The most important thing for us as conservators is making sure the object is safe. That's the primary goal, and then beyond that, we want to make the objects as accessible as possible to researchers. My name is Jim Thurn, I'm a conservator here at the Library of Congress. My name is Annie Immediata, and I've been here a year and a half. (Jim Thurn) I've been here for about 11 years; I'm in the stabilization section. So we do some book treatments, we make a lot of protective housings for books and documents, and also a lot of three-dimensional objects like pre-Columbian objects and globes that we're housing today. This type of box we call a drop front box, because when you remove the lid, you'll see that the front drops down. The box itself is constructed out of corrugated archival material, and when we get into boxes of this size, they're far too large for us to make on our automatic box-making machine, and so we have to make them by hand. We have to make sure the materials are strong enough; they are carefully selected, they're meant to be inert so they don't chemically react with the globe, and they also have to perform their function in protecting the globe from physical damage. This is hexamount, this is a very lightweight rigid board that features a honeycomb material on the interior. And then on top of the hexamount, we place layers of ethafoam, these come in 40 inch long planks that are one inch thick and various widths, and then we try to form a nest that follows the contours of the globe as much as possible so that it's held securely in there. And then we line the ethafoam with sheets of valerafoam, this is quarter inch valerafoam, very soft surface, and then on top of that we place polyester bedding which is even softer, and the final thing that goes on over it all is this Tyvek sheeting. I think the general design of these is similar regardless of the object that we're housing. We've housed about 400 pre-Columbian objects, a lot of these are very small flasks and containers; and then there were quite a few, about a hundred medium size objects, and lately we've been housing larger objects that are more of this size. The advantage of the drop front box is that once you take the lid off, it gives you pretty good viewing of the globe and you can also pull the tray out and be able to look at other surfaces of the globe, so it helps minimize handling of the globe.