2025 Webinar Archives

Would you like to care for Grandma’s grave? Does your historic site have a cemetery whose care has been assigned to you? Just love old cemeteries and want to do more? Then you have come to the right place. In this webinar we  will  discuss a wide range of cemetery care topics such as:

• How to get started with a historic cemetery
• Documentation and mapping tips
• If and when do you need GPR
• How do make maintenance decisions for your cemetery
• Basics for headstone cleaning

There are few repositories and archives that hold extensive collections of oral histories pertaining to people of color, let alone community stories that help tell more comprehensive stories, which speak to changes in the built environment or serve to reinforce cultural identity and collective memory. While some cultural institutions have made a concerted effort to develop collections that include histories of people of color, there remains a pressing need to strengthen archival collections by recording and preserving place-based, hyper-local, non-dominant oral narratives that can create a blueprint for understanding our shared history. This is especially true for those who work in small and mid-sized cultural institutions

This webinar offers insights from preservation professionals on the type of care work it takes to preserve our past using similar techniques as archivists.  By the end of the program attendees will learn techniques including: 

• How to build long-term relationships with residents and community partners to help redress urban inequities 
• A more holistic management approach to combat the misrepresentation of publics that have been historically excluded from traditional archival practice

Recent disasters across the country have presented small and mid-sized institutions with the unique challenges of not only dealing with health and safety for people but how to deal with the collection materials. During this special May Day 2025 webinar, participants will:

• Learn ways to protect volunteers, staff, and themselves
• Find out ways to properly dispose of items in their community
• Hear a case study from the 9/11 Memorial Museum for examples of health hazards associated with disaster response and recovered artifacts.

Providing a safe environment for collections is one of the key tenets of preservation. This is because temperature and moisture have a direct impact on the condition of collections. Cultural institutions are often advised to collect temperature and relative humidity data to monitor the environment. The collection phase of this process is easy. Managing the data and understanding what it is telling you about your spaces is more difficult. This webinar focuses on de-mystifying the process of environmental data collection and analysis. Topics covered include good, better, and best practices for setpoints, analysis software, and communicating findings with stakeholders.