time to pass things off to our host, Susan Barger. Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. It's nice to have you here. And I'm just going to go through my slides very quickly. The best way to keep up to date with us is to join the C2CC Announce List, which is a list served only for announcements. So maybe one or two messages a month and not for discussion. And you can also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. And if you need help due to a disaster, a flood, a fire, whatever it is, you can, excuse me, contact the National Heritage Responders. This is their 24-hour, seven-day-a-week number. And our discussion forum has moved over to the AIC Higher Logic Platform. And so if you go to our website, you can get instructions on how to join that. That's the place to ask questions and get help from conservators if you need it. So please feel free to join that. You can always contact me. This is my email address. I'm happy to hear from you. And next, in a couple of weeks, we're going to have a webinar on how to close a museum, which is an important thing, what to do with a collection when a museum closes for good. Then the end of November, we'll also have a webinar on caring for plastics. And then in December, we're going to have one on packing materials and crates and stuff like that. And on Thursday, we start our first course. If you are interested in signing up, there's a link on the website to the registration page. And it's $149. So with that, I'm going to turn this over to Whitney Baker. So Whitney, go ahead. Hello, everyone. It's really wonderful to be here with you today. As you can see, I've titled this presentation, Preserving Artifacts of Free Speech, Caring for Political Memorabilia. If you live in the United States, you're probably well aware that we are coming soon on our midterm election. So if you're in a state like I am with a governor's race, you're probably somewhat inundated with political material right about now. And it may have gotten you thinking about getting out some of your collections that relate to political topics for maybe exhibits or research or class events or that kind of thing. So thanks to Connecting to Collections for providing this webinar at this time of year. So I'm Whitney Baker. I'm head of conservation services at the University of Kansas Libraries in Lawrence, Kansas. I believe I was invited to speak on this topic for two main reasons. One was back in the summer, late spring, early summer, the American Institute for Conservation Meeting. There was a really interesting panel on preserving social protest archives that I was a part of. And I talked there really briefly about things like buttons and t-shirts and the like. So I was able to include some of that today in this much longer presentation. And also, I think I have a bit of a reputation for being the crazy bumper sticker lady. A number of years ago, I got very interested in bumper stickers and then later on decals from a conservation perspective of how are they made, what's their history, what should be worried about as conservators of how to care for them. And so then I did publish about both of those types of materials for a more general audience. So I'll talk more about that later. I'm trained as a librarian archives conservator, so focusing on books and paper. I've been very lucky to teach a collections care class at the University of Kansas for the museum studies program on preventive conservation. And then I'm also a trained librarian. Anyway, as part of these webinars, we're able to do some polling. So I wonder if we could have our first poll up on the screen about who's here today. I'm curious about your affiliations. If you're willing to participate, we can get a sense of who's here, who's here, and if your background's kind of fun to watch, seeing the numbers going up. Museums ahead so far. It's kind of almost like a political race, isn't it? Okay. It appears that we have stopped here. So museum, okay, many people from museum, library and archives, as well as historic house and sites and government agencies. Hopefully. Welcome to everyone. Hopefully you'll find this to be interesting and get some new tips and ideas. Okay. So political memorabilia. It's kind of an arbitrary term when you come to think of it. It could include a lot of different things. And really any kind of object could become political if you stick a slogan or an image on it. So I've decided to define political memorabilia to encompass these three main areas. The first being campaign materials, which may be what people are mainly thinking of, especially at this time of year with our elections coming up. So signs and bumper stickers and buttons and that sort of thing for politicians who are campaigning. But you may also have in your collections information from political interest groups or artifacts as well. So maybe like the League of Women's Odors or groups like that who are working for political causes but are not running for office. In addition, you might have collections from politicians. So here at the University of Kansas, for some reason, we have a few of the governor's papers, governor's collections, most are at our state archives. But for some reason we have a few. And this artifact on the screen, which I think might not have been the best thing to put on this slide, is an actual plaque that was given to him. It's a buffalo chip. And I realized after I put this here that it's not a commentary on politics today. It may appear to be, but it was sort of randomly chosen. There's a lot of unusual artifacts that could be political. So in preparing this talk today, I tried to determine what political memorabilia could include. And so I polled a number of family friends and curators and various people. And most people, the number one item that came up was buttons. Followed by paper items like posters and banners and then bumper stickers. Those were the top items. So I've covered those materials today, along with a few others. But I'm sure there's a type of object I haven't addressed in this webinar. And I'd love for you to bring it up during the discussion time. And as I, we're going to talk about some solutions that I like here today. But there are often, as I tell my students, many right answers and defendable strategies. So these are, this is my perspective.  Okay, we have another poll. This is our second and final poll. I've listed here some of the materials we're going to talk about today. And I'm curious if you, like I, have these in your collections. Okay, so far, yeah, well, and of course this is one where you can choose many things. So the numbers should be large on these. Okay, it's looking good. Paper items, yeah, paper items. They're all quite high numbers, as we're seeing here. Okay, well, that's good. So at least these are items that you have. I'm not coming out of left field. I'm discussing these types of materials. Okay, so this kind of gives you a sense, too, of the types of materials we're talking about today. And because I work with an archival collection, a lot of these materials are found in archives. Okay, so moving on to the next slide. I just wanted to give a shout out to my institution because all of the items, except for one that I think I've credited later on, come from the Spencer Research Library at KU, which is the Rare Book Manuscript and Archives Library. And we have a very large collection of, as it says here, contemporary political movements. And when he was a teenager, he started collecting materials from what I would call fairly fringe political groups, both left and right wing. And so this is one of our most heavily used collections. You may also have archival collections or museum collections that also have a lot of political materials like we do here. I just want to say I have pictures of lots of different things on the screen because we need pictures of objects. I'm not endorsing any political viewpoints or cause in this slide show. They are just examples used, you know, with material artifacts, not as political views. It shouldn't go without, I shouldn't have to say that, but at this day and age I just want to make sure we know. They're just here as examples. And they should be typical of what you also have in your collection, most likely. Okay, so when I am coming up with housing solutions, I generally keep these parameters in mind. So I work in the Library Conservation Lab and really our focus is on book and paper materials. But we often get a lot of artifacts, or three-dimensional objects, and I'm not a trained objects conservator, so it really would not be ethical for me to attempt to treat something. The best that we can really do for a lot of our materials is to house them properly. And so as such, we don't have a particular budget here at KU for dealing with these materials, and you might not either. So we try to use materials that we have on hand. We don't usually have the funds to purchase a lot of special supplies. Also, I've found that when we use boxes and other types of materials that most people are familiar with, it really helps my colleagues, my curators, for example, understand how to use the boxes or housings. So for example, we use a lot of standard-size archival boxes that we already found in our archival collection, so that they sit on ourselves very well. They make sense to everyone. I know that everyone can open them and close them properly when an object is removed and placed back. Also, because our collections are really heavily used, we really try to devise simple housing solutions that will be easy for someone to undo and repackage after an item is used. If something is going to be used in our context, we have seen the use a lot in class instruction. It's also nice if the box can function also as a display, so things don't always have to be removed if possible. Now, because if we get, let's say, a large collection of buttons and we're looking at every last one, it's a great idea, and especially because I have graduate students and museum studies to help, to actually go ahead and complete some level of inventory at the same time since we're handling everything anyway, because I find most of our permanent staff really aren't going to have time to make a list of objects. They're so busy with other things. Other things I think about for political materials or really any materials is what are the goals for these materials? Maybe they're going to be on a frequent display. For example, buttons. We often have in our exhibits here in this rare book library. Maybe they're going to be using classes or for research. Maybe they'll be put on bone for other institutions, so the housing may factor into that. Will individuals be allowed to handle materials? If so, it should be clearly stated when gloves are required and how to remove items from a housing. In addition, if materials will be used for research purposes, it's important to keep that in mind. I see some people are saying that they're not hearing very well. I'm not sure if there's anything we can do about that, but I will turn up the volume on my microphone if that is helpful. Okay. Mike says it's fine, so we're going ahead. Okay. Now, depending on how much background you have about collections care, this may be very familiar to you and it may not be, but I always like to just take a minute to talk about the agents of deterioration. When we are housing material, we're really creating a microclimate to help us buffer an item against changes in the agents of deterioration. For example, if something is in a very high and humid space, the box can protect it a little bit in correct temperature as well. It can provide some sort of light barrier, protect it perhaps a bit if there's a disaster with water to some degree, et cetera. These are in some ways more important than housing in that the agents of deterioration affect all of our collections on mass, so if the temperature or humidity is very high or very low, everything in your collection is affected. Okay. Just a very short talk about storage material terminology. I often get asked these questions and just in case this isn't familiar, I just want to make a point of seeing a few things about them. These terms are often used really freely when we talk about storage, and sometimes they're not clearly the scientific standards attached to some of the terms that we use, like acid-free, so I just want to make sure everyone, when they make selections for housing, is careful about thinking through what they actually are looking for. So pH technically refers to the acid content as a solution, but in our context we tend to refer to it as the acidity of paper or board products used in our enclosure constructions. And so if you look in one of the archival catalogs or one of the products or suppliers, they might often say the pH of the board or the box, and it can be complicated because some materials are best stored at more of a neutral pH if you look at the pH scale on the bottom of the screen. Some people call that acid-free, and that's not technically accurate, but that's often what we kind of mean by that. It may mean pH neutral. Some materials have something called a buffer or an alkaline reserve that's usually around 2% to 3% calcium carbonate added to the paper or the board when it's made to make the pH a bit higher. And so for most materials, well, you have to determine which is best depending on the type of material you have. Another word that's used a lot is archival, which technically just refers to archive, but it is used to denote storage material oftentimes that is appropriate for long-term preservation. So we use that term really loosely. I just a few minutes ago said archival suppliers, but technically I mean companies that provide storage materials for us. So if you're not sure how something is made, it's important to contact the manufacturer and make sure they understand or they can give you information, so you feel confident in putting your materials in such a box. Okay, so the first category of material I'm going to speak about today are paper ephemera, and that's probably the easiest. I think most people are familiar with how to store small paper objects, but just in case we should go over it. What I have on these main slides is sort of some ideas of the most typical types of storage enclosures or materials. They're not the only ones, but those are most typical. And so small paper items might include pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, small posters or the like. And some of these are fine standing upright in a pamphlet box. For example, many of these items will be put on their side in an archival folder or box, and some of these items might be best stored flat. Okay, so small paper items. The simplest method really to store small paper items is in an envelope or an archival folder. And in an archive setting, of course, it's typical for many items to be placed in one folder at a time. And so sometimes as you see here, we have a standard size 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper and then a tiny, tiny item. And sometimes it's a good idea to include an extra enclosure within the folder so that that item won't get lost. So an envelope or a folded piece of paper that's a little bit bigger. That's pretty simple. Some materials that are small and political are fine stood on end without an issue. In our library, we're really lucky that we store items by size. So we're assured of having most things in a pamphlet box be about the same size. And this system doesn't really work as well if everything is a different size. So we use large items next to smaller ones. So the larger items will start to sag and be unsupported. But for items that might be stored in a pamphlet box, like we see here a little brochure about anarchy, it looks like, it might be a good idea and fairly inexpensive to add alcohol and paper envelopes. They are quite inexpensive, relatively speaking, and will provide enough structural support for items to be stored vertically. Okay, so slightly bigger items, of course. Can't fit in a pamphlet box or that sort of thing. And are typically stored in folders and placed within a box that has one side that drops open to allow your hands to get in and firmly grasp the items inside. If an item is too large for a box or those kind of boxes are too expensive or unavailable, medium-sized folders could be placed on oversized flat shelves or in a map case. It's possible to add bumpers to a map case to section it off so that similarly sized folders could be stored together. And this usually is a good idea, so things don't slide around as the map case opens and closes. So I'm looking here at this item on the left, and it was created with magic marker, which could be unstable, so you'll of course want to inspect your items and just see if things like this might be best stored on their own, just in case you have fluctuations in humidity or a water leak or something of that nature. You don't want it to bleed on anything else. And here's a picture of a political newspaper collection that's been stored in a drop-front box, as I was talking about in the last slide. And for this particular project, we actually bought oversized end sheets from a bookbinding supply company. The reason for this is when we were trying to save costs, and they're not as durable as a folder would be, like a cardstock folder. But for this collection, we were always moving the box as a whole, not pulling individual folders out. And so that was able to... I'm sorry, I'm just hearing that we're having problems with the audio system. Let me see, Mike, can I dial in for my cell phone? Let me see. I will try that if you're all having problems hearing. Let me try that right now. I'm sorry, I apologize. We're having a couple of issues with it, and I think that that may help the issue. So just stand by everyone, please. Thank you. Okay. While we're waiting... We're not broadcasting. Oh, okay. You let me broadcast. I'll just say something. While we're waiting for Whitney to call us back, I just want to let you know if you post any questions in the chat box, I'll collect them so that we can answer them at the end of the webinar. And also be aware that when the advertisement for this is no longer on the home page of our website, you'll find it in the archives for 2018. So that's always the signal that I'd posted, the webinar recording, the PowerPoint slides, and the handouts. We're trying to correct this sound problem, and... This is Whitney again? Yes, you're back now. Go ahead. Okay, I'm sorry. Sorry, don't know what's going on here. Okay, apologize for that. Okay, so as I was saying on this slide, we had chosen to use oversized pieces of 80-pound paper instead of cardstocks 20-point or 10-point folders, which is another solution if you're trying to house things archivally but are not able to afford the fancier folders. But this we only do when we're moving the whole item at a time. Okay, hopefully people can hear. Let's see. So now let's move on to banners, flags, and oversized posters. Some typical materials you might use include tube, and here I've used that term acid-free, which of course is somewhat nebulous, but best to be unbuffered is what I should have probably written. Archival paper, such as often pH neutral if you're not sure exactly the composition of your item, and especially if it's a textile, you might include things like unbleached muslin or cotton ties. So there's two main ways to store oversized materials. Some are padded and boxed, and the other main way is rolled. And I'll also show you in sort of an in-between sort of way, which is rolled in a box. So here's an item from our collection that is very long. It's a bed sheet, sort of a mixed media item with magazine pages, photographs, and textile pieces attached. And it really is a challenge no matter how you look at it. I found this item in our stacks, folded in a box, and I'll show you pictures of how that looks because it was stored properly, if you will. But we've since decided to roll this item because it was hard to fold it with all these materials attached in such a way so that you didn't crease something. So if you do have something that's folded in a box, it's really important to create gentle rolls or gentle folds by using something like tissue paper snakes to pad the folds so that makes all of them gradual. And it's a good idea also to add a layer of tissue paper to the bottom of the box to then insert the item and fold the paper around the item. And you can buy both unbuffered and buffered tissue paper, and many collections items really benefit from being in contact with buffered paper, often paper materials, but when you're not sure and it's a mixed media object like that, it's generally better to choose unbuffered. Okay, and here's what this box looks like. One thing we always do, and you may do too, but if not, I think it's a great idea to add a photograph to the outside of the box to really cut down on people opening just to explore what's inside, especially when it's something so large, it's going to be a real pain when someone takes it out to try to get the fit back down the way you want it to be. Okay, so here's another example. This is sort of an in-between solution. Let's say you have room for boxes, but maybe not for hanging rolled storage, and this particular item was very long but not super tall, so it was rolled and inserted inside a box. This solution takes a bit more hand skills, but it might be a good idea if you have a rolled store... you don't have a rolled storage area, but you do have a place to store boxes. This was developed by my colleague Angela Andrus, and in fact, in the handouts, there's more information about this. She wrote a blog post about this that you might enjoy reading. So she took an archival or good quality tube and used a saw to cut it down a little higher than the item, and then covered that tube with unbuffered tissue and then rolled the item, in this case image-side in, onto the tube, and then it was covered with a layer of polyester and tie with cotton tape, and you could use paper or muslin if you wanted on the outside as well. And then she took, if you can see here, she made this out of corrugated board and made a little half-moon cutout on some pieces of corrugated board on the edges to create a sling for this item to sit in. And this has worked really well. It's easily pageable, and again, it's always a good idea to put a picture of the item on the outside so you don't have to attempt to unroll this very, very long banner. Another great solution is rolled storage. We constructed the setup that you see here using a conservergram, which is in the handouts. There's our wonderful leaflets from the National Park Service, if you're not familiar with them. And we used playground chain, metal F-hooks, and electrical conduit. We had shelves since we're a library. We have lots of metal shelves, and we removed the shelves, so we just had the struts and the armature, if you will, and attached the playground chain to the shelving braces above. And we're able to hang quite a lot of materials in a small amount of space. Another thing that we always do, and I've mentioned it already, but I can't probably say it enough, is to add pictures of the items on tags that are rolled with the items, but then we also create a picture map to help locate items in an input per section so you don't even have to go to the items themselves to locate which of these identical-looking flags you're looking for. Here's another example of how you could have rolled storage. It's better if you can stick something to the center of the tube and hang rather than placing tubes directly on a surface, but sometimes that's not possible. So here, someone used brackets along the sides and then padded them with ether foam to create a gentle surface, like a colleague gave me this picture and she didn't want her institution to be identified, but you can see it's a lovely way of creating a lot of storage in a small amount of space because there's a few rolls per bracket. So that's another option as well for oversized materials. And again, that could be textiles, it could be posters, anything that's very long and oversized. Okay, so bumper stickers and decals are the next area. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, I have a lot of research interest in these materials. With bumper stickers, I examined over 2,000 of them and looked at how they were made and how they had aged and also how they've been stored in different museums and archives collections. And my hope was that I could provide data that would be useful for collections managers and archivists in their hopes to better understand these materials. So the main problem with these collections, of course, is that they stick to themselves and other things. So if you'd like more information, probably more than anyone would like, you can look in the handout for the articles I've written. They're both an open access journal, so you should be able to go online and read a lot about the history of bumper stickers and decals. A little bit more about bumper stickers. They're generally made of either paper or vinyl, and it's surprisingly hard to tell the difference sometimes. You'd think it'd be clear, but it really isn't always. And they have an adhesive layer on the back, which has the adhesive changed over time. And then there's also, of course, a removable paper liner, which is impregnated with silicone. And it is kind of amazing to think about how those liners, those back liners, attach to the item when needed but pull off when we want them to be removed to be stuck on something. And of course, they were not made to last very long, but they are really rather complex in their composition. The main point I would say about these is that bumper stickers, either because of their adhesive or the vinyl, if they're made of vinyl, can off-gas or emit gases as they age, which can be damaging to paper and photographic collections. So it's really best to store them separately from paper or photographs if possible. Oftentimes, they're sort of all mixed together, per topic or, you know, Eisenhower collection, and they're mixed together. But it's best to store them separately when possible just because of the risk of the bumper stickers damaging other types of materials.  They're usually coated with some sort of water-activated adhesive and made out of paper. They are not really off-gassing a lot, but they are really sensitive to moisture since that's what makes them stick. And so it's really important that they're stored in a cool and dry place, and they're generally pretty stable if atmospheric conditions are correct. Now, the only big concern with that besides their adhesive issues is that they aren't usually printed on very good quality paper, so they might yellow, become more acidic as they age. After looking at the way bumper stickers and the canals have been stored in a lot of institutions, I really think that this approach, which is very simple, is the best. They're really generally fine stored vertically in alkaline folders and document boxes as with other archival materials. I would encourage you, if you can afford it, to store them in their own folders since there's always that risk of sticking together. And also, if you store them vertically, you'll minimize the pressure that might result from a stack of items pressing on top of one another. If something's particularly sticky, I have found it best to add a piece of silicone release paper, cut slightly smaller than the folder, just fold it in half so it has a little folder within a folder, just to contain that sticker from other materials. It's interesting, and it might be a little counterintuitive, but I found that some bumper stickers in particular that have been stored in mylar or polyester start to stick to the mylar, or there may be some sort of bonding happening with some of the inks and some types of polyester. So silicone release paper seems like a safer choice, and I wouldn't have necessarily guessed that until I saw it in some storage environment. Okay, so that's the sticky items. Buttons, of course, are something that we often associate with political materials. There's a lot of different ways of storing these materials, and you can look online and find lots of ideas. I'm going to give you my favorite idea. It's not just the University of Kansas that uses this. A lot of institutions do. What I really like about this is it avoids using the pin backs or the metal parts in the actual housing. It's really tempting to stick them to things, but oftentimes that metal might be fragile or rusty, and you don't want to cause damage to an item you're hoping to preserve. Since they're wonderful political, I'm sorry, wonderful exhibit and teaching tools, they're often brought out, at least here. We're always using them, and our curators like to bring out one at a time for different events. So I like the solution a lot because it allows you to easily remove one item without affecting all the other items. So this system involves using boxes within boxes, and many of our supply companies sell commercial slide boxes that are long and skinny that sit within a larger size, fairly standard archival box. Purchasing specimen bags, plastic specimen bags from one of these suppliers is pretty inexpensive, and it can go a long way to preserving large collections of buttons. Now in the handout I have some other ideas. Other people who have written some solutions, so feel free to look if this idea doesn't work for you. Another thing to consider about buttons before we get into the solution is that they can weigh a lot more than you think. We often seem to get very, very large collections of buttons, and so how do you make each one accessible and retrievable while still keeping their blueprints small? This box, for example, has over 900 buttons, and it was so heavy that two people had to pick it up. It was too heavy for one person to carry. And so, you know, this is just one record storage size box, but it really was heavy. So we need to make sure people can pick up our storage solutions as well. So in this case, this is what we've decided to do, and many institutions do. Using these long slide boxes, we've put our buttons in individual polyethylene bags. And then because we're a conservation lab, we always have lots of paper scraps or board scraps around.  All the labeling information can go on the piece of paper. This particular collection had individual barcodes. Those can all go on those pieces of paper as well. And then the button is just slid into the bag separately. I am not, so nothing is being stuck to anything else. The button is just slid into the same bag. This has worked well because, again, as I've said, one of our archivists in particular loves buttons, and she's often removing one or another. And this way she doesn't have to disrupt the entire group of buttons. So here's an example of what these slide boxes look like within their overall box that they come with. If you look in the right here, you can see that we've used both the bottoms and the lids of the slide boxes, just to, because they both work for our purposes. You may also be able to see that we add some little card stack dividers. For this particular collection, the archivist wanted things to be arranged by topic. That was a graduate student project, because there were a lot of buttons. And so as you can see, it says peace, no nukes. So anti-nuclear war and peace buttons are in a category, and she could easily find things. Something we also do is add an inventory in a pocket on the inside of the lid of the box so that she can also look there without having to look through each item. But she could if she wanted to, because they're all protected, and it's easy to sort of work your way through them. And sometimes there's oversized buttons. They can get quite large. And we found what the archival companies sell as shoeboxes, or I think they're 5x7, 8x10 size boxes. Just adding some cardstock to make dividers has worked quite well for us to store a lot of materials in a small amount of space. Okay. So I thought I'd also include ribbons, because before people used buttons, they often had political ribbons. And sometimes, as you see in this picture from the Library of Congress, you can have a ribbon button combo. And with ribbons, they are often very fragile and often from quite a long time ago, and it's really best to store them flat whenever possible to avoid further creasing and crumpling. I'm sure textile conservators have other ideas, but this is what we do in lieu of having a textile conservator on site. So here's an example that one of my graduate students came up with here. We actually created a mat, a window mat. If you're not familiar with how to do that, there's ideas in the handouts here that might give you some ideas of how to cut a mat or how you could also purchase a mat if you're not able to cut them yourself. So what we were trying to do is just to stabilize these items, which are often quite fragile. So what happened here, which I hope you can see, is that the width and the height of these ribbons were measured, and then slits were cut through a mat board a little bit out on either side of the ribbons. And then polyethylene strapping, which is the softest strapping you can find, is laced through those slits and then secured on the back of the mat board. We've used double-sided tape that's taped to itself and not obviously to anything else like a ribbon. And this way, the ribbons are secured and they're not obscured. You can see everything that's happening here at these ribbons. Then this is the window mat that went on top. In conservation, we often add a third layer to our mat, which is another piece of solid board on top that's hinged and then can be opened. This is what eventually happens with this item as well. So again, if you aren't familiar with how to mat, you can look in the resources for more information. And if you had a button ribbon combo, you would have to somehow strap across the ribbon or create some sort of bumper with corrugated board or foam around the edges of the button to keep it in place. I didn't have a button ribbon combo that I can find at my institution, so you have to sort of imagine that part. But the idea is to provide some support, keep everything flat and stabilized. Okay. Moving on here to another type of political collection. T-shirts. Now, these are kind of a more modern political artifact, but of course, not many events happen these days without a commemorative t-shirt.  We have hundreds of them. So this is a fairly simple way to store many items in a small space. Again, we tend to use the standard archival boxes because our people at our institution, our curators, understand how those function. And then we tend to roll them. So we'll roll for us usually on rolled-up tissue paper. Okay. Here we go. So in this case, what we've done here is folded into sleeves and rolled fairly loosely around those tissue paper cores. We always try to roll so that the picture is up and you can see what everything is without having to unroll them. Before we roll our items, we often take pictures of them so that, again, we can create some sort of visual inventory. And someone I know had asked a question about this, I'll just address now. It's not that typical in archives to have pictures of everything as it might be in a museum. And so this allows us to create some of these visual files that we wouldn't otherwise have. I think it's standard in museums to have pictures when you can, but that's not always true in archives. So we will create a picture of each item. And then I usually put that in a pocket, as I've said before, or a sleeve on the inside of the box lid. And then we also have pictures on the outside of everything that's stored within the box to help people find things. And, of course, there will be paper records or online records that will point you to individual boxes. Hopefully there's an inventory of what's in each box. But sometimes that doesn't happen. So at least this gives you a better sense of finding things. Okay. And I thought here, I have this one last type of object and then I wanted to leave a lot of time for questions. Sometimes you have random things, if I can call them that. It was political collections in particular, like these plaques or three-dimensional artifacts that are often not a great exhibit or research value per se, but still are in your collections. And you need to make sure that you take care of them properly. So what are some simple solutions if they don't necessarily rise to the top of importance, but you need to take care of them? And actually, I found this picture in our stacks. And I should say we're not in an earthquake zone because this is a bad idea to have something like this on the top shelf if you aren't in an earthquake zone. It's a bust of a former governor of my state sort of hanging out there. And the question is, is it okay there? You know, maybe it is just fine where it is with some sort of dust cover or protection. In other places, like, again, if you're in an earthquake zone, you secure this better and probably not on the top shelf. So some solutions that are materials you might use include soft Tyvek or unbleached muslin, various types of boxes or lids, tissue paper might be helpful. We use a lot of isofoam and plastizote foam in our collections. Perhaps you do too. And then cotton tying tape always comes in handy. Okay, so this is a very strange plaque I will admit. It had a lot of comments when it was in the conservation lab. It's actually a plaque that was given to a former governor of my state, Kansas, by a shoe manufacturing group. So it's a plaque, but it's a three-dimensional artifact and sort of a bear to store. And probably will never come out for research or exhibit. But we want to make sure to protect it. So in this case, as I put here on the slide, a dust cover is probably fine and just enough. So you might consider vacuuming or just making sure there's no dust around this item.  And this item was loosely tied to a secure area of the item with cotton twill tape. And then before I would put something like this on the shelf, I would put a tray lid or a piece of corrugated plastic or something underneath to help slide it in enough to shelf safely. There's not really very good handholds on this item. And of course, you don't want anyone to grab the shoe at the top and have it come apart from the rest of the plaque. This is another example where having a picture label to cut down on curious unwrapping would be a great idea. If you have more important, I shouldn't say important. Everything's important in terms of its architectural value, but we don't give everything equal attention. So something that you might want to have more attention placed on or maybe stored flat, some of these plaques. What we often do is take one of our standard size boxes and pad with some sort of foam or tissue paper. Here are two examples that we've housed in our collections. Leaving finger holes to remove things safely. And what I like about these solutions is if these items are using exhibits or in classes or for research or groups coming by, you don't really have to take them out of their housings to make them usable. People often ask about hot glue. And so I might just mention here that there are better and worse kinds of hot glue. I always purchase from one of the archival suppliers. Like I was talking about earlier, we can't always do all of the testing ourselves on materials. And if I have a question, I call and ask them about the composition of their materials. I would encourage you to do the same if you're not clear on what's good to use and what's not so good to use. Okay, so I hope you've enjoyed this presentation today. I've been caring for some types of political memorabilia. I apologize for some of these audio difficulties. I hope you have come up with some new tips or ideas. And I wanted to mention that the slides with the notes will be connecting to collection sites. So I have included the notes. If something wasn't clear in my reading or speaking today, I would love to open the webinar to questions at this point. I'm going to look over here. I can read them off for you if you want. Okay. Okay, so Donovan said, do they make unsized and unbleached muslin that would be suitable for storing rolled textiles? And then Amanda Richardson says, I saw that talus has it.  I know many people do do that. I'm just looking here in the Gaylord catalog. I'm not really an expert on muslin. I'm sure there may be textile conservators who could better answer that question. But yes, it is a great idea if you're able to wash materials. I'm looking here at the Gaylord catalog, which I happen to have in front of me. And it seems they sell unsized, unbleached muslin. So I think many of our suppliers apparently do sell it. Good. And Amanda, thank you for noting that you also saw that on the talus website recently. The more places the better. I think in the resources on the Connecting to Collections Care website, we have a lot of the companies. We have links to a lot of the companies that provide archival materials. So Catherine Owens says, does the archive not use a collections management database? It holds pictures. Yes. And that is a great question, Catherine. And I sort of addressed that a few minutes ago. But no. No, that's not that typical, at least. And I work in a large research library. A lot of the collections are very paper-focused. Most of the time. So we don't really think too much about these artifactional materials that are often kind of extra additions to collections. And sometimes they kind of get put aside because archivists are trained mainly to work with paper. So yes, where a museum might have a collections management database that has a place for pictures of individual items, archival collections are often thought of really on-mass. And so we don't always have that. But that is a very good point. And one, because I'm coming from this archived side of thing, I didn't really think about. If you have a collections management database that has pictures, you are way ahead. So congratulations. Well, I think it was a really good suggestion, though, to have a map with images. Because even if you have pictures in your database, you may not be carrying your computer around with you when you get to the end of a range and need to know what objects are there. Missy Molkalecki. I'm sorry, I just butchered your name. Do you do anything special for vinyl banners? Now vinyl banners are much like vinyl stickers that they have potential for off-gassing and negatively affecting other collections stored nearby. I would suggest that you wrap something like that or fold it or however you're going to store something that's oversized in buffered paper. If you can afford something like microchamber paper that has zeolites in it that actually can capture gaseous molecules, you should do so. But that paper is quite expensive. It might be worth it. And I would definitely store vinyl separately from other types of materials. Yes, vinyl is a wonderful and difficult material. Yes. OK, so Catherine Owens says, we stick our buttons at the foam to give them some rigidity in the bag. I take it that's a bad idea. I don't know that it's necessarily a bad idea. It definitely works for rigidity. And again, there's many ways of dealing with things. And a lot of people store buttons in that way. I just like this idea of the bags because you do not then have to rely on the metal backings to actually hold it to something else. Because again, sometimes those pin backs can be fragile. They can snap off or be rusty. You're doing your best and I appreciate that. Isoflame is a good quality material and it may not cause much damage. But you might consider in the future not using the metal parts to stick it to something else. Yeah, Catherine Owens says, if you have narrow ribbons, we've used mylar sleeves for film negatives and then slip them into acid-free paper-negative sleeves. So that's just a suggestion from her. Thank you, Catherine. That's a good idea. So Tracy Hampton says, we have cotton slash canvas tote bags. Any suggestions for storage of those? Yeah, well that's another political item, isn't it? It hadn't even occurred to me. Generally with anything that is three-dimensional, you'll just want to make sure that it is supported in all parts. So if you have room to pad the canvas tote bag, I would probably put some bald-up tissue paper inside and put it in a box and it would probably be just fine. Probably some of them you could probably roll like you do your t-shirts. That's true. You could roll them as well and that would take up a space. So thanks, Susan. That's a great solution. Jessica Pace says, the AIC-OD testing wiki provides information on the types of 3M low-melt glue that have tested well. So I think the ADI testing wiki is on the AIC wiki, so I can add that to the handout and I'll post it when I post the recording. Actually Intamin says, I work in the National Mall in Washington, D.C. We could potentially be collecting thousands of political objects a year. We don't have the staff, time, storage, or money to care for this many objects in perpetuity. Do you have any tips for choosing the best examples to collect in terms of objects that are made of the most stable materials? That's a big question, isn't it? Made of the most stable materials. I guess that's one thing to think about, but also there may be materials like bumper stickers that are not all that stable as a class. So finding the best, you might look and see, of course, if something is yellowing or emitting an odor, that might not be as stable as other materials. It's hard because the best examples, yeah, I'm trying to think like in the terms of politics, if you would have examples from, let's say, campaign materials, a few examples from different people's campaigns. Boy, that is a hard question. Let's see. I'm not sure if I can... The best examples may not be made on the best materials. It depends what you mean by the best. If you mean the most stable materials, that's one thing. But sometimes you're right, but it's not necessarily the most visually attractive or the most representative of a class of materials. But it is true. Political objects are just all around us, and we can't preserve everything, so it is important to make informed decisions. But that is a question that we probably could talk about for some time and might need more information to answer fully. Yeah. Danetta Holds says, Excellent information about storing materials. I have some items like feather headdresses, axes, things like that. Do you have any suggestions on storage? Before you start, Danetta, look at our last webinar on feathers and care of feathers that may be very helpful, and that's in our archives for 2018. So, on... I was going to say the same thing. Oh. Yeah, and I can add that to the handout, too. Fantastic. Political material? Do you have any suggestions, Whitney? I'm on all sorts of things. Well, just in general, storing any type of material, you want to make sure that you fully support all the different parts, that you stabilize materials. It's generally a great idea when something is three-dimensional to store it in the way it was intended to be good or housed or used, but that's not always possible. Making sure the parts are all stabilized is sort of most important, but when you have something that has potentially a lot of loose pieces or are made of composite materials like it acts might be metal and wood, you'll have to think of what part of that acts, for example, is the most vulnerable to the agents of deterioration or perhaps falling apart or decomposing in one way or another and address the most vulnerable parts of an object. It's kind of a general suggestion. Yeah. Hillary Sullivan says, what suggestions do you have between vinyl or plastic memorabilia that started to plasticize? We are at the end of November going to do a webinar on plastic, so pay attention to that. Whitney, do you have any suggestions? In general, I would separate those materials from others. There's a lot of interesting research going on right now about cold storage of plastic and if that's a good idea or a bad idea, and I'll be really interested to tune into that webinar and see what the speakers suggest about that. It could be that that might be a good idea. Separating or segregating those materials is important. I might go ahead and take digital images of items at that time because when they start to plasticize, you really can't reverse that. It's kind of a point of no return in a way. It may be worth keeping. In some cases, maybe it's a time to deaccession, but obviously a curator would have to make that decision. All right. Julie Saylor says, do you have any advice for how to store or preserve political yard spines? You know, I thought about this yesterday as I was walking home and seeing all our governor's signs, our governor candidate signs, and realized this had already been sent off to connecting to collections. So I would say to you, it kind of depends on if it's most important for its information or its artifactual value. And if it's something that you mainly are interested in, the poster itself, and you would have to talk with a curator or perhaps you are a curator and decide if the metal parts matter to you or not, if they do, then you might store it in a different way than if they don't. Of course, if they don't, then you just basically have a poster. But if you are keeping the metal prongs, perhaps you want to preserve it as an example of late 20th century, early 21st century political activity, then you have to obviously be aware of the metal. So you might store it flat in some sort of folder, although I would make sure to indicate that there's metal involved. Sometimes they're stable enough to store vertically, although I would turn them upside down with pieces of corrugated, either board or plastic in between. In general, another idea might be to somehow, if you have a map case and you can sort of segregate or put bumpers in so that they're long, skinny areas. If you have a number that you want to include together, that might work as well. I would put a buffering material in between different ones. If it's been in the ground, I would probably try to make sure to wipe off any loose dirt or that kind of thing before you store it long term. I mean, that definitely is a political item of our time. Yes. Well, even in the past, I remember finding yard signs in the attic of a relative long deceased. Maybe they're not that new. Yes. Right. Well, the plastic ones are. And C. Donovan says, what about how to preserve foam core posters that have been attached to foam core and that might have been burned by tiki torches? Hi, Sue. I know, Sue. Thanks for that lovely question, Sue. Well, that's good luck to you, Sue. Now, while foam core is probably the least stable part of that particular item, but again, if the whole thing has been burned and it's not very stable, I would probably again separate it from other materials. And again, if you can afford the microchamber paper that might be a good opportunity to use it, taking some pictures of that item might also be good. And it may be that the burning or the bird marks are super important to the artifact and its history. So preserving that information is probably a good idea, but I would segregate it. And thanks, Sue. That's a really challenging question. I would like to know more about that particular item. That sounds complicated. Yeah. But politics, there's often a lot of passion involved behind political rallies and that kind of thing. Yeah, maybe Sue will tell us more about the torches. I know where Sue lives, and I know there were some large political rallies not too long ago there. Maybe it's related to what has been going on related to that in her part of the world. But often political rallies, for example, can become very heated, literally or figuratively, and the burn marks might be important. But burn materials should be segregated for a number of reasons. Yeah. And I think that's all the questions. Do you have anything else you want to add? No, I do apologize for the audio challenges today. But thank you for those of you who have hung with me during this time. I hope you've gotten some great ideas about different types of artifacts. And again, you're always welcome to contact me. Actually, I feel like I have a slide with my email, which I should have put up sooner, wbaker at KU.edu. I'd love to talk with you more if you have further questions or if I can be helpful to you. Thanks a lot. And so, as soon as the slide announcing this webinar is no longer on the main page of our website of the Connecting to Collections Care website, you'll find it with the slides, the slides with the script, the recording, and the handout. And that'll happen in the next couple of days. So look for that. And I'm sorry about the sound, but we're always working on sound, and sometimes it works better than others. And a lot of it has to do with where the sound is originating or where we're from. We switched to using a phone bridge, but at KU, their phones are voice over IP. Oh, okay. That's where we get problems. So I'm sorry about that. I'm wearing a headset. No, it has nothing to do with the headset. I'm wearing a headset, too. And Theresa Pennington, if you send me a message, I will send you something to show that you logged in. And that's all I can do. Okay, so thank you very much. And we'll look forward to seeing you all at the next webinar, which is the beginning of November, and or if you're taking the course. Thank you very much.


All right, here we go. All right, we got that let's do a bright blue. Oh Yes, oh that's gonna look so good. Here we go Just like that a little darker blue Okay, here we go Let's do another bright blue Just quickly a little navy here. Okay, let's do another bright blue And just another one here here we go ready. Oh my gosh


Okay. Welcome back everybody. Thanks for taking the break. I am up here with two gentlemen who are going to lead us in a great discussion about the Camaro project. So I'm going to hand over this microphone and let them introduce themselves. Yeah, thanks Jill. Hello everybody. Great that you are here. I'm Markus Kümmerle from Deutsche Telekom. I'm leading the Magenda API exposure program of Deutsche Telekom. Yeah, I'm happy to be here with my second head. I am driving Camaro I think since the beginning, since two and a half years. My name is Alberto Torron from Telefonica. I'm the head of the GoToDevelopers area for the Open Gateway initiative. We do have Telefonica globally deploying these days based on the Camaro initiative of the Linus Foundation and we're really proud of being one of the believers in all of these initiatives, right? So we're happy to join you. Yeah, let's get started. Okay, then let's get started. So hopefully you enjoyed it and please imagine the fire behind us because it's a fireside chat. Yeah, beginning with the whole thing. Why are these network or Telco API so important and interesting? Telcos have decided to open the networks for the new business cases and there are two reasons for that. The one is today the world optimizes as best as possible and for that we need an interaction with the networks too. So there is a great potential, there is a great benefit, a great value for the customers. But also for the Telcos, that's the second reason Telcos can't stick to the pure connectivity. So it's very important for them that they get additional revenues, on top revenues and for that opening the networks, that is a real women's situation. And then the question is how you can open the networks. And in two days times, it's a good idea to do it automatically and by that automatically you do it via APIs. So coming to the APIs, then we thought about how we can create these APIs. The first trials were using the existing technical APIs, but that failed. And the reason is these APIs require a lot of Telco knowledge, have a high complexity and they can be different from Telco network to Telco network due to different topologies, vendors and so on. So it's not a good idea to do this low technical level that we learned and for that we created a new level, an intent based level of APIs with simple, easy to consume APIs. On the other hand, when we started with that and had the talks with first customers that were, for example, automotive customers, they told us, yeah, that's really great. We use the APIs, we build it in our cars, but only if these APIs are available in all the Telco networks in your country and our cars have a bad ability, they can drive over borders. So it should be working in Germany but also in France, Spain and all other countries too. So this global availability that was the second big driver for the whole thing. And out of this, we created the idea for Camara for the open source project. Two and a half years ago, we reached out to the first partners, for example, also Telefonica and together we worked on it. We launched it at Mobile Workongress 22 with 22 partners. And now it has grown significantly. We are happy to say that we now have more than 70, 750 people and from more than 250 companies in Camara and that's really a success story. But it's not sufficient to do that, to make real business happen. We need an ecosystem and for the ecosystem, we need something more. Well, we need many more things. The idea is not about being creative only with the technology. The idea is to figure out what will be the best use cases and how to get to the correct partners in order to speed up the process. I mean, all the big Telcos have plenty of technology around. We've been growing our business based on new technologies, faster networks, more capabilities and so on. And we've been using APIs for ages these days. So the idea is what if this is accessible to the developers? What if we make this easy enough? What if we do fine together with the best developers on earth, the best use cases that can bring more security to the transactions, bring new use cases in the transportation, bring speed and trust to the evolution of the personal communications and the B2B communications as well? What if we can give you another taste of the use of technology at home? What if all of this can be deployed together as we did, for example, with the roaming? Remember, the early days of the roaming were a nightmare, but then we had agreed to exchange information in a proper manner. And from that point on, we grew our business together. Today is very, very big, right? So the point is what if we're capable to simplify the adoption of this new technology? And what if we bring the latest networks at the fastest speeds we've ever seen with a taste of new services together with you, right? This is the point. That's great. Let's talk a little bit more, more to your overall presentation here. Marcus, tell us a little bit more about telco network capabilities, API capabilities. Yeah, let's have some examples. Okay, perfect. So first of all, I want to point out it's not limited to mobile connection. We're also looking on the fixed line connection and all other telcos two APIs from the telcos two capabilities from the telcos two. Yeah, let's have some examples. So we can divide into two groups. On the one hand, telcos have a lot of data about the network and all the contracts. And so we know a lot about the devices. So we can tell exactly where a device is, which can be very helpful. We know a lot about the status of a device, if it's connected or not, or if it's in roaming state and where it is. But also we know a lot about the network itself. So we know how the situation is in a specific cell. We know how congested it is. And that could help to do some traffic jam warnings, for example. Let's imagine a simple example, a car is driving on a road and the driver is have a very important phone call and he wants to know if I drive, follow this road in one kilometer, five kilometer, 10 kilometers. How is the situation? Can I continue or shall I do better or break and finalize my call? Such simple things can be answered. So this is one part using all the information which we have in our network about network and devices. The second one is the more interesting one. So the possibility to actively configure or influence the network, for example, with quality and demand. So it's possible to progress a data connection from a device, from a specific application on device to a specific server and application on the internet. And by that, getting a reliable connection, a low stable latency and a stable bandwidth. And that is interesting for a lot of use cases. So imagine remote control from a small drone or HIV in a factory up to complete teleoperative driving. That is a great field. The second great field is, for example, ARVR. Also very important, prominent example is remote maintenance. You have unexperienced people all around the world. They are supported by experts in the office and using some ARVR classes. Perfect case for this quality demand. Gaming is a big thing. So the faster you can shoot, the better you are. It's very easy. And then also a big field is safeguarding of transactions. So banking transactions, ebay, all kind of things. You know it also. You are clicking on a button. Yes, I do the transaction and then you are waiting. You see the send clock. Nothing is going on. And exactly to avoid this situation, to safeguard this little piece of information, we can use this API. So there is a lot of potential in. And these are only the first technical examples. I'm pretty sure the real business demand customer welcome. It helps us to get in touch with the customers, to have talks with them and to see what they really demand. And then we want to build the best APIs for them. Great. Thank you. With that in mind, Alberto, what are you hearing from your customers? What does the demand look like? We have a very, very insistent demand in terms of adding layers of security. Because we will become a trusted party for transactions of our customers at the end of the day. From the earliest banking services, we do send SMSs to confirm with one time password the transaction. So this is becoming more and more difficult because the smithing attacks are becoming important these days. So we're figuring out if there's a way to provide different set of services based on APIs that could handle this situation. At the end of the day, one certain thing is one way or the other, the telco companies tend to be a bank for the privacy of the users. I mean, we don't sell the data for customers. And that should make us become a trusted party for the transactions. So if you think it really, really ensures them, why not addressing that need and figuring out if there's something we can do to help the trust and the confidence of the online transactions that on a daily basis we all do perform, right? But more and more services will be coming from the quality and demand API. We'll see more of that. And many other things that combine will create completely different digital experiences for our customers. And that's the value we must provide together. I mean, it's not about the telco bringing all the staff home and getting all the monetization of the services. It's about creating this really fast to make sure we do align to the purpose. And we help, for instance, the sellers know better their customers with their trust on board, right? The privacy must be granted. It's something that we do very well. We're used to that. So if we go together and address these market needs, we will create tons of new value, new revenue streams. So how are we going to address those market needs? Enter Kamara. So do you want to, can you talk a little bit about how that's going to happen and what problems are going to be solved with this project? It started small, it gets larger. That's a simple, simple summary. No, we started, I think, in a group of eight in, in early 2021. And we thought about how we shall organize this telco alliance. We wanted wanted to go a different way. So typically telcos tend to do some SDOs standardization organizations, and then take three or five years to create some papers, and then you get the APIs. But in two days times, that is too slow. So then the business is gone, and the chances is away. So we decided to do it differently to do standardization via code, via an open source project. And by that, we approached the Linux Foundation, because Linux Foundation is the biggest organization on that planet with the biggest open source projects, and they know how to do open source projects. So and, but we also wanted to have this telco domain knowledge in. So we had talks with the GSMA about a collaboration between the two organizations. And it was a hard time in the beginning to do all the negotiations and created legal terms of reference, but we have managed it. And finally, yeah, we could launch it at Mobile Work and Rest 22. We've already 22 partners. And that was, I think, the real kickoff and starting point.  We haven't done any great advertisement for it. It was only from from mouth to mouth. And people came and it grew and we got more APIs. Now I think we have 14 plus four API families in Kamara already. And where can people find access to this? Oh, it's quite easy. There is a slide in I think it's the last one. There you can see. Yep, exactly. Thanks a lot. So if you want to get more information about Kamara, use this QR code or this link to our nice web page. Also thanks to Linux Foundation for creating this. And you can get a contact page and can also ask all questions you have. I think we can talk a little bit more about the architecture and some of the specific work that's been done. So let me throw up this architecture slide. Okay, so that picture, we can quickly go through it. That's exactly this intent based level. You can see the green boxes at the bottom are the technical API standards, the existing ones. But based on this, we want to create this intent based level. Let's do it with an example. So let's again take this quality and demand. A customer is coming and he is telling us, please give me the best quality you have for the next hour from this device and this application on the device to this server and this application on the server. That's a simple question he gives us. He doesn't cares about any network telco topics. Simple, easy to consume. What we are doing now, we are checking. First of all, what is the situation on the device? We are already in talks with device manufacturers to optimize the latency on the device. So that are APIs which are in the chipsets of the devices. Second, we are looking in our mobile network. And there we have several opportunities. If the device is in a 5G standalone cell with a slice, a load latency slice, it's the best to use that slice. If no slices available, you can using the five QI glasses in the cell. And if the device is only in a 4G network at a country side, you can use QCI glasses. So we have to look in which situation are we and what can we do to optimize the latency here. And then it continues to the fixed line. There is an exchange point between the telco infrastructure and the internet. And the next job is to do some traffic influence to bring the traffic to the closest exchange point. So to avoid the latency is also the fixed line. And then you look at the back end application, where is it? Could it be relocated to the closest edge independent? If it's a telco edge or a hyperscalar edge, and then bring the application there. And if there are some devices in a Wi-Fi in a home network, then we have to do some optimization and the Wi-Fi. And all this complexity is behind this simple, easy to consume API. You can see it at this slide. So the blue layer on top, that's the easy one, and that's visible to the developers to make it easy. The light blue one, that's the job of the telcos, the more difficult one. And the green ones that are the basic capabilities that you use. And I will lend the plane that's fine. It can be easier. What if we can provide you a premium service to make your gaming experience much better? What if we can provide a premium service based on this quality and demand service? What if we can provide security from the sky based on drones that can fly even in congested networks? What if we can provide services that will make holograms visible for a daily basis or metaverse services? I don't know. And what if, and this could be shocking if we get to that point, what if the cars don't need that much infrastructure on board and can rely on the service that we can provide from the edge and our antennas and so you can pay as you drive autonomously in the cities? What if all of this will become feasible in the few next few months? What if we can do that? And so the thing is, we're deploying ultra fast networks, we're deploying ultra low latency networks, mobile networks as well. And if you mix all the pieces together, we can create the experiences that will become a game changer in the close future in Europe and America, right? So the point is, what if we do it all together under the same standard and create value as an aggregate for the market? That's the challenge we're trying to address. So what does it look like in terms of usage so far? So, Marcus, you were saying earlier that there's a handful, there's a pretty decent number of APIs already set up. Are any of those actually being deployed and used in production right now? Yeah, let's look back to Mobile Workongress this year. There, we already have more than 20 showcases of Kamara APIs in the live networks all over the world. So from Brazil, from your company up to, I think it was Indonesia, from Axiata, a lot of networks already had implemented the first APIs and the situation has improved since then. So there's a lot going on. In general, we can say 22 was the year of the first APIs in the labs. 23 is the year of the first technical APIs in the live networks. And now the next step is the commercial one. So we need the commercial products of the APIs and all the tacos are currently really working on that to make it happen. Great. And so, Alberto, you mentioned a little bit about privacy and regulations in Europe. How does that impact the work that you're doing? A lot. It's shocking. We're shocked with that. Thankfully, the European telcos are used to get privacy by default and security by default. And this is a red line. We're not going to cross that board. We'll make sure our customers' privacy will be granted from scratch. And that's a very big win for the start, but it makes all the stuff difficult at the very beginning. Not only the privacy itself and the regulations related to privacy, but also all the rest of the regulations in the telcos space, related to how do we compete. And at the end of the day, we're very big companies and we cannot agree to deploy the same service at the same prices in the same market. So it's absolutely shocking. What we call the multi-telco discussions are surrounded by lawyers from each side. And you have to make sure that you say the exact words that cannot end in an antitrust. How do you call it? Lawsuit. So the idea is that taking advantage of the existing technologies with the difficulties we are suffering in the technical and legal and economical area in Europe these days is a big challenge. But we're going to address it very well. So the point is we are sure that we're going to be committed in the future, as we have always been, in taking care of the privacy of our customers by default. But we need to learn how to deal with big, big players like hyperscalers or aggregators that must adhere to these terms in Europe as well. And it's not only about them, it's like social media and so on. There are plenty of different parties involved in these initiatives that must adhere to the extent of the law. So you cannot go by your own in a regulated space like the European. So how does that work then when you're trying to deploy similar services, say in South America, where maybe the restrictions aren't quite as stringent as in Europe? Does that create more work, or do you just pour it over what you've already done for the Europe? Following the same standards these days, because what we're aiming to is a global service. We want to make sure that come what may. We think that all the world is going to go in the same direction. We're going to protect the privacy of the users. So we see that in America these days, things have changed. And there's much more protection to the end user these days in the privacy that it was in the previous years. But the cases that we're going really, really to the extreme in Europe is just shocking to discuss up to the last specific detail of each contract. So it's something we're learning to do and we'll do for such a big service. So where does the bulk of that work fall on? Does it fall onto the telcos or more to the developers who are coding these APIs? Or is it kind of everybody all hands on deck? Everybody must have a view to that. So we set the standard at the end of the day because we know very well the regulation. We've been dealing with that for ages. Telefonica will be one century old next year. So imagine we were used to protect the data.  So what's next then? We had some we had a discussion earlier today about 6G and we know AIs all over the place right now. So where do you see Kamara evolving as technology evolves beyond just the standard 5G stuff that's getting embraced very quickly right now? Yeah, I think the way forward is to create more customer demanding APIs. Currently we are two technical. We use the first technical capabilities. We create APIs out of it. Yes, the customer is needed. They can do nice things with it. But we should now learn from the customer what is your real demand, what you really need for us and build these APIs. And that could be combinations of all these technical capabilities like with this quality and demand or more specific things. So also an example we are in contact with one of the big hyperscalar companies and quality demand is a good thing for them. Then they told us no real time is not so interesting. For us it would be more interesting to see how is the performance of a specific cell on a typical summer day in the afternoon 4 p.m. Because they are optimized already and this information helps them to optimize the whole network. So it's much more important for them than having the real-time information. So that's exactly the example where we have to go. We have to get in touch with the customers, get all the requirements and see what best we can do for the sake of the customer. Yes. And I imagine a lot of that changes in real-time and it changes as they're deploying the stuff and starting to use them. So I imagine that would be one of the positives here of open source is the ability to develop those things very quickly. It's the only possibility to do it in that way. Because it's an HR process. Without having a first example people don't know what they need. So we have to show first something then they get the idea that could be good and that could change that. So it's a typical HR way of working which is really key and we are very happy that we have chosen that way. Great. So going back a little bit to organizations that are participating in Kamaro. I know we're starting primarily with the telco folks but are you looking to bring in the hyperscalers and all of the SIs and the vendors and the whole ecosystem? Or is it maybe you're starting with the telcos and kind of branching out from there? What does that look like? So it's key to have not only the telcos in. So because we need the vendors. If we want to create the APIs following the demand of the customer we have also to influence the roadmap of the vendors because we needed basic technical capabilities here. So that's important. Happy to say that we have a lot of them already in Kamaro so you can see it on the local list. We have Ericsson, Nokia, Mavinia, Huawei only to name a couple of them which is already great. Then sure we need as much as possible operators here telcos because the APIs have to be implemented in all the networks and this is also great. We have from the U.S. Verizon and T-Mobile and AT&T as the biggest ones. For Europe we have Telefonica, DT, us we have Telecom Italia, Orange. A good coverage in Europe. We have XZ, we have China Telecom, China Universe. Huawei even telcos from small countries like Peru, Uruguay and Hawaii even. I want to travel there. So that's really really great. We have already a very good coverage from the operators. But then we need the customers and that are the hyperscalers? Yes, because they are interesting customers for us. So happy that we have very active Microsoft in and also Google and in the background we also have the other two ones working with us. That's really great. But we would like to have more customers in because we want to follow this customer demand and it's key to get all the requirements here. So do you think what are some of the barriers to these organizations joining or maybe they don't know about the benefits? Are you seeing any of that or what's the biggest barrier? I think it's just to know what's going on because we yes we have launched it but it was visible only in telco ecosystem and now we have to make it public and tell look we have something great for you. What do you really need from us? Please join, help us to develop the best APIs for you and it's just the next step. It's something normal I think. What do we have to do now? Well there are more. Of course first of all developers must know that the capabilities are around. I mean we're launching this in Spain with an early adopters program in Spain, Germany and Brazil and we start testing by November. So hopefully for the next mobile conference we'll be really ready with building customers with a lot of building customers hopefully. So the idea is if we manage to make sure we do align to the privacy standards, the regulations and so on and we finally get all the stuff set and ready in the legal part of this business and this hopefully will be ready in a couple of weeks. The plan is to start testing with hand customers really really fast and we're on it. We're starting to developing the approach of concept and we have this I don't know maybe almost 300 early adopter companies registered in our portal so we find there's a lot of interest and the thing is all of them say the same thing, the same song. Okay make sure you align with the rest of the telco in your country and we both together to the market otherwise it won't make sense. So that's what we're aiming to. So how are companies like Telefonica going to monetize this? Well that's easy one. I mean we're used to sell services separated or aggregating them at the bigger services and we think that the point is if the all the industry finds out the best way for each API to charge for the service for the number of instances, the time you use it or the bundle of API consumption you do in a monthly basis whatever, I mean it shouldn't be a big issue to prove the value to the market. So we don't see in that point a barrier at all. We think that probably given the diversity of APIs we're going to provide we'll need to study case by case what would be the best way to go to the market with the developers to make sure we all together find the value. And are you feeling any sense of competition with some of your other some of the other telcos in terms of how they're using Kamara and these APIs is it more of everyone's working together or are we seeing a lot of forking happening and people trying to solve similar problems and then close sourcing what they've come up with? I think currently we have a very good situation so we all know we only win together when it comes to the API definition because only this standard this global availability is key. So there is no competition there is a real good collaboration. Because everyone has the same problem so there is. Yes, the competition comes when you think of the implementation of the API. There you have the differentiation and there you can try to implement it more efficient better faster than the others and that's still open and that's okay. Yeah and that's where the monetization piece comes in as well. Okay great, so we talked a little bit about some of the APIs that already that are already out there is there anything more that you want to share about that or anything that's maybe currently in the works that people can look forward to seeing soon? I think one important topic is there has been alignment between the Linux Foundation, between the GSMA and TM Forum about the collaboration of the different standardization bodies. Because the industry wants to have one solution and not three and we are very happy to have created a white paper for it so we aligned the area of each of them and also here we have a very good collaboration so and it is done like we have the technical standards from 3GPP for example or broadband or from CNCF from from the Etsy Mac for cloud that is the technical layer then we have TM Forum for the whole orchestration and management of the thing and then for the customer facing the intent-based customer APIs we have Kamara and I think that's that's a really successful Kamara to be to get this role but it's also a great responsibility so customers and the whole industry is relying to us and so yeah we are happy to go the next step and that we will announce tomorrow so if you like you can join the keynote there could be something in from Kamara if you're interested great before we open it up to additional questions how closely aligned are you with other open source groups and projects is that is are you seeing a lot of integration there or is it more kind of integrating across each other in terms of the members so in the moment the most important alignment was with TM Forum and with the GSMA that is done now but there is much more to go so we have a very in talks with the Etsy Mech we are in talks with OpenID so with a couple of more but it's going on and has to be done great all right are there any questions in the room hi I would have two questions one is that where do you draw the line between the CGP defined APIs and the Kamara APIs or TM Forum or other organizations and the Kamara APIs you had a slide with these layers but I think I need some more clarification on that the other question is you said that there is this common interest to keep the APIs the same and all of that but still do you plan to have some kind of a conformance program for the APIs or some kind of you know like a way to test if an API is a Kamara API or not and or if you plan to do some kind of a versioning of the APIs because now you are in an easy phase when every API is the first one but there will be a second and the third I can answer you then the second one because it's something we discussed over the last few weeks at my office and I was given I think it was a very correct answer right at the end of the day we what we do is to share repositories and set the standards and at the end of the all of this initiative what we send to the market is a couple of lines of code one single line of code is what we always mentioned probably could be a couple of them with with all the commands you need to to use to ask your telco provider about something right you have the repositories with all the versions and we simply say this and telephonic is using version 3.1 of this one and you have the repository will be straightforward for you it's not a completely different integration but what we aim to do is to make sure that we do a line to the in each country to go together with the changes and the evolutions right so that's the aim let's figure out what will be the best way to roll up this app because it's as you can imagine extremely complex organizations but the easiest way will be first of all show all the steps of the project and show where you are with your standardization probably the differences will be pretty tiny right but if there there are some you will have plenty of documentation on board in the same place it was from the very beginning right but again it's not easy at all one of the challenges we we face and it's something that we probably get very fast over it is that the starting point from the one MNO to other one telco company to other is completely different I mean we at Telefonica we've been investing tons of efforts and money over the last few years to make sure that everything is ready for something like this to come and for us it's really strategic because we see the value but not all of the players around are the same page right but again it will be about sharing all the knowledge making sure this consists of open source information documentation and standardization otherwise it won't work and the first one is okay and for the first one I would like to show one slide it works great so going one level deeper for you looking at the customer facing APIs we decided to create three different groups the one are the service APIs so the APIs who really do the functionality provide the content then we have service management APIs who enable the service APIs and then we have to operate APIs let's do an example again quality demand the customer is in a cell and the first thing he wants to know how is my performance in the cell and this API is a service management API so he can ask and he get the information it's not so good yeah then the second question he has what services are available to improve the situation and that is an operate API from TM Forum so here he gets the catalog of the available services in a cell and then he sees oh look there is a quality demand service API which I can call so that's the next step then he calls the service API and then at the end he wants to know how has the situation changed how is my performance now again he calls the service management API how is my performance and gets oh it's now exciting so and for that the customer is happy to pay some five cents for that and that's the exactly way the things should work and it's good to organize the APIs in that way because TM Forum already has created this operate APIs we don't want to duplicate the work so it's a good thing and we focus and come out really on the service and service management APIs thanks just building on the implementation and you know viewing a little bit forward would it operate similar to and and you know I don't know what the end user is is it like me or is it an enterprise or it could be both or it could be an IOT or whatever but for if you if you take an analogy of data services roaming and data right we move around and go to another country we get a text you have low speed data click here you get high speed 5 gig for X dollars right or something like that that is increasing our throughput and bandwidth and all that right and that's kind of I wouldn't say quality on demand but bandwidth on demand or whatever are you envisioning or not bandwidth but just you know speed on demand yeah or latency right so you're is the implementation of this going to be something similar for for all the other services like quality on demand or is it through some more portals and things like that or is it going is it coming to the phone or is it just going to stay with the network management and the ops people I don't know if you're going to understand the job as long as it's not in Spanish I mean I'm Galician and we all answered with perhaps we don't know I mean it's just a joke the idea is what if if you have the option I don't see from these type of initiatives the compulsory use of certain services in order to get enough from your supplier it's the opposite one so I see that there will come some premium services that will make a difference in the latency completely different to the throughput in the latency in congested services where there are plenty of people and you cannot with the existing networks do anything then probably you'll find out a way to do some basic stuff that otherwise will be completely impossible right but the case is that we want to preserve so far the network neutrality I think we think this is a basic right so so it's not about that we're not touching that space so far because the regulation doesn't let us move forward than that right so the idea is what if you find we find a way to make use cases profitable profitable for the telco with the existing networks and the networks to come and very good for the end customer call it B2B, B2C, B2B to C call it a drone it depends strongly on the use case and we're trying to discover the faster the better these use cases that will change the industry because we think this will change the industry for better but we must preserve the existing regulations and add you to that and that's something I want to stress because this is something for us Reiki any other questions all right I think we can wrap up this session thank you gentlemen thank you very much