I'm Brittany Crawford and I'm the National Archives Supervisory Management Analyst and the Director of the Virtual Genealogy Fair. You just heard from the United States Archivist David Ferriero and I also would like to welcome you to our 2017 Virtual Genealogy Fair. Before we begin with the first session, I also have several tips. Because we're broadcasting live, you can join the conversation with our family historians and ask the presenters questions. There's a question and answer time at each of the sessions. You can submit questions for a speaker two ways. Use the chat on your YouTube page or join us on Twitter using hashtag genfair2017. For live captioning, open a separate browser window and go to the link found on the YouTube web page. The same link is also available on the fairs web page. From the fairs web page, you will also find the schedule and handouts. Finally, please know that the video presentations and handouts will remain available on the Virtual Genealogy page after they event. From our web page, you can also find previous Genealogy Fair handouts and presentations. And now we will proceed to the next session. This is session one, and the lecture is taking care of your family heirlooms. Our speaker is Katie Smith. During Ms. Smith's presentation, you will learn how to properly store and handle family heirlooms. She will discuss books, paper, photographs, and a little bit about textiles and other family heirlooms. In particular, she will discuss appropriate storage containers where to put them in your home and how to handle them properly and important tips about digitizing what you have. Ms. Smith is the education and communication coordinator at the National Archives at College Park. We now welcome to the stage Katie Smith. Thank you, Brittany. And I particularly want to thank all of those who are tuning in specifically because they have family heirlooms that they want to take care of. The work that you do in taking care of your family heirlooms is so instrumental to the work that we all do. You're not just taking care of your family's things. You're taking care of the history of the whole world. And it deserves a big thanks from us in particular. Because I really wanted to think about this group that have items right now, I wanted to do a step-by-step guide for you. The reason being is that this can be a very overwhelming task. You just have one box that you need to organize or several boxes. You can get very overwhelmed very quickly. So it's important to sort of task yourself. I have to run through quite a bit of information in a very short amount of time. But that doesn't mean that you have to run through all of this information with your own stuff all at the same time. Please pace yourself, pace your budget, you know, pace your emotions. Do all of those things that you need to do so that you don't end sort of mid-project. But slowly take care of these things for the next generations. And the first step of that process is really assessing what you have. You know, it's probably pretty rare that you're going to get an archivist to tell you to throw away stuff. But if it is, you know, like old reruns of happy days or something like that, it might not really be worth your time or money to house it and take care of it. So ask yourself these questions while you're going through each and every object that you have. The first is, is it really worth taking care of in the long term? You want to focus on things that have familial value and will continue to have familial value. The next thing that you want to ask yourself when you're going through your items is what medium or type of object do you have? This is particularly important when you're going to talk about sort of newer media that requires unique machines to read the records. That's going to be more important as I speak later on. The third thing you want to ask yourself is if you really own these items or not. If it's owned legally by another family member, you might want to include them in how you take care of this item and in what way you want to take care of this item. And the last thing that you want to ask yourself is what is damaged and what isn't? You know, just because something is damaged doesn't mean it's worthless, but you are going to have to expend more energy on it. And depending on sort of what you need from a conservator or a professional vendor, that cost is going to vary and you're going to have to make that part of your plan. Now once you've assessed everything, you've gotten rid of the things that you don't see as having long term familial value, then you need to go about labeling and organizing the things that you have. Claiming is very important. So you might know who the people are in a certain photograph, but once you're gone, they might not know that it's your great-uncle or that maybe your grandmother knitted the shawl. Make sure that you take the time to keep that familial value intact. The best way of doing that is using pencil. Pencil does not damage things in the long term like pen or other markers or things like post-it notes will. So keep with pencil when you possibly can. For items that you can't write on, try finding a way of attaching a label of some sort. Now you don't want that label to damage your items if you have very sensitive textiles. Use a soft paper label of some sort, but label. That's sort of the very key thing. And as you're labeling, you really want to come up with a naming system for everything, particularly the who, what, why, when, how. This is often called metadata and you want to make sure that that metadata stays with its object. And whatever organization that you choose, you need to stick with it. So if you want to separate things by their type, make sure that all the photographs go in one place and a spare photograph doesn't end up in your book area. Or if you want to keep it with families, make sure that you separate all of the Smith stuff out from the Jones stuff. Things like that are going to be very important in the long term. And in particular, create a key document. This key document is going to explain the names, titles, and organizations that you choose for your things for the next generation. Keep this key document with your boxes, with your things. You can even go so far as to have, you know, take photos of the box. So not only will people know what's inside, but will know how to put everything back in the box once they've finished using it. All right, so once you've assessed everything, you've labeled and organized it, now you need to find the ideal environment to sort of keep it stable. There are several factors that you need to think about. And the first is sort of temperature and humidity. For most things, the cooler and drier, the better. Now that's not all things, but that's most things. However, you also have to live in this area as well. So the key function is to make sure that your temperature and humidity doesn't rapidly fluctuate. Here you see a picture of my own temperature gauge in my own home. You don't want things going above 75 degrees Fahrenheit, so I keep mine around 73. Now there are different parts of your home that are going to fluctuate differently. You want to avoid areas in your home that fluctuate. So avoid basements, avoid attics, avoid garages and barns. All of these areas can eventually do damage, damage such like this. Mold is a huge issue, and you want to make sure that you try and keep your environment below 65% humidity, which is the amount of water moisture in the air. Now if you do get a little worried and feel like you might have mold in your collection, be careful with it. See if it's fuzzy, if it's splotchy, if it smells of mildew. If that is the case, contact a professional conservator and I will explain how you do that later on in this presentation. Another thing that you have to worry about are pests. Now pests will permanently damage your items, but so will pesticides. So you don't want to spray your area where you're going to have these things. What you really want to do is just maintain a very clean, dust-free, swept area. Now the best thing to do is monitor pests. So put out sticky traps, check them regularly. If you do see a problem, contact a professional conservator. Now at this point in the presentation, I also like to mention that not all pests are unwelcome. Your pets can also do a significant amount of damage. So if you have furniture, if your dog really likes to chew on photograph frames, try and mitigate that as best as you can. Because I'm sure you don't want to lose either your pet or the family heirloom that you're trying to keep in your home. Another thing that is permanent damage is light. You're going to see this most often on your bookshelf.  As you can see along the spine where the title of this book is, the white is sort of going yellow and darkening while the colored floral pattern is lightening. This is called fade and there's no way that you can reverse this. And this actually accumulates over time. This damage happens as it stays out in direct light all the time. So if you are going to set up a shelf with open books or open heirloom items, you want to make sure that it's not facing a window. You want to avoid any direct sunlight. Another big issue is your fluorescent light bulbs. While all light waves can be damaging, UV light waves are particularly insidious. So remove your fluorescent bulbs, go energy efficient and you're not going to have as much problems as you would with fluorescent bulbs. We mentioned dust with pests and how they will attract pests of all sorts. Dust is also acidic and will collect moisture and can permanently damage things as you see here with this cracked glass dust sort of filtered through onto the photograph. And while we were able to clean up this photograph, that sort of dark stain across it is permanent and we cannot remove it. You need to make sure that you keep things out of dust as much as possible. So if that sort of location that you've chosen for your storage is sort of near event, you want to maybe close that vent and mitigate it as much as possible. You never want to use any commercial cleaner on your items. So any metal, any books, any furniture. Stay away from waxes or oils, anything for tarnished reasons. All of these things can do damage. You want to make sure that you're just using a lint-free cloth. For things like furniture, you're welcome to dampen that with water. But anything more can cause a bit of damage. And so the key thing for your sort of small to medium size things is to store it in containers. As sort of a review, you want to sort of keep everything on sort of the main level of your house. Hopefully in an internal wall rather than an exterior wall, so find a closet. But then even in the closet, you want to use boxes, folders. Things like this are called housing in the archival world. You want to house your things well and properly just as you want to house yourself well and properly. Now when it comes to boxes, there are a lot of different types on the market. If you do not currently know the type of boxes that are storing your family heirlooms, you might want to be suspicious. A lot of boxes contain things called acids or oxidants. For the most part, these things will damage items. So the key thing is to go to a vendor. If you go to any search engine, you can type in archival products or archival supplies. And a lot of things will sort of pop up places that you can go to. When you search these websites, there are two things that you should pay particular attention to. The first is the phrase alkaline buffer. Now acid free is a generic term and it's really an advertising term. So you want to look for something that says that there's sort of an alkalinity in it, a buffer of some sorts. This isn't going to save your very acidic paper, but it's just going to keep it from really getting over everything else in the box. Another thing that you want to look for is to see if these storage items are PAT tested and certified. Now what that means is this, the Image Permanent Institute has done studies on what type of storage is best for photographs and photographs are particularly sensitive. So anything that's safe for photographs is for the most part safe for the rest of your items in your collection. What they have developed is a photograph activity test and they will test different supplies from different vendors. Look for that certified PAT test on your vendor site. If you don't see it, contact the vendor, ask them if their housing has gone through a PAT test and if it's certified. That's going to ensure that you use things that are not going to further damage your items. And on top of that, you really want to make sure that you measure your item first and buy a box that's going to fit. You don't want to cut, fold, crease, or do anything to your family heirloom. You want it to fit snugly in the box that you buy. So make sure that you measure the item first and then buy later. That's absolutely key. For things like oversized items, a lot of vendors have many options. You can get archival tools, tubes where you can roll things onto it. There are larger boxes for your items. Talk to your vendor, really spend time talking to customer service on the phone to get what's just right for your collection. And this can potentially be expensive. So once again, as I said, sort of budget carefully plan and do this slowly. You don't want to buy a box and then overfill it because you were only able to buy just a few. That's OK if you're able to buy just a few. But overfilling or overstuffing can cause more damage.  If I try and pull up a folder from a box and other things come up out of the box with it, chances are it's overfilled. So if it's swelling, if you can't close the lid, all of these things signify that you have overstuffed your box. Buy slowly and move your items into boxes slowly over time as you budget. So that's sort of an example of that overstuffing. Now, books don't necessarily have to go into boxes. They are in and of themselves in many ways their own support. But there are some key things to remember. First, with scrapbooks or albums of any kind, you want to lay flat because over time some things might sort of fall out of the bottom. Another thing that you probably should lay flat is large volumes, particularly if the paper or the text block, as it's called, is really heavy inside. That sort of block of paper inside. If you see it sagging in any way, that will eventually tear away from the cover and cause damage. So you want to lay those large volumes like atlases and dictionaries flat. For medium and small items, you want to make sure that when you put them on the shelf that you put them according to size. You don't want two very small books supporting a larger volume in between because that sort of medium to larger volume is going to distort all the time over time. So make sure that you try and get everything sort of equally supportive of each other. As I mentioned before with photographs and films, it is really important to make sure that when you're purchasing items for storage that you look for the PAT certified. This will likely also come in some polyester, sleeving polyester is inert. So for the most part if it passes that test, it's okay. You can also have sort of plastic reels for your films of any kind that are also available. The biggest thing that you're going to have to worry about is what other people have done in the past. There are a lot of previous albums that were used frequently that now do a significant amount of damage. One of these classic examples is the magnetic album that you see up here on your left. Now they're not magnetic. What they are is they're strips of adhesive like sort of attached to a very thick paper board. And photographs are sort of put on and then covered with a very crinkly clear plastic. Both the adhesive and that plastic is quite detrimental to your photographs. So if you have this, make sure that you contact a professional conservator to help you remove these items. You don't want any adhesive on the back of your photographs. So try to keep sort of photo tabbed corners, especially stay away from rubber cement. You know it's something that was used in the past but we know now from experience that they can do a significant amount of damage. Metal items are in particular a little tricky and you want to make sure that different types of metal items are not touching each other. When they touch each other, it's very possible that one of those metal items can corrode. For most of you, the biggest problem is going to be silver. Silver just tarnishes, period. So it's important that you mitigate that as much as possible but that you shouldn't polish it, especially with commercial cleaners. When you polish silver, you are actually removing metal from the object. So if something is highly decorative, you could in fact remove that decoration over time. You also want to keep silver away from silk or leather, anything that is organic and material like wool. These things contain sulfur and will add to the tarnishing problem. Another thing that I'm sure a lot of you have in your family heirloom boxes is textiles, particularly clothing. You really need to remove that from your grandmother's cedar chest. It was fine then, but what keeps moths away now actually also does damage to your clothing. So remove items from your cedar chests, particularly remove those wedding dresses out of that sort of crinkly plastic that's hanging up in your closet that will significantly yellow those beautiful wedding dresses. If the textile is strong and can support itself, you can hang it up. Make sure that you use a padded hanger and a cloth bag rather than a plastic bag. Many of you will have textiles that are very fragile though and really shouldn't be hung up. In those cases, definitely store it in a box. However, it's important to note that a fold now will become a crease, will become a tear later on. So you want to support your folds. And the best thing to do is sort of take acid free or alkaline buffered paper, crinkle it up and stuff it sort of in the sleeves or along the fold lines. You can also even take cotton batting, cover it with undyed cotton and also support your textiles that way. Now, electronic and magnetic devices are very sensitive. And so you want to make sure that you use hard-click cases and you can readily find these on the internet. However, a lot of these hard cases don't necessarily pass that PAT test that I was talking to you about. So when you store any sort of tape or magnetic electronic devices, make sure that you store in a separate box away from your other items because you don't want those cases to do damage. Another issue with this type of media is it really is tricky to know if you should store them upright or horizontal. You can go on to archives.gov and I will show you in this presentation how to do that later. But we have a list that actually says what type of media something is and whether it should be stored, either vertical or horizontal. And it will definitely help you in terms of the best storage for your items. And lastly, it really should get off the floor. Now, in the archive world, we use sort of metal powder coated shelving. If you don't have that option, you can buy liners from these conservation and archival vendors that I have been talking about this whole time. But it's really important to key that you brace your shelving against a wall for safety for yourself and those items that is housing it. And you want to make sure that those shelves can fully support that heavy, heavy box. There are numerous times I've walked into homes and seen sagging shelves.  A lot of people give the good advice of just putting your boxes at the very top of a closet. That is a great suggestion. Be aware that in any area where you have earthquakes or any other disasters of that nature, those things can come toppling down off of high shelves. So you not only want to brace the shelf, but you also want to brace the box so that you are not damaged during a disaster. So you have stored, you've taken care of your environment, you have everything organized. Now how do you go about handling your items for the long term? Now the key thing here is to wash your hands. You don't want to have any lotions, sanitizers, or anything that's advertised to help you handle paper. Most of those waxy substances that people use to flip through paper really quickly can leave stains and other things on the paper. And I want to say you don't want to flip through these things very quickly. You want to handle them with care slowly. So clean hands are the best and also avoid food and drink and tobacco while you're around these items. Now when I talk about hand washing, a lot of people bring up the glove question. Shouldn't I be using gloves when I touch my items? Well, yes and no. For paper items, when you wear gloves, you actually can't feel if you're doing damage. So the most recent conservation science says that clean hands are the best when handling books and other paper items. However, for metals or photographs, that's when you need to put on your gloves. Now the question is, should you put cotton gloves on or you should put other types of gloves? Well, cotton actually holds moisture. So the more those gloves stay on the hand, the more moisture is built up in that glove. And then when you touch something, that moisture and all of that content goes into your object. So I always suggest to people that they should buy a box of nitrile gloves. Nitrile are the type of gloves that you see in dentists and doctor's offices now. They've replaced latex because of allergies. There's very few people in this world who are allergic to nitrile. So that's your best option. You know, go on to the internet, buy a box of nitrile gloves and keep it on your shelving right next to your photographs, your textiles, your metal objects. That's going to be the best thing for you. If you don't do this, if you decide to touch metal or photographs with your fingers, fingerprints will show up over time and they're permanent. With photographs with metals, your fingerprint will permanently show up if you're not careful. So use gloves. Another thing to take particular note of is with older things, sometimes they resist you opening them. Let the object win that tug of war. If you're trying to open something, if you're trying to open a rolled photograph, if you're trying to open a book and there's resistance, let it be. Don't open it. You're going to do some massive damage. As you can see on the right, this one book was perfectly fine and then somebody opened it up so wide that pages started breaking off. This is incredibly difficult to repair. With photographs, if you unroll them, you could break the emulsion or the film part of the surface, it's very difficult to repair. But things will fall apart and you have to realize and understand that. The best thing to do is to avoid any tapes, pressure-sensitive tapes like scotch tape, post-it notes, or adhesives. The best thing to do is to put your different pieces in a folder and contact a conservator. You can store it for the time being but tape will ultimately and permanently mar your document. You're also going to handle probably a substantial amount of metal fasteners, paper clips, grommets, all sorts of items. This rust can be very difficult and very damaging. So if you're trying to remove a paper clip and you start damaging the paper, stop and contact a conservator. They will be able to mitigate some of that sort of future damage that you might do as you continue to try and handle these items with rusted things attached. When you're moving your things from sort of place to place, I do this all the time with my own stuff. You're sort of pulling things out of your box. You're getting very excited. You pull something particularly fragile and you look around and you have no place to put it. It's very key before you pick up anything that you have a clean and clear landing surface for it. And if you're moving something particularly fragile, put it on a stiff board first. Now we're going to get to a more sensitive topic and that is display and use. Display and using your family heirlooms really keeps the people that you have loved in your family close to you. So I don't want to say, you know, don't use them. Don't display them because I really believe in that strong familial bond. You just have to be aware that when you use these things, you speed up the damage to these things. As you see here, these are two items of the three that I actually own from my grandmother. And as you can see, I wore her necklace until it broke and I had to make sure that I repaired it. I put a photograph of her when she was four years old of her pet lamb in my wallet. And as you can see, it's sort of torn and really started to damage this photograph. When you can use facsimiles, use photocopies and stick those pictures in wallets or exhibit those in your home. Also be aware that when you use real items, you know, particularly things that you can't do facsimiles with like textiles of any sort, that you don't display them permanently. When you constantly leave them up in your home, you are going to cause damage. So only pull them out on special occasions. You want to make sure that you contact a professional conservator and or framer and that you have conversations about making sure that the glazing doesn't touch your object, particularly if it's a photograph, and that they are going to use appropriate ways of attaching your material to the mount in question. So talk to them about adhesives or not using adhesives in particular and make sure that you know exactly the best sort of thing that you can do when displaying your item. Once again, as I mentioned, lighting is really bad in this situation. If you are going to display an item even for a short period of time, try to put it in a location where there's a dimmer switch so you can sort of dim the lights in that room and not cause any light damage. Now, I talked a lot at the beginning of this presentation about familial value. And while you should never get rid of your original object, it is probably important that you digitize and make copies. Stanford University has created this lovely website called LOX, and it stands for Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. They give you great tips and tricks on how to best digitize and sort of get copies. The key thing is that people tend to forget that they only have to digitize their stuff once, and that's it. But really, you should convert to new media about every 10 years. Your object's degrade, so does new media. Make sure that you convert about every 10 years, and make sure that you file name with your organizational file and use that metadata that I talked about at the beginning. With papers and photographs, you really can do this yourself. If you have a good camera, if you have a good setup, you are able to make digital copies for yourself. The best way of doing this is sort of digitizing face up. There are multiple types of scanners out on the market. Be careful, because some of those can, in fact, do damage. The best thing to do is not sort of flip over your object and sort of push it down onto a scanner, but actually, you know, take copies of it facing up in sort of a planetary position in which your camera is above the object and taking picture of it below. Now, with new media like electronic, film, media of any sort, you really shouldn't do this on your own. It's not about getting the unique equipment to play it. It's making sure that you adapt that equipment so that you get the best possible recording. So there are things that you should ask your vendor that you have contacted to see if they're the right fit for you. The first is you need to ask them if they'll do a pilot test. This is in particular, if you don't know what is on your media. They should give you a pilot test so you have an idea that it really is sort of a filming of a birthday party rather than a TV show rerun. The second is something that some people are okay with and some people are not. I always ask if they digitize in-house. I feel like the more removed you are of the process of digitizing, the more you are removed from making sure that it is recorded well for you. So I always make sure that I'm talking to the person who's going to be doing the job for me rather than having a vendor take it from me and then send it to an outside vendor. And three, you wanna make sure that you talk about file type. You don't wanna just talk about getting your items back in CD or USB or other sort of disk formats. You wanna talk about file. So for example, with Wave, the recording that they're getting, they're getting everything. It's not just what you can hear with the human ear. So it's really great for archiving and make sure that you have everything from your media, but it's maybe not the best for storage or for making copies for other people to share. MP3s on the other hand, compress their files, they're really great for sharing. And sharing is important. You don't wanna make multiple copies and then keep them all on one desk, especially in the case of a disaster. Share these, make sure they're in different locations. I always tell people to gift them to their other family members. That way you get to give a gift to somebody and they're also ensuring that the familial value attached with the original object is kept intact if and when one digital copy is destroyed. And then the fourth thing that I do is I always make sure that the vendor in question really knows it's equipment. So if you're getting vinyl records recorded, you wanna ask them about needle size. If you're getting tape cassettes recorded, you really wanna talk about adjusting the azimuth. You might not know what an azimuth is, but they should definitely know what an azimuth is. And if they don't, you need to go to another vendor. All right. So we're getting slowly towards the end and some of you might have some wonderful questions for me and I'm very excited to receive them. But if you're anything like me, the real questions are gonna come up when you're facing those boxes and not knowing what to do.  Well, the first place you can always go to is our own website. It's www.archives.gov. Now, when you get to the screen, scroll all the way down and what you will see is a list of words and you will find preservation among that list. You can go ahead and click it and you will find a slew of wonderful information that will help you with your specific needs. Like I said before, we have different media types and you can know how to store them. We have things on emergency preparedness. We have a vast selection of information for you at your fingertips. If you're not finding your question, you can also email us. We have an email at preservationatnara.org and we will respond to those. Another place that you can go to and particularly if you are looking for a conservator to help you. I've talked a lot about finding a conservator to help you with your projects. Now, AIC is the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and you can find them at www.conservation-us.org. On the left-hand side, you will find a button that is Find a Conservator. When you click on that button, it will ask you a number of questions like where you're located and also what type of media that you have and it will pop up a list for you that you can contact. Now, if you're not in the US, there are different conservation organizations all throughout the world. You can go on your search engines, you can find them, most of them have these sorts of resources for you so you can find a conservator close to you. Another thing that I want to sort of particularly mention on this front page is this area right here. It's the National Heritage Responders. This is a group of volunteers who go to organizations during a disaster and help them salvage the items that they have. Now, I want to particularly talk about this because disasters happen and right now we are particularly going through some major disasters and our hearts definitely go out to everyone who is experiencing that right now in their lives. There are ways to help. You can plan. We have resources on archives.gov that can help you and so definitely make a plan before a disaster happens. The second thing that you need to do when a disaster hits is that you take care of yourself first. People are always first. Stuff is always secondary. You want to make sure that you are always safe and that you don't go back into your home until it is safe for you to do so. Typically, when people go back into their homes, they want to close their doors and turn on the heat. That's the opposite of what you want to do. Open your windows, get some good airflow in there, and turn down your heat. This is going to prevent mold from really causing you some grief. And then the fourth is contact the national heritage responders or contact a conservator. The national heritage responders do not help sort of private individuals in terms of actually going to their home and helping them take care of their things, but they will offer really good advice. You can also go to a vendor. There are several available online. Just make sure that you get a quote from them in writing, specifically saying what they will do and roughly at what cost before they start helping you. Once again, don't get overwhelmed. I just gave you a lot of information. That's okay. Sort of work plan slowly, and you will see the results of your efforts in time. So thank you so very much. And this is the time for questions. Thank you so much, Katie. You're welcome. This is the disembodied voice of Andrea Matney. Welcome to the genealogy fair. We have been collecting your questions and we have quite a few of them. So we'll go as far as we can until we've run out of time. Okay. So I have at least eight right away. I think you covered this, but which picture albums are the best to use? You know, the best picture albums are ones that have that polyester sleeving that's been PAT approved. A lot of people sort of react to plastic because a lot of plastic can be damaging. Make sure that it's PAT approved and you can slip your sleeves inside it. Another reason why I always suggest that is you can write on the back the data that you need. So you can write on the back who is in the picture, where, when. And with those sleeves, you can see the back and actually have that information readily available. Oh, that's a great tip. Hadn't thought about writing on the back. Yeah, it's a great question. It is. Will scanning damage photos? So it depends on the scanner and that is an excellent, excellent question. You really need to make sure that you scan in a way that fully supports your item. So a lot of scanners come with sort of scanning beds. You wanna make sure that your items don't overlap those beds if you can help it. A lot of scanners also have sticky parts where you sort of stick your item to be scanned. Once again, that's an adhesive and so that can sort of leave residue and damage your item over time. A lot of people will use sort of the automatic feed in regular copiers. That's also probably not a good idea.  Make sure that when you go, you're looking for something that can support, doesn't have any sticky parts. You can use them for sure. You also don't want anything that will rub against your item if you can help it.  The friction from that can cause some damage if you have some friable media or some media that's popping off your papers or photographs. So that's why I always suggest sort of a planetary system where your camera is above. But there are scanners out there that are safe. Fantastic. I love your detailed answers. Thank you. Thank you. So this is a really cool. We have one person. She's so lucky. She has a question about how to store tin type photos and how to duplicate those tin type photos. Wow, I love tin types. So tin types are actually made out of iron, not tin. So you really need to treat them like a metal. The best way of storing them is, keep them separate from other metal items. A lot of tin types have their own sort of boxes or containers. Those are perfectly safe. And if she has those sort of boxes or containers, she can leave them in there and then store them in sort of separate boxes. If she doesn't, by all means she can wrap them in acid-free tissue and store them that way. So your biggest problem is gonna be with iron, of course, sort of rust issues. So as long as you mitigate your humidity, don't keep the water moisture in your air too high, it's gonna be okay.  That's an exciting sort of collection to have. I agree. Thank you so much. Our next question. I have my grandfather's World War II photo album. Leather album cover is falling apart. Pages and photo corners are intact. I was going to transfer them to a new album or am I better to remove pages and save originals? That is such a good question. And in so many ways, that is gonna be sort of left up to you. Yes, the leather in this time period is not great. It was processed not well. There's a lot of acid in that leather, which over time sort of destroys it. So I can only imagine what the leather cover looks like. Now, if that leather cover is dusting, that is acidic. So if it gets on the photographs, then you might have a problem. You're introducing acid onto the photographs. If that leather isn't dusting, then by all means you can keep it in there for a while, but you should definitely watch it. And over time, you might wanna start slipping those photographs into sort of plastic polyester sleeving. Now that doesn't mean that you necessarily have to get rid of the album. You can keep both. If that album is significant to you, if it reminds you of World War II in that time period, by all means treat it like any other object that you have and keep it. But just be aware of that sort of dusting of the leather that really can cause some problems with your photographs later on. I think another similar question, but she's concerned about provenance. So she asks, I inherited a collection of mid-20th century photos in assorted frames. Should I remove the photos from the frames or keep them in place for the purpose of provenance? That is such a great question. I am gonna make the assumption that these photo frames have the glass actually touching the photograph. You really don't want that photograph touching the glazing of those frames. The reason why I say this is over time that emulsion can stick to the glass. And in some cases it's impossible to remove it from its glass. So if you can remove it, I would suggest do so or at least sort of put a barrier inside the frame in between the photograph and the frame itself so that that glazing is no longer touching the photograph. Now for provenance's sake, of course she can talk to somebody to see if those frames have value. If those frames certainly have dates on them, I would advise that you write that date on the back of the photograph. But those are sort of all questions that you're gonna have to sort of tackle on your own unfortunately, so yeah. Yeah. I'm going to move along to the questions that deal with paper and then we have some other ones that are different types of media. Awesome. So one person writes, I have an 1800s marriage certificate that is fading and falling apart. It is oversized. Should I store it in a tube or flat? That is a great question. I always suggest that flatter is best. You know, really, really large items and if you don't have space to store them, by all means roll it onto a tube. But it sounds like this is already falling apart and so you don't wanna, you know, mess with curving it in any way. It seems like at this point in time. So your best option is flat. You know, marriage licenses can be very beautiful. That fading is permanent, unfortunately. So make sure that you keep it out of light. Keep it from fading any more than it already is. Thank you so much. You're welcome. We have the next question. I think it might be the answer is depends how much you wanna spend on it. So the question is I have an 1898 family Bible that is quite large and the binding is slowly coming apart. Is it best to get it repaired or should I store it as is? That is such a great question. And I think that that is a question for many, many, many people. You know, those family Bibles are notorious for falling apart and they're also notorious in putting them back together. It really depends on your budget. If you want to see, you know, this thing back in its pristine form, by all means contact a conservator. Make sure that you get a budgetary quote before that conservator starts to tackle that big of an object. I always tell people that with something like that, it is, it's going to be just fine to store it. Now if that doesn't mean you shouldn't contact a conservator, conservators can make storage and boxings that fit the item perfectly so that that Bible isn't jiggling around and causing more damage later on. Contact a conservator, have them make a special box. It will be somewhat cheaper than the actual conservation of a very large volume that's really falling apart. Another key thing that you want to sort of pay attention to in these family Bibles are those pages that talk about birth, marriages, and death. You know, those things are probably the most valuable and contain the most familial value. So before doing anything, you might want to consider copying those and sharing those copies with family before you go into the sort of lengthy process of fixing it and sort of rebinding those things. If it's damaged and you can easily remove them at this point in time, take photo copies and then consider doing conservation afterwards. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Now on to some questions that are not textual. All right, I'll see if I can do my best. This is so sweet. We have somebody, she says, how to duplicate an old 78 recording of my mom singing to MP3? Oh, that is so lovely. So by all means, contact a vendor. With something like that that means so much to you, I would consider maybe at least getting one copy that's wave, which is sort of that full recording format. That's the one that's not compressed at all. Now that will have a lot of space, but if you just make one for yourself, that's gonna be ideal. And then make some MP3 copies for your family as well so they have that. That would be my best, my best thing to do. Thank you. Okay, different type of media. This is a great family heirloom. What is the best way to store an 1881 quilt? Quilts are so wonderful and they're particularly fragile with all of their sort of stitching and sort of many, many, many things. And people really want to display them, I should add. With a quilt, you can sort of roll them on rolled storage. Make sure that you roll outside the tubing. I didn't mention that and I should. You shouldn't roll it and then stick it inside the tube. It should roll outside the tube and then you should cover it with some sort of acid free paper and sort of tie it. That's gonna be your best option. Now the key is is you can't necessarily sort of put that upright and hang it in your closet because over time that the gravity is gonna pull that quilt down. If you can sort of leave that roll flat somewhere under a clean bed, that's gonna be your best option. But really don't consider displaying that for a long period of time. Quilts can be very fragile. Thank you. I'm gonna go on to a question that's again about textiles. I inherited a hand embroidered tablecloth circa 1920 that has been cut into sections with each section individually in a wood frame. Should I keep them framed or take them out to store as textiles? That is such a great question. And that's more common. I get a lot of questions like that in which family has sort of cut up something so that each person in the family can keep the item. That's really a discussion that you should have with your family. Once again, if they're framed, you wanna make sure that that textile isn't touching the glazing and so you might wanna remove those from the frame. But the real question is what's gonna be best for your family? Does your family still want those individual pieces so each family member can keep these items? Or if they're now all yours, do you wanna hire a conservator to sort of stitch them back together if possible? It's hard for me to judge because I can't see the textile in front of me so I don't even know if that's possible. I would have her definitely consult a textile conservator. They'll be able to give her a lot better advice in terms of even if she can stitch them back together or not. Thank you so much. You're welcome. So on to a different type of precious family heirloom. I love it. Yeah, someone asked, how do you best preserve athletic medals and trophies? You know, that is a real thing. Any sort of medal, whether it's athletic or even sort of war medals from soldiers in the past, you know, all of these things are composite materials meaning they could be made of wood, plastic and metal all rolled up into one. The best thing to do is to make sure that you sort of wrap them individually so they're not touching other medals. You know, if you have them all in one box sort of jingling around together, once again, that's gonna cause some corrosion problems with your medals. So you wanna wrap them in paper items. I should also mention with trophies or teapots or anything of that nature, you don't wanna pick these things up by it's the most fragile part, which is often the handle, right? You know, it's the part that you really wanna pick up. When you're picking up trophies or anything else, you wanna sort of pick it up at its most stable base. So make sure that when you're handling these things, pick them up at the base, wrap them in sort of acid-free paper and then stick them in a box. That's gonna be your best option. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Great. So we have someone who's come back. She's got another question. Yay. She says, thank you for answering my question. And she swears, last question. I have a dried rose in my great-grandmother's funeral, from my great-grandmother's funeral. Is that just a sentimental item to save or worth archiving? You know, that is really a personal question and particularly organic things that are gonna fall apart over time. That's definitely going to be an option for you. If you plan to keep it, you should be aware that petals will start falling off. So wrap it in case it makes sure that things aren't really hitting it a lot. But it depends on what's sentimental or not. The picture of the necklace that I showed you, my grandmother gave it to me because she thought it was ugly and I fell in love with it. And so she had no sentimental value toward it whatsoever but I now have a huge sentimental value for it because it was a gift that she gave to me as a joke and how much do I love her for that? So I can't gauge your sentimental feelings but I think that those things definitely have value. Like your feelings towards something do have value.  Nice, thank you. Let's see, I'm going to go on to something that I think more people are running into these days, more modern archivals type of question. If you are starting fresh preserving digital photos and files, what is the recommended media storage to do now for the future? Portable hard drives in addition to cloud storage or something else? Well, that is such a great question, especially now that we're dealing with a lot of born digital items as well. Even if something is born digital, do you print it off a paper copy or do you just leave it on the cloud, what do you do? So my advice is put it in multiple storage types and multiple places. If you put it on the cloud, don't just put it on the cloud. Make sure that you have a CD or a portable hard drive as well as a different type of copy. There are a lot of companies on the internet right now who are sort of storing photographs for you. You never know when those companies might not make it and there are sort of stories out there of people completely losing all of their photographs because these companies went under. So make sure that whatever you decide definitely choose different types. There is a lot of advertisements about the best storage that will last 1,000 years or storage that will last 100 years, whether it be CDs or other different drives. The fact of the matter is we just don't know. We don't know if those things will last 100 years and we don't know if we'll even have the equipment to play it in 100 years. So the key is to just make sure that you continue to convert to new media every 10 years. That seems like such a short amount of time but I mean if you look back and think of floppy disks, zip drives, all of those things, where advertising is lasting for a really long time and just simply aren't around anymore and you can't really even play them on anything. So that's gonna be your best go-to when you're starting out fresh. Thank you very much. You're welcome. We still have questions coming in. However, we need to take an intermission break so we can connect with our next presenter. Thank you so much. You have a lot, many, many kudos, including you Rock Katie. Thank you for an excellent presentation. Thank you so much. It goes on and on. Well, thank you so much for listening and please feel free to continue asking your questions. They're so beneficial for everyone. So yes, thank you. And you mentioned already one way to ask questions is to go onto our webpage and we also have a generic email address if you can't find the other one. It's for all researcher questions. It's inquire at nara.gov.


Hi, good morning, and welcome to these products in focus. So most global equity markets are lower again this morning following another sell-off in Asian markets as people looking at the broad sell-off and in Euro bonds which impacting Japan and the US as a bit of an alarm call that could be stronger a stronger sell-off in the other markets as well and Today is the UK general election, which is a widely Looks like it's kind of impacting the sterling slightly this morning as we might be looking at other coalition government But as you can see there yesterday it bounced off potential support 17738 So it ended up a good bit away from from that load that it reached yesterday But we're drifting down a little bit lower this morning down about 29 points in the US So moving on to UK 100 you can get a bit of a flavor of where we are right now looking very very top-heavy 6906 the potential support We actually dipped a little bit below that yesterday ended above it before the end of the session quite close to that 55 period SMA and this morning we have already been below it again But it's still bouncing around 6906 that looks to be the potential pivot level for many traders to be aware of and that was the High resistance level from September last year So moving on to Japan to do five It is pretty much flirting with this potential upwards trend line right here trading below 55 period SMA Other technicals began to look a little bit weak right now with the MACD close to cost in the zero line So from a technical perspective we've broken two moving averages and the MACD just crossed in the zero line And we're just about to take below a potential upwards trend line So a convincing close below that would open up 18648 and Dollyan as ever is trading at about 119 Which means you're probably not going to get a huge amount of volatility in Japan to do five unless we see a little bit More action on that FX pair There's a little bit of economic data due out today Obviously we've got non farm perils tomorrow so that might be something that will be the catalyst to get this market moving Not really much else to say about Dollyan 119 probably still very much in play It's been oscillating around here for the last couple of sessions All the other technical indicators are flattening out There's not a huge amount of opportunity on that FX pair right now So moving on to West Texas crude real strong day yesterday only to get pushed right back down as crude oil inventories came in Pretty high again The previous week people had taken the slightly slower acceleration on stock distally as a sign that Demand was picking up, but now we've seen China is all over the place Actually, there's not a huge amount of demand up there even though we have seen the price of tick up Graveyard doji formation was posted yesterday And we're pretty much bang on 5950 right now Which is going to be acting as a potential support slash resistance level This is a very ugly candle to have so close to at the top end of an uptrend So from a technical perspective everything else is massively overbought you see the RSI's overbought the slow stochastic is overbought We've almost got a crossover in the MacD with a flattening histogram So don't be massively surprised if we do see a decent non farm perils Figured tomorrow that would cause a little bit of spike in the USD. What's your pressure? West Texas could Obviously Middle East anything can happen. So looking at gold Reverse cost again below 1186 There's not really a huge amount happening here longer term potential support 1137 Dollar Not really doing a huge amount either to be completely honest. It's not a dollar move There's still uncertainty in the markets I'm kind of surprised to see that gold is actually taken down the way that it is just now These formations that you're seeing here This could look like a very strange head and shoulders formation Well, you would normally get a head and shoulders formation at the bottom of the downtrend So it doesn't really count instantly But this would be a classic and shoulders formation and if you go below 1137 that would be quite significant, but we're not the top of an uptrend So that's not what it is all the other telecondicators are natural as well So there's better opportunities out there than looking at gold. So Moving on to your dollar has gone mad on the back of this huge sell-off and Euro bonds which is The side effect to that is that is pushing the value of the euro up and obviously people saying that Greece has to reach a deal because The alternative is just horrible to contemplate apparently And that's really pushing up the value of the euro as well And they're very much running at a time to reach a deal Running out of money as well apparently so your middle two ranges to be honest one spot 1642 is the next potential resistance If you're looking for another potential pivot you take the tip of that candle right there 1295 was a broken resistance not expected to act as short-term support You've got a golden cross the moving averages, but your other technicals are over are overbought But these don't really count in an uptrend So they are assigned the solicit acetic only in a sideways moving market So you can you can not be too alarmed by the huge increase in the trend right there So finishing up with GBP USD is not going to probably do a huge amount as election day comes in today Pauling closes at 10 p.m. UK time and the results will probably be known at some point tomorrow morning With many commentators of his talking throughout the night again golden cross moving averages one spot 51 85 is a level to be aware of broken resistance now expected to act as support But you do have this crossover in the RSI and the solicit acetic So economic data-wise we do have unemployment claims due today, which could be quite interesting Obviously, you've got UK general election and then Friday you've got Chinese trade balance overnight German industrial production and then of course massively important non-farm payrolls and everything else So I'm better make sure I've got my reoccurring alert set for them So as ever make the chart forum part of your layer and same with insights as well and join me again tomorrow to find out


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Welcome once again to the tower the talk we're about to have is optimising boot time by Margarita Manterola and once again the IRC channel for questions is hash dc6-talks-tower. Thank you very much Margar. Okay this is above not a talk so it's not intended for me to come here and give you the magical solution I'm going to present some research I've made some suggestions and things that I've found and I'd like you afterwards to also propose ideas and present experiences that you've all had regarding boot speed. Mainly it's a question of usability since you are here with your laptops you probably boot your machine quite often and you probably complain of how slow it boots because most laptops tend to take about a minute in boot time and that minute seems like a very long time when you are eager to start working and you have to wait for the whole booting sequence to come up so that's why we want to make it better but we are not that bad these are the times that I took they were all done in the same computer in Pentium 3 so all these are freshly installed distributions well actually the edge installer was not working really really well that day so I had to manually install the desktop task because desktop task was not there but that's the only thing that I manually did and the Shen 2 I did not install myself because I'm not capable of installing it myself but I asked a very good friend of mine to install it in the same machine and it was freshly installed Shen 2 whatever that is so as you can see of the freshly installed distributions edge is the one that's doing better so we are not that bad from edge to search there's very little difference it's there hasn't been much of change this is of course with Exim for working properly if for some reason when the network comes up the interface is not configured Exim takes like one whole minute to time out but well this was with Exim working properly so we didn't have that problem it looks like the Ubuntu people made a lot of progress between Breezy and Dapper but we are still doing better and well with Shen 2 it's it's Shen 2 is twice here because Shen 2 has a nice configuration file something like etcrc.conf or something like that where you can configure how the boot process is going to work so freshly installed Shen 2 was kind of slow but after changing something like three variables in the config file we got a very fast boot for Shen 2 that's one of the nice things that of that distribution that you can just touch three variables and change the boot process completely it's like more than 20 seconds of the difference just changing three variables in a configuration file when you compared the startup times did you also compare to what services were being started by default or that were installed by default on the differences distributions because if one has an SQL server by default and the other does not that will impact boot times so did you look at that yeah sort of it's mainly freshly installed and I was aiming to a desktop distribution so Dapper and Edge installed almost the same services and with Shen 2 we installed only the desktop part so it's there might be a little bit more services than others but it's mainly the same thing because it's a desktop installation it does not have Apache or SQL server or anything like that well and well up there it's what I've been doing tweaking the installation of Edge so that it booted faster I got it to boot 20 seconds faster when the boot time is 60 seconds 20 seconds it's a big difference but it still is a lot of time 37 seconds it's a lot of time we should aim to get it as fast as possible like lower than 30 seconds we are competing against an unoperating system that boots in something like 10 seconds so we really want to make this as fast as possible so of course all that I did I did it with boot chart see I didn't time the time of the distributions with a clock I did all this with a boot chart so this is the boot chart of freshly installed Edge do you want the mic boots in 10 seconds uh Windows XP I don't think so uh yes it booted in my laptop when I bought it it booted in 10 seconds okay it usually loads the graphic interface but still loading all the services in the background so it doesn't really load in 10 seconds I know I know I know of course of course of course I'm talking about the user point of view I know I know it's crap I'm not saying it's a good operating system it's just that from the user point of view you have an interface in 10 seconds well uh we tried this uh with school and the thing is you have to be logged in that's the acid test you have to be ready to start a program as a user then you can say you have the boot everything ready thank you yeah okay well this this is up to gdm gritter it's not logged in if you count the time that gnom takes to start it's even more time I'm just waiting until gdm gritter runs and that's the point pointer if the measurement the measure the method you use to measure this gets you into this this kind of discussion you should probably find a point where you really started uh just arguing with you a little that you just are starting a program as a user thank you okay yes but well I was concentrating on boot time I also think gnom should try to start quickly yes they are trying to work on that okay so what's the what takes the time away this graph for if there are some people that haven't seen boot chart yet uh the blue thing is the sepe you use the pink thing here is waiting for the hard drive and this is reading order of the hard drive or something like that so we mainly don't want these kind of things where the cpu is not being used the hard drive is not being read or well here or here and here we have very little cpu and a lot of hard drive so this is hardware clock being synchronized all the distributions have this problem hardware clock takes around two seconds to synchronize and if you don't run it in background it's hold two seconds of nothing going on this is depth mode it's reading the whole module list and stuff it's about three seconds this is network coming up this is waiting for the dhcp server to give you an ip and afterwards running port map as you can see around here there are two slips there's one slip one in the dhcp script and another slip one in the port map script these slips are there so that services can be set up after the interface has come up or after port map has finished running and you might think that one slip one is not that bad because it's only waiting for one second but if we have one slip one here one slip one here and there's like another slip here although it's not in shellcode it starts to add up a lot of seconds of doing nothing so we don't want our cpu to slip at all and well finally gdm takes a lot of time like this place here is this place here and it's doing nothing but it's inside gdm it's not in a shell script it has a slip one but hard coded inside gdm so it's it can't be touched from a shell script so what i did to make it boot faster here's the boot chart for when it booted in 37 seconds was first start the network in the background so we don't have that hole here then remove depth mode from the boot process because we only need to run depth mode when we change the kernel so why run it every time the machine boots okay i know for a server i know that a server only reboots when the kernel changes but that's not the point no that's not the fact for a desktop what would happen if you put depth mod in the background what would happen if you were to put depth mod instead of removing it put it in the background just like you did with the network i didn't try it i think it would work okay does anyone think that it wouldn't work i just take it took it away because i think it was useless why run depth mode every time your machine boots if you only need to run it once when your kernel changes it's like such a waste of cpu and of disk reading so i took it away because i was bothered but it would probably run okay if you put in the background uh then running hardware clock in the background took six seconds away uh the boot chart showed three seconds of of uh gap but it took six seconds away to run it in the background uh i'm not sure if running hardware clock in the background uh is damaging in the days i've done i didn't find it damaging but i'm not completely sure so if you think there's a problem with running in the background please say so yeah okay sorry i'm just going to pass this on from irc um somebody has just said putting depth depth mod in the background won't work you need it completed for loading modules but yes removing it makes sense no just passing that on okay running hardware clock in the background is probably not the problem because it only the reason it takes so long is because it wants to properly sink or read the time at the moment it gets updated but the only thing you have is that you might have a slightly less accurate time in the during the boot process but that's should not be an issue definitely and surely if you run stuff like ntp it probably gets synced properly afterwards anyway so that's probably you could i think you could even just leave it out you could patch hardware clock to not try to do syncing and just read the time and then you might be one or two seconds off but that will get corrected later anyway okay so it's not damaging okay uh then this i found on a user list um searching for something like devian boot time or something like that i found the mail let's say point your shell to bean dash instead of bean bash and it took six seconds away this is the most trivial change i made i used update alternatives it was one comment line then pressing one button and and it took six seconds away i think that this is a change that should be made either by making dash the default sh or by making the need scripts use dash explicitly but one of the two has to be done because it's such a waste of time not to do it uh well then uh using parallel starting for the services at the same run level this is actually mangling with etc init d rc which actually has parallelized uh starting of the services already there uh it's just a variable that has to be changed i didn't know it either i started looking at the file to see what i had to change to make it start parallelized and i realized there was a variable there that actually did the show up it's just changing the value and it works uh well it took only two seconds away but then rearrange the services so that things start in a different order and especially this this hole over here was the gdm sleeping right so i rearranged the services so that when gdm is sleeping uh debuff is doing something i don't know exactly what but debuff is taking the cpu so it took other two seconds away okay so uh what i've been saying the problems that we need or may be able to solve to parallelize to to start the services in parallel we need to know what has to be started first and what has to be started second i did i did this by hand tweaking things changing them from the 20 to 15 or whatever but it was like a very dirty thing to do i only did to try to boot as fast as possible but to do it clean neatly we would need to uh know exactly what needs to be started before whatever else needs to start so uh this needs kind of a lot of work to show the dependencies of each script this is what shen to that currently it does it at runtime and doing it at runtime probably waste cpu time because it calculates the dependencies whenever the script and in each script needs to run it calculates the dependencies sees if the dependencies are already started and if they are started it starts and if they are not it starts it uh this works okay gen2 boot quite fast but uh it would be faster if the dependencies were hardcoded if we had a command like update boot dependencies or whatever that hardcoded the dependencies so that it started in the correct order yes nati okay passing on another few messages from irc um firstly boot script reordering could be done based on dependency info using i i ns serve secondly um the parallel booting can be enabled in et cetera default rcs but the parallel sorry yeah but the parallel boot system needs more testing before it can be made the default this is from the person who wrote the parallel boot feature okay uh okay so historically there have been problems with things like where in the sequence you start ntp based on the fact that people have very different ideas about what they're using their computer for and what's important and what's not as we go through thinking about this and thinking about how to maybe make the stuff configurable is anyone thinking about that notion that you know some people that we might need some concept of a usage profile mapped into this as well i mean the specific example of the time synchronization stuff some people want that started very early because they don't want any log entries on the system that uh don't have the right timestamps and as a result they're willing to push the network start stuff also very early on the other hand with a notebook or something the right assumption is no networking until very late in the process and you do dynamic device discovery and so forth these things create interesting trade-offs and sometimes even loops in the boot script dependencies yes well if we had the second point here a configuration file where you could specify your boot process it could be a nice feature to specify what priority network has or what priority whatever other things that we want to have priority have so that the yes so that they are started earlier regarding ntp when i was testing breezy my network was kind of clogged because i was downloading like three dvds from previous devcon from um for selling fedora that i don't have time to install it but anyway uh so the network was clogged so ntp couldn't reach the server and that like added like 20 seconds to the boot process because ntp was running in foreground and uh until it timed out after 20 seconds the the boot process didn't go on so that's the kind of bugs that we don't want uh then i tested breezy without uh with with the network not clogged the number i presented earlier was with the network working all right yes nati so this is actually just an aside from um from irec yet again saying could people in the audience when they're speaking please introduce themselves okay uh so it it would be nice to have script dependencies uh that someone from irec said that it can be done uh i didn't understand exactly how but it's good if it can be done uh and it would be really really nice to have a file where we can specify what kind of boot process we want um oops and finally uh the boot process is really very verbose it shows up a lot of info and when you're running it in parallel the info is like so much garbage because all the scripts are outputting the same to the same place at the same time and it's like it's useless so it would be nice if that could be selected or configured like passing an option when it starts that says verbose yes or either configuring it in the same configure file whatever but so that it's not so verbose it's easier easier to understand easier to see is if something is working or not and maybe not outputting so much might reduce a second or two i'm not sure but uh when you when you un-tar something and you use the minus b option you know that you are taking such a lot lot more time because you are outputting things so i think it might reduce a second or two not to house of output uh on other side note people embedded systems also um disabled the uh kernel message output and almost all of the boot output and they gained um multiple seconds i think at least uh three or four or so on a slow arm system just by not doing anything of kernel output um i'm peter the driver from belgium p2 at debion.org okay so probably not outputting things makes things things faster too so well mainly mainly this was what i was proposing uh going back to the previous slide is there any objection to making dash the default sh show i mean it's a great idea in practice the problem is that you will occasionally run into bugs with people who assume it was bash so you're just ask you're just um making it a little bit worse if such a bug happens which bugs um bashes them so you know of any kind um just there's all there's all different kinds um i run with with uh dash and i see maybe one a month or something it's not a big deal andrew mcmillan um wouldn't that just mean that the bugs would get filed against those scripts that might be a good thing okay so uh to whoever has the power of doing this i really want to ask to have sh point it to dash yes sorry again with the ilc one person one person comments um init dot d dependencies can be specified using lsb format and the reordering can be done using the ins serve package using the info to reorder the scripts and it is possible to to run init dot d scripts in parallel using serialized output from the using the start part option another person says yes um bash isms are already rc bugs which means most of them have already been fixed so about the dash uh change maybe it would be a bit less risky of breaking different things to simply have the init scripts that are critical for booting have hash bang bin dash at the top then it's very clear whatever interpreter you use and you can use dash for specifically that init script and not for anything else and uh of course it needs to have then a dependency on dash but well we need to do that anyway um i'm mad doc um this is basically what i was going to raise if we have dash as the default for init scripts we do need to add it to the base system which is something we just might want to consider because if we keep adding stuff to the base system we are effectively increasing the size of our minimal system which used to be 30 megabytes and is now well above 100 so okay uh does anyone who has a computer can tell me how much dash takes 160 kilobytes could we actually get rid of bash this is bedale i mean look if you're gonna change that if you're gonna change the default it's ludicrous to ship more than one shell in base essential right so you know if there's one that's faster and smaller than that kind of like feels reasonable for days i mean i'm not a bash bash or i actually like bash but let's be reasonable um the problem we have with that right now is that we've allowed people who have bashisms in their programs to just add a dependent uh make the hash bang line say bin bash so um there's lots of scripts out there that do just use bash and they don't even declare dependency on it because it's an essential so it would be a lot of work to move away from using it i think yeah if you're gonna move to it you certainly are talking about you know a policy change in that regard because i don't think you could tolerate that at least for innet scripts and stuff like that whether it would still be reasonable to invoke bash from you know post in scripts and things like that whether it would have to be added as a dependency it's not a trivial change but if we're talking about making changes you know to what's going to be used by the init scripts and that's going to lead us to think that having two shells and bases reasonable then i'm not sure we've finished solving the problem yet okay so maybe the solution for edge so that we don't make edge lag could be to file bugs to whichever init script is there that can work with dash and ask nicely that these init scripts run run with dash i will note that that a lot of us who worked on embedded have used ash for exactly this reason this is also much smaller footprint and you know appreciated by that as well so lots of people like like ash as opposed to bash for this sort of basis okay i'm not such a surely expert i don't know the difference between ash and dash in practice it did not cause us much trouble to to make our scripts work under ash as opposed to bash yes it's not exactly the same but neither was it a big hassle to to build build familiar to use ash instead of bash i'm jim get us i worked on the handhelds project and i'm currently still worried about keeping things small though not as small on the one laptop or child project okay another maria another remark would be that it definitely helps to use a small binary as possible for getting for booting faster so you could even think of using busybox for all the init d stuff if possible and the second thing you could do is minimize the amount of forking don't don't in scripts so don't use pipes when you don't really need them but try to use as much of the options of the single command use you use in the script that helps a lot as well saves multiple seconds all these tricks together uh peter reynolds in comments that um demian edu has been using dash as shell for several years already and it's not a big problem i have one more question about where to place the login story is it possible to move that even earlier to to give the user a kind of good feeling it is supposed to be possible i tried i move gdm very up the scale of the numbers i don't remember exactly which number i gave it i put it very very up the upper i could give it and it still came up last but it's supposed to be possible if you put it early it is supposed to come up early but it takes such a long time that it comes out last anyway uh i'm blars uh not using gdm maybe a way to significantly speed up your boot you know even if you do have to start x after you log in that way i i don't like any gdm or any of those i don't use them well yes of course uh but i was aiming to the whatever the user interface the user installation and users tend to like gdm or kdm but i like norm so i stuck with you know yeah just a really quick comment on the ash dash bash controversy um so actually currently in devian ash uh predepends on bash so there's uh sorry on dash ash predepends on dash so uh there's really no point in using ash instead of dash yeah but you just get an extra 16k instead of just having the whatever 93k it is installed okay uh wookie uh i'm wookie um yeah i was just going to follow up really on other embedded people who've who've mentioned all the all this stuff applies to small systems particularly we tend to really care we'd like boot seconds of two seconds boot times of two seconds rather than 35 um obviously that involves taking stuff out but there's a lot of people who've looked at p2 mentioned a couple of things there's a lot of things we can do you can there's kernel patches to make things boot faster and um obvious stuff like changing the shell but there's a whole load of research being done on how to make things boot as fast as possible and not all of that is applicable to desktop systems as well but some of it will be so if someone gets really enthused there is uh quite a lot of research being done and we could try and see how much of that we can use on general systems and the embedded people will be terribly keen to see essential reduced as much as possible and all these sorts of things are generally great so uh tiki g all we have to do now is make it happen yes exactly how do we make it happen how do we get uh whatever knowledge you have to the user system there isn't a simple answer to that question obviously um i mean what i would say is if someone's interested in this um i went to a talk about reducing boot time aimed at embedded systems and so anyone who is looking at this should read that document because it had loads of useful points um that will be a good start um i suppose we need to have a team or something really is is the only way to get it done because it does it crosses all aspects of the system so you've got to have people who know about this that and the other and know whether changing something is going to break a whole lot of other things and who's going to complain and as someone else pointed out there is a genuine problem of what is your target system is this a server a laptop or a tiny box uh and they don't have the same requirements so um we want to make as much possible as possible because we are supposed to be the universal oils and debbie and has so far had very much a kind of desktop and server focus and has largely ignored smaller machines and obviously we're keen to get as much stuff suitable for smaller machines in that doesn't break everybody else's systems as possible the website of the ce linux forum has a lot of tips which are which are mostly geared towards embedded systems but some of them should be applicable to and some of them we actually already implemented so that proves they are applicable to desktop systems uh if for the people who want to look it's like i think it's www.celinuxform.org and it's a wiki page and there must be a link on boot time optimizations and then you get the whole list and some have been implemented and some have hints on how much per how much time you could save by you implementing those um better ryan holds and comments on irc that six google summer of code projects propose to work on the boot system speed hi i'm ryan murray the gdm maintainer and i just like to say that the sleep that you are seeing is actually gdm waiting for the x server to be ready to use gm tries to talk to x when it fails it then sleeps and tries again and again so it's actually waiting for x to come up here and the sleeps uh there was one in earlier versions but in the current version and unstable and testing the sleeps have been removed from sort of the standard process so the only time it's sleeping is if x has not come up yet so anyone wanting to look into that part of reducing that time look at x not at gdm because it's just waiting for x okay uh just a comment to the previous comment uh i had to say something and i forgot what it was uh which was a previous comment summer of code right uh it's great that there's a summer of code issues and and people wishing to work on that but i think that this needs to be much more than just summer of code that every person that has an init script in the boot process has to be involved not only four or five students working and trying to earn some money during this summer yeah um i got smahinoz also comments that two of these six projects have a very good chance of being accepted it's great i just want to have the whole devian maintainers with the boot scripts uh also involved not not only the summer of code there was a comment over there no uh i'm just too stupid um yeah a few comments to several things that were mentioned here um for example uh the the fact that ash p depends on dash is uh because we have no ash anymore and it's just a dummy package so that's uh so we don't have any choice there anyway um and on the thing that uh script should use dash explicitly i think that's actually a bad idea um because if you ever change the default shell again you will have much much more trouble um so i think we should go for the clean solution here and uh just change the base system uh obviously that needs uh one release cycle to uh to really apply and i think don't think it would actually make it for edge but maybe that's just me being pessimistic um so um the i think the the uh more important problem on uh by uh of changing the default shell and kicking bash out of essential is um the whole um build thing because many um i think most of the this actual installed system is uh very bash bash cleans so that you can use dash instead but uh i think uh many of the devian rules files and stuff like that they still use bashisms and um if you kick bash out of the essential you will have many uh failures um on build time so you need to uh give um give you some time to fix all these failures yeah uh Clifford Beshears from linspire um the gdm maintainer has a good point x takes a long time to start you and after you get past the desktop on either no more kde or past the login screen you have another 15 to 20 seconds before you get a desktop and as long as we have Keith Packard and Jim get us in the back maybe they could tell us if they have done any research into optimizing the start of x because i've heard rumors that there are things you can do actually i had i had two comments i can certainly answer that question um the reason x takes a long time to start up is not x it's the desktop environment uh if you look at what gtk or kde does i can pass the buck because the next guy um if you look at what gtk does it's reading all of your gcon files which is about 300 or 400 separate xml files in your configuration and it reads a bazillion icon files it reads a million font files um it takes it takes the disk head and basically buck shots the entire hard disk because it finds files all over the file system so really at this point uh x login is completely seek limited um i don't know exactly what the desktop environments are going to do it's really nice to have your just your configuration spread all over like that because it makes configuring the system very robust because you have you have configuration for each application in a separate file and practically for every config variable it's in a separate file so it's a very robust environment but it means it's very slow to log in um there was one question about gdm sleeping um when i wrote xdm i actually changed the x server so that it would send a signal to the uh to the display manager um so if you ignore the appropriate signal uh tell the x server that the signal is ignored it will actually kill with that signal it's parent process so gdm can actually synchronously wait for the x server to become ready i don't i assumed it did that that's certainly been been in the in the xdm code base since about oh 1990 so uh but yeah x session login just takes a long time because genome and kde read a lot of files is this uh question to the well let me continue on on what what Keith's saying um if you uh have been watching Federico uh mania quintera's blog you will note that that replacing the genome session program with a shell script uh sped things up like six six seconds the genome session is has been sped up somewhat in the latest release but they still have stupidity inside of the gnome session um as far as some of the icon stuff i believe that there's been some patches for gdk that are may have already gone in at least in some distributions for for putting a lot of the icons and the like in um in a shared memory area so that you aren't at least reading it for each application so certainly um certainly i know that genome folks are working pretty hard to try to help this situation um but there's just you know there's lots more to be done um in all of this um jocelyn muet comments that uh the the file reading has been changed in gnome 2.12 and debian gconf has apparently received loads of optimizations and as for gnome session it is being rewritten peter dynaltz in comments that readahead and preload might improve the problem with reading files all over the disk uh juet was the is the gconf and gnome session maintainer so hello okay so uh i wanted to use readahead 2 but uh i read a lot of documentation and couldn't get it working but on this moment when the cpu is being used so much but the disk is mainly idle you could use readahead so that around this time when the disk is being used so much it does not cloud the cpu it will probably take some seconds away but it needs to be simplified so that it can be done easily was there another comment yeah um uh about uh yeah about the uh the dash i've never used dash but it seems like a trade off for increasing boot time but then you lose uh flexibility and features from the the uh the base system i mean if um if during the install if you use dash then the user accounts are populated with dash then and it sort of sets a precedence for for the uh the base system then i do think you need to necessarily change the default user shell but it's a question of what's actually inessential and what the scripts are using so certainly for an embedded system we'd like it if there wasn't bash there as a requirement but then we're not expecting the user to be sitting there at a shell playing around so sure on a desktop system if you're expecting people to drop into the shell and do stuff themselves maybe you want to make sure that bash is installed by default but that doesn't mean it needs to be inessential yeah i'm murray uh actually well i've got the mic um it's wookie again uh somebody mentioned over there that there is a problem with uh stuff at build time requiring essential features of bash which are complicated and fancy um but we don't care about that at all during boot time um that is a general problem that at the moment debian because everything's done natively has no concept of the difference between things you need when you're building versus things you need when you're running and uh it actually we probably need to make a distinction between those to solve a great pile of problems um but that's that's another big subject which we probably don't want to get into right now but um danny's doing okay no more comments i'm matt taggart one of the things i do is uh work on the linux standard based projects i can comment a little bit on the lsp file format uh the lsp is a developer standard and and what the lsp work group was facing when they came up with uh the standard for nitscripts is the fact that they're trying to come up with something that could be common across all the linux distributions so that developers um writing um applications and needing to install nitscripts could do it in a common way across all linux distributions because you have some linux distributions that are using system five and nitscripts you have others that are using other parallel init schemes um and then you also have different utilities you know in debian we have um update rc.d but in in red hat you have different things and so uh we needed one common way for people to be able to um install an init script on the system and then be sure that it would would work with system five or other things so the way it works is that um as an application developer if you're putting something on the system you use the lsp mandates that lsp compliant uh runtimes provide a command um to install the init script and it's up to the linux distribution to figure out to to provide that command and figure out what it does so in our case um it's just a wrapper around um update rc.d but you know red hat probably does something else because i think they use check config or something like that um so you you use this utility to install the init script and then the init script itself um at the very top in uh in some comments um there's some syntax that you use to tell it um you know not system five numbers about what order i want it started and you just say what your dependencies are so you set up these these comment fields um that can be parsed later on uh by the init program or or like you were saying if you could have all this stuff pre-compiled ahead of time so it didn't have to be recomputed on boot which also takes time you could do that um so if you maintain a package that uses init scripts uh take a look at the standard and basically you know even though in devian we're still using system five and um update rc.d you can put these comments in there and it will mean in in the future people will be able to uh turn on parallel init systems and and really speed things up a lot uh hello i'm uh philip hands i've recently been looking at uh packaging an alternative init called dep init which uh doesn't use the standard init scripts tool and you specify dependencies between every service and every you can depend on things like the existence of a root file system the rest of it uh and you start the system by instead of saying init three you say dep init gdm and uh it just does it uh it because it makes completely different assumptions from init throughout uh i can't see it being a candidate for edge really um but there will be interesting cross-pollination issues between what you're doing and uh getting this working so we should have a chat at some time uh do you have any idea of how long it takes to boot i've seen it boot a system but it's not a devian system it was uh limits from scratch system and it booted in about 15 seconds but it's quite a fast machine that was to a gdm uh login prompt yeah well it's it's difficult to compare from a linux from scratch but it's a nice the person that uh the person that built that is the person that wrote dep init and uh he has a very different way of looking at things so a lot of his assumptions will never work in devian but some of them are very interesting no more comments i'm done