Google Trends data from an API. Yeah, that's something I'd need to look into, but I presume you can. Yeah, I mean, there's mention of one here. So there's a Google Trends API. Yeah. So okay, so it should be doable in theory. There's a second part to your question which is quite interesting, which is a more general point is when we were using the police forces API, can you just change the web address slightly to get different information? So I mean, yes you can. I know that Dorset is a valid force ID, so I can search for that. And yeah, you'll find that you can change the web address slightly. It's almost like a little trick to access information. I won't show you other examples because I think by doing that, sometimes you can actually get access to files that you're not really meant to scrape or to collect. Excuse me, but yes, in theory, you can change around the URL for an API. Excuse me, or for a web address and that might actually get you access to the data that you need. Yeah, so fantastic. I can only scroll back so far on my phone if that's okay. Yeah, so if we can, I think we shared the GitHub link. If not, don't worry because you've all signed up through Eventbrite.  Yeah, we'll have a full set of links to all the code demonstrations. I can just show you quickly where you can get that. Who am I signed in as? Perfect. Yeah, so we've got a dedicated repository for all the coding demonstrations. And there's a code folder. And at the moment you can see we've got intro to Python, web scraping and the API's code as well. And hopefully it worked for you. If you're to click on the binder link, that just saves you downloading Python and Jupyter notebooks to your machine. So, given that we had a late start, I am reasonably early. Thank you. Thank you for putting up with the substantial technical issues. Julie and I will be in contact soon. Hopefully you've learned a little bit about how to interact with an API. As I said, the notebook has a little bit more reading, a few more tasks it asks you to do. I'll just run the code and the appendices really quickly. Just to prove that we can get stop and search data for every police force in the same block of code. It takes a wee while because actually there's a lot of stop and search data, as you can imagine. It's quite a lot actually. So 44 forces times hundreds and hundreds of results per force. Yeah, it's deciding to be a little bit slow so we'll leave it for now. But yeah, thank you very much. Please contact me via my Twitter or my email address. I'm very happy to help out. I hope you're all doing well and I hope I'll see quite a few of you next week as well. So thank you and speak to you soon.