Prepping for the American Institute for Conservation / Canadian Association for Conservation Meeting in Montreal

Preservation professionals are getting ready for the joint American Institute for Conservation/ Canadian Association for Conservation’s joint meeting in Montreal, May 13-18. I like to use the term “preservation professionals” rather than conservators. Many of us work closely together to support each other’s goals for protection of cultural heritage. This year’s theme of Emergency! Preparing for Disasters and Confronting the Unexpected in Conservation has great capacity for a great range of cultural heritage professionals, including registrars, collection managers, facilities managers, scientists, technicians, as well as conservators.

As Chair of AIC’s Collection Care Network, we’ve been focusing on building bridges between all people involved in caring for collections. Our pre-session meeting “Sharing the Care: Collaborative Preservation Approaches” is a new joint session held between AIC CCN and the International Association of Museum Facility Administrators. This exciting session has four focus areas: collaboration in risk management, emergency preparedness, environmental guidelines, and selecting fire suppression systems. Working together with our facilities colleagues is crucial to building good working partnerships and the session is structured with several interactive opportunities, as well as the ever-important reception at the end of Day 1.

I’m speaking bright and early on Monday morning at 8:30am. Grab your coffee and come hear my session “Lighting a Fire: Initiating an Emergency Management Program at your Institution.” Getting an emergency program going and maintaining momentum can be the most difficult part of preparedness work. I’m discussing my experience at AIC-CAC’s Annual Meeting at Montreal. I’ll discuss creating a vision, recruiting allies, educating administrators, connecting with your community, asking for that budget line, and more.

And join the Collection Care Network for a great group of talks ranging from risk assessment, HVAC, vibrations from sound in exhibition design, archives management, preventive conservation, and much more.

See you in Montreal!

Survey for Collection Managers and Registrars about Developing a Preventive Conservation Major at Winterthur

As collection managers and registrars, we are charged with a wide array of responsibilities in administrating the balance between preservation and access for collections. Preventive conservation has grown expansively since the 1980s. With it came new technologies, new procedures, and new discussions about how staff should design and execute preservation procedures. And while many conservators are charged with the physical integrity of collections, most American programs did not start including preventive conservation training in their programs until the mid-1990s. The focus has been on treatment of specific materials, rather than the programs, risk assessment, planning, and management required of preventive conservation.

The Winterthur University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation is currently exploring developing a preventive conservation major. Wisely, they are looking to the potential colleagues of these preventive conservators to gauge what sorts of expertise are needed in the field. The following link takes you to a survey that will help them in their planning. The survey closed at 8pm EDT on Sunday, April 3, 2016.

Survey here.

Kimberley-Clark Safeskin Purple Nitrile Powder Free Exam gloves. Read my post on getting rid of white cotton gloves for museum use and switching to nitrile here.

Share the Care: AIC’s Collection Care Network and the International Association of Museum Facility Administrators Joint Meeting in Montreal, May 13-14, 2016 at AIC and CAC Annual Meeting

Think about it: how much time do you spend working with colleagues to achieve preservation-conducive conditions at your institution and managing expectations? How much of that work have you had to do on the fly? In the hall? At lunch? Looking at HVAC equipment, or over floodwaters? Wouldn’t you like to sit down and enjoy a day to focus on shared goals between conservation and facilities colleagues?

Join the American Institute for Conservation’s (AIC) Collection Care Network (CCN) and the International Association of Museum Facility Administrators (IAMFA) for a pre-session to the AIC/CAC Annual Meeting in Montreal, May 13-14. The session is entitled Share the Care, focusing on our shared efforts, risks, and responsibilities in the preservation of collections.

Each of four sessions will involve short presentations and an interactive session to get facilities and conservation voices talking about the issues they face in buildings bridges for preservation in their organizations. The sessions and speakers include:

Collaborative approaches to facilities construction, renovation, and operation: Lois Price, (Winterthur), John Castle (Winterthur), Jack Plumb(National Library of Scotland, Ret.), Deborah Potter (Tate)

Collaborative approaches to emergency management: Maryanne McCubbin (Museum Victoria), Laura Hortz Stanton (CCAHA), Nick Artim (Heritage Protection Group)

Collaborative approaches to achieving appropriate environmental guidelines: Jeremy Linden (IPI), Julian Bickersteth(International Conservation Services), Barry Knight(The British Library, Ret.), Michael Henry (Watson and Henry), and Smithsonian colleagues Nancy Bechtol, Catharine Hawks, Kendra Gastright, and Sarah Stauderman will present on the Smithsonian Preservation Environment Summit

Collaborative approaches to selecting fire suppression systems: Nick Artim, Heritage Protection Group, Israël Dubé-Marquis, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Carolyn Morgan, Bruce Peel Special Collections & Archives, Karen Potje, also of CCA, Ala Rekrut, Archives of Manitoba, and John Ward, Canadian Conservation Institute.

Registration is $140. To register, visit the AIC website at  http://www.conservation-us.org/annual-meeting/aic-iamfa-joint-seminar#.VuhYBVJqnwM.

The Brutal and the Beautiful New York State Museum

This weekend, Dr. V, Jake, and myself went up to Albany to visit the New York State Museum. We had the very good luck of running into Kate Weller, Chief of Museum Education, Visitor Services and Public Programs. She gave us all the information we needed to have a great day – and at the same time, she was managing a slew of events for the New York in Bloom event that day. Many thanks!

New York State Museum Cultural Education Center. RL Fifield Photo, 2016.

New York State Museum Cultural Education Center. RL Fifield Photo, 2016.

I had no previous knowledge of the museum, and was startled to find its white mass rising above the 19th-century residences between the interstate and the park.  That huge sparkling  structure rising above the park, that’s the NYSM? For all of the cheapening of architecture wrought in the sixties and seventies, poor interpretations of international and brutalist styles, I secretly loved this building. First, I was shocked that this entire huge building contained culture: museum, library, and archives. I love its outdated and yet hyper-modern late 1970s traffic signals underneath the stairs. I adore the glamorous terrace on the fourth floor with the incongruous 1895 carousel, surrounded by windows overlooking the city.

This Automat cabinet sits on the fourth floor near the carousel. New York State Museum. RL Fifield photo, 2016.

This Automat cabinet sits on the fourth floor near the carousel. Prune danish anyone? Graham bread? New York State Museum. RL Fifield photo, 2016.

It had been a few weeks since I’d gotten inside the doors of a museum, and I had no preconceived expectations. But the collections, architecture, and the mid-1970s installation blew me away. Yes! I liked the interior space and the old water fountains on a marble ledge, and the outdated display cases (which admittedly, are not preservation-supporting). Even as the museum prepares for the first major redesign of its galleries since 1976, I still adored the galleries in their current format. The galleries were full of people (it was an event weekend). Many stories were happening in the space, from Adirondack natural history, to the immigration experience, to mineralogical collections, to New York City mass transit, to 9-11. Yes, there are huge gaps in the interpretation. Yes, there is incorrect dress on the mannequins in outdated dioramas. Yes, the open platform layouts require huge amounts of maintenance that is not sustainable to staff or collections. No matter – I had a great time. Go and see the NYSM before it is renovated. It’s not that renovation is wrong, but that there is something to appreciate in that 1970s presentation.

City Beer Hall, Albany. RL Fifield Photo 2016.

City Beer Hall, Albany. RL Fifield Photo 2016.

It is no secret that Albany was wounded by shoving Empire State Plaza into its midst. During an era of urban depopulation, this project wiped clean neighborhoods, traditions, commerce, and community relationships. Today, the expanse still creates an impassable barrier in the city fabric.   Instead of the history that was, mid-century ideals created a space on 98 acres in downtown Albany in the vision of history neatly packaged and staged by hands of privilege. Read more personal stories of the 9,000 people displaced by the construction of Empire State Plaza at 98acresinalbany.com It is a thrill to see pockets of Albany rejuvenating itself, if not to the benefit of those displaced. We tracked down City Beer Hall – good food in an old city telephone building.

While we are at it, bring back passenger train service to downtown Albany! The station is there, and so are the tracks. Feed the city.

New York State Museum. https://www.nysm.nysed.gov 518-474-5877
Free admission, except for some special events. Tuesday – Sunday, 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM. Closed Mondays. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day.

 

The Genealogy of Privilege

I’ve been a fan of Henry Louis Gates’s programming since he launched African American Lives in 2006. In Gates’s programs, he introduces celebrities to their past through various documents and photographs.

For African-Americans whose family heritage has been obscured by slavery, identifying ancestors prior to Emancipation is difficult, if not impossible. Gates presents his guests with family trees and it is telling that white guests receive scrolls that are much larger and more detailed than those received by African-American guests. I understand how easily white guests like Bill Hader can amass 40 generations worth of ancestors. In my study of enslaved and indentured women in the late 18th century (more on it here), I’ve wrangled with newspapers, indentures, wills, inventories, account books, and personal correspondence. In most cases, a newspaper runaway advertisement is the only piece of documentary evidence that a servant woman existed.

White privilege facilitates discovery of family heritage. I know that even though many of my ancestors were financially poor,  their life events of birth, marriage, and death were recorded in legal documents because of they were white. My ancestors wore their heritage as adornment in displays of privilege at DAR and SAR meetings. Online resources quickly reveal that my 8th great-grandmother was tried for witchcraft at Salem and my 11th great-grandfather arrived as a child on the Mayflower.

For the families that emerged from the struggles of American slavery, identifying even one generation before Emancipation is a great triumph. Before 1870, the United States Census recorded those held in bondage by tick marks denoting age and sex, not by name. Documentary evidence often records enslaved persons’ heritage not as life events, but as commercial transactions.

There are current projects to restore the history of enslaved people. At the Virginia Historical Society, the Unknown No Longer project has created a database of the names of African-Americans documented in manuscripts in their collection. I performed an open search on the women in the database and the list of names is staggering. Charity, Moll, and Barbary, held by the Custis family. Phyllis, Betty, and Amey, held by the Bolling family. These are just a few of the names, a few of the lives that can now be studied through this resource. This is a good start to making this type of information in other collections available for study.

Privilege allows me to contribute personally to the work of rediscovering enslaved women and men within the historical record. Below are the names of people enslaved by my ancestors, or ages, where names were not indicated. These references come from wills, inventories, and the 1783 Maryland Assessment for the Revolutionary War. More funding to facilitate access to the information stored in wills, inventories, family papers, and other documents is needed to rebuild heritage obscured by American slavery.

Daniel Scott, d. 1724 Bengies Point, Baltimore County, Maryland (my 9th great-grandfather)

From his inventory:
To 1 Negro man Called Mingoe at                                              36.0.0
To 1 Negro man Called Sherry at                                                33.-.-
To 1 Negro wom Called Munsar? At                                           33.-.-

Gervace (Garvis) Gilbert, d. 1739, St. Georges (Old Spesutia), Baltimore County (now Harford), Maryland (my 8th great-grandfather)

From his inventory:
To 1 old Negro man at                                      15.0.0
To 1 negro woman at                                        22 [illegible]
[Illegible] line Negro                                       6.10.0

 

Richard Ruff d. 1733, St. Georges (Old Spesutia), Baltimore County (now Harford), Maryland (my 8th great-grandfather)

“Item my Will is that my Son Richard Ruff Shall have one Negro Boy Named Ratliffe he discounting Twenty Pounds out of his part of my Personal Estate.”

Sarah Peverell Ruff (Richard Ruff’s wife) d. 1749, St. Georges (Old Spesutia), Baltimore County (now Harford), Maryland (my 8th great-grandmother)

“Item I give and Bequeath unto my daughter Hannah Bull and unto her in forever my two Negro Slaves Jack and Pheby.”

Vestry House, Old Spesutia St. George's Episcopal Church. The Vestry House dates to 1766. The current church dates to 1850, but the congregation was the oldest in Maryland, founded in 1671. It ended worship services in 2012 due to low attendance. Photo: Maryland Historical Trust.

Vestry House, Old Spesutia St. George’s Episcopal Church. The Vestry House dates to 1766. The current church dates to 1850, but the congregation was the oldest in Maryland, founded in 1671. It ended worship services in 2012 due to low attendance. Photo: Maryland Historical Trust.

Henry Ruff, Ruffs Chance (Thomas Run, Harford County) (my 7th great-grandfather)

1783 Maryland Assessment (for funding the Revolutionary War)
1 Child under 8 $6
1 Child 8-14 $25
1 Male 14-45 $70
1 Female 16 to 36 $60

Thomas Run Church. Harford County, Maryland. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas Run Church. Harford County, Maryland. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

John Botts, Part Eightrip, Susquehanna Hundred (Harford County) (my 5th great grandfather)

1783 Maryland Assessment (for funding the Revolutionary War)
2 Children under 8 $3
1 Child 8-14 $25

 

Michael Gilbert (Harford County) (my 7th great grandfather)
1783 Maryland Assessment (for funding the Revolutionary War)
2 Children under 8 $35
2 Children 8-14
2 Male 14-45 $140
2 Female 16 to 36 $120

Micah Gilbert (Harford County) (my 8th great grandfather)

1783 Maryland Assessment (for funding the Revolutionary War)
3 Children under age 8 $35
2 Children 8-14

 

Get Ready! Snow in the Mid-Atlantic

Stay safe, stay warm, and make sure you’ve updated your emergency plan, whether at home, at work, or protecting our cultural heritage.

Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Bloc[K]Aded Cars On 23rd St., New York." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed January 21, 2016.

Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Bloc[K]Aded Cars On 23rd St., New York.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed January 21, 2016. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-289c-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Crafting an Elevator Pitch for Preservation

Originally published at rebeccafifieldpreservation.com.

If you’ve ever taken a management or marketing course, you’ve probably heard of the elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a short, 30-second statement about you, your business and goals, and what you can do for your potential client or employer. Recommendations for crafting such a statement include “make it about the audience” and “don’t use jargon or acronyms.”

We can also make elevator pitches for the preservation work we do.

Preservation professionals (that’s collection managers, conservators, registrars and others who oversee or heavily contribute to care of collections) can despair that colleagues don’t get the need for managed preservation systems in cultural heritage institutions. “But exhibitions/programming/keeping the doors open/day-to-day…” can be the reply to our suggestions for a better system for managing all the risk mitigation strategies we use to keep the Agents of Deterioration at bay. Our work can be described as “make-work.” I’ve even heard collection management called “a red herring” by the former director of of large art museum.

Could one of the problems be that we try to overwhelm our audiences with the bulk of work we do, rather than a concentrated pitch about preservation’s importance?

When a colleague or member of the public asks you to explain your profession (see my post The Crazy Things We Do for Cultural Heritage), do you start listing things? “Well I work with Facilities, Security, Conservation, I manage exhibition installation, I oversee maintenance of the galleries, construction projects impacting collections, integrated pest management, I manage documentation of the collection, I prepare objects for outgoing loans…” While this slew of activities may sound interesting and/or overwhelming to your audience, are you winning them over to the importance of collection care? Are you asking them to support or buy-in to systematic preservation management?

Probably not.

Why is it difficult, even for preservation practitioners, to distill the importance of their work? I have a few ideas:

  • Preservation takes place over a long time. While the average museum project has a 1-10 year life span (say, short-term object rotation to a long-term construction project), preservation’s time horizon is 200-500 years. Humans have difficulty grasping results and goals that are beyond their lifetimes. It’s difficult for us to show the consequence of skipping environmental monitoring this month, even if repeated temporary excursions may cause more rapid deterioration and impact future access.
  • When preservation is suitably managed, we don’t have anything to show for it. Great collection care maintains high levels of access to collections.
  • Collection care tasks are seemingly simple. When removing dust from a sculpture, how many times have you heard “Can you come do that for me at home?” What is not apparent within each single preservation task is how the application of the network of risk mitigation strategies counters a specific risk profile for that collection. Preservation doesn’t happen on a “here and there” basis.

So, what does an elevator pitch for preservation management sound like? What components should be included?

  • Consider audience for your pitch. Is your audience the president? Your registrar? Your curator? Your educator? A member of the public and potential supporter that sees you checking a datalogger in the gallery? What are your shared goals? What words and phrases help your pitch make that preservation “sell” to specific audiences? Organizational sustainability? Public outreach? Accountability? Reputation?
  • Think big picture and think about your organization’s mission. Don’t talk about laundry list of preservation activities, talk about the ongoing goal. “Preservation protects access to collections.” “Our preservation work prevents damage, lessens the need for conservation treatment, and makes collections more readily available for exhibitions, loans, and projects.” Or make it about what access to collections can mean. “A better preservation management system allows our collections to more readily inspire and educate our audience by lessening the need for expensive and time-consuming conservation treatment.”
  • Add a dimension that demonstrates the importance of differing segments of staff working together for a common good. “We strive to make practical preservation systems in partnership with our colleagues from across the museum. An inter-museum committee would help us make those connections more readily.”
  • Paint a picture if you can. Bring to mind an incident that will help your pitch’s audience visualize how your idea is better than the status quo. For example, “Remember the fire? An emergency response plan would help us recover and re-open more quickly.”

Do we have too much for an elevator pitch for better preservation systems? Let’s bring it together:

“A new preservation management system would help us mitigate the greatest risks to collections, facilitate exhibition preparation, and clearly prioritize preservation investment spending so we can achieve the greatest benefit for our audiences. This approach can support our sustainability initiatives and save money in conservation treatment for damage that could have been avoided. Existing preservation working relationships could work more effectively through a new preservation committee.”

Phew! This still needs streamlining. Then practice, practice, practice. Re-work it. Pitch it in the lunch room. Re-work it. The hallway. Re-work it. The staff meeting. You get the idea.

I’d love to hear your preservation elevator pitch!

The Crazy Things We Do for Cultural Heritage

I was at a children’s playgroup in Beacon, New York yesterday with my son. Yet again, I was trying to pull together in a coherent thread that thing I do. This challenge can be difficult among my cultural heritage peers, let alone a more generalist audience. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great to have one of those jobs where I could say “I’m a dentist!” and everyone would understand what I mean?

Preserving and celebrating cultural heritage is my dream job, but I realize that the vagaries in our job descriptions and the variety of tasks we manage can be mind-boggling. I’m currently working on a research project to explore how job descriptions within cultural heritage institutions support the development of our preservation staff and their preservation goals, or not. What are the requirements institutions ask of their collection management staff? What responsibilities are common? What are outliers? How has the rise of the title “collection manager” impacted other positions within the museum, library, or archive, especially curator and registrar?

I’ve collected 50 job descriptions. I’d love to get 50 more. If you perform collections management or care OR if you have “collections” in your title, I’d appreciate it if you’d share your job description with me by 1 February 2016. Please send to becky@rebeccafifieldpreservation.com.

I’d love to hear in the replies about the excellent and eccentric and mind-numbing tasks you’ve done in caring for collections and the organizations that house them. A few of mine are:

  • Positioned 600 pairs of black stockings and socks for photography
  • Gotten confused for the wax mannequin standing to my left
  • Vacuumed, vacuumed, vacuumed
  • Flew into JFK in the cockpit of an Air France freighter!
  • Wore corsetry of various time periods since I was 16
  • Shoveled snow
  • Served as a member of the NYC Office of Emergency Management Emergency Support Function committee
  • Stood for countless photos with visitors’ children while wearing historic dress (how many family photo albums have I appeared in?)
  • Visited almost 350 museums
  • Learned how to operate an aerial work platform (scissor lift) and got complimented by the construction workers on our site for my skill!
  • “There’s no crying in cargo!” [it was the other courier, not me!]
  • Built storage mounts for 100 hats, 25 corsets, dressed 150 mannequins and performed rapid condition surveys for over 10,000 textile and costume objects
  • Climbed onto the roof of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in NYC during a museum facility administrators meeting
  • Ate a Big Mac by the side of the highway in Belgium (thank you truckers, and I have to say, they taste a little bit better over there. Then again, I was jet lagged)

 

“Omelettes – Plain or with Rum”

What?

Where in culinary history did I miss the inclusion of rum in an omelet? New York Public Library announced recently the availability of thousands of their images in the public domain available for free and open use. A long-time fan of their What’s on the Menu? crowd-sourced transcription project, I found this Pullman Dining Car breakfast menu from the train carrying William McKinley’s body to rest after his assassination. Breakfast was so much more hearty in the 19th century. Pass on the wan cereal – I’ll have the mackerel or steak with mushrooms. As for the NYPL, their online digital records also have an “item timeline” which indicates when the object was generated, acquired, digitized, and accessed by the user. It’s kind of a fun, accessible way to indicate to the library’s audience how the collection is being used through time.

As for the rum omelette, it not only included rum, but was brought to the table flaming. Read this Gothamist article on rum omelettes. Seems a bit festive for a funeral train.

New York Public Library. 1901-2380.

New York Public Library. 1901-2380.

Apple of My Eye: Lead Pesticide Use in 1920s Orchards

Journal Kept by Hugh Ross Stephens of Havre de Grace, MD. The CEB on the cover are the initials of his employer, Charles Bryan, the owner of Mt. Pleasant Orchards in the early 20th century. Founded in 1755, the orchard was turned into a housing development around 2003.

Journal Kept by Hugh Ross Stephens of Havre de Grace, MD. The CEB on the cover are the initials of his employer, Charles Bryan, the owner of Mt. Pleasant Orchards in the early 20th century. Founded in 1755, the orchard was turned into a housing development around 2003.

Over the Christmas holiday, I unearthed a small journal with a heavily damaged tooled vegetable-tanned leather cover. Within were pre-printed dated pages with intermittent journal entries by my great-grandfather Hugh Ross Stephens, the Orchardist (according to the 1940 census) at Mt. Pleasant Orchards, near Havre de Grace. An architectural survey by the Maryland Historical Trust prior to the development of the property discusses the original 1755 house (rebuilt in 1907) and its 18th century terraced landscape, the tenant houses and buildings (in which my grandmother Gurnice was born) can be read here. The orchard was still in operation during my childhood. This document provides documentation of what was destroyed (with the exception of the 1907 house) when the property was developed into nondescript luxury residences in the early 2000s.

Stephens wasn’t a great diarist. Scattered over the pages are sporadic annotations recording pruning, visits to Baltimore, snowstorms, and bad weather. The entries begin in 1917 and sputter out in the 1960s.

For example, the page with the printed heading of January 8 was inscribed:

“1931 Sawing wood. Pruning in no 2-4 [ill.] rain
1932 At Jasper Berry funeral pruning 4 rows below road No. 1
Margaret 1948
HRS & Wife in York bought Wife’s Coat”

What caught my eye was his repeated entries akin to these:

March 29:
April 3:
“1929 Started prepink [sic] on Apples  3 B 40
10 Gal L[ime] Sulphur Siguiel
6 lb Lead 2 lb Kays”

On April 5:
“1930 finished delayed dormant with Sunoco.”

On April 6:
“1931
Finished East side of
back Orchard peaches
and Apples with
Kleanup 12 gal
Lime Sulphur 9 gal
Kleanup in tank”

The composition of the Sunoco (perhaps the “oil emulsion” HRS mentions occasionally), Kleanup, and the “pink spray” used on peaches and apples was cloaked by their proprietary names.

Lead Arsenate was used to deter cydia pomonella moths from damaging the apple crop from 1890 until 1950 (read an article from Virginia Tech on its use here). It’s replacement? DDT.

Orchard workers at Mt. Pleasant Orchard, near Havre de Grace, Maryland.

Orchard workers at Mt. Pleasant Orchard, near Havre de Grace, Maryland, c. 1915.