Thank you so much, Hope. This is Kristin Lays from Heritage Preservation. I apologize for my scratchy voice, but hopefully you can hear me well today. And I want to welcome you back to Caring for Yesterday's Treasures today and this class that we're going to be having in our Collections Care Basics series. And again, thanks to the Institute of Museum and Library Services and to Learning Times for making these webinars possible for us. Just a few tips. I'm about to drag away this hello box that, as Hope mentioned. And if you're hearing any echoes, you might be logged in twice. So you might want to just double check your open windows on your computer. Or if you're having any sort of spottingness with the audio, you might want to quit out of any other programs your computer might be running like email or word processing. So I don't mean to cut anybody off here, but I'm going to minimize this window and drag it away. But thank you for saying hello. And as Hope mentioned, you will still have an opportunity to speak to us in this Q&A, especially if you're having any technical issues. Hope can help you with those. And if you're having any questions or anything you want to communicate to me, you can type in here as well. And then if there are questions about the topic today, we will make sure that they're published and that we get to your questions. Again, this is our third in a series of six webinars. It's collection, storage, and handling today with Danya. And I think it's going to be a really helpful webinar addressing some of the environmental challenges we discussed last week. We have two more webinars this week, one tomorrow, one Thursday, and then a final one next Wednesday. And we've gotten such great interest in this course as Hope mentioned. We already have 250 people logged in today. And we will be in touch with all of you, we hope, somewhere or another. But it was great to hear last week that we've got participants as far away as Belize, Alaska, Hawaii, and we're not sure if the folks from Sweden are watching live or not. We gave them a bit of a reprieve, but we do have a group from Sweden. So that's really exciting for us and everyone in between as we were seeing in our Hello Box today. Today I thought just to get a sense of the group, we would ask what you do at your institution. Now I know it's a huge, a huge variety that we have. And this is not an exhaustive list, but it's hopefully going to capture just about everybody. And you can check more than one box if you wear more than one hat. I know that a lot of us do. Hopefully everyone's seeing that on the screen. So feel free and if you can find your role, give it a whirl. I'm sorry, trying to resize this box here. Hopefully that's good. Let me know if you're having trouble seeing it. While you're doing that, I did want to answer a question that Ronald had. In case you're wondering which sessions you've registered for, you're certainly welcome to email us at info at heritagepreservation.org with any kind of registration questions and we can look that back up. So feel free to do that. Of course, if you're participating in this series, you're welcome to come all the webinars. Our next course begins, it'll be on risk assessment and that begins in February on Tuesday, February the 5th. But we will be getting you, be assured if you are registered, you will be getting email reminders from us. So I see we have a lot of people weighing in on this and a nice mix of our responsibilities. Lots of archivists, collections managers, registrars, a good number of librarians and we're really happy to see that Heritage Preservation has been doing a number of these online continuing education opportunities and we've been doing a lot of outreach and have found that mostly we had been reaching museums and historical societies, which is terrific when we were happy to do that. But we also wanted to make sure that the archive and library community had a chance to benefit from this sort of offering. So that's why we're doing this series and I'm so glad to meet so many new library colleagues. Looks like we're having a little hard time seeing everything on this screen. I don't know if Hope has any suggestions in resizing it. I don't have suggestions. Usually if you can't see everything, there should be a scroll bar. I think we have a lot of content so I think what happens for people with smaller monitors is that things kind of get a little crunch down. If you're having a hard time seeing anything, particularly for the slides, I don't want you to have to scroll around, but for this poll, it should present some scroll bars. And let us know if when the slides come back up, if you are having a problem seeing the slides, I can make some suggestions privately as well. Okay, thanks Hope. Okay, well I think I'll slide that away for now. But thanks everyone for answering that and I will keep that in mind for the future that fewer options might be better. Okay, and of course if you haven't already, you're welcome to join the Connecting to Collections online community. It's this very simple registration process. We do ask that we approve your registration just to make sure everyone's legit. And it might take us a little like a day or so to get that approval, but it's a great resource. You can continue these conversations online and we're so happy that a number of conservators are on the online community and have been really responsive to people's inquiries. And again, also a reminder that this whole course has a home on the Connecting to Collections.org homepage. All of the assignments are there, PowerPoint copies are up there, and we're doing our best to get those PowerPoints up at least the morning of a webinar, if not the day before. So if you do want to print it out so you can follow along, you can do that. And we are working also on getting the closed captioning text so that you can have a bit of a transcript and have that posted on the website. It might be an easier way to do a ready reference to the information that you're hearing over the webinar. We have been sending out, after the end of each webinar, we've been sending out an email to you and hopefully you've been getting it, which will give you a link to today's recording. So if you do want to revisit anything, if you want to share it with a colleague, you'll have all that on hand. At the end of the month, we will post them all on that page on the website. And this is a great way in case you've missed a webinar, please look out for those emails so that you'll have a chance to do catch-up work. So if you're working towards earning our certificate by participating in all six webinars and doing all six homework assignments, do check that Collections Care Basic web page for the homework assignment. It's a link to a survey monkey. And you can fill that out. They're pretty short and we've had a really great turnout. People doing their homework for class 1 and class 2. And I think Dhanya is going to reference some of the quiz results from class 2. And if you haven't had a chance to fill it out, it's not too late. You can have up until January 31st to get those homework assignments done. But do let us know if you're having any questions about seeing a recording or getting the homework assignments. And I think that's all I have today. I'm going to turn everything over to Dhanya and I want to welcome her back. She gave us a great overview last week. She specializes in book conservation and does preservation training. Currently she's teaching preservation management and collections maintenance for Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. And again, if you have questions for us, please feel free to put that in the Q&A box. So let me close the screen and bring up Dhanya's PowerPoint. Thank you, Kristen. Today it's going to be a bit of a whirlwind. We've got a lot to cover in a short period of time. And because of that, I'm just going to let you know right now we're not going to be able to comprehensively cover everything, but I'm going to be giving you resources at the end of this webinar where you can go get more information. So I'm just giving you that little caveat right now. I did try to go through all of your homework assignments from the first session and kind of gathered together materials that seem to come up repeatedly. So I'm hopefully going to cover most of those, but for some of the outliers we may not get to it. So what we are talking about today is really storage and handling. And what we're going to start off by talking about is really what is archival because most of us can look at a catalog and get a sense of what's going on, but sometimes things just say archival. We're going to talk a little bit about storage furniture, storage spaces, and then the actual practice in storage and handling, and then finally end up with just a little bit on policies and guidelines. So it's kind of where we're going today very quickly. So archival in the word in and of itself is really not a measurable word. It implies that materials are chemically stable, but we really never know why if the only descriptor is archival. So what should we really be looking for? We really want to look for materials that are labeled acid-free, but also lignin-free and buffered. What we're really looking at when something is only listed at acid-free is that materials have a pH of 7-7.5 at the time of manufacture. So materials will absorb limited amounts of acids before becoming acidic themselves, and a really good example of paper that really falls in under this category is your standard photocopy paper. If you test that with a pH pen, it will come out as being acid-free, but we all know that our photocopy paper that we just get from staples or from whomever really doesn't stay that way. What we really want to look for is paper that is also lignin-free. Lignin is a component of ground wood pulp paper that is incredibly unstable, and as it degrades, actually generates acids in and of itself. And so what we want are lignin-free papers that are either rag papers, so made from linen or cotton, or from wood pulp that has had the lignin removed. And many of our materials are going to want to be also stored in materials that have been likewise buffered, and this means that an alkaline reserve, usually a calcium carbonate, has been added as one of the fillers in the paper to bring the pH up to about 8.5, allowing for greater absorption of those pollutants and acids so that we can get a longer life from them. But also protect those materials more from the acids coming from the outside as well. So we're protecting them from both directions. You will find that you can also get storage materials that have a molecular sieve. These are pretty much almost always sold under the brand name of Micro Chamber. And these storage materials have not only a buffering agent, but also in the case of Micro Chamber, a little molecular component that's called a zeolite that actually doesn't neutralize the acids like a buffer does, but actually attaches and grabs onto those elements, the acids, and in many ways the odors, if any of you listened to Tara's odor lecture earlier, they hold on to it, and so they actually don't allow those materials to get to your collections materials. So for the vast bulk of the materials that we have, we are really looking for the trifecta of acid-free, lignin-free, and buffered. And when we get to the more detailed area or segment of this lecture, we will actually go over what wants buffered and what doesn't want buffered. If you are storing paper-based materials, generally you want to store them in a paper-based storage product. You want it to be chemically stable, lignin-free, and buffered. If you're storing blueprints or cyanotypes, which is a type of photograph, you really want to get those into unbuffered enclosures. Any of your silks or wools will want unbuffered tissue. Most of your boxes and folders are going to come buffered. About the only thing unbuffered now is tissue paper. So if you've got things that need it, stock up on some of the unbuffered tissue. If you have diazo types, which are another type of architectural reproduction, they really, if you can afford it, should be stored in the microchamber folders because they give off so many volatile organic compounds because of the nature of how they were processed that they really can cause damage to other things. So there is an example where you would really prefer to use the microchamber paper. If you're using plastics, and many of us do, preferably you want to be thinking melanics, which is polyester. Predominantly, polyethylene and probably propylene can be acceptable if they don't have any added plasticizers, which many do, and never, ever, ever get vinyl or PVC products because of the vinyl it gives off the chlorides, which can be problematic for most of our collections. And then any unidentified plastics, if you don't really know what they are, they're maybe the best not to use. If you're unsure, give them the sniff test. If you can smell anything, you know, basically think of if you're smelling a three-ring binder, you can definitely smell something there. If you can smell something, that is telling you there are plasticizers and volatile organic components being given off, and you really want to avoid that. So if you can smell the plastic, don't use it for collection storage. Laminates are something, if you are really meaning laminates, we don't want to use because laminates imply that they have an adhesive, and we don't want to store anything that would have an adhesive that's going to be touching the collection. So you would want to encapsulate anything that you've had deacidified in the melanics, otherwise, you know, store it in the plastic. And for the cellulose nitrate and acetate, we'll get to it, but the microchamber products are fabulous for the acetate. They really do absorb and hold all of that odor of the vinegar syndrome. Tyvek is okay because Tyvek is actually a spun polyester, but only the Tyvek that you can get from Gaylord University products or any of those types of providers not going down and getting envelopes from the post office or getting housewrapped. So if you have the items that have been laminated, it's a little too late, I would really recommend getting them digitized before the laminate starts to go bad because it's really a potential for that to happen. The laminates tend to start to shrink and the adhesive to go yellow. A buffered paper actually has the buffered component, so it has that calcium carbonated, and unbuffered paper does not have the calcium carbonate in it. It's lacking that filler. So an unbuffered paper is really just acid-free. It's not acid-free and buffered. So it won't last as long, but for many of our silks and wools and blueprints and cyanotypes, anything that might have aniline dyes could react to the alkaline agent in the buffered paper, and that's why we want the unbuffered because it doesn't have that. So moving on to storage, we're going to talk a little bit about furniture and storage spaces because I think this is something that often gets overlooked when we're thinking about storage and handling. So we want to think a little bit about our actual storage furniture. What are we using? We really want to look and assess our furniture to make sure that it's of adequate strength. I can't tell you the numbers of institutions that I've been in where I have seen shelving just bowing under the weight, and you really want to avoid that because if those shelves do give way, you have a really big problem with collections being damaged because your shelving has collapsed and there's nothing left for you to do. So you want to make sure it's of adequate strength. You also want to make sure that it's anchored both to walls and to floors and to other shelving units. This is something that those folks who are here that are in more earthquake-prone areas already know about. But for those of us not, it's definitely something we want to think about because it doesn't take much for an accident to happen. I just did a site visit yesterday where the institution was shifting books and the workmen had come in because while they were shifting books, they were going to be putting new carpeting in and they released the bolts on one shelving unit on the floor and that shelving unit tipped and caused a domino effect and all of the shelves in that area toppled over. No one was hurt, none of the collections were damaged, but it was a long time for them to sort those books out, get them back in order and get them up onto the shelves again. So we want to be thinking about that. So the quick question on types of Tyvek found in roles as housewrap, it's because of the inks, they can come off. They also have a lot of other coatings that we don't really know about because we don't know the specifics of each Tyvek brand and so you want the blank naked Tyvek. No inks, no coatings and that's really the best thing to do because we don't know the stability of those materials. So we really want to think about the strength, we want to think about the surface. So Ken has a question on the stainless steel shelving used in food service applications. Those shelves usually tend to be very strong but they're also more of a woven mesh. So what you would look for there is to really only be storing things that are going to be boxed and not in direct contact because you don't have a smooth surface so you don't want to put collections items directly on that or they'll start to take the imprint of the wire shelving. But they're actually really good shelves if you can get them. They tend to be a good depth, which is also something that we want to look for. So we want it to be strong enough but we also want it to be deep enough to support the materials we're looking at. We also want to make sure there aren't any sort of odd projections or ridges, things that could poke or abrade your collections while they're being moved around. A really good example if those of us of a certain age think back and remember the cement blocks and planks of wood that we used for shelving in college. Think about how abrasive that material was and if you're storing collections materials around that, what could happen? I mean we all know what happened to our knuckles. Think about your collections. And finally we want to think about the types of shelvings that we're using in terms of the finishes that we have on it. If we're using wood, are we actually using good water-based polyurethane to at least give us some protection from the volatile organic compounds being given off by the wood? Are we thinking about doing some other vapor barriers like... Oh no, it's just gone out of my head. Marvel seal to really prevent the organic compounds from coming out and interacting with our collections. But also think about some of those other shelves that you may get. Not necessarily food service shelving, but if you just go and get standard shelves from say the Home Depot or Lowe's or Ace Hardware that go into your garage, they may have at the time that you buy them an oily coating on them to prevent them from rusting too soon. And so you really want to watch out for things like that because you definitely don't want that transferring to your collections either. And you really want to try to avoid a lot of those plastic shelving units. One, they're generally not very strong. And two, we don't really always know what plastics they are and so we just want to avoid any of the volatile organic compounds. So we're going to think about that. I'll get to the VHS tapes in a couple of sections. We also want to think about the actual space that we are storing our collections. We really want to make sure that we are giving ourselves enough room to move around and not actually bump into collections with book carts or backpacks or feet or knees or hips or heaven only knows what. Because a lot of times in our collections we tend to have things that are larger than our shelves can accommodate. We turn them on their sides, preferably spying down. But yet they stick out and so we definitely want room for people and carts and other collection items to move safely without worry of damage. But we also want to make sure that we have good air circulation. Air circulation, as you will find out in some of the upcoming webinars, is really good for combating relative humidity but then also pests and mold. And then we also want to think about the people that we're working with. Do we have shelving that's at a safe height for retrieval or do we have a sufficient number of stools or kick steps or a sufficient kind of ladder type system that you can safely move up and down and get to collections that are higher up? So think about those sorts of things when you're trying to move through your collection storage. Think about the safety of the collections. Is just piling things willy-nilly up and around a good idea? Or do we want to be thinking about maybe moving collections up off of the floor so that they are at least four inches off of the floor? So in case we have a flood, we don't have any damaged collections. And then are we also considering proper storage accoutrements for some of our special odd collections? So you can see here all of these vases and urns and other round-bottomed items all have these little velara rings that you can set things in that don't have a flat bottom to support them. You can also see there's a lot of little ethyl foam cradles being made. So you can see down here the ethyl foam cradles that are cut out to match the circumference of the neck and the base. You can see the little velara or those could be ethyl foam rings. Just great things to help support and protect your collections from rolling and vibrations and things of that nature. And so think about a lot of those things. And then finally, in an ideal world, none of us would be storing things in basements or attics because we know the environment there is really not the best. Our basements tend to be too humid. Our attics get really hot. Both of them have pests which, you know, you want to try to avoid. But if you must store them in attics or basements, try to do whatever you can to manage the environment there. But also definitely take into consideration airflow and keeping things off of floors because especially in basements, that's going to be one of our biggest problems. So we're going to think about that. In almost any storage area, we really want to prefer metal shelving. Wood, especially oak, off gases, a lot of volatile organic compounds that can be damaging. So metal is preferred and ideally powder coated steel. But if you do need to line things, you can line things with the Melanex, so the polyester sheeting. That acts as a partial vapor barrier. Giving it a coat of water-based polyurethane can also help. Marvel seal is actually a vapor barrier, but it can be expensive. Poly felts really isn't going to do you anything in terms of lining wood, in terms of blocking the volatile organic compounds. It will give you a less abrasive surface, but it's not really doing anything protective. Styrofoam you definitely don't want to use. A, because it makes a really big mess when you cut it. And B, because it's not chemically stable. Ethafoam is chemically stable and cuts really well and doesn't give you all of those goofy little pills that you can think about. So there are some things to talk about. And so think about your storage space. I know we're not really getting into a lot of details, but I will make sure that you get my email because I am actually happy to converse with anybody who has some really specific storage questions that we don't get to today. We want to remember those in storage environments. As we talked about last week with Tara, we want to try to minimize the fluctuations within temperature and relative humidity. Now there has been a lot of research saying that it's really okay within a box between about 30 to 55% as long as the relative humidity can move naturally. So some of those setbacks at night, what we're noticing is because of the nature of our materials, they don't equilibrate as quickly. So some of these swings are okay, but it's still better to not tempt fate. And then with most of our collections, the cooler the better. And so we really want to think about at the warmest having our collections at 70, really ideally for most of our collections if you can have storage, dedicated storage space that you have set to about 55 degrees, that's really going to be in many ways best for a lot of your collections. For those that need even colder, we'll talk about that in just a bit. So if you can't have, or if you have collections that do require different temperature ranges, one of the things that you can think about is getting, setting up your HVAC system to have different zones. This would probably require getting an engineer in to set up the different zones, but you can set different temperatures in your different zones. And it can be throughout your building in different areas. Or if you can't create something with your HVAC system, you can think about building a room within a room. And so putting up false walls, getting an extra insulation to really help protect collections. And in many ways get them away from exterior walls and windows, which tend to be the components in our older buildings that can wreak havoc with a lot of our stability of our indoor environment. And then you can also think about microenvironments. So either storing materials in purpose-built cases that can have the silica gel in it like we were talking about with Tara last week, or even just microenvironments of the buffered, papered materials or unbuffered, if you need it, and having layers of that to really slow down a lot of the fluctuations. And so you can think about things like that and we'll talk about some of these details as we go through. So what I want to do now is open it up to our first poll question of the day. And so we can have that pulled over. Okay. Great. And I think I know it. Hold on. Sorry. I wonder if we can also take a break after this to get to some questions. Yep. And I was going to read questions while people were answering. Excellent. Well, Donia, this is a shocking poll result. I know. See, I knew it was going to be really close. 200%. For those of you who don't know, the answer is probably yes. Almost any institution you're going to find yourself working in will probably be yes. Those of you who don't really see any improvements, you are the lucky few. The very, very lucky few. Okay. So what I'm going to do now is answer some of the questions that you've been sending in that I haven't gotten to as I've been just prattling along here. Storage for VHS tapes. You know, if you can make a homemade phase box out of good chemically stable materials, that's just fine. A lot of the plastic containers tend to start to crack and break down relatively quickly, especially if they get circulated a lot. There's nothing wrong with your own homemade phase box as long as it's chemically stable materials. So that acid-free, lignin-free, buffered materials. If you already have coating that's, or shelving that's coated, the thing to find out is what it was coated with. You know, so there you can think about, you know, if it's already been coated, there's probably not a lot more you can do, but if you want to do more, even just a sheet of the polyester film will give you a little bit more protection on top of it.  For those of us, I've been seeing people logging in from chilly places, so it's addressing in layers and giving yourself more barriers to the cold. Wrapping pictures in brown paper is really not the best thing to do. The brown craft paper is not even acid-free and can go acidic very quickly. It's protecting your pictures from dust and light, but what it is is it's giving them an environment that's steeped in extra acids. So if you want to, you can get acid-free, lignin-free craft paper, and that would be a better thing if you need to wrap them and store them in suitcases, or even just acid-free tissue, because what that's going to do is just give them a little bit of protection from any sort of abrasion or scratching. Stacking them in a suitcase is maybe not the best thing, and we'll talk about some other ways to store framed items in the future. Natural materials, I know a lot of places want to go with wood. There are better woods than oak, and now all of a sudden they're not coming to me off the top of my head. Mahogany, but a very specific type of mahogany. Beech is good. Cherry, I believe, is good. Pam Hatchfield, Pamela Hatchfield from the MFA in Boston, wrote a great book on... Oh, what's the title? Kristen, if you can help me out here. Okay. On museum storage materials, I don't know if that's the title of it, but it's a really great book, and in one of the appendices, it pretty much lists all of the good, okay, and definitely not okay materials to use, and woods are one of the ones that she lists, so I would try to find that book. We'll give you the title and author and all the info on the website once I look it up, but the title of the book is not coming to me, but it's by Pamela Hatchfield. Is it pollutants in the museum environment? That's it. Okay, I'll put something on the chat. Connecting to collections bookshelf? Do you know? It was not on the collections bookshelf, but I will put a link in that information. The time-weighted preservation index from the Image Permanence Institute is a really great thing to follow if you've got eClimate Notebook and all of that, but a lot of people don't have access to that, and so yes, it's a better way to address temperature and relative humidity, but really if you're looking at specific types of materials. So if you've got one storage space and everything stored in it, there's always going to be something that doesn't have a good TWPI, and so if you can think about keeping things cooler and drier, that's always going to be the better way to do it. But yes, the TWPI is a good way to go if you have access to that. Storing hundreds of bound volumes of the local newspaper. Oh, good heavens. The off-gassing from the deterioration shouldn't affect the rest of your collections. Basically, it would only be a problem if they were in direct contact. I would basically put them somewhere out of the way, because my guess is that they're not going to get a lot of use, especially if they've been digitized at some point. But if they are going to get a lot of use, really think about where they're being stored and how you can access them, because they are very large and they're often very heavy, and sometimes could take two people depending on who you have working to actually access them. I really want to think here more about, you know, is the shelving strong enough, is it deep enough, and then do you have enough space between aisles, or between shelvings in the aisles to actually get them out and handle them safely. Best enclosure for a 17th century book bound in human skin is a really nice clam shell box. And you can be really fancy about it and find somebody to make you a cloth cover drop spine box. Etherington Conservation in North Carolina, and I've forgotten the town now, makes boxes, but you can also just get a custom-made corrugated clam shell box from either Gaylord or archivalboxes.com. And that would be just as good depending on how much money that you have. I just see, I'm seeing a lot of questions coming in, one that just passed my eye. What about acid-free sprays? Don't waste your money. If you have somebody who has a bookkeeper system set up and can do the more professional level of spraying, that actually works. But the spray cans for the most part aren't going to give you the benefit that you would really hope to have. I've never had good luck with them. They always tend to clog up before anything actually happens anyway. So, you know, there's some of the things. And I think I'm going to move on because we really have a limited amount of time today for as much stuff as I'm trying to cover. So, like I said, I'll make sure I will get all of your questions from Kristen and I will do my best to answer them as I can. So, we want to actually think about the care and handling of some of these questions, our collections. So, we're going to look at some of the, like I said, the larger volume of things that I was getting coming across in the homework assignment that you had and pretty much the things I mostly get questions about. So, when you are storing bound volumes, and this could be general collections, special collections, scrapbooks. Scrapbooks tend to be a very special subset of books, but they're still bound volumes. What we really want to think about is storing books as we usually see them. So, basically vertically for your regular size volumes, you know, with the tail at the bottom, spines facing out so that we can find them. And, you know, generally trying as most of us do to shell like-sized books together. So, our octavos will go with our octavos, our folios will go with folios, things like that because if you start to get too many different sizes going, you can actually get distortion of shapes because books aren't being supported. You really want to try to make sure that your books aren't leaning on the shelves. So, using bookends to make sure that everything is supported because as you get books leaning, it does start to do damage to the text block to cover attachment, especially if you've got older books in leather that's getting a little bit brittle, like many of you were talking about. That can really cause covers to pop off and that's a big problem. And basically think about the types of bookends that you're using. Try to get good sturdy bookends that aren't going to shift and move when books are taken out. And also be really careful with any of the bookends that come built in with some of the shelving. Those little W-shaped wire ones that clip into the underside of the shelf above. Those types of bookends generally aren't of the right size and can be very damaging to the books. They also tend to attack people when you try to move them. At least they attack me and they come springing out and go flying around and it just makes for bad relations. If you've got oversized books, especially in most institutions, it's usually above 18 inches, gets categorized as oversized and so maybe a flat folio. You want to think about storing them horizontally and no more than two or three in a stack. We really want to make sure our books are fully supported on the shelf. So if you look here, this is really what you're shooting for in terms of good book storage. You've got shelving that is of an adequate depth to store the books. You don't see any books hanging off of the front edge. And we're using bookends to support our books. Nothing is leaning and everything is really neat and tidy. I know many of you are probably rolling your eyes and going right and that can happen, but it can, especially if you have a really good relationship with the people who do the shelving of your collections. When I was at Northwestern University, the shelving department was absolutely phenomenal. They really took pride in what they did. And apart from finals week, the collections maintenance was incredible. They did a super job, so it can be done. It just takes a little bit of work. So think about maintaining the books on the shelves, keeping things straight. Think about if you've got fragile books or books that have a lot of red rot of storing them in simple four flap wrappers. You can use the, what is it called, the colibri system, which is a polypropylene dust jacket kind of thing that goes on very easily for those of you who are going to find yourself at ALA. At midwinter, colibri usually has a booth in the vendor area. Stop by then see them. They will actually do a demonstration. For example, they'll put a colibri cover on it for you. That works really well for red rotted volumes. And then also, if you're so inclined, you can just make polyester dust jackets for the red rotted items. But for those, for the colibri and the polyester dust jacket, you want to be sure that the covers are well attached or people could get the wrong idea and handle them a little less carefully than you would like. So for really fragile books, go with either the four flap wrapper or with a corrugated clamshell box, like I mentioned earlier. And those will really help protect the fragile and damaged and, well, red rotted books, which tend to be a big problem. For our archival, for our archival documents, ideally we want to think about storing them in boxes and folders. Now, sometimes you could get an instance like this that you see in this image where this is how the collection came. How it was stored by the company that put the collection together. But is this really the best way to preserve this collection? Probably not. So what we want to think about are good flip top boxes and folders. You want to make sure that you're not overstuffing your folders themselves. Generally what we try to encourage people to do is if you have really fragile materials, no more than 10 sheets per folder. If they're not as fragile, you can put more in. But if you are going to put more sheets into a folder, always remember to crease the bottom. The bottoms of our folders all come with those pre-scored creases. Make sure you crease that so things sit neatly in the folder and don't stick up where they could get damaged. You also want to fill a box full enough that the folders don't slump. But if you can't fill a box, you really want to think about using spacers. You can buy spacers from Gaylord University Products, Hollinger Metal Edge, I believe they have them. But you can also make your own if you are so inclined. It's really just a way to keep things propped up and not slumping. We want to think. Oh, so see, here's a nice image of nicely filled flip top box. But if you try to overstuff things, it can really run into problems. Most of us actually wind up doing this more so with our filing cabinets. Filing cabinets are a great solution to storing archival documents, but really resist the urge to overstuff them. And really try to think about what kind of drawers you have and would it be better off using the hanging file folders that you can get or can you just use the regular folders. And again, here, acid-free, lignin-free, buffered folders, please, if you can afford it. And you can get acid-free, lignin-free, buffered hanging folders. So think about some of those things. Do we want to think about removing damaging fasteners as we go? That's really up to you. Are you practicing more productless process? Do you have a storage environment that is relatively stable? So if you've got staples and paper clips and you don't have the time to remove all of them, remove those that are already corroding. And if you know your storage environment's okay, the others will probably be just fine. It's really when you start getting into those high-relativity environments that your fasteners start to go a little bit funny. So use your intelligence, use some logic, and make the best decision for your institution because it's really tricky sometimes to tell people exactly how to do some of these things. Think about how fragile the papers you are storing are. They may need to have some sort of conservation treatment or repair, or they may need to go into maybe a polyester sleeve, maybe a separate paper folder to help protect them when they're getting used. Again, think about what your budget is, what your space needs are. And for really fragile documents that you think will get a lot of use, digitization is a great access tool. So you can think about that as well. And again, for those of you who might have early fax machine papers in your collections, if you have anything like, oh, Good Heaven's Mimeograph machine paper, anybody remember Mimeograph machines and that wonderful smell? It's actually really bad for the rest of your collections. Or any dye types, those sorts of really smelly collections it's preferable to store them separately if you can. If you can't, they should go into a microchamber folder within the folder with other items so that their volatile organic compounds that they're giving off don't do any damage to other things. Framed items, a lot of us have framed items. And what we want to think about is how we're storing them. So most of us probably have a wide range of framed items stored like this. It's not the best thing in the world. They're stored directly on the floor where they could come into contact with water if there was a water emergency. But more than anything, they come into contact with toes and mops and carts and things of that nature. And so we really want to think about if this is the only thing we can do, we want to think about getting some 2x4s and covering them maybe with some old carpet and getting them up off of the floor. Palettes, you can get half plastic palettes. They work really well too. It just gets things up off of the floor. But if you have handy volunteers or if you're handy yourself or if you have a lot of money, you can buy storage bins specifically for framed items. And so what you want to do is think about putting your framed items in the bins of the storage and separating them. You can separate them with corrugated cardboard, acid-free, lignin-free, buffered corrugated, foam core, any sort of material that will and store them by size because what you're trying to avoid with the spacer boards and everything is preventing the corner of one picture from going through the middle of another one. Whether it's glass, whether it's canvas, you really want to protect from puncture. And so that's what you're doing there. You know, your racks don't have to be anything fancy. Here's something that looks like just garage storage from Home Depot. That works as well. This institution just got the corners and has tied them up. And so instead of having spacer boards, they just have the corners to protect from punctures. And then think about creative ways that you can use other space. You can get essentially frames with wire mesh to hang materials from on a wall. You can go and get a former store, an accessory store wall hangings. That's what this institution did. They went to, I think it was Forever 21 when they were going out of business and they purchased all of the store displays with all of the clips. And that's their framed material storage. And then finally you can think about being even more organized and creative and putting digital print of the actual image right on the foam core so you know where things are and maybe what's missing. There's a lot you can do to protect your framed storage materials. So you know, make them accessible, make them easy to find, keep them protected. And that's really the big thing because for a lot of us what we want to try to avoid by not storing on floors is this sort of damage to the frames. Because for a lot of our older, more historic framed materials, the frame can actually be much more valuable than the actual painting in terms of monetary standards. And so we don't want to destroy monetary value if we don't have to. So you can store them flat and boxed if you have just a few, but if you have a high volume you really want to think about the bin storage. And if you are storing them flat and boxed, just a single framed item to a box because that's going to help prevent any sort of abrasion or puncture. Paintings, just looking at the paintings themselves, need to have a little bit more of a stable environment because if we think about paintings, they're very much composite materials. You can think about all the different components in here. You have a canvas or maybe a wooden foundation. You have a layer of gesso and then you have multiple layers of oil paints. And then if the painting has had conservation in the past, you could have watercolors in there, you could have other things that you maybe aren't aware of. All of these things expand and contract differently and react to that relative humidity and are also incredibly fragile when it comes to water damage. So you can see here all of this tenting that's going on, this is all, it's called tenting, and that is damage to that canvas from a water event. So this canvas was sitting on the floor in a basement, the basement had a flood, and so now the painting is really quite damaged in many of these spots. And without pretty quick intervention, what starts to happening is all these little tinted areas flake off because there's nothing that's holding them onto the canvas anymore. You also really need to remember that canvas is a cellulose-based product and a lot of our canvases in older paintings actually do start to get really quite brittle. And so it doesn't take much for punctures to happen or even a poke that you don't see as being damaging will actually start to give you radiating cracks over time. Keeping paintings or objects in their travel crates is okay. Make sure that crate is labeled as still containing its object. I have known an institution to throw out a crate that still had the painting in it. Please don't let that be you keep things labeled. Registrar's are wonderful people. They keep us all honest. So definitely make sure the crate is labeled as still being full. A lot of your paintings are really going to depend. Oil paints are going to react differently from acrylics, which are going to react differently from tempuras. They're all very different. And even canvases will vary from canvas to canvas as to how much they expand and contract with the relative humidity, really depending on how tightly woven they are and how tightly twisted the threads are in there. So there's a lot of it depends with paintings. And in a large part we really don't know for many of our artists the composition of their materials. And so that really just gets to be a little bit confusing for many of us. And that's where if you have a lot of paintings and you're very concerned about them, having a paintings conservator as somebody on your list of people we can talk to is really helpful because they'll be able to tell you a lot of information. You really want to think about when you're handling paintings to really handle only at the edges and make sure you're keeping the painting flat so there's no torque, so you're not twisting it. And you're also not picking it up so that your fingers are poking through from the back. So you're not reaching around the stretcher and having your fingers poke through in the back because you can get a lot of damage happening that way, especially if you've got brittle canvases. You want good air flow when you've got paintings hung, especially behind the painting. So if you're hanging paintings, have what are called bump-ons to keep them away from the wall so that air flow gets behind there because there have been a lot of institutions that hang paintings on exterior walls and they have mold growing on the back of their painting because there's no air circulating back there. So make sure you get good air flow. And if you are hanging paintings, try to avoid hanging them over fireplaces that get used. Where do we tend to always hang paintings over the fireplace? But it's an area that gets really warm when the fire is going. But also any sorts of vents. So if you've got forced air, try to avoid hanging them over radiators or near air conditioners. Anywhere that's going to have really rapid changes in temperature and relative humidity, that also might get much warmer. And so just think about some of those spaces. We want to think about our photographs and any sort of storage materials we want in our photographs to have passed the photoactivity test. This will usually be told to you in the catalog, so it will say has passed the PAT. What that means is that those materials have been tested so that they will not react with the photographic prints themselves or with the photographic negatives. So there's nothing in there to hasten the deterioration. Ideally, things would be stored in paper. It tends to be more stable, and it gives a little bit more protection for changes in the environment. But I know many of us store our photographs in polyester sleeves so that we don't get fingerprints all over them, and they're much easier to see. And that's actually okay too. But with photographs, you really want to try to make sure you always do the polyester because it is the most stable of the plastics. Again, like with our manuscripts and documents, you can store them in folders and boxes. For photographs, you definitely want to make sure you have the spacers in there because photographs over time will tend to curl because of the difference in expansion and contraction of the gelatin layer versus the paper. And if you are storing photographs in negatives, slides, anything like that in paper and people need to handle them, this is probably one of the few areas that I recommend wearing cotton gloves. I don't recommend cotton gloves for much. Photographs in film are one of them. So I want to just give you a little information on a couple of the problematic characters that come in when we talk about photographs. One of them, of course, is cellulose nitrate film. Many of us have probably heard of it. It was our first flexible plastic photographic film base. It was developed in 1889, went out of production in 1951. But it's essentially the same base material as gun cotton. So for those of you in museums that tend to do demonstrations of shooting muskets and things of that nature, it's essentially the wadding that would go into the gun that provided the material that would actually explode to propel the bullet out of the gun. It's incredibly flammable and it's what our cellulose nitrate film was made out of, which is why our cellulose nitrate film is so problematic. Most of us know it is very flammable. It will self-combust at high enough temperatures, but I believe those temperatures need to be around 120 degrees and it has to be deteriorated to a point. But if you do have a fire in a facility that has nitrate film, once nitrate film begins to burn, it releases hazardous gases and generates its own oxygen. And so you cannot put out a fire that is burning cellulose nitrate film. It's the big reason why we have lost so much of our silent film heritage. The warehouses just went up in flames. And it does decompose naturally. There's not a lot we can do about it. One of the big things we can do is to not store our cellulose nitrate film in plastic sleeves. When I got this piece of sheet film that cellulose nitrate, it was stored in a plastic sleeve and that was the top picture is what it looked like when I got it. The next picture was one year later and the next picture down was two years later. So you can see just how quickly this stuff goes. Basically now, three years later, there is no image left here whatsoever. So think about those sorts of things when you're storing cellulose nitrate. Think about the dates to identify your cellulose nitrate. It's not always labeled on the edge but what is always labeled is cellulose acetate film. Cellulose acetate was a reaction to the flammability of the cellulose nitrate and it will always say safety film on the edge. So if you see things that say safety film, you're okay. You don't have cellulose nitrate but you do have cellulose acetate which will succumb to vinegar syndrome and so here with both cellulose nitrate and cellulose acetate if you can store this film in micro chamber paper folders, you will really help to keep the smell down and to help prevent the rapid catalyzation of the deterioration because of all of the extra acetic acid in the air. Acetate nitrate films should be in cold storage. The National Park Service has an excellent cold storage tutorial. So if you have it, check it out but that's all I'm really going to say about photographs because I know coming up in March or April, probably April. I can't remember. Kristen will tell us. There is going to be another course like this just on photographs. It's actually coming up in May but registration is already open for it. We haven't set the dates yet but five classes and it'll be set for May. Oh, super. So if you have lots of photographs and lots of questions about photographs, that's the course for you. The other type of collection material that I really recommend wearing gloves for is any sort of metals. Silver, copper, bronze, iron, anything. You should be wearing gloves when you handle it. With metals, one of the big things we want to think about is really just keeping them in a low pollutant environment and keeping it low relative humidity so that we can prevent corrosion. Silver tends to be a little bit more finicky of a metal for us to deal with and so I get a lot of questions and how do I store silver? How often should I clean my silver? Remember whenever you polish silver you're actually removing a layer of that silver. If you've got silver plate materials like this one here, if you polish it too frequently you will eventually get down to the core base metal and you will have lost all of your silver. You can also get silver as a highlight accent. For me I have a problem with this little plate because it's got the silver inlay but if I polish the silver inlay then all of a sudden I lose the patina that's on the copper part of the plate and so you really need to ask yourself how important is polishing? And then you need to ask yourself what is the environment that we're storing this material in? Silver is basically your canary in a cage. If you remember when Tara was talking about pollutants and the Audi test silver really is one of the most susceptible metals and it will be the quickest and so if you know you have an environment that's not the best you can get silver cloth and it's basically just an impregnated cloth that helps to minimize the tarnishing of your silver. And so just really use caution if you have to clean it and I would really consult a conservator if you think you need to clean your silver just to be really sure that you're not going to do damage because we really want to follow the tenets of do no harm. Textiles are another big area that we tend to have a lot of problems in storing. We're going to actually talk about some of this in the staff and volunteer training but textiles can be boxed with sufficient padding so that you don't have sharp creases in the folds. If you have sharp creases in the folds that's where your wear is going to occur first. If you're going to hang them on hangers, if you have costumes I'll get to that in a second for large textiles, quilts, things of that nature if you're boxing them they get to be really big boxes but they can be rolled on tubes and then covered with tissue or Tyvek and labeled. So rolling is a perfectly viable option. If you've got costumes, think about how they're going on exhibit are you supporting them on exhibit and more importantly are you supporting them in storage or you don't want to just use a plain old hanger you really want to pad out that hanger because again think about that costume and if it's hanging on a hanger all of its weight is being supported in a very small range along that shoulder and that's where you're going to notice a lot of the damage occurring. So really think about supporting your textiles whether they're folded in boxes, rolled on tubes or hanging on hangers or on mannequins and there's a lot of information out there on a lot of this but I will refer you to the references because we are starting to run low on time. We want to think about some of the hazards that we could have in our collections. We talked about the cellulose nitrate but we can also have other things that could be problematic. So we have our cellulose nitrate film that we know can be problematic if any of you have any sort of ammunition, bullets, cannonballs even just having the guns around can be problematic because a lot of the problems that you get are with the gunpowder as the gunpowder deteriorates over time it gets to be more and more susceptible to shocks and jars and can be explosive that way but you also want to really think about what would happen if you had a fire in your institution. So this is one of those risk assessment things that you want to think about because you really don't want the fire to start shooting at your fireman. That would just not be a good thing. Usually your local National Guard can help you with disarming and cleaning some of this stuff but just make sure you tell them you actually want the item back because their natural reaction is to just go out and blow it up. So tell them you want the casing back and they'll be more careful. A lot of us probably have stuffed dead animals of some ilk and so a lot of our more historic, well actually not more historic anything up through the 1970s our taxidermy will probably have some pretty hefty pesticides and potentially arsenic in them. So basically if your taxidermy is 100 years old and in really good condition you have some serious pesticides or arsenic in there and so you want to be very careful about that. We can also have some of our really innocuous looking collections be fairly dangerous and this is a collection of the different types of celluloid materials that you can get and celluloid is essentially a cousin of cellulose nitrate. It won't be as flammable or as explosive but it can be problematic in a fire so you just want to be aware of it and know that you have it. And then there's some of the other maybe not so obvious things. Many of us might have Girl Scout, Boy Scout, military first aid kits from any time prior to 1960. You might want to check in there because you might have gauze bandages that have been soaked in picharic acid when it dries out is very unstable and can be flammable. So you want to make sure you're dealing with that. You would want to contact a hazmat company to come take it away.  If you have any sort of medical implements, medical jars, medical bottles make sure you know what's in them and you're taking care so that they're not going to be harmful to anybody. And if you have any of the old canisters from the early 1900s, the invigorator or anything labeled like that, they were jugs to put in your refrigerator and the whole purpose was that the clay was irradiated because at one point they thought radiation was really good for you. So be aware of any items that may have radiation. Watch dials, the glow in the dark stuff, the reinvigorator. Just be aware of what some of the hazards you might have in your collection are. So actually before we go on to that, I want to give everybody a pop quiz just to make sure we're still listening so if we can pull over the pop quiz really quick, we're almost done folks. Daniel, while people are answering that, I put a bunch of questions to the side. Yep, I'm working on keeping up with them. Okay, but if maybe what we can do is if you can hang on a few minutes after 3.30, okay, we might be able to get to a few more questions and we'll do our best to get to some questions before the end of the half, you know, before 3.30, but if not, hang on and we'll try to get to yours. So how are people doing? I've covered. It looks like people are doing really, really well. The correct answer is, well, if you want to, I can't quite see the whole screen, but the question, the answer that I thought, you know, is really truly the right answer, is answers one and four, but it really could depend on what you're looking at. It could be all of them because, you know, some of them you might want to get rid of. Some of them you probably could ignore and be just fine, but really you want to label them as being hazardous so that other people know, include the information in your catalog and then consult with the experts to ensure that the dangers are minimized or eliminated. It's really, it's one and four is really what we were going for. So soldiering on, we want to think about having some sort of processing policies and guidelines because our collections get probably most of their handling when they're being processed. So we want to think about ensuring that, you know, we don't allow food and drink in the workspaces. We try to encourage good habits and we try to discourage having personal items in the workspace that could be a potential for theft but also just add to the clutter. So we really hope that, you know, we also provide good enough processing spaces so that you have the room to handle things safely and move them around when you're actually trying to work on them. You also want to ensure that everybody knows what sort of materials to use for storage and labeling and a lot of this is really going to depend on your institution. You know, so things also like removing fasteners and if you do any sort of treatment or flag things in any way that are already fragile and need some sort of repair or conservation work, you want to think about having these guidelines written down because a lot of us in smaller institutions probably have this work being done by volunteers and we want to be sure that they know what their expectations are. And I can't talk about storage and handling without getting up on my soapbox about Post-it Notes. I know a lot of you are here from libraries and archives. Please don't use Post-it Notes. I know I have had so many people say, they're really not that sticky and they really don't leave a residue. They do leave a residue. I've seen it. And they really are stickier than you think. I had a very embarrassed curator bring this book down to me after I had already conserved it once because she'd put a Post-it Note in there because she wanted to remind herself to add something to the catalog record. And she went to take the Post-it Note out after she was done and this is what happened. So Post-it Notes are problematic. Please don't use them. Okay, that was my soapbox for the day and I'm done now. Just a few tips. Again, reminding ourselves, think about what kind of storage furniture and enclosures you're using. You want them to be durable, chemically stable and strong enough for what you're storing in them. We might need micro-environments to protect some certain items. So think about your silver. You might actually create a box with the silver cloth inside creating a small micro-environment for your silver. You want any sort of protective enclosure that you're putting around your collections to fit properly and actually provide support. So don't just go and grab any old photocopy paper box and throw things into it and think that that's a protective enclosure. It's not protecting anything. And identify your materials that are deteriorating or damaged. Your storage materials so that you know what needs to be replaced over time because nothing lasts forever including our chemically stable storage materials. Think creatively when you have odd things to store. This is a... well, it's either an alligator or a crocodile. I don't actually know which now.  He's got protective rings around him and then he actually gets covered with a Tyvek cover so that he keeps the dust off of him. So, you know, there are things that you can do and get creative. We want to avoid any sort of pressure sensitive tapes or labels directly on our collections materials. Labels are okay for boxes. We don't want to put things with used rubber bands. They deteriorate and get sticky. We want to try to avoid paper clips. Definitely avoid post-it notes. And really any sort of standard glue or glue sticks. So no elmers, no, you know, anything like that that you can buy because they aren't chemically stable and they can deteriorate in ways that we don't want them to over time. I know I went through this really quickly but here are some other points of reference. Check out the Connecting to Collections website. There's topics on the care of many different types of materials but also look back in some of the past webinars. There have been a lot of webinars that you can refer back to on specific topics. The Library of Congress's Preservation Directorate has a lot of great information for library materials. The American Institute for Conservation has some great leaflets and Net Nebraska Saving Your Treasures was a project that the Nebraska Historical Society, the Gerald Ford Center and the Nebraska State Library did with the public television station in Nebraska with a lot of great videos on saving your treasures. So there's a lot of other types of materials that we covered there. And so I'm going to go and move on to questions now and of course I left myself one whole minute for questions. But like I said, I'm happy to stay on and answer questions but for our homework I want you to think about a discrete collection in your institution and think about where it stored and is that storage space appropriate for that collection? And it just really needs to be a two or three sentence response. If you want to tell me more that's great too but it really just needs to be a one or two sentence response. So okay. Thanks, Donia. I just wanted to give before I do some questions just remind you if you're watching with other people let us know who they are so we can give them credit for attending today in that chat box. And the homework assignment which along with a lot of the great links we talked about and more that came up in the conversation that I'll put there and you can get the link to the survey monkey where you can answer the homework there as well. I think that's all I have for today but hopefully people can stay on for a few more minutes and especially if you've asked a question we'll try to get to them all. And if you can't, Kristen can answer all of the questions and so I can answer some of those or if you are dying to know about some of this start a discussion on the Connecting to Collections page. Yeah, that's great. Can I ask one? I just want to reiterate one that's going a little bit back to more towards enclosures but Margo in Los Angeles has been storing documents with mylar sleeves which my understanding is that's great in terms of access, you can see what the item is but she's in LA and that's dry but I had heard you had to be a little careful with mylar or plastic sleeves because it could trap humidity. What do you say? I do tend to caution people with the mylar sleeves because it could be problematic if or if you're in a really humid area so if you're in Florida or any of the more tropical areas, Belize would be a really big one. I really wouldn't recommend polyester, the mylar or melanox down there because it can trap moisture in and you'll get little pockets of higher relative humidity where the mold will grow and you'll get the same problem that a lot of people actually several of you had pointed out that one of your deteriorating collection items were actually items that had been framed and framed photographs and the photographs stuck to the glass it's kind of that same problem you get pockets of higher relative humidity and things stick. So you really want to think about where you're storing things and what your environment is like because higher relative humidities will definitely be problematic for the polyester sleeves. And then there was a good question about military uniforms so there were pens and braids I was just reading that one. What you can do is you can store the military uniform complete with pins and everything and one of the things that you can do is to get the polypropylene sheeting and make little barriers between the wool and the metal if you want to. Otherwise what I would do is document exactly where everything is and remove the pins and metals and braids and store them separately with the knowledge with that digital image or something so that you know where everything goes because with military uniforms there's definitely an order of how things are supposed to go. There's really you could do either way so you might want to or you can use tissue to wrap the metals to prevent the corrosion it's really going to in many ways depend on the environment you have for storage. So I think we covered companies that encapsulate I think I saw everybody people chiming in answering that one so the best method to store old hardcover journals is really depending on how big they are stand them up on a shelf if they're really fragile archivalboxes.com and Gaylord Brothers both make custom orgated clamshell boxes that are really reasonably priced and so if they're really fragile you could store them in there. But pretty much treat them like any other book and give them the support they need. And I think you answered it there are a number of specific questions on like scrapbooks and things that might have loose materials and I think you sort of covered that but I think special enclosed clamshell boxes are foresighted. Scrapbooks want a box plain and simple. Scrapbooks want a box. If you're I've got small paper items in large plastic binders with polypropylene sleeves if you can get them out of the PVC covered binders and into something safer that would probably be better. It's maybe not the ideal preservation solution that would really be folders and boxes but if you are accessing these small items a lot and trying to find them the polypropylene sleeves are probably just fine as long as they truly are polypropylene sleeves and not something else. So just double check that they are chemically stable and don't have plasticizers in them. Ditto masters will fall in under the same category as cyanotypes and mimeographs because they were likewise an aniline dye similar to mimeographs and they would be susceptible to the buffering agents. There is no polyester coating painted on the shelves. If you want to paint something liquid I would go with a water based polyurethane. We avoid the oil based polyurethanes just because the oils tend to leach out over time but you could also do a latex paint if you wanted to that would be another option. We had a conversation going over in the Q&A box on paper clips stainless steel paper clips coated paper clips any paper clips good or bad stainless steel coated or okay but I've seen the coating go funky on some of them so I wouldn't recommend the coated and definitely not the plastic clips they are actually much more deforming than a standard paper clip so stainless steel paper clips are just fine. Great. Kathy in Elmhurst, Illinois had an interesting question about the images on the dividers and worried about that as a security risk I would say it just depends I mean ideally your storage area is fairly secure limited access to staff and volunteers Basically if your storage area is secure the pictures aren't going to really deter any serious criminal because if they want something they're going to get it and you have to weigh how likely is it that somebody is going to break into your secure storage and steal something as compared to how often you need to go actually access things it's going to depend on your situation but if you security is one thing you really want to think about who has access to storage should your volunteers really have access to storage or should it just be staff and you'll get into that next week in our webinar okay what about aluminum foil it's a barrier for wood that's come up a couple of times aluminum foil is great you just want to put a layer of polyester on top of it so the polyester sheeting because as we know aluminum foil is really easy to tear but if you put down a layer of aluminum foil and then put a layer of polyester on top you've essentially now just made marvel seal because that's all marvel seal is is aluminum foil with you know clear plastic coating um so and then what about the um rebecca had a question on corrosion intercept you know I haven't really read anything that says it's great I haven't read anything that says it's not um I would give it a try um you know it it can't hurt because what it's doing is it's acting like the micro chamber paper does for metals it's actually giving a much more susceptible metal surrounding your more other metals and so that other uh metal is going to corrode first and collect all of those pollutants before they get to your metals um so it's worth a shot you know I wouldn't completely buy it for everything to start with but try it for a couple of things and see if it works because sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't is pretty much what I've found and you said one about the um old um woollen yarn and textile mill I'm just reading that one so spools of old woollen yarn um is it okay to put them in polyethylene ziplock bags or should they be packed in boxes wrapped in unbuffered tissue um wool is an animal product and once is actually naturally in an acidic state um just like silk so you want to use unbuffered tissue and um wrap them up and put them in a box the polyethylene ziplock bags make me nervous um in large part because you're in Rhode Island and it tends to get really humid and I would worry about um trapping moisture inside box with the unbuffered tissue should be just fine okay we're getting there um what about putting something under those paper clips like a piece of mylar a piece of paper um you can put what I would do is put a piece of acid free lignin free paper underneath the paper clip um so if you're gonna put a piece of paper clip around make a little fold of regular paper to put on first and that's a great way to do it it's a great compromise and I know it's a kind of complex topic and there has been a recent publication about it but gloves I know you know there's cotton oh there's plastic um basically you can talk to practically any conservator and you'll get a different answer to any librarian um my opinion is cotton gloves for film um or metals or photographs um you can substitute nitrile gloves if you don't feel like washing cotton gloves um nitrile gloves are pretty much identical to the latex but they don't have any latex in them so if you have potentially allergic people the nitrile works better um but never ever gloves for books or documents or anything like that because we lose so much tactile sense even with the nitrile gloves that we can cause more damage than we're preventing um clean dry hands you know periodically wash your hands with hot soap and water not the um you know like the alcohol gels the purels and things like that cause that's not actually washing anything off um so you know you want to wash your hands with hot soapy water um and you know just you know be aware of that and as you see your hands getting dirty go wash your hands again um you know if you're dealing with maybe a textile or a binding that has metal elements um you would wear gloves but then only for handling the binding it's a tricky subject and everybody has a different opinion um but you know it's just be aware that it's not necessarily always the best thing for the protection of the item because you lose that tactile sense of more damage so I think that's a good synopsis thank you yeah basically it depends yeah I did notice that somebody does have a nitrile allergy and that's not something I've come across before so thank you for sharing that because it's it's so tricky to know with you know contact allergies so having a selection isn't probably a bad idea yeah did you get to the question on glazing for paintings oh there we go recommended glazing for painting on canvas I don't know if Janet's still on basically for any sort of framed item if you're going to use um glazing for smaller items use the conservation TruView glass it's a UV blocking glass at least you're not blocking out the visible light obviously but you are blocking out the ultraviolet element if it's a larger painting you can go with there's UV blocking plexiglass I believe it's Lexan is the brand name but I would check with a paintings conservator first because you want to be really conscious when you're putting any sort of glazing in front of a painting that you're being really aware of any of the impasto or any of the layered painting techniques that the painters would use if there's any sort of ridges or projections coming out that was part of the element of the painting you don't want any of the glazing to be in contact with any part you really want to contact a painting conservator for a real proper answer that won't depend you'll actually get your very specific question answered so are there any others I don't know if Kathy's still on she asked about laminating but I think that's what we were talking about encapsulating and it's already been laminated and I mentioned that the lamination is because of the plastics used and the adhesives used they tend to deteriorate rather quickly so they tend to go brown and shrink so I had recommended that she get them digitized before they started to go bad so that she could at least have that information okay well I got Brittany's question too oh good thank you okay I think we caught up on everything but I will be as you mentioned going through the Q&A transcript and if I spot any I don't think we answered I will let you know and we can try to track people down by email and if we didn't answer your question or didn't answer it fully enough for you you can always email info heritagepreservation.org with anything else and Donia will do her best to get you an answer and I will be putting up a lot of links on that webpage so thanks again Donia we really appreciate all of your information and personal attention today and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow


Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. I'm with Wikibon.org. I'm with my co-host today, Paul Gillan. We're here at the MIT Information Quality Symposium. We're live all day. We broadcast yesterday, two-day event here. The Cube was invited in. We were thrilled because we cover a lot of big data topics and not enough is said about information quality and data quality and data governance. And there are a lot of adjacencies as well that we're learning about at this event. Peter Akin is here. He's the founding director of Data Blueprint and very active with the Virginia Commonwealth University. And welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. Absolutely. Let me hear. So you've got a little prop here. I noticed it's the case for the chief data officer. Paul and I were talking about the chief data officer role before this. And we've heard from Derek Strauss yesterday that most companies don't have a chief data officer. Should they? Yes. And the real key to this is that we've got sort of an interesting situation that we've allowed to happen over time. And Paul, you've witnessed an awful lot of this in your career. But when we think of what a chief officer is in an organization, your chief financial officer is focused on one thing and one thing only. And that's making sure that your fiscal assets of your organization are available to implement the strategy of the company. They don't do bookkeeping. Your chief medical officer is focused on making sure that medical practices in the organization are the highest care and, again, supporting the goals of the organization. They don't do surgery. Your chief risk officer is focused on risk aspects of what's going on in the organization. And they don't do software testing. Now what do we ask our CIOs to do? If you'll excuse me, I'll do this, right? The portfolio of what we ask our CIOs to do is enormous. And they are supremely talented and have gotten phenomenally good at what they do. We're talking email, we're talking backup and recovery. Now we're adding big data topics into this as well.  And in order for them to do more with data, something else is going to have to give up. And as most of us know, in IT, we can't afford to let anything else lacks because that's hard enough as it is. So the long answer to your question is yes, most organizations need a single individual to focus 100% on data all of the time. So the corollary of that premise is, if you're going to be, we've talked about this earlier, if you're going to be a data-driven organization, somebody's got to have responsibility for that data strategy. But Paul brought up an excellent point. I want to take a contrary position here. Just for the sake of argument, one of the problems with creating C-level positions is that it means that other people don't have to worry about that job. So I've got a CFO, which means I don't need to worry about finance. We hear a lot of talk now about the chief customer officer, which I think is a harebrained idea because everybody should be focused on the needs of the customer, not just one person. Isn't that the same case with data? I mean, we have a chief information officer. Data is a subset of information. Shouldn't that role be part of the CIO office? So it's a great point, and it is one that we have to examine very carefully. In most organizations, though, when you look at what's actually happening there, there's a couple of deficits that occur within that existing structure of being a CIO. First of all, IT organizations are project-driven, as they should be. IT projects need to have a beginning, middle, and end. One of the things you'll notice about data is that it doesn't have a beginning, middle, and end. It's not a project, it persists. So trying to manage data with this type of a project orientation doesn't work. It hasn't worked so far, and it isn't going to work. Now, Dave, you mentioned earlier, I've got sort of an interesting background in that I'm a Tangier University professor. The university owns part of my consulting business. I'm also president of Daima International. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit more. I should have given you an opportunity up front where you just jumped right into it. We would do that sometimes in the CUBE. So yeah, so why are you qualified to talk about this topic? Y'all gave me the camera, right? No, seriously, talk about your background because it's very interesting. So Daima International is the professional organization for data managers. And what we are trying to do is elevate the status of the profession. And one of the things I talk about in the book is a fair amount of research. But you can't have a book like this to a C-level person and say here, read some research that we've done. So this is actually the short letter that I had time to write, whereas most of the time it's the apologies, I don't have time to write to a short letter, so I've written you a long letter instead to do this. And our research shows that back 20 years ago, 25 years ago, the data people reported directly into the CIO. Now what we've seen is in the intervening 20 decades, we've pushed that function down in the organization and we've done it largely through the fault of college and university systems. For example, when you look at what people take as they're going through college and university, they get one course in data. And that course happens to exist in the IT department where they talk about building new databases. Now frankly, if there's a skill we don't need on the planet, it's building new databases. So it's pretty easy. And when we've done that, when smart people take these classes, they, you know, leaders, right? They're going, okay, so that's a construction function and it really belongs in the bowels of the organization. But data, when you look back at it from an abstract perspective, is our sole non-depletable, non-degrading, durable strategic asset. Now the durable part immediately causes people to pay attention, it circles back to your point earlier Paul. As a durable asset, we manage those things differently than we manage our normal assets, right? Your paper, your supplies, your things that go less than a year, you have a different management process than things that last a long time through the year. So being a durable asset, it does actually warrant additional time and attention. One of the stories I like to tell when I'm illustrating this is many people remember the Enron story. And Enron as it was devolving towards the end of its life, it got married to a company called Dinergy. And as part of that marriage, they came along and brought several billion dollars in cash to keep Enron afloat. They were a little cash short. Enron as a company had no cash controls anywhere in the organization. Any individual in the organization could write a check for any amount of money for any reason, right? Your eyebrows are going up and going, that is not good governance, right? I want to work at a company like that. Fine and handy, right? For the six months that it lasts. And now that we're 10, 12 years beyond this, most people are going, yeah, that was an example of bad corporate governance. Well, if we're going to govern our data assets with the same care and precision and professionalism that we do, our fiscal assets, our risk aspects of the organization, our medical practices in the organization, just to use those three examples, then we need a class of professionals who know how to do this. Now you'll also hear another piece of this too. And that is that you'll hear the term business rules. You know why it's a business rule? Because we're over on IT side and we have to go over to the business people and ask them questions. So another piece I make in the book is that this C-level position should report to the business as opposed to IT. Okay, well that's interesting. That plays into my next question. Because I hear a lot of frustration at this conference with the inability to connect with the business side, to get the business people interested in data quality as a core discipline. Is that because? And is IT, is the problem really that IT is too invested with responsibility for data quality? And so it becomes something that others just don't have to worry about. It's one of these things, right?  That's everybody else's responsibility. My data's good. Or I'm getting by. But the minute it says, Peter, your next raise is going to be dependent on taking a specific aspect of data and improving its quality in a measurable fashion, I'm gonna start studying that piece. I'm gonna look at it very carefully and say what's going on. But we also have this belief, again, that data is being taken care of somewhere because we have this title, Chief Information Officer. Must be okay, right? Chief Financial Officer, I don't have to worry about that anymore. So what we've got to really recognize is that most CIOs are doing the best they can with the very large palette that they have. And again, they're doing a phenomenal job in terms of what they're able to juggle. But if we ask them to do more with data, and that's what big data is really all about, something's gonna have to give when most organizations don't have that flexibility. So let's move that function over to the business, let's make it report directly to the board at the same level the other asset managers report into, whatever that is in the organization. And let's pay some attention to it. Well, and you talked, Peter, about how the university sort of perpetuated the problem with the way in which they train students. But as well, organizations were fine saying, okay, the data governance piece, we'll push that down because the data governance is in this God box here and it's all about the financial systems and the like. And that's a pretty narrow part of the corporation's overall data.  Now all of a sudden, CEO says, who's data do I believe? And now that problem of single version of the truth just gets multiplied by 100 or more. Absolutely. Okay, so how does that play into the case for the chief data officer? Will the chief data officer be that sort of centralized function or will it sort of exist in some kind of virtual environment? Good question. If we think about what our chief officers do, they're focused on one thing and one thing only. I'm arguing for an overcorrection because of inattention in the past. It's entirely possible, for example, that this chief data officer function might become something like our chief electrification officer. No, you think about this for a while and say, okay, we did have chief electrification officers, 1890 to 1910, and in some parts of the world, there are still electrification officers. Do you think a knee-jerk reaction is appropriate at this time? I think an overcorrection is what I'd like to do is that term, but let's just put some serious attention. In terms of making this real, we hear talk about risk, about defining this as a risk problem which the business can understand, or as an opportunity problem, or as an opportunity, I should say, an opportunity to sell more to the customer, to customize the experience, or to build the business. Which message do you see resonating better? Unfortunately, the message that's resonating better is the innovation component. Now, I'll go back to Michael Porter's strategy pieces. And again, the fun part about what I get to do is I do have a lot of measurements in these areas. So I can tell you guys that only one in 10 organizations even has a board-approved data strategy. Now, there's obviously a strategy, again, around medical risk. There's obviously a strategy around financial. There's obviously a strategy around HR, right? If our work force is 55, we got to go out and hire some young people, right? So these are things that they do. If they don't have a strategy, then it doesn't matter what we're doing from the other part of it because any road will get you there. Well, that's an interesting stat. I would think most organizations say, well, what is a data strategy? I mean, that's really, why do we need one? Well, I would assume a lot of those organizations are in regulated industries where they don't really have any choice. Right. Is that fair? Fair, at the same time, though, if we think about strategy from a basics perspective, Michael Porter went back, again, crystallized this for a lot of us, and there's two dimensions of strategy. You look this way, it's innovation. You look this way, it's looking at efficiency and effectiveness. But these are orthogonal, and so most organizations are trying to do both at the same time. So what we're advocating is a crawl-walk-run strategy of first practicing what you're doing and if I'll take it one step further, most everybody remembers Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that wonderful pyramid that comes in. Well, data's kind of like that in that if we put in the top part of that pyramid, MDM, mining, all the big data concepts, whatever it is, it's the latest silver bullet of the week. And again, over the 30 years we've been in this business, we've seen a lot of silver bullets come and go, right? That's great. But if you don't have a good foundation on which to build those things, you can get there, but it'll take you longer, cost more, deliver less at greater risk to the organization than if you instead adopt this crawl-walk-run approach, which is first of all getting good at what you're doing at data management, and then trying to go to the really innovative pieces. So I always advocate to organizations, look to your expense reduction area, even though it sounds hard in today's environment, it's not a bad place to go. If you can turn around and say, I can save you 10 million on the bottom line just for the next three months, people pay attention to those numbers very quickly. Go ahead. We're seeing a lot of interest in cloud computing today as a way of moving apps, spinning up apps more quickly and making the business more nimble. And when you move to a cloud service, you essentially are moving, you're either migrating database or you're building a new one. Is there opportunity during that process to fix the quality problem? Boo, and that's a huge opportunity. And again, we see most organizations aren't taking advantage of it. So data in the cloud has three characteristics that it should possess that data outside the cloud does not possess. First one is that it should be of higher quality. That's easy to justify by saying, why would you put data of lower quality in the cloud? But if you don't know, you need to measure it as it's going in. Second part is that it should be less in volume. And again, I'll give you another stat, David, that you might like. 80% of organizational data falls into the category of rot. It's redundant, obsolete, or trivial. Craplications, we call them. If it is, why would you put any of that stuff out in the cloud? It should be less in volume. If it's not less in volume, again, just because the cloud is cheaper, you're just putting it out there.  And by the way, you've got a little pipe and you're pushing a lot of data through too as well. So let's be careful about what we do. So that Paul articulation there is that is an opportunity for organizations to do it. The third characteristic is the data in the cloud must be by definition more shareable than data outside the cloud. If it's not more shareable, why are you putting it in there at all? Well, is this a cloud service? I mean, is this something that cloud providers can offer as a service? We're going to help you clean up your data as well as provide the application. It can be, but where are they going to make more money? To give the application. Well, they're going to sell you more cloud service, which is what they're, again, think about it. We don't do many things well at the same time. Yeah, lower quality, high volume is better for the cloud service guys, is what you're saying. Because they're charging, because that's how the billing model is. Bingo, bingo. Now, again, it's not that they're mal-incentives. They're not bad guys. But just they sell this service. This is what they're trying to do. So it's, of course, in their interest to do what they do well. They're Pavlob's dog. Okay, so where do you see, so you said one in 10 organizations has a board-approved data strategy. Correct. Is the percent of organizations that have a CDO actually follow that to track or is it even less? Less. We just finished a survey at Data Blueprint on this, a new section of it. But our booth up there, and we'll have it online, the diversity soon, yeah. Thanks, Megan. It'll be, get a hold of it. What we're seeing, again, is that 70% of the CDOs were hired within the last 12 months. And of those, we see some very interesting challenges in that half of them have no budget, and half of them have no staff. Which in organizations is a, it's a short-term job, yeah. Okay, so that's good. This is a great segment we could go on for. We're out of time, but I wanted to talk very briefly about the Data Blueprint model. So that is a consultancy that is a joint venture, if you will, with the university. They and I co-in the organization. Awesome, I love that. So how did that come about? Well, the universities, we're here at MIT, right? Commercializing the property, the intellectual property that we do with the faculty and trying to push this out into the community so the university are seen as not just great centers of research and learning, but also useful to the immediate community. So it does put me in a very nice position of being able to work with it. I'll mention this. Our new dean at the School of Business at Virginia Commonwealth University is the former CEO of Disneyland. So that was an interesting move for us. That's great. All right, Peter Aiken, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Great stuff. Awesome data. Really appreciate it. Paul Gillan and I, we'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. Hi, from MIT, Information Quality Symposium.