AIC Annual Meeting – Assessing Risks to Your Collection Workshop with Rob Waller

I was familiar with Rob Waller’s writings and work in the area of Risk Assessment and was excited to have the opportunity at the 2010 AIC annual meeting to take his workshop and learn at the feet of the master! I have worked with colleagues at a large institution that did go through the process and it was interesting to see what was involved and learn a bit about their findings. My own private practice is heavy in preventive care and I think that familiarity with these kinds of risk management tools can be very useful for institutions. I hoped that by taking the workshop I would someday be able to offer this as a service for small or mid-size institutional clients. In short, I wanted to really learn how to “do” a risk assessment.

After participant introductions and an overview of why an institution would do an assessment Rob introduced the basic elements of the program. We started first going over the ten agents of deterioration:

    Physical Forces

    Fire

    Water

    Criminals

    Pests

    Contaminants

    Light and UV radiation

    Incorrect temperature

    Incorrect relative humidity

    Dissociation (sometimes also called custodial neglect)

This breakdown is now well known in the field and many participants were comfortable with this.

Most of these risks can then be divided into three types:

    Type 1 – rare in frequency and catastrophic in severity

    Type 2 – sporadic in frequency and intermediate in severity

    Type 3 – constant in frequency and gradual/mild in severity

Groups of workshop participants brainstormed about specific risks, their potential outcomes and then categorized them by type which was a fun and dynamic exercise.

Next we began to learn how to “do the math”. Assessing the risk for a collection is done with the following basic formula:

The total magnitude of risk (MR) = the fraction of the collection susceptible (FS) x the loss in value (LV) if the risk should occur to its full extent x the Probability (P) of the event occurring x the Extent (E) of the event. Or, in short MR = FS x LV x P x E.

Rob had participants work on short exercises that helped us understand how to calculate each of these elements of the formula. Assessing what portion of a collection is susceptible to a particular risk seems straightforward until you get to a material you aren’t really expert in. It forces you to confront the boundaries of your own expertise which is always troublesome and interesting! Understanding how to calculate the loss in value is a bit harder. What kind of value – display, research? If you aren’t an entomologist can you make the determination for a collection of natural history specimens? If you are the curator can you determine how much value is lost when a watercolor is faded? Understanding how to compose a team to actually answer these questions in important in getting the work done.

There was an interesting discussion on what words mean when assessing the “P” probability of risk. What I mean when I say a specific risk is “rare, sporadic or constant” might be very different from my supervisor’s definition. When my supervisor presents my assessment that a certain risk might happen occasionally or sporadically to the Director did she mean the same thing? So Rob went over ways in which we can standardize our terminology when we talk about the frequency of occurrence of events. Finally Rob has us work on getting our heads around how to figure out “E” the extent of an occurrence.

Groups of participants were each given a shop in the convention center’s adjacent mall for which we were to do a mini-assessment. This exercise forced us to work as a team to put our fresh understanding of these terms into practice. We were glad that we had a calculator with us, but doing the math in the end was the easy part – figuring out the values for each category was challenging but, presumably easier with experience.

The workshop had a large number of Spanish and Portuguese participants and Amparro Rueda provided translation into Spanish. Clearly there is a good deal of interest in this topic in Central and South America. The need for translation slowed down the pace of the workshop but, in the end, that may have been an unexpected boon – allowing the English speaking participants time to take good notes and really absorb the content without being overwhelmed when too much is packed into too short a time.

Each participant received a handbook from Rob (who is now retired from the Canadian Museum of Nature and works through his new company Protect Heritage Corp). Along with great notes and off-prints, the packet contains exercises that I hope that I can find time to do to reinforce this new knowledge.

At the end of the day I asked Rob what an institution needs to have in place to make it a good candidate for doing a full collection risk assessment. He went over some of the attitudes, staffing and processes (e.g. like having a good collection inventory) that are basic requirements. At the end of the day I left thinking that many small institutions that I work with are far from needing a program like this, but that there should be a way to combine some of this more rigorous approach into simpler surveys. I may not be ready for conducting an assessment yet, but I look forward to gaining more experience and experimenting with some of the techniques in this important area of preventive care.

Rachael Perkins Arenstein