The five core documents are the foundation of a well-run museum, shaping its values, operations, and long-term success. They’re not just paperwork—they’re a museum’s playbook for making thoughtful decisions, ensuring stability, and staying true to its mission. With these documents in place, a museum can better educate its visitors, safeguard its collections for future generations, and remain a vital part of its community.

Each core document needs to meet the Core Standards, which outline the key elements every museum should include. Whether you’re drafting new documents or updating existing ones, it’s important to make sure they align with these standards and cover all the essential components.

The five core documents:

• Mission Statement
• Institutional Code of Ethics
• Strategic Institutional Plan
• Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Response Plan
• Collections Management Policy

Also, check out the Mastering Your Museum’s Core Documents Toolkit, available for purchase!

Join Julie Hart, Senior Director of Standards & Excellence for AAM, and Kelly Falcone-Hall, President & CEO, of the Western Reserve Historical Society, to learn about how the five core documents can help your museum reflect professional practices.

Transcript

Cecelia Walls:

Hello. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to Working Your Core: Core Documents that is.

I’m Cecelia Walls. I’m the assistant director of member resources here at the American Alliance. Of Museums. I’m joined today by Julie Hart and Kelly Falcon Hall.

They’ll introduce themselves in in just a moment but let me do a couple of quick housekeeping announcements. If you feel comfortable, please introduce yourself and where you’re from in the chat. You should see a conversation bubble icon on the right-hand side of your screen for that.

We also ask that you enter any question into the Q&A section on the right where there’s a question mark icon. That’s so we can keep track of and make sure that we get all of your questions answered.

And if you like or need to follow along with close captions, click the CC button at the bottom of your screen.

We are recording this webinar, and all registrants will have access until April 30. If you’re a member of AAM, you’ll also have access beyond that on our website.

Now, Julie, I’ll turn it over to you.

Julie Hart:

Thanks, Cecelia. We can go to the next slide.

So, I’m Julie Hart. I’m the senior director for standards and excellence here at AAM, and, the Core Documents, standards, ethics, Accreditation, the Museum Assessment Program, those type of things fall under my portfolio. And I am joined today by Kelly Falcone Hall, who is president and CEO of Western Reserve Historical Society. And I would like to point out a brand newly accredited museum as of last month. So, congratulations, Kelly.

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Thank you.

Julie Hart:

We can head off to the next slide.

So, today, we’re gonna go over what the court documents are, why you why you should care about them, why you should do them, talk a little bit about each one of them very briefly. We only have an hour. We could spend an hour on each one, so they’re gonna be high level, and really use this time to

hear from Kelly about kind of, like, some real-life experiences in creating them, using them, how they’ve been come in handy, and etcetera. Share some resources and tips for creating them, and we’ll, get some Q&A in there as well.

And I think as Cecelia said, drop your questions in the Q&A section in so to start with, we should talk about what are the five core documents, upfront, that’s your mission statement, an institutional code of ethics, strategic institutional plan, a disaster preparedness and emergency response plan, which just for shorthand, you’ll probably hear us just call it a disaster plan, but it’s got a lot more components and a collections management policy.

So, I, we call this dot this webinar Work Your Core. Kind of a little cheeky title, you know, because we feel that just as your core muscles in your body are critical for your stability, your strength, and your flexibility, the five core documents are likewise vital for your museum’s operational health.

They have been designated core documents because they are fundamental for professional museum operations, and they embody core museum values and practice. They codify decisions and actions that promote stability and viability, which in turn allows you to your museum to fulfill its educational role, preserve its collections, and preserve and tell its stories for future generations, and be an enduring part of your community. So, these documents are real fundamental things, the part of your infrastructure that are capturing some of your core raison d’etre, your core values, your core practices, around number of operational areas. And the core documents are an institutional ask I think I really want to reinforce that. They’re good risk management. Having them ready and current and ready to use when you’re faced with an unexpected, opportunity or crisis. Is invaluable. And codifying the museum’s policies plans, and values in these documents ensures that you have consistent decision making and informed decision making in practice.

Your actions and your decisions are drive driven by organizational mode motivation rather than a specific individual who may be in the certain role at a certain time or a certain department. They ensure accountability and transparency both internally and they’re are very important risk management tools, and I mean risk management, not just in terms of financial risk or physical risk, but also reputational risk. That is critical for your organization’s long-term viability. And adoption of these documents really puts you in line with field wide standards and professional practices. And I would also add, these are also the sort of key documents that when you apply for a grant, a funder’s gonna ask for or museums or a donor. These are the things that are really expected to be in place.

And these are just five documents, and we’d stick with five because, there are many documents that an institution should have. But we want to focus on five real fundamental ones to make it achievable, and sort of the basics and start here. And one of the things we’re trying to weave through this conversation today is some hallmarks of all of these documents that we’re gonna talk about is that they need to be current. They’re up to date. They’re approved. That they’re, they’re regularly reviewed. Not a one and done, put it on the shelf, and they’re being actively used.

And an important point that I hope we’ll come across is the process of creating these documents is just as important and sometimes even more important than the final result.

It’s the process of talking about internally what your values are, what your procedures are, what your policies are, what you stand for, how you’re gonna do something if x y z happens. And that is a critical piece of the puzzle with these documents. And the other thing I want you to keep in mind as we talk about these is these documents need to be tailored to your institution. There are lots of examples out there. There’s samples, templates, etcetera, and we totally encourage you to use those to help in inform your documents. But, when it comes down to it, you need to write a tailored document that’s relevant to your specific situation, your type of collections, where you physically are, what kind of physical buildings you have, etcetera. So, don’t just take the shortcut route. I said that’s kind of a bottom-line tip. Is, don’t just copy and paste.

Next slide.

I do want to mention that the court documents themselves are an intrinsic part of the continuum of excellence, and the continuum of excellence is a pathway of standards-based programs that help and help and motivate and recognize your museum and sort of help support its ability to fulfill its mission. You know, you may have heard of Accreditation or steps or MAP and things like that. They’re really underlying all these programs, and everything is a set of professional practices, the core standards, and the core documents. So, and I do want to just make one distinction you may have heard of something, and you’ll hear Kelly talk about this as well. She’s gonna mention core document verification.

That is a program that AM offers if you want to submit your documents for actual review and feedback and recognition by us. But regardless of that and regardless of if you want to be accredited or anything like that, every museum no matter what, needs to have these documents in place. For the reasons I mentioned before.

So now we’re gonna walk through each one of these in a little bit more detail. So, I want to, start it off by kicking this over to Kelly and, saying, you know, Kelly, you at the Western Reserve Historical Society, you have a lot it’s a big organization with, like, a lot of small museums kind of under one umbrella in some respect. You’ve got you know, cars, costumes. You’ve got historical sites. You’ve got historical buildings. You’ve got living history. You’ve got all kinds of stuff, and you’re spread out.

Across the state. So, could you just tell us a little bit about what was the initiator and motivator for you to start working on these core documents at the, at the museum?

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Yes. Thank you, Julie. And, just delighted to be here. Hello, everyone. You know, Accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums has been a long-standing objective. For our organization. We’re 58 years old this year, And, when I joined the organization, a long time ago in the nineteen nineties, I knew that the institution had been accredited at one time. And for one reason or another, we did not seek reaccreditation in the nineteen nineties. You it’s you’re up for it every ten years. So, so we have had this as an objective for all of the reasons, that Julie just explained, for many, many years. And I would say we probably elevated Accreditation as an institutional mandate, and I will use the use the word mandate in 2014 and 2015.

I participated in two AAM conferences both years. And, the organization, the staff and board leadership, and some of our volunteer leadership decided that we were going to do this, no matter how long it took. And even if we were never accredited, we just knew that the process would make us a better organization all around. So, we became acquainted with the process and understood that core document verification you know, is a required part along the continuum of excellence which, we took the pledge in well, we’re members. We’ve been members for a long time. Which is really critical. We made a decision to join at a certain level so that we could have access to a lot of the really amazing resources that AAM has to offer Julie mentioned, sample documents for example, from other accredited organizations. We took the pledge of excellence in 2022, and then we, were accepted into the core document verification program in 2023.

Julie Hart:

Great. And I know, because you also have a kind of a swath of different types of museums and collections, etcetera, and did you have any when you kind of embarked on this, were there any kind of challenges or issues right off the bat just in terms of kind of the encompassing scope of such a variety of things that you do and that you have.

And staff at a lot of places. Great. So, let’s take, a look at our first core document,

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Yes. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And, and I should mention, I know this isn’t a core document. And at the risk of sounding like commercial for the American Alliance of Museums, truly, you know, we for example, we have hundreds of thousands of items in our museum collections. We have seven properties. We have 39 historic buildings, which we, of course, consider part of the museum collection. We have millions of items in the library alone, photographs, papers, maps, atlases, slides, you know, you name it, So in 2016, we initiated the process, to do a MAP, a collection assessment MAP, the Museum Assessment Program. And I think that’s when we really, started to get serious.

Again, we knew the road to Accreditation would be a long one, but I think this is a good example. This was an excellent opportunity for us to not only inventory and assess our own collections, we brought peer reviewers in, from AAM. We got to know, one of AAM’s Accreditation officers, Danielle Rickard, almost ten years ago now. And so that was an excellent way to review, you know, the current policies and protocols, but also start to get everyone working toward the same goal and objective which can be challenging when you are a big old, and diverse organization like Western Reserve Historical Society.

Julie Hart:

And it’s actually not a document. It is it is your mission statement. So, I just want to point out before we talk about this as we go through the slides, the slides have just some key points and highlights of the required elements and something these things called required elements are, a set of a few bullet points for each one and you can go on AAM’s website and find the specific elements as they’re spelled out. And those required elements for each one are based on the core standards,

And, you know, they’re very kind of broad points that explain or state kind of what the scope of your plan should be or kind of what should be in it. It doesn’t get down to super prescriptive. They’re not super detailed. We’ll talk about at the end some resources if you really want to get, you know, the how to, the hands on, really get down into the weeds. So, the required elements are the key things. Like, if you send them a for a review or Accreditation, etcetera, we’re gonna be looking to make sure they have those specific things. But those are the, you know, if you know where to start, big picture, those are the key elements. Obviously, there’s a lot more that could be in these documents.

Besides the required elements, but those are the basics. So that’s why we want to have just a few things that sort of the minimums.

So, like I said, the first document is not a document. It’s exactly but it is your mission statement. And I’m sure all of you have one. I don’t know when the last time you looked at it is, but, hopefully, everybody can rattle off their mission statement just like that.

But really, the mission statement is what the museum does, and not just what it does, but who do you do it for, and why do you do it. And I think that’s really critical in a lot of mission statements we see. We just see the what. And not the who or the why. And, you know, it’s articulating what makes you different than everybody else, and it should really assert your educational and public service role. And, you know, everything is hanging off the mission at your north Star. That’s what you’re making decisions off of, and it’s all the core documents are really intertwined or interrelated, I should say. And mission statement is the one thing, obviously, that’s sort of connecting all of them.

And, of course, there are a a million as many museums there are, there’s many varieties of mission statements There’s a single template for it. There’s a matter of styles and approaches to that. And I would say, you know, this is a mission statement. It’s different than a vision statement or a tagline. Those things tend to be more malleable and flexible in changeable. Your mission is you know, you’re not changing it.

With every strategic plan, etcetera. It should really be an anchor for your institution.

So, we’ll talk about our next document, which is really a document. It is your strategic institutional plan or for shorthand strategic plan. So, your strategic plan is a mutually agreed upon vision of where the museum is going and what it wants to achieve and how it’s gonna get there.

Who’s gonna do it? When are you gonna do it? How do you know when you got there? What’s it gonna cost? How are you gonna get the money to do it? That kind of thing. It’s really about how you…what is your vision, and how have you articulated the needs of your audiences and your community you know, how are you gonna get the resources to fulfill this vision? And a comprehensive planning process that engages all relevant stakeholders inside and outside the organization is a key factor in this. And I think sometimes that’s what we see missing in a lot of plans that we review here at AAM is they’re very internally focused.

Rather than you know, it’s like, here’s what we decide we want to do rather than what is the community, and our audiences need for us to do and how should we, you know, balance that with some of the internal needs as well. And every institution just like mission statement, every institution’s plan is gonna look really different, based on you know, your organizational life cycle, your particular goals, if you’re going for a big new, expansion of operations, versus, hey. You know, we kinda just do status quo or, you know, whatever your vision is you’re it’s gonna sort of inform your plan and kind of how it really looks. But in the grand scheme of things, it needs to have the vision, not just the operational day to day, but really the big idea, how you’re gonna get there. It needs to be multiyear, obviously, aligned with your mission.

And a critical factor, which, again, another piece is often missing in plans we see is measures of success.

How are you gonna know when you when you got there? So, and oftentimes plans you know, there’s a big plan, the visionary piece, then there’s the operational piece that might be a separate thing that’s done on a yearly basis. As well. But that’s kind of been in the big picture of what we’re looking for strategic plans. But I want to ask you, Kelly, when you started your core document initiative, you already had a mission and strategic plan in place that you’ve told me about. And they were already approved. So, you didn’t do those from scratch.

And one of the required elements, as I mentioned, is that it’s not just written by the board or one staff or one department or just internally, but it really needs to be inclusive of your community and your external folks as well. So, how did you how did you manage this part when you did your plan, and what informed your process? Great. Thanks, Kelly. And I think know, kinda begin how I said the documents are all sort of connected together. Like a good mission statement, a solid strategic plan is a real touchstone to guide your decisions and keep the museum moving forward. So…

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Yeah. The strategic I mean, really, the strategic planning process, for WRHS really began in 02/2011 and 02/2012, and we did a new strategic plan in anticipation of our hundred and fiftieth anniversary, was in 2017.

At the time then, it was inclusive of the staff and the board. Our volunteers. We have a lot of auxiliaries and affinity groups all volunteer that affiliate with, you know, various areas of WRHS. So, there’s already a framework, if you will, for community engagement, but that still of itself is you know, also internal. There are, you know, auxiliaries that affiliate with our library, with Hale Farm and Village, which is one of our properties, the auto museum, etcetera. So, we did a MAP another MAP, earlier than the other collection MAP for community engagement and that really dovetailed with that strategic planning process. And I mentioned that, though it seems like it’s a long time ago, that was the basis and the foundation for really every three years. We have sort of gone back and initiated formal review of our strategic plan. We did one in 2015. We did another in 2018.

We had a few years of disruption, you know, like everyone during the pandemic years, if you will. But when we submitted the strategic plan to AAM, during the core document verification process, it came back with, it was graded. I guess, if you will. And it was so helpful you know, it had, you know, some of the required elements, and then some of the items that we didn’t have.

For example, how were we measuring success? Who all is involved with the plan, and you know, dozens of people, you know, so we needed to include that in the plan. And so, I think, again, going back, you know, fourteen you know, years or so now, we just we are in the practice of being inclusive. Again, it’s not just staff. It’s not just board. It’s, really a lot of different you know, community partners. We made a point of interviewing other museum directors, you know, people from the education community, people from other local historical societies and museums our own membership. By the way, your own membership is a really valuable resource for, getting feedback. And so, I’m not sure what more to say about the strategic plan. The mission statement we developed, during that initial strategic planning process. And again, every three years or so, we in our formal review, we take a look at that mission statement. To inspire people to discover the American experience by exploring the tangible history of Northeast Ohio. And we review it, and we sort of decide whether or not it’s still relevant, and we have to decided that it remains relevant, all these years later.

Julie Hart:

Know, you’re looking and think you re you know, you’re looking at your mission statement when you’re doing strategic planning. It’s like, is that really who we are and what we want to be and what we want to do? And, you know, you want to make sure that those are in line alignment because sometimes you decide you want to change direction, and maybe that mission is holding you back, or maybe you want to do it. So really the strategic plan has been taking the mission and bringing that to life in terms of, like, how we actually bring this mission statement to fruition. So, we’ll move on to our next document, which is an institutional code of ethics.

And this is so your mission statement is what you’re gonna do kinda how you’re gonna do it on the in the macro level of strategic plan is really kind of the specifics. How you’re gonna operationalize that that mission statement. Your institutional code of ethics plays another role kind of in this trifecta of those three documents is it is your statement of institutional values.

So that’s sort of like your moral and your center of the organization. It is putting forth your public trust and stewardship responsibilities of the museum as a museum. And how you do things. It is document that is also addressing individual behavior of sort of individual behavior and behavior of individuals on behalf of the organization, both governing authority, staff, and volunteers. And it talks about specific issues related to each one of those groups because they have, they may have there’s overarching ethical, issues to address for the organization and individual types as based on their role may have some additional ethical issues that you need to call out. And it is really encouraging the conduct and accountability that merits public confidence. This is a very important document, sort of, for the soul of your institution, and it’s really this is not

this is not a legal document. This is going this is ethics is beyond legal. And it’s not an HR it’s not an HR document in the sense that, you know, we you probably have, you know, a conflict of interest policy in your staff personnel policies about gifts and favors and this, that, and the other.

It it’s not that. It’s more than that. It is really the ethics for the organization as a whole and what it means to be a museum. So, I know, oh, I want to do add to is this is a single document not a mishmash and compilation of whole bunch of different things. We have at here, there, and everywhere, and it is tailored to your institution.

That is really critical. This is all of these, as I said, the process is so important, and the discussions that you have about your organization are important, but this this is really where it comes to four having the conversations about what is our organization really believe in, what do we stand for, how do we want to represent ourselves in terms of you know, our reputation and who we are so people can trust us, and we have a guiding document to make good ethical decisions internally.

So, Kelly, I know you created this document from scratch. Tell us about what the process was like again, any unexpected challenges or results, and how have you found it a useful tool both either externally or internally to guide behaviors or to be an edge educational tool or anything like that.

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Yeah. You know, as a as I mentioned before, a large and pretty diverse organization, we really didn’t have a single institutional code of ethics. We had ethical guidelines, certainly for our staff, and those, you know, were included more, like, in the employee handbook, which is more of the HR area. We have, you know, statement of expectations for board members, and there are ethical guidelines embedded in there. And then we have, you know, similar guidelines for our volunteer staff.

So, we really did start from scratch. Myself, I involved our HR director, our board chair, our executive committee, members of our staff, we even had our actually, our legal counsel, reviewed it and we created a single document, that as Julie stated, sort of goes beyond anything, you know, that was related to HR. But we wanted to make sure you know, we work with labor lawyers, and we wanted to make sure that that they felt that this was, you know, that we were compliant, you know, with laws and other things. And I did want to mention also, you know, there were areas that we actually hadn’t codified or written about, and we used, I don’t remember the exact title, but we used the AAM code of ethics for curators. That was developed a little while ago. We actually hadn’t we sort of allude to it in our collection management policy, which I know we’ll talk about. But we didn’t have anything specific to ethical guidelines for curators, and we wanted to make sure curators and also other museum staff, and we wanted to make sure that that was part of this institutional code of ethics, that it was codified. Because it really wasn’t prior to this.

I mean, again, just the process of you know, having all areas, again, and employees, board volunteer, and having people who are involved as employees, as board members, as volunteers involved in this process, really brought a cohesion. And a lot of buy in, you know, to the document. I always on the side of including lots of people. It might take a little bit longer than we like, but it’s very helpful when you are, again, trying to get our case, a large, pretty diverse organization. It’s like trying to move a barge, you know, get everybody moving in the same direction. And now people have a lot of ownership, and they’re very proud of the fact that we have an institutional code of ethics that truly reflects our core values, our mission, our core values, and, as Julie said, so critically important to you know, your reputation, which is really, paramount, you know, for organizations like ours.

I can think of probably, you know, even since 02/2023, when we created it and it was approved by the board of directors, were why I have used it. You know? I have pulled it out on a couple of situations with board members. Typically, for us, you know, ethical concerns typically arise when they are concerning collections, you know, items in our permanent collection and, the use or loan or you know, access to those items. So won’t get into specifics, but it certainly has been worthwhile, and it is something that we once we developed it and had it vetted and fully approved, by council and our board, it is now available on our website for anyone to look at.

Julie Hart:

It’s kind of like to me, I mentioned these are risk management documents. It’s kinda like your disaster plan. You know? It helps you decide or even your collections management policy. Should we something somebody offered us. Should we take it? I don’t know. Is it within the scope? Is it our within our policy? Etcetera? Same thing. Here is this an action we should take. Is this something we should do? It’s Your code of ethics can really be an important guide for informing your decisions. It’s not gonna tell you it’s like disaster plan. It doesn’t tell you every conceivable scenario that that’s gonna happen and what to do.

Same thing with this. It’s you’re setting your boundaries and your values to guide your decisions. And just to mention kinda reinforce this this idea of tailoring in the process, Kelly mentioned there’s an AM code of ethics for museums. It’s a very high-level Uber umbrella code of ethics, for the field, and it is a good place to start. It’s a good guide. There’s lots of examples and samples and other associations, maybe your discipline specific, your history of ASLH has a code of ethics for its members, the Association of Art Museum Directors, many, many different codes of ethics out there. On the AM’s website, you could find a list of probably at least a dozen of them important to look at.

Again, look at those. Take those into consideration. Maybe reference those in your code of ethics. As, another tool. But you can’t just take the AM code of ethics from our website and put your name in and say we ascribe to this. That defeats the purpose. That is a shortcut defeats the purpose of the of the process of doing this, and you’re not get the same value out of it in terms of your end product.

So, we’ll move on to collections management policy. So, this is kind of where we’re moving into this one and the next one very different. They’re much more operational and often sometimes may have a little bit more procedural stuff in this. So, it’s more gets down to a little bit more operational detail versus the three we just talked about are these very high-level big picture things, to guide the institution. This one kind of goes the next step. It’s gonna have a bit more operational detail in it, but still big picture.

So, really, your CMP is explaining how you care for your collections and how you make them available. And it’s gonna detail the scope of your collections, the categories of your collections, how you document them, how you use them, how you care for them, You know, it’s got your policies and your, maybe some procedures that might be in another document. Really, your core policies for things you take in, acquiring or accessioning, acquisition, then things leaving the museum, deaccessioning, disposal, loans, borrowing, kind of all of those things. You know? What are your policies? Who’s involved in making those decisions? Kind of what’s the chain of command of all that kind of thing? And particularly if you have different types of collections, what are the different care requirements and needs and approaches for different types of collections. Educational collection, hands on, very different needs and practices than maybe your permanent accession collection. And tying this back to the ethics code, your ethics code is gonna address some collections issues ethical issues in it, but so is your collections management policy, and they need to be the same statements in there, particularly about the use of funds from the sale of deaccessioned items. That is a critical thing.

That’s sort of a documents are never gonna pass our review if they don’t have it, because that is an issue that, as you know, comes up in the field over and over, and it’s very important. It is one of the most critical ethical issues in the field that we see is making decisions about how to responsibly deaccession, disposal, and then use the funds if you choose to sell them.

Again, this is one of those documents that should be created not just by the registrar or the, you know, curatorial department, that type of thing. You need to involve more people. And like I said before, it’s not a these aren’t a one and done. You have to regularly review these types of documents, And I know, Kelly, we had talked to you told me you told me a little bit about who was involved, kind of maybe surprising, involvement in terms of this document on your end. Could you talk about who was involved and kind of how you strategically use this document?

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Yes. This document has been in place our organization for a long time. You know, we’re a collecting organization. We’ve been around for you know, well over a hundred years. We have a board level collections committee. It’s actually collections and library committee. So, it’s a governance committee that has a board level committee that has governance and oversight over all collections. And so, the creation of the collection management policy initially was with that committee sometime in the nineteen nineties. It’s the first to date we see on the current, policy. It gets updated every three years.

Now the process to update it and review it is initiated by the staff. We have a chief curator, so this falls under his purview. We have a collection management team, and that’s the group that is the initially, the decision-making body its staff driven, and it includes myself, the president and CEO and chief curator, our library director who has oversight of library collections, registrars or you know, obviously involved. We have people from education and public programming involved. Really, the only two areas of the institution who wouldn’t be involved with, you know, determining what comes into the permanent collection or what leaves if we’re de deaccessioning, is our chief financial officer and our, development director, kind of back to, you know, those ethical concerns. There could be ethical concerns there.

So, there are a lot of people involved at our organization at different levels of the organization, staff and board, and I think I I also wanted to mention, in the you know, we review every three years. So, the last time probably the time before, we updated the collection management policy, was kind of on the heels of the collection assessment program we did back in 2016 and 2017. And we used the AAM, direct care of collections. There was a white paper that was done several years ago. And we literally verbatim, we did cut and paste the language from that document into our own collection policy, and we provided a footnote that we used the AAM Direct Care of Collections white paper because it is so critically important, for organizations like ours to, be using the proceeds from the sale of deaccessioned items from the permanent collection for the direct care of collection And there is no, it’s not an always a black and white answer, but it comes with the matrix. And we use the matrix today. We’ve been using it for several years, when we make decisions. So again, you know, the who, really everyone, and, you know, again, in our organization, I am involved with this.

We’re large in that we’re sort of expansive and far reaching. But we’re not so big that the president and CEO wouldn’t be involved, you know, in in making decisions and helping to advance our collection stewardship program. We’re only about a $6,000,000 operating budget. As Julie said, that may be different for every organization, and you have to tailor it for what works best for you. In our case, we felt that it would be important for leadership to be involved, because sometimes as you all probably know, donors, prospective donors will reach out directly to, you know, whoever is in charge Anyway, so, Julie, I think I answered your question. The chair of our collections committee is

Julie Hart:

Yeah. Great. And I know you had mentioned that, in terms of sort of implementing these documents.

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

…very involved with the staff, in in our collection stewardship program. She was, very involved when we did our, when we submitted the collection management policy to AAM during core document verification. She’s a member of the board executive committee, and having her involvement and her ownership in this policy really helped us present it to the board and have it approved again in, 2023.

Julie Hart:

You, Toby, you have a some you created some protocols too in terms of to drive the policy sort of two checks and balances for the policy. Is that right? Can you say a little bit about that?

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

We did. Yes. Through the Core Document Verification process and the last updating of this policy, we wanted to make sure policies are great, but how can you ensure that the organization is compliant with the policy? So, we created separate written protocols for, incoming and outgoing loans. Also, for accessioning and deaccessioning activities, And we also have one for just relocating items within the organization. So, if we move a painting out of painting storage and we exhibit it or we hang it, you know, else in the museum, there needs to be a process for that so that for example, even someone from the curatorial staff can’t just move something. There’s a process for it. And our collection management team meets, every other week, and we review, again, incoming, outgoing loans, again, accessions and deaccessions, obviously. But you know, oh, so, we want to move a vehicle out of storage, and we’re gonna put it on the floor of the Crawford Museum, we know about that. So, there’s checks and balances. There’s quality control. So those are addended to the collection management policy.

And it’s worked pretty well, so far.

Julie Hart:

Great.

Great. And also, kinda just jumping back to code of ethics a second in terms of kind of how you’ve used it or implemented it. Like the examples you did for the CMP. You had a situation recently when you had to kinda whip out the code of ethics and use it kind of as an educational tool to sort of gently guide some behavior. Is that right? For the maybe the volunteers?

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

We did. We absolutely did. So, I mentioned earlier, we have all of these affinity groups and auxiliaries that affiliate with, you know we’ve got a carousel and a car museum, and we’ve got a living history museum and a clothing collection. And we were having a meeting, with, it was staff and members of, one of our auxiliary groups. And, you know, sometimes when you talk about resources, in this case, we were talking about budget, allocations, we’re a single organization and you know, if you love the carousel, for example, you might think that all of the resources should go to the carousel. And so sometimes discussions about budget and resources can get a little heated. And one of our volunteers, was, really grilling our chief financial officer and after an appropriate amount of time, I waited, and I decided to get out our, code of ethics and our code of conduct. And I and I had to reference that. In the meeting. And, fortunately, the person who was really not behaving in an appropriate way, apologized. And is still with us. This is, three years ago. So, you know, it worked. And so, it’s good to have these policies guiding all of these areas of the institution probably only someone like me could have said, look. You know, we’ve this code of ethics. You’re a volunteer. We appreciate you, but you can’t treat our employees like this. She’s still with us today. So, you know, it all worked out in the end.

Julie Hart:

Great. So, our last document we’re going to talk about is the Disaster Preparedness and Emergency response plan, or just for short, emergency plan. And, you know, as you can tell the, by the title, it is, of course, a document that helps manage risk and damage to people, facilities, and collections from disasters. And I want to reinforce people, facilities, and collections, all three of those things. And, you know, in some ways and it’s really a three-part document. It’s got preparing, responding, and recovering. And when we say the word disaster, most people think, oh, it’s like fire, flood, natural disaster. That kind of thing. But it really encompasses all forms of emergency disaster. That could be natural disaster, mechanical disaster, biological, human. You know, there was a pandemic and things like that. There’s civil unrest and disturbances. Things break. And I would say it should cover again, sometimes we see documents, and it’s really just focusing on the big natural disasters. Those are less likely to happen, more statistically, what’s more likely to happen is the little things. So, it should be it’s you know, the pipe burst, and something got flooded, drain backed up, basement flooded, collections, storage flooded, that kind of thing. It’s these day-to-day operational things that sometimes can be the biggest risk and have the biggest impact and they’re much more likely to happen than a hurricane or tornado or things like that.

So really kind of making sure you’re thinking big and small. And I want to just reinforce about this that this is a, again, it’s not just about what to do in the in the event of emergency.

That’s part of it, but it’s preparing so you’re ready to respond, how you’re gonna respond, and how you’re gonna recover, particularly recover the collections, you know, you’ve got it’s really more than just an evacuation plan. Really got to be very tailored, specifically if you have lots of different buildings lots of different kinds of collections. Know, you may have staff spread over a lot of places. You know, it’s this is where you’re gonna get a very a document that’s very detailed, and it’s this this is one that’s gonna be updated much more frequently.

And I know Kelly has a great story about how their emergency plans saved the day. So, I’m gonna turn it over to you, Kelly.

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Oh my gosh. And yes, you know, we could talk only about the disaster plan for an entire hour or maybe even you know, half of the day. So, I think I will briefly say, you know, we did have safety, you know, emergency disaster plans. For our various sites and divisions. And AAM requires correctly

a single disaster preparedness plan. I’ll just call it that for shorthand. So, we really had the process to consult consolidate became an exhaustive review of the various disaster plans for the different areas, which, again, turned out to save the day because we reached out to experts in the field. And I’ll give you a quick example. We, we’re updating our disaster planning and response for the library. And so, for our archival collections in particular. And, after speaking with, an organization called Northeast Document, Preservation, it may have not gotten the name exactly right, but that organization strongly recommended that we add BELFOR property restoration to our list of vendors. And contractors. So, you should have that list ready to go. You know? Something will happen. You need to have do you need to know who you’re gonna call? You know, your insurance company, your board chair, And in our case, we had a fire in September, and we got a call that we had a fire in the lower level of our library, which is a four story. It’s a massive building. Again, millions of items. And know, this is a disaster for us. Unfortunately, the smoke and the soot spread to all four levels of the library, within, you know, an hour we had the disaster plan out.

We had our emergency response team assembled. We had reestablished our headquarters. All of these things we had just recently, added and updated in our disaster plan. It had also just recently been verified. By AAM, literally within two weeks of the fire. So, unfortunately, I had to get this document out.

The morning of 09/28/2023 and do all of these things, but it was fresh. It was recently updated. We knew exactly who to call, We knew exactly what to do. We knew that the 29 boxes in the lower level of our library that had taken on water.

Knew exactly what to do with them. We had a freezer truck in our parking lot within twenty-four hours, and these documents were there. And, again, I won’t get into why that is so important, but the in the end of the day, we did not lose one item.

Not one book, not one piece of paper, as a result. And you can call up BELFOR and ask them. They credit the fact that we have a good disaster plan and speedy I know. Thank you. And speedy response again, you know, it was it certainly the most horrible thing that has happened during my time with WRHS, and probably the worst disaster in our history and we have come out of it. Now we’re on the other side. Eighteen months later, the library’s been fully restored. The documents have all been, you know, cleaned, processed, you know, deodorized, reboxed. Again, I won’t go on and on, but this safety disaster and emergency, plan, which is what we call it, literally saved the day.

I can’t say enough about it. And, again, whether you’re going through the Accreditation process or not or whether you’re even having your core documents verified, this is a critical document. We use sample documents. I read dozens of disaster plans that were available are available on AAM website.

And looked at the disaster plan for a museum that I had, reviewed that was up for reaccreditation in 2023. They had been through some really horrible natural disasters. So, can’t say enough about it, but I will stop there because I know that we’re short on time. Thank you, Julie. I mean, again, really encourage you to join AAM. Get involved, use the resources as Julie mentioned, here they all are. I mean, we use them exhaustively. We still use them. We went through core document verification. We were we are recently accredited. We’re thrilled about that. We do use the sample document library and other resources all the time. A relationship with the American Alliance of Museum staff has been just vital to our work even not related to core document verification or Accreditation, I picked up the phone in 2020 and called and said, we’re closed down. And we are

Julie Hart:

Great. Thanks, Kelly. So, you know, we’ve talked about all these documents. And, again, we’ll share a few kind of wrap up tips and resources. But you know, again, it’s five documents. They’re you know, you don’t want to take shortcuts. They do take time to create, to think through, to go through an approval process with the board or the governing authority, who’s ever approving these types of things. So, you it does take time, and it does take energy and effort I think it’s well worth the result. Like, you know, you don’t want to, like, where is that disaster plan when the building’s on fire? Like, oh, dust it off. Like, who to have Oh, here’s a list of names in here. Half these staff don’t work here anymore, etcetera. So, it is something, it’s an intuition an institutional investment in time to do these.

But it will pay off for you. And so, we can move to the slide with some tips and resources. And, again, where to start? Pick you know, do what start with the ones that you already have and go through and review them. Make yourself a timeline. Put this in your sort of strategic priorities. To do these. It’s good to look at them if you have them all kind of as a whole to make sure that they are in alignment with one another.

It’s really up to you as to where to start. And if though, I would say, make sure you have a solid mission because everything’s gonna flow from that of course. And they’re all might be on a slightly different timeline for review and that kind of thing, because you know, disaster plan you should, you know, look at it every six months. Or more often, your strategic plan, you’re only, you know, doing that every three to five years, that kind of thing. So, it’s different for every document. And how you want to tackle it is, really up to you in terms of where your capacity is and which ones you already have or maybe you have already started, or which are the oldest. But in the grand scheme of things, take a look at the AAM Website, if you type in the search bar core documents, you’re gonna come up with a lot of great resource. One is the list of required elements.

If you want to go, there’s a nice blog, what to expect from the Core Documents Verification process written from somebody who was running a field services office in so worked with a lot of smaller history organizations. And an article on how my small dot can, small museum handle Core Documents and one of those was also written by the Japanese French of Garden, a very small garden in San Diego.

And we also have obviously, you’ve heard about sample documents and tier three membership as being required for that.

But we have something called the mastering your Core Documents Toolkit, and I would highly recommend everybody look into a acquiring a copy of that. It is a fantastic tool It’s gonna walk you through the what and why and how of every document. It has activities. It has examples. It has a sort of an action plan for you to help organize this process for you. So, my number one tip is to get the Core Documents toolkit. And, Kelly, I want to hear from you kinda what any wrap up, general guidance tips and resources that you want to reinforce.

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Not wanting to lose everyone. And what type of work, you know, what types of things can we be doing during these, mandated closures? Sign up to be a peer reviewer. The

the lessons that we learned from each other, when we are visiting, you know, other organizations like ours, they are invaluable. Cannot, emphasize that enough. And, again, even if you know, even if you’re not seeking Accreditation, or going through, you know, formal program, all of this just makes the organization better and stronger, even if we were never accredited. We are a far better organization today than we were even ten years ago.

So, I think those we those are the items that I would say, you know, Kelly’s tips, and really appreciate the opportunity to share all of this with you today.

Julie Hart:

Thanks, Kelly. So, in the bottom line, while we’re an investment of time and resources?

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Absolutely. I absolutely. Hey.

Julie Hart:

Great. I’m sure your insurer loves, the fact that you have a good disaster plan too. That that counts.

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Everyone loves it. And by the way, we really truly do tell this story to, people. Anyone who will listen, we say, you know, you have to know you have to know who your insurance provider is. You need to know what level of insurance you have for your organization. You need to be reviewing these items, you know, at least annually. I especially as leaders, you know, of these organizations, it’s not like, oh, that’s well, we have people who do that or someone else does that. It’s just I I can’t say it enough.

And, again, unfortunately, we had our own event that really just brought this all home for us. And thank goodness we had this this document, especially.

Julie Hart:

Right. Because it could’ve had a major like, this is something that could have had an, obviously, a very major financial impact on the institution. And I think it’s the same way with code of ethics. You do something maybe not a good move or something, and you your reputation takes a hit.

That has financial implications for your organization. So, all of these, that’s why I kinda talk about it. It’s a package of documents that really help you manage risk for your institution. And financial risk, reputational risk, and actual physical risk to physical things and places and people. So, protect your assets, essentially.

And we, are there any questions in the chat that we should go back to Cecelia.

Cecelia Walls:

Hi. Yes. We have quite a few, but I’ll try to consolidate a couple of them.

There are a couple of people asking about museums that are under more complicated governance structures, university museums or parent organizations of the same. How would you recommend writing and approving the core documents for those type of institutions that maybe don’t’ have their own strategic plans or codes of ethics?

Julie Hart:

Okay.

Right. Very good question. Something we get here all the time. Is it you can’t just say, oh, we you know, oh, our parent has one. You have your own building, so you have a disaster plan for your specific thing. Your university may have an overarching disaster plan. Or your university has an overarching strategic plan.

You need to have your own version of that or a subset of that ties into the larger plan. And you need to involve kind of concurrently or conversely you need to involve your parent organizations, maybe facilities department or team, etcetera. So, you need to mesh them together. You need to have your own sort of version of it that does tie into and support the larger one.

Cecelia Walls:

Great. Thank you.

Also, how often can or should the core documents be verified? If they’ve already been verified, do they need to be reverified when they’re updated?

Julie Hart:

Sure. If you go through the Core Document Verification process, it is good for five years. So, if you don’t if you do not take the step to become accredited, you do that process you have we have to rereview them every year. I’m sorry. Every five years. But if you move on to become accredited, that review process gets baked into the Accreditation process. So, it’ll happen when you go through reaccreditation each time, every ten years.

Cecelia Walls:

Awesome. There are some folks that are having a hard time getting buy in from leadership on a couple of the documents. Any, suggestions to help nudge them through that process?

Julie Hart:

Kelly, I’ll let you take that one.

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Yeah. I mean, I think, Julie, I think you nailed it. This is a this this is a package of core documents that it’s risk management for any organization of any size. And I think, if you participated in this webinar and you are trying to make a case for doing this.

You know, I don’t think anything speaks louder than that to leadership, whether it’s I don’t know if it’s staff leadership or board leadership in your in your cases, but you know, that’s ultimately you know, leadership has a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that this the vitality and the longevity and sustainability of all of our organizations.

We need these documents. You have, you know, the AAM saying that you should have them. So, I think make the case. Go to the, go to the website and, you know, create the argument for it if you need to.

Julie Hart:

Right. And then when it comes down to some people only hear dollars and it’s the return on investment for doing these. There can be real dollar implications for not having them or not implementing them.

Cecelia Walls:

Exactly.

We do have a couple of more questions. If folks are willing to stay around. If not, feel free to reach out to Julie or myself. Our emails are available. You can contact the content@aam-us.org, and we’ll get them to the appropriate folks who need them.

But very quickly, any thoughts on combining a CMP and the procedures document that covers steps or procedures for donation letters, etcetera, like that? Do you combine the policies and procedures?

Julie Hart:

We tend to recommend not having too many specific procedures embedded in the collections management policy because every…those may be more changeable or if you make it a change or an edit or something, you don’t need you don’t want to send that to back through board review and all of that kind of stuff. So, I kinda recommend, having if you want to really drill down, have a complementary the procedures. That’s kind of my take on it.

Kelly mentioned she created the sort of a companion piece that kinda had some of that procedural stuff in there too. I mean, so you might have high level procedures. Like, again, if you’re gonna deaccession something who is involved and what’s the order and the chain of command and the kind of decisions that kind of stuff. But you don’t want to get into the weeds of you know, when you’re doing your inventory, you want to have policies like how often you do inventory, or are you doing a percentage or what however the practice you’re not gonna get into who’s doing it on what days and, you know, how this and what form, and, you know, that might be in something else.

Cecelia Walls:

Yeah. And the last question I think we can cover today is there any status update on an education core document?

Julie Hart:

Yep.

It is we are actually in the process of looking at all five of these core documents in terms of we want to provide put a inclusion and diversity lens on them just to as a matter of good practice. And so, we’re taking a look at all five of the documents and at the same time, we are wrapping up, putting in, looking at the draft that we have been considering for a while for the education core document. So maybe there might be a sixth-core document and what that looks like and what the rollout is. So, it is still in the mix.

Cecelia Walls:

Great. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Julie, and thank you, Kelly, for joining us today.

Thank you, all of you, for participating in the chat, and for attending this webinar. We look forward to hopefully seeing some of you in Los Angeles in May, for our Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. If you haven’t read here’s a link to that. Thank you, everyone, and have a great rest of your day.

Kelly Falcone-Hall:

Thank you.