Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's webinar on Risk Assessment for Cultural Institutions. My name is Jessica Unger, and I'm the Emergency Programs Coordinator at the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation. I will be serving as technical support for today's program, and I'm happy to address any questions you may have. Today's webinar has been organized by the American Institute for Conservation's Emergency Committee. The Emergency Committee aims to promote awareness and increase knowledge of the AIC membership in the areas of emergency preparedness, response, and recovery for cultural heritage. Thank you to all of the committee members who have worked to make this program possible, particularly the committee co-chairs, Katie Wagner, and Becca Kennedy. Before we begin the program, I wanted to share some technical notes. On your screen, you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left-hand side. You can use that chat box to say hello, ask questions, and share any information that you'd like. If you post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a written response from me. Any questions will be noted, collected, and then I will verbally ask them of our presenters at the conclusion of the presentation. Our presenters have prepared resources to accompany today's webinar. Please refer to the web links box at the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Click on one of these resources to highlight it in blue, and then click the Browse To button to be taken directly to that site. All of these resources have also been captured in a handout available in the box labeled Files to the left of the links box. Simply click on the resource handout and then click the Download File button to save a copy to your computer. With that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's presenters. Susan Dool is a professional associate of the AIC and serves on the AIC Emergency Committee. Susan is also a team member of the National Heritage Responders and serves on the National Heritage Responders Working Group, programs that are managed by the foundation of the AIC. Susan teaches disaster protection and recovery worldwide, including in Puerto Rico, Nepal, and Greece. Bob Herskovitz is also a professional associate of the AIC and likewise serves on the AIC Emergency Committee. Bob was one of the first group of individuals trained to serve as National Heritage Responders, and has presented numerous workshops on disaster response. He also provided input on the development of both the emergency response and salvage wheel, as well as the field guide to emergency response. Syrah Hakee is a member of the AIC and is currently serving as a book and paper conservator at the Minnesota Historical Society, where she is also responsible for updating the institutional emergency plan. Syrah is interested in issues of conservation ethics and outreach within and beyond the field of conservation. With that, I'd like to turn things over to Susan to kick off today's presentation. Welcome. This is Susan. So let's get started. This talk is about assessing your institution's disaster readiness. Disaster specific assessments are an opportunity to review the conditions affecting protection and safety of people, the collections, the building, and the site. An assessment is the beginning of understanding how to address your institution's specific needs at each level of disaster management. Our goal is to familiarize you with an approach to assessment procedures as a way to discover conditions, develop priorities, and make improvements. An assessment usually results in a disaster plan used to respond to an event and a strategic plan to systematically improve conditions and overall protection. This talk doesn't include how to write these plans, but instead it's about how to ask the right questions and lead your team to make thoughtful and balanced decisions in disaster preparedness. There's a lot of good information about assessing, planning, protecting, and responding to disasters, and we've given you a number of excellent handouts and resources. We recommend the AIC website, the AIC YouTube channel videos, and Connecting to Collections Care webinars. This talk will be made available on the AIC YouTube channel. As of this side, grant funds are available for assessment projects, and there's a good digest of funding sources on the AIC website. So I'd like to thank Jess, Becca Kennedy, and the AIC staff for all of your support, and I see a lot of friends and more than a few experienced heritage responders on the webinar today. Thank you for coming. We're very pleased that you've joined us today. This is Syra. I'm going to get us started with some history. In 1966, the Arno River flooded Florence, Italy, killing 101 people and destroying and damaging millions of cultural artifacts. This was one of the hallmark events in conservation, with volunteers from all over the world called mud angels, working to save as much of the damaged material as possible. The Florence flood highlighted the need for systematic disaster planning. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina took everyone by surprise. No one was prepared, and it showed. In recent years, large-scale events like Hurricane Katrina and Sandy motivated the further development of a methodical system of disaster preparation, protection, and recovery for cultural sites and collections from all types and sizes of disasters. The system of disaster readiness in cultural institutions is constantly evolving, and our response to recent disasters shows that we have made great strides, including training many more people. In honour of the 50-year anniversary of the Florence flood, there was a joint meeting of the American Institute for Conservation, AIC, and the Canadian Association for Conservation of Cultural Property. The postprints are a really good resource. Disaster assessment, planning, protection, and response in cultural institutions is now systematically organized. In the United States, the Foundation for the American Institute for Conservation, FAIC, began by formally training and organizing over 100 responders, originally called AIC CERT, C-E-R-T, for Collections Emergency Response Team. There was confusion because in the disaster field, CERT refers to community responders, so now the group is called National Heritage Responders. NHR responders are available 24-7 to answer questions and respond to disasters. There are two groups, the FAIC Working Group, which supports Boots on the Ground Recovery, and the AIC Emergency Committee, which focuses on education. This talk is sponsored by the Emergency Committee. As you begin thinking about disaster assessment, external heritage protection groups which provide local, regional, statewide, national, and international disaster planning and response. Along with the National Heritage Responders, there are groups like the Alliance for Response, AFR, which is a national organization of regional groups. There are also local groups, for example, HERA, the Heritage Emergency Response Alliance in Atlanta, Georgia. All these heritage preservation groups provide regional training and other resources of disaster management. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has recently joined with the Smithsonian and the U.S. National Archives to provide training called HART, Heritage Emergency and Response Training, which was recently involved in assessing conditions and conducting training in Puerto Rico, along with NHR. Another group, the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, works to protect cultural heritage specifically in areas of conflict. Museum and library professional organizations, regional and state agencies also offer assistance. You should always feel comfortable reaching out to the people who work on disaster issues. We're devoted to this work and are able to provide important information and resources. City, state, and federal disaster agencies have their own plans and provide information, training, and response support as well. Some of this information is specifically directed at cultural institutions. Here in St. Paul, for instance, the Minnesota Historical Society participates in a statewide multi-agency task force with Minnesota Homeland Security. The Department of Emergency and Management also exists at the county and city level. You may also choose to work with local universities and other agencies. All these types of organizations can be helpful resources when considering disaster assessment, since they have their own disaster plans which can be integrated with yours. Disaster assessment is important as a first step toward building a disaster plan to protect your site, buildings, collections, and most importantly, people. The safety of people is always the highest priority. A disaster plan formally documents needs and priority actions. But even without writing a disaster plan, a disaster assessment is a great way to get to know the institution's strengths and weaknesses, its capacities, and its needs. Investigate every aspect of your institution in detail to determine how best to protect it. What's the current level of protection? How ready are you to respond now? In line with this, Jess, can you post a poll question? How many of you have a disaster plan? Wow, it looks like most people have a disaster plan. About half so far. We're giving it a couple minutes to get some more results in and then we'll continue. All right, it looks like most people do have a disaster plan that is in some form or another. I'm going to go home for everyone else. We're glad you're here. In conducting a disaster assessment, you're evaluating the level of preparedness in the institution. The more information you have before a disaster, the more successful and efficient your recovery efforts will be. So gather a diverse range of information, including your organizational mission, policy plan procedures, staff duties and capabilities, and the conditions and vulnerabilities of the site, buildings and collections. And we're going to touch on these throughout the talk. We really want to stress that assessments are an ongoing process requiring a high level collaboration between an institution's departments. You might have a specific project to do an assessment, but you will also have to periodically reassess conditions as people come and go and collections grow. If this all seems overwhelming, know that there are a range of helpful resources out there to guide you in conducting your assessment. A good place to begin is the AIC evaluation form. AIC is a great resource. There are also other assessment templates available online, whether free or for a fee. Depending on the size of your institution and the depth of your assessment, you may prefer one of these. Disaster assessment, protection and recovery should be a primary concern in every cultural institution. As the graphic represents, we assess every aspect of the institution, starting with the administration and progressing through the physical site and building and into the collections level. Identifying problems may not always be comfortable, but acknowledging them and sensitizing people are very important. Without question, it's better to invest time and money to protect collections before a disaster than try to recover afterwards. We will look at many aspects of disaster management throughout the talk, starting with administrative issues. A useful place to begin an assessment is by looking at the institution's mission statement, which in part defines the reason the collection exists and how it is to be used. The mission statement will provide the assessment team with a basis for identifying collections' priorities. Every museum has a unique focus and interpretation of their collections. Obviously, art museums and a natural history museum have very different needs. Are you working in a larger institution with professional staff in a large budget or a small historical society with a volunteer staff and no money? A key component in disaster readiness is the success of the institution's management of daily operations. Organizing developed institutions will likely be more successful in disaster recovery. An example of good collections management is reflected in inventories, which should itemize collections as well as building contents like furniture and equipment. Complete and appropriately detailed inventories are important for daily operations, but they are also critical to disaster preparedness and response. They provide identifying information, especially when disassociation or the loss of identifying accession numbers and tags occurs in disasters. They are necessary for tracking collections if working with disaster companies. And insurance companies will also require detailed inventories and monetary values to justify losses. Successful inventory management includes making sure information is backed up off-site in a safe location. A disaster assessment typically includes reviewing a variety of documents that are attached to a plan. We include this topic in the assessment because these informational resources are critical in disaster response and need to be assessed and updated regularly. Some of the most critical documents include a telephone call list with contact information for people available in disaster response, and building in-site plans with copies of the plan showing evacuation routes and locations of safety equipment. Other documents that may be attached to disaster plans include but are in no way limited to disaster supply lists, safety checklists, identification and permission forms for response staff and volunteers, template inventory forms which are used to identify objects, their conditions, and their changing locations as they move through recovery, insurance information, collections policies, protocols, and procedures like instructions for handling collections, and inventories. To determine which attachments may be most useful, look at other institutions' disaster plans, especially those institutions most similar to yours. There are a number of good resources including the AIC emergency pages and the websites for the American Alliance of Museums and American Library Association. Some additional resources are the AIC emergency response salvage wheel, the field guide to emergency response, and the emergency response app. The app is available as a free download for a variety of phone operating systems while the salvage wheel and the field guide are available for purchase on the AIC website. An assessment team should include input from all members of the staff including the board of directors, collection staff, security personnel, buildings and grounds crew, and the director, all of whom will have unique observations. The team may expand depending on the size of your institution. The assessment team should gather information from everyone on staff to best identify, prioritize, and address comprehensive needs for protection of the entire institution. The assessment team may include recovery specialists such as conservators, historic preservation architects, and the heritage preservation groups like NHR and AFR who can provide valuable insight, support, and training. Architects and engineers can identify building issues and develop priorities to address them. Other institutions in your area may have staff with expertise or experience, and institutions with mutual aid agreements are often more successful in recovery actions. Funders may function as assessment team members if there are a good source of information about similar institutions, programs, or available funds. Vendors can suggest improvements in collection storage and local businesses may be able to provide you with needed equipment, supplies, and or people in the event of a disaster. Most importantly, first responders should be brought in to assess conditions, identify safety issues, make recommendations, and provide training. It might be unnerving to have inspections although this review is crucial to ensure the safety of people, the building, and its contents. Their visit is also an opportunity to cross train and sensitize police and firefighters to your collection needs. There's an important point to make here. In a disaster event of any size, cultural heritage responders should only enter a disaster site after first responders have declared the seed to be safe. Developing a relationship with local fire and police departments can only be beneficial. Disaster response companies are another part of the team. They provide equipment, supplies, and different kinds of services. Services include providing drying equipment, cleaning, buildings, and contents, and for collections, packing, moving, storing, freeze drying, and mold removal, duplication, and archiving. In a pre-disaster assessment, it is important to determine if local or national companies can meet your institution's needs and standards. A contract written in advance of a disaster can define jobs, their expected outcomes, and include costs, scheduling, expectations of staff training, site security, detail of inventories, and quality control. Each disaster company or franchise may offer varying types and qualities of services. A number of companies have experience in working with cultural institutions. You can investigate vendors by looking at their relationships to other museums and by visiting the vendors' facilities. An important component of developing good disaster readiness is in assessing individual staff and volunteers' capabilities, limitations, and quirks. How can you best assign projects and responsibilities in disaster assessment and protection or in a response action? Disaster situations are stressful and critical decisions will be made during difficult times. Stress commonly exaggerates personality traits, so it's helpful to anticipate a variety of emotional responses. Frankly, there may be individuals that you may choose to work with or possibly those you need to work around. Some people may be well-intentioned but may assert strong opinions or perhaps not understand the importance of working within museum standards. This assessment of individuals' capabilities will help identify skill sets and assign the best roles and responsibilities, especially when developing the Disaster Response Team. It's also very important to do a self-assessment, looking at your own personality. Identify how you can best contribute to the assessment team and in Disaster Response. In fact, what are your capabilities, your limitations, and your quirks? Extroverts may be more comfortable being team leaders or community liaisons while introverts may prefer focusing on hands-on recovery. So coordinating people with different personalities and abilities is done through something called the Incident Command System, or ICS, which was developed by FEMA. ICS defines roles and responsibilities within a Disaster Response Team. ICS is not necessarily an assessment topic, but it's important to understand in advance of disasters. We strongly recommend that you take the free online FEMA ICS 100 training courses. There are some key issues about ICS and cultural institutions that we want to mention. The Incident Command System needs to be flexible and adjust to the given situation. The person who is most qualified for a role should assume the functions of that role. For example, a collections manager may be best suited to supervising the disaster site and collections recovery, while a museum director's skills are better suited to taking charge of fundraising and public relations. In smaller organizations, one person may be responsible for several roles depending on the size of the team. The Incident Command System provides an important structure to sometimes chaotic disaster response. This is where it's very helpful to assess team members' strengths and assign them appropriate roles and responsibilities. Determining the training needs of staff, volunteers, and the public. For example, does everyone on the staff know how to use a fire extinguisher correctly? Do you conduct fire drills and practice evacuations that include your visitors? Determine who can assist in training, such as first responders, cultural heritage responders, and or in-house staff. Training should be done on a regular schedule and repeated often. As your staff changes, it's important to teach the new people and make sure that all staff training is current. In any disaster deployment, it is essential to have proper personal protective equipment, called PPE, for personal health and safety. If you're not healthy, you'll be unable to perform and be an integral part of a team. If someone becomes ill, their absence will disrupt smooth, salvage operations and make everyone's job that much more difficult. Without proper use of PPE, people may develop long-term health issues. In the image on the left, you see the things that are essential personal protective equipment. Your institution may have legal liabilities related to PPE, but this is a complicated topic which must be addressed by your administration. Information on health and safety can be found on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration OSHA website and the AIC Health and Safety Wiki. Along with standard PPE, each responder should equip themselves with a personal go kit. This is usually a backpack filled with basic supplies, which not only includes your PPE, but additional personal items such as medications, food and water. The contents of the kits may be influenced by the specific needs of your institutional situation. For example, those in flood prone areas which may develop contaminated water may want to include water filtration straws in their kits. Part of an assessment process is ensuring disaster response supplies and equipment are either on hand or readily accessible. Having a cache of supplies available saves time, so they won't have to be gathered during an event. Access to stores and their supplies may be limited, especially in large-scale events, so it's important to keep supplies set aside for disasters of all times. A master supply list is available on the AIC Emergency website and is one of the disaster plan attachments Susan talked about earlier. It's helpful to think of assessment as a series of observations, starting with the broad and proceeding through more specific physical or conceptual issues from the site and building into the collection or object level. Conducting assessments is a group effort. People see different things and it's difficult for one person to see everything. Including staff from different departments will ensure that every area of the institution is represented. It's helpful for everyone to observe problems firsthand and also to contribute information and guidance from their area of specialty. Hopefully, undertaking an assessment will encourage team building and will educate and sensitize staff to issues outside of their expertise and daily responsibilities. Cross-communication is crucial. Identify issues specific to your geography that are unique to every site. These features are important to identify since they may present hazards or hinder disaster response. For example, is your institution in a floodplain, a mountainous area with winding narrow roads, or in a busy city? Northwestern United States is more prone to floods. California has earthquakes. There are volcanoes in Hawaii and hurricanes in the southern United States. Each situation will require somewhat different planning and effect response. A more specific example seen in this slide is the Minnesota Historical Society, which is located at the intersection of two very heavily traveled interstate highways. In the event of a disaster, access to the historical society may be limited by stalled traffic. Those unfamiliar with complex highways may become lost, or an overturned truck nearby may create a hazmat, a hazardous materials situation. Assessments involve being ever vigilant for changing conditions and unexpected situations. Determine existing local hazards. Are you next to an oil refinery, a nuclear power plant, or some other potential threat? Next, monitor changing conditions such as weather. The goal is to identify all hazards knowing it's impossible to predict every eventuality. For example, the 2008 Republican National Convention was scheduled close to the Minnesota History Center. We could identify a potential hazard in the crowds of people that were coming, but we could not predict if there would be civil unrest, vandalism, or tear gas being pulled into the HVAC system. Assessment includes evaluating communication systems and their potential for failure. Cell towers, for example, may not function in large-scale disasters, or your phone system may be electricity dependent. GPS may fail, so paper maps may become necessary. In the case of a large complex disaster in a building, a network of staff with backup systems of communication will be essential. A building can be the first line of protection in a disaster, but it can also be a source of the disaster. So it's important to assess each building to identify vulnerabilities and issues. Once these are identified, projects can be designed to secure and protect the building, its systems, and its contents. As you do an assessment, think about the building envelope, fabric, and configuration, infrastructure, and the structural materials comprising the building. Where are the building's weaknesses? The building and grounds crew, architects, and engineers will be really helpful here. And this type of in-depth analysis of your building can be funded by grants. When assessing a building, it is particularly important to be concerned about human safety. We really want to repeatedly stress that keeping people safe is always the top priority in any disaster response situation. Buildings are multifaceted and have many aspects and variables in location, access, construction materials, age, and state of repair, which can constitute either protective measures or hazards depending on quality and conditions. The building structure and the building fabric will be specific to every institution and so will its inherent issues. Frank Gehry is known for using experimental material as opposed to a traditional log cabin. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Inspect a building from the outside in. Consider the condition of the building, the frequency and quality of maintenance, and whether certain items need to be repaired or replaced. Assess the infrastructure inside the building. Consider the age, condition, and maintenance of various systems such as plumbing, electricity, gas lines, and city services. In doing this, work with building engineers, facilities, and custodial staff. In assessing the various building systems, locate the shutoff for gas, electricity, and water. Decide ahead of time whose job that will be and know the safety protocols. You might not catch all potential problems, but the more situations are identified, the better. A thorough examination and documentation of conditions and issues concerning the building construction and vulnerabilities will identify problems and should lead to priority repairs and improvements. For example, water infiltration and drainage is a common problem. When you examine your building exterior, look for clues to what might be happening inside. All the images on this slide show ways of determining whether water may be infiltrating your building. The image on the left show the preservation specialist assessing whether building is damp to the touch, while the center image shows mold below a downspout. The image on the right show the confluence of site and building problems that could result in water seepage indoors. Doors, windows, and skylights are all potential sites for water infiltration. Changes in weather can cause water to condense on windows and skylights in particular. Keep an eye out for pest infiltration. Pests aren't just a disaster in themselves, but can also indicate that the building envelope has issues. As we suggested in the previous slide, exterior problems can create interior problems. Stains or mold on walls and ceilings are both signs of water intrusion. Consult with qualified building specialists regarding the pros and cons of ceiling foundations and the exterior of basement walls, especially in historic buildings. Do not seal interior walls unless you want a vapor barrier. Every building interior will be unique in its structure, interpretation, and use. Building layouts, space allocation, exhibit design, evacuation routes, safety equipment, and visitor flow, including population identity and density, all need to be assessed. And decisions need to be made relying on the expertise of staff and consultants. It's important to evaluate the building's space allocations and proximities to potential hazards. In other words, is the space being used to maximum efficiency and safety? Risks include collections stored near or under sources of water, pipes, mechanical rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, janitor's closets with sinks, and workshops. Collections are also at risk when stored with or near hazardous materials such as solvents or gas. Collections located close to exterior doors risk exposure to water or pest infiltration. On the other hand, collections near exterior doors are more accessible for evacuation. Sometimes space allocation assignments were made in the past and can't be changed. Addressing competing issues and the needs identified during the assessment may be a balancing act and becomes part of disaster protection and preservation planning. Wayfinding within a building, especially a dark one, requires thought and preparation. Evaluate routes and pathways for the safe evacuation of both collections and people. Mark evacuation routes clearly on posted floor plans. Halls and corridors should be kept clear. Look for hindrances such as low hanging pipes, ducts, or electrical chases. Lighted exit signs and emergency lighting with backup power are public building code requirements in most areas. Are keys necessary to open exit doors? Will doors with electronic key card access function when power is out or when the backup generator as a power source? Ensure that staff training is repeated regularly so that staff and visitors can be moved safely through the building. A good question to ask is, will someone unfamiliar with a building such as visitors be able to find their way out in the event of a blackout? Locating additional work and storage space is another important part of assessment. In small scale disasters, you may be able to use alternate spaces within the building, but large scale emergencies may necessitate using offsite spaces. Consider nearby buildings, rental storage units, school gymnasiums, and freestanding storage pods. Keep in mind that transporting collections requires trucks, drivers, and insurance coverage. Transporting collections may introduce additional risks as well. Moving collections through bad weather or moving damaged collections may further compromise their condition. Heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems HVAC or HVAC are another focus of assessment because those in good condition may help prevent disasters, but those that are old or in poor repair may be a cause. For example, poorly combusted oil in an old furnace may result in a puff back covering collections in soot. In the assessment, determine the age, condition, and level of maintenance of the equipment. Simple actions like regular inspections and replacing filters that are properly sized and installed will prevent many problems. Establish if regular monitoring and maintenance is being done. It's important to work with the building engineer and or a hired HVAC company to ensure that professional standards are met. Fire suppression systems from museums and libraries are beyond many of your job descriptions or daily responsibilities. The assessment team should be familiar with how systems work, existing or potential vulnerabilities, and any needed repairs or upgrades. This is an area of assessment and disaster protection that must be done and usually by a professional.  Many institutions are nervous about having the fire department expose problems during an inspection since it may necessitate changes to bring the building up to code. But the point of doing this assessment is to ensure that building codes are met to protect the building, the collections, and especially people. Jess, we have another poll question. Would you put that up please?  It's encouraging that a majority of people have had a visit from the fire department. That's really great. Thank you everyone. Part of an assessment is determining the need for protective measures against potential water damage. Identify locations of liquid bearing pipes will supply and drainage, especially those over collections or running in the walls adjacent to collections. Floor drains and sewage plumbing should be checked so that they are unobstructed. Check that any freestanding dehumidifiers drain directly into a floor drain to protect against collected water or overflowing the reservoir. Raising collections off the floor and moving them away from water sources are something to strive for. More simple protective measures include preparing pre-cut sheets of plastic to drape over vulnerable shelves by using water alarms. In a large-scale disaster, a backup generator is desirable or may be needed to provide lighting and environmental control. If you have one, assess whether there is regularly scheduled maintenance and a qualified person to operate it safely. If you don't have a backup generator, determine if it's in your institution's budget to rent or buy one or if someone's available to pursue a grant to obtain it. Some of you may be managing building climates without the benefit of electricity or generators as is happening in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands right now. Without mechanical backup systems, a viable alternative can be a passive environmental control system. Knowledgeable professionals who can identify in your pre-assessment, pre-disaster assessment can help you with this. As we continue the assessment, we will look at the conditions of storage and collections. A well-managed institution with good collections maintenance will be more successful in responding to a disaster and mitigating its effects. At the collections level, review storage locations for security and accessibility and, of course, the most stable climate control. Determine if storage furniture is optimally configured and if the storage furniture is adequately sized and physically stable. Determine if collections housing provides sufficient support and protection. And finally, look at collections conditions since fragile conditions are likely to be even more vulnerable in event of a disaster. An assessment should also review how well storage rooms and collections are identified, look at whether location codes are assigned to every room, shelving bank, shelf, and drawer. Lists should be made to identify the contents of every shelf, cabinet, drawer, and box, and these shelf lists are useful to identify priority items in evacuation. Color-coded labels and reflector strips can be used to mark important collections and can be especially helpful for salvage by first responders who don't know your priority items. Each type of storage unit and the material it's made from will have distinct advantages and disadvantages for protecting your collections. On the left of your image, collections were protected from fire by metal flat files, but on the right the collections were severely damaged by water accumulating in the drawers. We can't give you ideal choices for furniture here, it will depend on your type of collections, financial situation, and identified vulnerabilities and needs specific to your cultural collection. Some important parameters to review in storage design include determining that aisles are wide enough for carts and free from obstacles. The fire department can help with compliance to codes and good judgment will help determine if collections can be safely maneuvered. Make sure that equipment such as ladders, carts, and dollies are available. Collections should be kept well off the ground, but some choices will need to be made. Is it better to have furniture on wheels to remove them quickly in case of a water disaster on the left? Or is it better to have furniture bolted to walls and floors for earthquake protection? Good quality housing materials provide physical and chemical support and can act as an added level of protection. If there's a leak, boxes will absorb some water before it affects the object inside. Storage housing can also be designed to make collection evacuation quick, easy, and efficient. The moccasins shown in the slide can be easily picked up using the handle built into the sporting enclosure. Given the scope of most collections, implementing improved housing is an ongoing endeavor. Identifying projects to rehouse collections as part of disaster preparedness might allow you to access additional sources of grant funding. Different types of housing materials like paperboard, plastic, metal, and wood will react differently to disaster conditions and should be chosen to provide the best protection as budget allows. For example, metal-edged archival boxes that are more expensive may protect against the contents being crushed when the boxes are wet. Many institutions experience a disaster while items are on exhibit. So disaster assessments should include reviewing exhibition areas, cases, and mounts. Are collections secure and well-supported while on exhibit? Are they positioned so that visitors can be easily evacuated? How easy will it be to evacuate the collections themselves? In undertaking an assessment, some of the most difficult decisions will be about choosing priority collection items. Decisions about priorities should be based first on the institutional mission, but they are often biased by staff preferences or sentimental attachment to particular objects. Criteria to balance include curatorial value, financial value, media sensitivity, the quantity of materials, and the replaceability of materials. For example, a single item rare book can be identified as a priority while current publications or duplicate materials are not. Balancing the criteria in determining priority collections requires a lot of clear communication and hopefully consensus among the staff. It's better to make choices about priority collections for salvage before rather than after a disaster. Hazardous collections require a special mention. These collections present numerous and varied safety and health issues. Natural history specimens often contain arsenic and heavy metals which are released by water from floods or broken open in earthquakes. Guns and ammunition can also release heavy metals like lead and some remain live like ammunition. Protecting hazardous materials should be considered a high priority when determining collections needs. As we said before, this graphic is how we conceptualize the sequence of assessment. However, no two disasters are the same in type, scale, and resulting damage. Another phase of assessment is always needed when an event occurs. Hopefully, this will be made easier by your preliminary preparations. For example, you have established priorities, conducted staff training, and maintained a cache of supplies. You will have to adjust the disaster plan to meet the needs of the actual situation. In a disaster, there's many things happening all at once, especially in a large-scale disaster. And this is the time where pre-disaster assessments and planning will provide the framework for an efficient and successful salvage and recovery. The first step in a response will be to access the disaster plan. Computer copies of a plan may not be available, either because you can't get to your office or because there's no electricity. We recommend paper copies be kept in cars, homes, or other places that are easy to access. Next, you will need to assemble your team using the disaster plans contact call list. Determine if primary people from your list are available for staffing the response team. People with specified roles may be unavailable, difficult to find, or unable to get to the site. So you will need backup people who should have been identified in your initial assessment. Sometimes help comes from unexpected volunteers, and everyone will have some way to help. Please remember, safety first. The initial assessment should have identified responsibilities and relevant safety documents to attach to the disaster plan. These might include safety checklists, identification and permission forms for response staff and volunteers. We've given you a handout titled reentry checklist, which will guide the team in the safety protocols for entering a disaster site. In a disaster, a reassessment is necessary to establish the type, quantity, extent of damage, and the accessibility of affected collections. The assessment team should refer to the disaster plan for predetermining collections priorities, but will need to adjust to approach the salvage based on the situation at the time. Once the collections reassessment establishes the needs and priorities, it's really important at this point to stop, sit down, and plan the methods, strategies, and resources needed to implement salvage. That is, the people, equipment, supplies, and spaces. Packout is the sorting, packaging, and removal of damaged collections to a work area, storage, or to a vendor. You will have to determine the needed and available people, supplies, equipment, and working space, and this will be challenging when dealing with large scale events. Your pre-disaster or initial assessment will have planned for where to get additional supplies, equipment, or space, and who will procure them. Pre-disaster assessment is all about anticipating and balancing the needs of disaster preparedness and response. It's also about predicting the long-term needs of recovery. And recovery can be a long process. After a disaster, institutions need to maintain their daily operations, but will also have the added burden of rehabilitation. Additional staff time will be needed to treat, repair, deaccession, or replace items to rebuild collections. Damaged collections may require isolated storage, designated work space, and regular reassessment of conditions over time. An important example of this is isolating and monitoring multi-contaminated collections to ensure there is no additional outbreak, even after treatment. A disaster of any size is likely to alter existing strategic management plans and divert implementation of other projects. And the need for additional funds is inevitable. Thorough, pre- and post-disaster assessments will help you develop strategic planning and actions that are both practical and realistic for your institution. Finally, after disaster response is over, the disaster team should debrief, assess the success of preparations, response, and recovery. What worked well? What do you wish had been done differently? This discussion will help you update the disaster plan, strengthen the team, and prepare for another emergency situation. This is the final stage in the cycle of assessments. Assessment requires focus, time, and energy. It's a real opportunity to strengthen your institution. We've seen the aftermath of many disasters, so we're passionate about this subject. Institutions prepared in advance recover more efficiently and successfully. We thank you for joining us in taking this first step towards disaster preparedness. We encourage you to pursue your assessment and planning. The bibliography and handouts provide many resources on each of the topics we've covered today. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for joining us, and we're so happy to take questions. Wonderful. Well, thank you all so much. We had a few comments and questions come in, mostly technical in nature, so a couple people had questions about some of the links and resources. So just to share with you all, we will triple and quadruple check those links and make sure they're all working as they're supposed to and have them included in the YouTube reporting that we will post tomorrow and then share that with you all via email. We've registered this formally. We had a comment come in from another member of the National Heritage Responders who noted that loans are always a top priority when you're considering your collections priorities. Susan jumped in and agreed with that. So let's see. I'm seeing a few more comments come in. Mostly thank yous. If anyone has specific questions related to the content that we heard from Susan and Bob and Ira, please do feel free to go ahead and put those in there. Well, I think you all did a wonderful job covering things. It seems that there aren't too many lingering questions. So thank you to our fantastic presenters. Again, if anyone does have other lingering questions that come up after you've had some time to process today's presentation, please don't hesitate to get in touch. I believe you all have received my email via the webinar system, but I'll go ahead and type it in the chat window here now so you all have it. Again, I want to give a big thank you to those members of the Emergency Committee who helped organize today's session. And I also would like to share with you all before you leave just a quick survey link so that you can share your thoughts on this program. In particular, note at the end if there's anything that you would like to see covered in a related sphere. This is a program that we'd like to try and run again in another webinar within the Emergency Committee. So please do share any thoughts about how to continue to build on this series. And likewise, I would like to remind you all that if you have undertaken any activities this month of May to help boost your institutional emergency preparedness, and this webinar counts, attending this webinar today, as one such activity, please do go ahead and share those with us to be officially entered into our May Day drawing. So we have had prizes donated, delivered archival for any institutions who share their emergency preparedness activities as a part of the May Day campaign. So please do share that information and you'll be entered to win one of six prizes and that drawing will be held on June 1st. So again, thank you all. Anything else, Bob, Syrah, Susan? Thanks for joining us. Looks like an official hello to my friends from Greece and Puerto Rico. I see we have people from all over the world. Thanks for joining us. Oh, great. Yes, and I do see a question come in. Thank you for flagging that. So Caroline asked, you mentioned grant funding for backup generators. Is there a specific grant that you recommend for that kind of purchase? No, I don't have a specific one. There are state grants available, I know in Minnesota, for example, but I think that also some of the federal grants will cover that as part of a larger project. Usually grants don't cover just purchase of equipment, but equipment necessary to do a project. Any other thoughts, Susan or Syrah? Well, I could just say that's a complicated issue and everyone will have to research it separately. As we said, there's a great source of grants listed on the AIC website and emergency grants have been made available in the times of crisis. So part of it is diligence on your part to keep up with available grant agencies. Well, I'm not seeing any new questions coming in. So again, thank you to our wonderful presenters, Susan and Bob and Syrah. Fantastic presentation. Thank you to all of you for showing up today to take part in this program. We had over 150 participants, which is fantastic. And I look forward to being in touch with you all soon with a copy of the recording of today's session. Thanks again. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Thanks a lot, folks.


This is Captain Daniel Sprouse from Fishers, Indiana currently deployed to Indonesia with 5th SFAB This is our year for the Indianapolis Colts for the shoe. Are you guys ready? 3, 2, 1, GO!


TheCube at Hadoop Summit 2014 is brought to you by Anchor Sponsor, Hortonworks. We do Hadoop. And headline sponsor, WAN Disco. We make Hadoop invincible. Okay, welcome back everyone here, live in Silicon Valley in San Jose for Hadoop Summit 2014. This is TheCube, it's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I've got a great, exciting, two guests from Cisco Systems here at the Big Data Event. Great to see you guys here at Cisco. Todd Brandt, Director of Product Market for Unified Computing and Raghu Nambiar, Distinguished Engineer, Data Center, Business Unit. Guys, great to see Cisco here. IBM, Cisco, the big whales are seeing big data as a big opportunity.  So, the big data is a big part of the business, but I want to first get to some news that came out today. Number one, Cisco is number one this quarter in server shipments, blade server, X86 shipments in North America. Is that true? So, it's IDC just released their tracker data last week, and Cisco's on top in the Americas for X86 server revenue, vendor shares, for X86 blades. If you drill down into the US, number one there as well with 41% market share has, you know, where customers have placed it. So, it's a really exciting time for us. I think one of the other really eye-popping numbers in the data this week, this is a two and a half billion dollar server business that just grew 40% in the quarter year on year. So, that right now is really unheard of. Cisco's really leading the growth in the overall server market. So, first of all, I'm a skeptic at the beginning when it comes to server share. So, I've got to ask the question. Obviously, everyone's looking at that saying, okay, let's look at the numbers, let's unpack the numbers. So, it's Q1, calendar year, North America. So, and IBM got out of the X86 business. So, their customers are going sideways, going, hey, that part of it, HP has a server business. So, you're eating share from HP, IBM, and Dell. Correct. Yeah, consistently. This is our 17th consecutive quarter of share growth since we entered the business in March of 2009. So, this is just kind of continuous ramp. I think early on, there was a lot of skepticism. Right? You know, Cisco kind of crossing the aisle from the network buyer to the server buyer. And think about March of 2009, we're tailing right into the depth of the recession. A lot of people kind of wonder, is this the best time to go into a market adjacency? But it turned out it was perfect timing because at that moment, all of our customers are trying to figure out how to do this more efficiently. And we brought them a platform that allowed them to get a lot more efficient the way they ran their computing. So, perfect timing, got us off to a great start. And then, you know, the words out now that it's a better mousetrap. And our customers talk about it in a way that's even better than we can. And it's just snowballing. So, a lot of people were skeptical when you guys announced this because it was the whole John Chambers adjacency market strategy, right? Okay, let's go get some market expansion because Cisco's growing, it's a mature company now. Been around for a couple decades. Well, it was some of that, but I think it was also, we saw an opportunity, right? There really hadn't been a lot of innovation in the way all the pieces of the data center were put together. And it was, the industry kind of laid it on customers to figure out how to bolt it all together into a platform that you could run an application on. And what we saw was an opportunity to bring all that together and really optimize for virtualization as a virtualization and private cloud, public cloud waves start to take off. So, obviously, big data kind of telegraphs a little bit about like the software defined data center. So, I've got to ask you, what are the drivers on this? So like, obviously, you know, UCS has a promise and a plan, but the customer environments are still on-prem. I mean, I talked about cloud, we talked about the cloud open stack, whether it's open stack, VMworld, all the different shows. It's very clear, hybrid cloud is certainly the way to go, but not on-premise data centers are not going away. So, what's the landscape and what's the drivers from the shared growth? The server huggers are there and we love them, right? The server huggers, the bare metal huggers. I think the key differentiator that I point out as it relates here to what we're doing at Hadoop Summit is versatility, right? So the way we architected this system, it's fabric-oriented, right? We're not really making the server the center of the universe anymore, but it's more how everything's connected together. So, if you need a rack or a blade, fine. We can do that all in one system. If you really want an app that scales up or scales out, like we're talking about here this week, we can do that. If you want to go optimize for a physical, you know, bare metal environment or virtual, right? If you want to do, you know, DAS storage or out on the network, all of those different permutations of operating models that are driven by the apps, we can accommodate that all. You know, everyone can accommodate that, but they'd accommodate it by setting up different kind of little islands of infrastructure. We can do all that at the same time on one centrally managed platform, and it really plays into kind of the dynamic in the application space, and Reg, you can talk about that much better. Absolutely. You know, one question that you asked is, like, why UCS is winning, okay? The main reasons are the unique thing that we are bringing on the table from the architecture side, the unified management, unified fabric, advanced management capabilities across all the enterprise applications, okay? So if you look at, you know, your enterprise IT ecosystem, I would classify the applications in three categories. The traditional data managing tools, like Oracle, SAP and SQL Server, you know, running on Blade servers or Rackmon servers connected to enterprise class storage arrays. The second class is the emerging big data platform, like Hadoop and NoSQL and other distributions. And third is the fast data platforms and the real-time analytics. So what UCS is bringing on the table is a unified fabric-based architecture for all these three different type of applications. So on unification, some people get confused by this. I want us to just play this out. So the data center growth has server sprawl, whatever you want to call it, where you know, server sprawl, data center sprawl. People are trying to consolidate footprint, but yet they have issues, right? So take us through what is the use case for a customer? I might not have the same data center from one facility to the other or I might have different mix and matches. How do you guys fit into that environment? So if you look at, you know, as I said, enterprise, right? You have different type of applications solving different type of business problems. So you need like Oracle Database to solve your transaction processing application or SQL server, again, for transaction process application. But if you have a database application, there are two options. One is traditional data management systems, like enterprise data warehouses or the emerging Hadoop platform, okay? And when you talk about big data, the way we look at big data is another extension of your enterprise application portfolio, okay? Again, in a typical enterprises, you know, you will have a different type of applications. Okay, one is not going to replace the other one. So with UCS, you have the ability to manage your entire application portfolio from a single pane of glass. I mean, complexity is the bane of the data center, right? I mean, everything that our customers have asked us to do that's influenced the design of the product is all around simplification. They don't want to be in the business of IT manual labor, putting all these parts together. They want a system comes out of the box, ready to run apps. And crucially, to Raghu's point, all the different types of apps they might need to run without standing up all these different silos of specially tuned infrastructure to hit each one individually. We can tune, you know, you can basically, we pool our resources, you can assign those out, tune a pool, you know, a set of resources for our service profiles, a particular app, but you're not spawning new management environments. So that's really important. Another thing is like, if you look at today's IT system, right, scaling your infrastructure as your application demands is very, very critical. So that is another unique thing that UCS is offering using our service profile capability. So, what does this mean for me if I'm like, so we're at the Hadoop Summit, what is it, I'm a guy who wants to build in a big data environment. I got scale out, I love the message of scale out commodity servers. I don't actually want to get locked into Cisco. I'm scared about getting locked into Cisco. Talk to me, am I a candidate here or can you guys deliver? If I'm like, I want to just do big data, you know, I have some Cisco already maybe or all I care about is big data. Do you guys fit into that? Yeah, our value proposition in the big data space, what we have done is we have created an architecture called Cisco Big Data Common Platform Architecture. It is built based on the UCS fundamentals. You have UCS Fabric Interconnect for connectivity and embedded management using UCS Manager. And you have a rack mount servers with internal storage for storing your data. And you build a cluster of N number of servers based on your application demand. You distribute the data across all the servers and do concurrent processing, right?  So, I mean, we are looking beyond Hadoop, okay? What we have done is we architected this solution to meet Hadoop, NoSQL distributions, and MPP databases. One common architecture, okay? That can meet pretty much all the demands of like a scale out applications. So, when you start with a, you know, 16 node, 32 node, whatever fits up your application demand today. But uniquely, we have the ability to scale as your application demands. So, I can put the toe in the water if I'm not a Cisco customer, if I'm a Cisco customer, it fits right into the architecture. So, there's nothing on me if I'm doing big data. I'm cool with it. And we're going to take you on the same commodity cost curve that the rest of the industry does, right? I mean, we're not using, we're using the same Intel parts, right? We're using the same types of drives, the same types of memory. It's really the way that we've constructed the larger system that's where we add our value, right? So, yeah.  94. 94, okay. You know, for CPU application, virtualization, database across the platforms. It's adversitility. Yeah, it is, it is, yeah. So, everyone cares about third party validation. So, you got that with the survey, with the IDC market share tracker. What about customer traction? Can you talk about any numbers, big picture, in terms of competitive wins, use cases? How many, we have about 32,000? We're north, I want to say, we're well north of 30,000. I can't remember it's 33 or 34, but we're well north of 30,000. And really there, it's the network effect. No pun intended, right, for Cisco. But it's- The network is the computer. The word's getting out. Scott McNeill is on the QB side. She just called it the cloud.   So, as more customers are seeing it play out successfully, you know, the word's getting out, even in a way that's better than the QB.  We're an equal opportunity luncheater. But I think if you look at the share shifts, obviously, you know, in the Q1 data, there was a big downturn for IBM. There's obviously a lot of uncertainty for those customers, but I think over time, it's probably HP and IBM, you know, where customers are already kind of thinking about- But Dell's pretty low in this survey, and where are they in this? Well, I think- Michael Dell always talks about how good his numbers are. Sure, so, well, and I've worked at Dell for a while, so, you know, I'm a little bit biased. Great company, but you know, there, you know, a lot of the differentiation they brought was adult supervision of the supply chain, but things that have really kind of now become table stakes, and now the game is really around true engineering innovation, and that takes the ability to invest and innovate, and Cisco has that in space. Well, that's why Michael Dell took it private, he's for like, you know, I'm done with this public offering, public scrutiny, just take the books off the public market. They've got a real strong play in SMB, right? Marius Haas is a great guy over there, they've got a good team of people. They can do volume and velocity, right? But, but in large part- But they're re-engineering, I mean, they're basically the, going private means we're going to go look at everything. We're going to still have big cash flow to throw off, but I'm sure they're going to like, hey, do you know, no more work right on Wall Street. So I got to ask you on the survey side, so how did you do it? What was your success? Because you know, we were talking before we came on about how the iPhone, one of the most- Oh yeah. For eliminating products of the, one of the most impressive products of our time. I think it's a context kind of thing, right? If you think about the iPhone, it was released in 07. It took three years for that product to hit number one in the smartphone category in the US, right? And if you think about the dynamics of what it took to hit that number one spot, it's a bunch of individual consumers seeing what is arguably the most iconic device of our lifetime, and saying, wow, I want that, switching over off you go. Think about the switching dynamics in a data center, right? And all the things that a customer's going to think about when they're going to decide on a new server architecture to put their mission critical apps on, and when they're also being presented with maybe a new way of operating together across their network storage and server teams. If you think about the amount of consideration and thinking that goes into that decision, for the iPhone to hit number one in three years, and for us to do it in kind of data center dog years in five years is nothing short of astonishing. It's pretty impressive. So, you know, we think the success is clearly to do that customers just want to plug in servers like they do routers. It's like, okay. But the thing about, you guys have done successfully with your other businesses that you have such nested products that have value. So it's really hard to switch from Cisco. Well, I think an example of the value together is what we do with integrated infrastructure. So, this wasn't in this most recent server tracker data, but in IDC's last integrated infrastructure tracker, if you look at the market for things like Vblock, FlexPod, VSpecs, integrated systems, all of those where Cisco is the underpinning for with Nexus and UCS for the compute and network component, we represent over 42% of that market. So the majority there. And that's actually before you start looking at, VSpecs isn't broken out, right? So if you add VSpecs in, it gets even bigger. So VSpecs would make the number bigger. So you're actually got an understated number. An understated number at 42. So that, and I think in many ways, you could say that with our partnerships, with EMC, with NetApp, we've almost created that category in many ways. And it's because of the synergy of the FAP approach that we have with Nexus, how that's extended into UCS and ultimately becomes a very flexible foundation for these private cloud initiatives that go on those integrated infrastructures. Todd, Ragu, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Cisco, great to see you guys here at Hadoop Summit. It's a great testament to what you guys are doing, very relevant, early days, and you guys are at the ground floor. Five years, you know. Well, early days for big data. Early days are big data, not for you guys. But we want to keep track of this further with you guys. Keep the conversation going. But I'll give you the final words. You're at the folks out there. What's going to go on next? What's the next big milestone? Your number one on the quarterly is to be consistent every quarter. What's the big to do item? So, you know, Paul Perez was our general manager for our server-businessed interview with CRN yesterday. And I'm paraphrasing the quote, but he basically said, I didn't spend 30 years in this industry to be number two. So if that gives you any idea where the mindset is of our leadership team and all the folks working into this, you know, I think there's a lot to be said for the fact that once that big domino falls in the U.S. and North America, you know, we often see the technology trend move out from there. So I think we've got a strong outlook. Cisco's got to be a lot of focus on the application side, too. And big data is a very strategic initiative for Cisco. You will see a lot of technologies coming from Cisco from the compute side, network side, platform management side, specifically focusing on big data. I mean, integrated systems is what it's all about right now. It's software, it's really awesome. You know, the old school's coming back. I said to everyone, you know, systems, networks, all the virtualization stuff all happening. You guys are great. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.


What's up everybody, Jayce here for jayspeakscasebrakes.com. 2021 Panini Immaculate Basketball just sold out. This is a one box break, ran on teams number 32. Number high risk, high reward. We did the first box yesterday. Not gonna lie, it wasn't the best box out of this case. I do expect there to be some pretty big hits here. So four boxes remaining out of the five. We use one of those boxes here for this break. And again, here's the dice roller, here's the customer name. So from Nick, down to Nick, bought those straight up. And then Nick actually got into a filler, number 197 and wants some spots there, down to Josh Smith. So congrats guys. There's the teams, let's roll the dice and we got ourselves a two and a two four times. Good luck. One, two, three, four. Brian Frank, down to Nick. Ready, four times. One, two, three, four. Dallas Mavericks down to the Golden State Warriors. And there you go, Brian Frank. You have the Dallas Mavericks, David with the Kings. Nick with the Rockets, Steve with the Knicks. Dusty with the Heat, Nick with the Hawks. Dusty with the Pistons, Nick with the Nuggets. As well as the Blazers, Cavs, Raptors. James with the Clippers, Nick with the 76ers. Nick with the Grizzlies, John with the Utah Jazz. Nick with the Wizards, as well as the Bulls. The Arm with the Brooklyn Nets. Brian Frank with the Spurs, Steve, you have the Thunder. Dusty with the Charlotte Hornets. Allen with the Celtics, Dusty with the Magic. Nick with the Lakers. Josh with the Pelicans and T-Wolves. Brian with the Phoenix Suns. Kevin with the Bucks. And Nick with the Pacers and Warriors. So there you go, guys. I'll give you guys a quick minute if you guys do want to trade. And then we'll choose a box out of here. A little dice roll or something. And Jeff actually just got four or eight spots in the NTRNB randomizer filler. Hell yeah. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There we go. Thank you, Jeff. Good luck, man. So Jeff just significantly helped out with that break there. We're now down to 19 left now. Let's close the trade window then. All right, we got four boxes here, guys. Four boxes. Pretend this is numbered one, two, three, four. Let's see if I can hit a one, two, three, four with a little dice roll or something. If it takes me a while, then we'll just use the virtual dice. There we go, three. One, two, three. So these will be for the next break. And good luck, guys. I hope we got a good box here, because if not, man, there must be something monstrous hiding in this case. The box that's, eh, trying not to see, so I didn't peek. No peeking. First one is a rookie little beef stew. 96 out of 99. And that was Detroit Dusty. Josh Richardson for the Mavs, 11 out of 99. Griffin for the Brooklyn Nets. That's a Pistons jersey, but Brooklyn Nets edition, of course, three out of 16. And, sure to tell you right there, well, a member of the Detroit Pistons. Brooklyn Nets, that's Bjorn. All right, good luck. Here's some autographs, potentially. And first one is Shadow Box Signatures Gold. That's Andre Drummond. Now, let's double check that that's not Lakers or I think he was on the Cows previously, right? Make sure what they have them under in the checklist. So this is card number 19. And it looks like Shadow Box Signatures Gold will be out of 10 in a, yes, Los Angeles Lakers. Los Angeles Lakers edition. So Lakers with a hit, that's Nick Smith, and that'll be out of 10. All right, good luck, two more hits. Ooh, major, major cheese. Vernon Cary Jr., three-color patch and autograph to 50. Charlotte Hornets, that is going to Dusty. Still a hit though, but cheese. And the last one, John Stockton, another veteran. Wow, that's back-to-back boxes. This is much better than though than Chris Middleton. A very nice Hall of Fame Inductions. Three out of 25, John Stockton for the Utah Jazz going to John Paul. Very nice card, though. No rookie just yet, guys. There could be some big rookie RPAs, potential maybe logo mats, who knows, hiding in the next boxes. Although this one was a little bit better though, for sure. Hall of Fame of John Stockton. So Chris Middleton was the last card, John Stockton in this one. We did get an RPA there, Andre Drummond Gold. So a much better box for sure. But like I said, still hunting down some big hits in these boxes that are remaining. Next one's in the store with two fillers, Jaspy'scasebricks.com.


Hey team. So I just recorded a little how-to video for lab number two and so I'm here. I figured dude, I might as well share some of my observations. It is Friday. The class has been open for a whopping six days. Woo, woo, you made it six days. I made it six days. I think that is quite a success for all of us. And I figured I've definitely been having like jillions of thoughts. And so I sort of wanted to just check in with you and say hi and kind of share my thoughts. So first of all, I love you. Like, no question. I am so excited about the group of humans that are joining me in this little adventure. I feel like you guys are super proactive. You're very creative. You are brave. Like some of the things that I've seen with the videos that you've been making and kind of stretching outside of your comfort zones. I feel just super impressed and pleased at the level of contribution that's already come into the scene. So yay, it's been really fun for me. I'd like to take a second to give you a little pep talk to... You know, there's been a lot of like getting kind of oriented for the class and it sounds like I didn't quite realize this, but it doesn't surprise me at all because nothing I ever do is like anything anyone else does. So I tend to be rather abnormal anyway. But it sounds like this class is a little more interactive than what you experience normally in an online class. And I don't think I could teach this class if there wasn't this like really kind of engaged piece of it. Like I'm keeping notes on you clowns. Like I'm like making notes of like, oh my gosh, that's the one that has the pug and that's the one that makes the mosaics. That person might be the same person who has the pug and the mosaics. But even in my face-to-face classes, like I get really excited to give people nicknames and to like get to know people and make connections. Like that's part of why I teach is because I love humans. And in the online scene, like I feel like it's a little bit harder to... Like it's easier for people to disappear behind typing and I just don't want that to happen because I will lose engagement and motivation. So I really appreciate the personal piece of it and hopefully you get comfortable and feel like, you know, really there's nothing to lose because I would talk to you in a face-to-face environment when I and you probably would talk back to me, right? So making me videos and like shooting me emails and contributing to the discussions. That's just part of what keeps this engaging. Another piece of the pep talk for you is, y'all made awesome schedules. I've been looking at your plans for how you're going to do the class and the schedules look good and we're about to get real. And this week has been a little bit like fluffier, trying to know each other and bonding, which I love. I could do it for 16 weeks, but we're going to get into some pretty intense content.  One of the recurring themes that I'm hearing a lot of is that, you know, a lot of y'all are ready to graduate and that this is a class that's required for your graduation. And it's one of the reasons why CR was really excited to put this class together. So they found the sucker to teach it and build it. So they're excited because it means that you can't. It increases access significantly to degrees because you can get your lab requirement done online. What that means is that we're in for some adventures. Like this hasn't been done here at CR before. And so we're going to be working some stuff out. I just did a whole, like Lab 2 is ready to go. I think you should probably at some time, even though it's not week two yet, I think you should probably look at what materials you're going to need for that to make sure that you can get them. You're going to need some pH paper. And that's a super random. Like you probably will never use pH paper ever again. But those of you guys who have kids out there, like kids will love this stuff. They'll be super fun. They'll be spitting all over, like testing the pH of their pee and like slug slime. And I'm sure there'll be all sorts of cool stuff that they'll have to test. So if you have kids and dude, you guys will probably be like, dude, look at the pH of this. That's awesome. You're going to need some cabbages. I mean, there's just some weird stuff on the list of requirements for next week's lab. So go into the lab notebook and you'll see that the lab, look, I'll even show it to you. Here it is. And look, chemistry of life is ready for you because it has a title on it. Don't go into any of these other places. Stay out. But go ahead and go into the chemistry of life and see what's going on in that crazy scene. I want to adjust the lab groups. And let me, I'm going to have, I want you to see this. So I'm going to somehow post this Google doc to Canvas. And I'll probably put it at the bottom of the week one module.  I'm going to do the lab on this day. I want to match you guys up by when you're going to do the lab so that I can, so that you have people to talk to so that somebody who's planning to do the lab on Saturday isn't in the same group with someone who's doing the lab on Monday. Because if you're doing it on Monday, you don't want to be hanging out. There's a reason you're doing it on Monday. You need to get it going and you need to get it done. So come into this Google doc and just put your name underneath the day that's closest to when you're actually going to do the lab work. And then I will try to group you as close as possible to others that are going to be doing the lab work at around that same time. I think that will increase the efficiency of our lab groups so I'm excited about that. I feel good about that. Okay, so I will give you information about how to get there. Dude, module zero was fun. Module zero is gone. By the time I leave here, it is 3 o'clock in the morning right now.  I'm also going to publish the quiz for the week so that you can go in and you can finish that piece. I'm not publishing week two until like I'm working on it, but I'm not going to publish that thing until Saturday. So Saturday I will let you get ahead and start working on that. I also want to talk about the muddy fun discussion. We're in process of this muddy fun conversation around the lecture content. And one of the things that I've noticed is that there's a lot of commenting on the lecture style, which I totally appreciate because I'm a feedback junkie and so it's super helpful for me to be like, oh, yay, so the colors work for people.  Like that's awesome. But we need, especially in the stuff coming up, we're going to need to focus in on content. Like I'm going to want you to really dig into the meat of the science and the topics. So just be kind of thinking about that when you're going through the video lectures for the future. Again, it's not a hoop to jump through. Like the muddy fun discussions, my goal is that we have a place to clarify things that are confusing just like we would in class. In my face-to-face classes, they watch these lectures and since the class has flipped, then they come to class and I've got an hour and a half to like answer questions and challenge them with concepts. So I'm trying to give you guys that same kind of opportunity to really interact with the material and think about it and get your questions answered. So make sure that you're being kind of proactive in that discussion board. There's something else that I wanted to tell you. I kind of feel like, I don't know, you guys can give me feedback on this too if the video is the helpful way to get like an update like this that you would actually prefer that I actually type it out. I just feel like I get typing. I want you to see my face. I want you to see that like, dude, I'm here and I'm engaged with you and I'm thinking about you like I'm super present in this class, which you probably already know that because I probably said the same thing to you like eight times in all eight of your things that you submitted to me this week. Okay, I'm going to go now and get all this stuff published and holler at me if you have any questions and we're in for a fun adventure. Okay, bye-bye.


Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic Quartz at Oxy. My name is David and this is a Magic Review. Hey today, we're gonna look at the Marksman deck from Luke Jermay. Alright, so what is the Marksman deck? Well, it sounds like it's a deck of cards, but it's actually a lot more than that. Luke is giving you a complete deck reading system that's gonna allow you to do some great feats of mentalism. You want to watch the trailer? This is it. The Marksman deck is a full show hidden in a deck of cards. Hiding in plain sight is a full performance of incredible magic and mentalism with playing cards. You know, I believe honestly that if you can tie your shoe laces, if you can do that, if you can tie your shoe laces, then that's significantly more challenging than performing with this deck of cards. So what do you get with the Marksman deck? Well, you get a really in-depth DVD with me teaching you how to use the deck. And the DVD doesn't just cover all of the kind of features of the deck. It also teaches a whole host, a whole variety of tricks that are specific to the deck. Tricks that you can't do with any other deck of cards that's out there. Once you watch the DVD, you know, very short space of time you'll be out performing these tricks because there's really nothing to it. The deck itself does all the work for you. It's a utilitarian tool that gives you a kind of, without exaggeration, never-ending flow of really effortless, really direct mentalism and magic with cards with very little effort. It's just so crazy. I don't know how any of it was done. You can't explain it. You can't explain it. All right, so that was the Marksman deck. Luke Jermay. This is being brought to you by the people down at Vanishing Incorporated. So a couple questions we always ask about all of our magic reviews and the first of which is what's in the box? All right, so what's in the box? You're definitely going to get the Marksman deck, obviously. You're going to get the Marksman deck and you're going to get access to the video and the PDF. Now, how that is packaged, I can't say because really, I've been listening to a couple of other different people who've received this and there's all kinds of combinations. So some people receive the physical DVD and the physical deck. Some people receive a shelled box and then inside the box is the deck and the DVD. Other people have told me they've received the hardshelled box, the deck, and then a download code, but no DVD. So regardless of how it gets mailed to you or shipped to you or what you receive, you're definitely going to get the deck. Okay, you're definitely going to get the video in some format and you're going to get the PDF. Is it what I thought? I knew it was a Mark deck. Actually, it's not a Mark deck. It's not a Mark deck. Let's differentiate. There are Mark decks and there are Reader back decks. This is a Reader Mark deck. Reader means you can read it right off the back. There you see it. There it is. If it says Sixer Clubs, it says Sixer Clubs. That's a Reader back. Marked back would be binary or scratch marks or some sort of pattern or flower petals to count. That's a Mark deck. So this is a Reader back deck. Is it what I thought? I did not expect the markings to be as big and as readable as they are. I think some people will be taken aback by it when they see it for the first time. They're going to think, wow, the back design is covered in markings. Like how is anybody not going to see this? There are five readable marks on each side, which means on the back of every card, there's 10 marks. Five on each side, right? It has to be readable from both sides. So this is an open marking system. Anybody could be able to see this, right? And so that was a little jarring. I was surprised. I was like, wow, it's not going to take you any time to look for these marks or for you to decipher what they mean. How are the angles? Okay, so the angles goes hand in hand with what we were just talking about. I think when we think about angles, we think about, well, it's suspected they're going to catch what I'm doing, right? Okay, so in regards to that, I would say don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Just relax. Luke Jermay uses this system all the time. He says he doesn't get caught. So if Luke Jermay doesn't get caught, you're not going to get caught. You have to treat it like it is an unmarked deck.  And if you treat it that way, if your body language says it's that, then you'll communicate that just with your presence. And if you can relax and not worry, then your spectators will. They won't assume anything. And I think most of the time as magicians, we're thinking about the back of the cards. We're thinking about the back. And we're burning that back and going, okay, what's going on? But spectators, they're probably more interested in the faces. Because really, when you ask them to select a card, they take it. They're so worried about hiding the face from you, right? They're worried about hiding the face. And for them, that's the identity of the card. They're not trained to think that the identity could be on the back. And if you watch Luke in the performance video, a lot of times what he does is he fans the cards face up towards the spectators. Like here, look at all the faces. They're all here. They're not in any particular order. And I think that gives them some reassurances. But at the same time, it's hiding the back design. Now, how are the angles for you? That's a good one, right? How are the angles for you? Because sometimes I would argue that when there are marked decks, people who have poor eyesight go, oh, wow, I can't read these. I had no problem. My reading glasses are really a low number. Okay? So my eyesight isn't really bad. But I do have problems seeing things close up. I do. But I think all these markings are a nice visible size and I didn't have any issues with them at all. That to say, can it be inspected? No. You can't have the stack be inspected. That if someone says, hey, let me look at those cards, I think you need an out or you just need to be able to manage your cards and your audience better that they don't ask you to begin with. What's the overall quality and production value of the video? A lot of time and care has been put into this project. And I think it's apparent from the very first frame. I mean, for the most part, Luke is sitting at a table. He's facing the camera. He is mic'd and he walks you through the how and why of every routine. And it also includes a studio performance, which is great. And I think you're going to get a lot of Luke's notes and his theory. It's a lot of fun to watch. I've already watched it twice. Like I said, somewhere else, Spanish Incorporated also has a live 45 minutes performance video. That is something that you can go and download. You can find that on the internet. If you have trouble finding that, I can find a link for you if you would like. All right. So what's taught on the DVD? You're actually going to get five tricks, okay, five different mental effects. You're going to get three tests of intuition, which is basically you allow the spectator to draw three different cards. And you divinely inspire each one. There's a dowsing one. There's a card peek routine. There's a card calling routine. And then, of course, a deck memorization routine. Is it well made? It's a deck of mandolin backs. So if you're not already familiar with that, this was a deck that was created so that magicians could manipulate the back design. Currently, the United States playing card company has their back design trademarked. And so if you're going to make a gaff deck with bikes, the only thing you could do would be to tweak the faces. Now they don't allow you to tweak the backs.  It was open source. And so the mandolin backs were created to look almost exactly like a deck of bikes. I think most of the time it flies right by people they don't even notice. And of course, the box itself looks just like a deck of bikes. The great thing about this also is, and I don't quite remember if Luke covered this, but what you can do is you can buy the bicycle deck seals. You can buy the deck seals on one of your favorite magic websites. I know Penguin sells the moths where I got mine.  Resale your deck. You throw your jokers on top with your ace of spades, and then a couple of ad cards from another deck. And you can just reseal it every time. And it looks like you're opening a brand new deck, but you know that it's in a special stack that only you know. Now as far as the marketing system goes, the deck stack, I'm not really going to go into how or why. I mean, that's, that would be giving it away. And that's not my job to give away the trick. You should buy it yourself if this is something that you're interested in. I will say that it uses Mamanica deck stack. Okay. That's, I don't think that's a huge secret because there's lots of products out there that use Mamanica. And so that's part of it. And the nice thing about it is, let's say, let's say you're not as familiar with Mamanica, this deck will help you learn the Mamanica system. How much practice does this require? I think for the most part, as with most mentalist tricks, a lot of the practice goes into the routine, okay? Not so much the use of the deck. You're right. You're not learning slights. You're not learning a lot of like hard to do moves. You're learning the routines and you're learning the pauses and the beats and the rests and the momentum of each effect. And so I would spend a lot of time watching the performance video, almost as much time as you watch the explanation. Okay. I think there's some hidden gems in there that you'll really want to sit and listen to that I think are well worth it. So practice wise, I mean, you'll obviously have to learn which marks are which, obviously. But a lot of your practice is just going to be on routineing and just getting all that down. How much setup and reset is there? Like I said earlier, it's a mnemonica stack. So a lot of the tricks work in a cyclical rotating stack. Like you can cut it anywhere you want, but you have to keep it in the deck stack. In the video, I will say this, in the performance video, Luke does use three different decks. Okay. He uses three versions of the Marksman deck. So don't think that he's doing that entire routine with one deck of cards. Okay. He is using a deck switch. And I think that's good to at least have two of these. And I might just throw this out there. You're going to buy one. Maybe you should buy two. Have one that's always in the mnemonica stack and then have another one that you can ring in and out where the spectator can shuffle it. Positives. All right. So what are the positives to the Marksman deck? Luke Jermay has not just given you a fun toy. He's given you a working system. This will not only allow you to do all of the tricks on the DVD, but it will further launch you into new ideas as well. Let's dress up some old ones. Is it worth your money? It's $35. $35 for a marked deck of cards and a 45 minute DVD where you could do literally an hour's worth of material with this. It's totally worth your money. Should be more expensive.  Like they say in the future that they'll have replacement decks, but why? $35 is well worth it. Like I said, add two to card. Who would like this? Mentalists. Mentalists who like doing tricks with cards. Card magicians who are looking to break into mentalism. Fans of Luke Jermay I think would definitely love the Marksman deck. All right, so that was my review of the Marksman deck from Luke Jermay and Venetian Incorporated. I got mine from Murphy's Magic. I want to thank Murphy's Magic for allowing me to have this so that I could do the review for you. And if you would like to purchase it for yourself, you can find it from your very favorite Murphy's Magic dealer. Thanks, bye.


Hey, welcome to the Surf Station Board Reviews. Today, we are going to be comparing and contrasting the remix and the rookie. These are two boards that I've been riding personally. A lot of this is my personal remix. The remix comes from remixing the outline of the rookie, which is a little bit narrower on either end and has a little bit more rocker. Basically, they take this board, squash it down just a little bit, add a little bit of volume on the rail, widen the tail template a little bit, and at the same time flatten a little bit of the rocker. The difference in the two directly from looking at them is the tail template. I was showing you the remix before, this is how narrow the rookie tail template is. It's basically the same curve, same outline shape stretched out. Also, there's a little bit less rocker throughout the board, making the remix a bit quicker and softer served. The rookie is going to turn a little bit more abruptly, got a narrower nose, a little bit more rocker, but they're very closely related. The curve between your feet, which is the most important part of the board in terms of familiarity, is the same. They have a very similar bottom contour, which is a relatively shallow single concave until you get to the tail and then it scoops out more in the rookie, whereas the remix flattens out a little bit. Here in Florida, I ride the remix all the time as long as it's waist higher bigger. My rookie works, but I know when to ride it. Generally in some steeper surf, a little bit more top to bottom surfing. The rookie is still a very valid board for a wide variety of conditions, but the remix just makes it a little easier to ride in not the best conditions. Wind swell, slightly softer waves, the remix excels. I find myself riding this board a lot and have ridden it a lot in the Caribbean and also here in Florida. The rookie is my standard shortboard dimensions, which happen to be 5'10", 18", 1'4", 2", and 1'8". My remix is an inch shorter and I'm 1 1⁄16". I just felt having a little bit more volume for Florida is never a bad thing. I'm about 5'10", and 1'50". So these boards work great. They're a perfect two board quiver for a pretty mellow trip. For the average surfer, for the advanced surfer, they're wonderful boards.