 because we try and begin on time. And my name is Christine Hastorf, and I'm the director of ARF currently. So it's my great pleasure to be here today and to introduce this special ARF bag lunch, which is really a panel discussion. But first, I'd like to let you know, everybody that this today's event is being recorded and will be posted on YouTube. And to encourage questions live at the end where you'll be able to let us know and we'll call on you or you can leave a message in chat that you have a question or put your question there, but you can ask your own question today. And also that this might be added to the Berkeley Talks podcast. And so this is a bit more of a formal introduction than we normally do. Okay, so welcome to our archaeological research facility at Brown Bag Lunch here at UC Berkeley. ARF is a hub for archaeology on the UC Berkeley campus with a mission to encourage, facilitate, an expedite field and laboratory research conducted by archaeologists and related specialists engaged with the human past. The ARF provides annual grants and shared lab space to support faculty and graduate student research. We also host a long-standing weekly lecture series today and other special events throughout the year. And most recently, we are developing a local commuter field school to provide essential fieldwork experience to Bay Area Bay students underrepresented in the discipline of archaeology which will take place this summer. I'm speaking to you today from Berkeley, California the ancestral and unceded territory of the Chechenyo speaking Alone people, successors of the historic and sovereign Verona band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Alone people and that the ARF community inherits a history of archaeological scholarship that has disturbed Alone ancestors and erased living Alone people from the present and future of this land. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archaeological inheritance in support of Alone sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all American, native and indigenous peoples. Joining us today is a group of panelists from San Francisco State University across the Bay virtually who will be exploring the topic titled removing collector names from museum legacy collections, a case study and discussion of the global museum of San Francisco State and they will all be explaining all this to us today. But I'd like to welcome the panelists and briefly introduce each of them before they speak to you on this issue. First is Lucette Jimenez. She is an assistant professor in the museum studies program at the School of Art at San Francisco State University. The set is an Egyptologist, archeologist and museum professional who has conducted extensive archival research on archeological legacy collections of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. She's a Cal alumna with a PhD in Egyptian art and archeology from the department of Middle Eastern languages and cultures. The set is also an associate director of the museum archives and exhibits of the Abai Dose, I probably didn't say that right, Temple Paper Archives, ATPA project, a collective mission between UC Berkeley and the Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt where she conducts archival research to better understand provenience and provenance of museum collections of ancient Egyptian culture. Wonderful. Christine Fogarty, our second speaker is associate director of the global museum at San Francisco State University and lecturer in museum studies program in their museum studies program in the School of Art. Also at San Francisco State University, Christine is a museum professional and career educator, especially interested in informal learning pedagogies, cultural responsive teaching and engagement with underrepresented audiences. Edward Loupie is a professor and director of the museum studies program in the School of Art at San Francisco State University and interim director and chief curator of the global museum, we're gonna hear about today, also at San Francisco State University. Ed was formerly associate director of the Berkeley Natural History Museums and before that worked for the vice chancellor for research and the Phoebe Apperson-Hurst Museum of Anthropology. As recent research and professional development activities concern museum community interactions, collections based museum research and international museum professional training programs. Finally, Ed has been associated with ARF for more than 25 years. So we're happy to see you here. And the last person speaking today is Gina Capari, as she is a register of the Global Museum of San Francisco State University and lecturer in the museum studies program in the School of Art, also of San Francisco State University. Gina is cross-trained as a librarian and museum professional with perspectives in records, data, collections management and experience in facilities and risk management. So we've got quite a font of knowledge from these four speakers. It's very exciting to have you all speak about what you're working on, clearly linked to this global museum. So without further ado, I'm gonna turn this over to Lisette and thank you again for coming and speaking with us about this really clearly very engaging and important issue. Thank you, Christine for that introduction. Today I'm gonna be discussing removing collector names from museum legacy collections and specifically looking at a case study from the Global Museum of a collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities. And then the short presentation will be followed up with a discussion panel with my colleagues from SF State who work in the Global Museum. So museum legacy collections are comprised of archeological materials purchased from the antiquities market. The objects in these collections were often looted from their original archeological contexts or their provenience and sold by dealers to collectors without records or documentation noting their ownership history known as provenance. As Joseph Green has stated in his study of the legacy collections stewarded by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, quote, legacy collections were, are and always will be tainted to a certain extent by their origins, end quote. As museums accession to these collections, they were often formally and informally referred to by the names of their benefactors. And this naming process further entangled the legacies of the collector themselves with the colonial conditions in which the objects were looted and sold and perpetuated narratives of cultural heritage ownership rather than stewardship. Today we will advocate for the removing of the collector's names from the titles of museum legacy collections. And more specifically we'll discuss how the Sutro Egyptian collection stewarded by the Global Museum at S of State became known as the Egyptian collection. We will discuss the process of the name removal, steps that the Global Museum has taken to be more transparent about the colonial history of this collection and the ways the museum has increased accessibility to the collection. We will also outline possible steps that other institutions can take to address similar issues with legacy collections in their own care. At the end of this brief presentation we will continue our conversation with a discussion panel of Global Museum staff and new welcome questions from the audience. But first it's important to provide a brief history of the collection to help further contextualize this case study. The collection formerly known as the Sutro Egyptian collection was purchased by a wealthy European entrepreneur and book collector named Adolf Sutro in 1884 when he traveled to Egypt. Based on letters by Charles Edwin Wilbur and amateur American Egyptologist, we know that Sutro purchased the bulk of his collection during a trip to Luxor. The collection included approximately 700 objects including amulets, figurines, pottery from the pre-dynastic to Greco-Roman periods and several third intermediate period coffins dating to around the 22nd dynasty along with their mummified owners. The collection and mummified individuals were purchased from a prominent antiquities dealer named Mohamed Muhassab. Sutro shipped the collection back to San Francisco where it arrived in 1885 with great fanfare and public interest. The collection was stored in Sutro's personal warehouse along with other objects such as his notable book collection as you can see here on the picture on the left until it was transferred and displayed in the Sutro baths and museum complex in 1895 which you see here pictured on the right. There the collection was displayed in Sutro's Museum of the World until 1966. Eventually it was transferred to SF State in 1972 and has since been stewarded by the Museum Studies Program and Global Museum. The history of the collection especially during its period of display in the Sutro baths and the legacy of its collector played a factor in the decision to remove Sutro's name from its title. While conducting research into how the collection was displayed in the Sutro baths complex information about the baths and museum admission procedures revealed policies of segregation were in place in the 1890s. In 1897 an African-American man named John Harris went to the baths with a group of white friends. He was able to purchase a ticket that granted him general admission to the baths complex in addition to a bathing suit and use of changing rooms. However, as he requested a bathing suit to enter the complex he was denied access to the baths on account of his race. Mr. Harris filed a lawsuit against Adolf Sutro for being denied admissions to the bath. Since at that time in California a new civil rights law cut the Dibble Bill had declared that no railways, hotels, restaurants, barber shops, bath houses and other institutions licensed to serve the public shall discriminate against any well-behaved citizen no matter what his color. Harris won his civil suit against Sutro for discriminatory practices. Consequently it became clear to as a state museum studies faculty and staff that the legacy maintained by associating this collection of ancient Egyptian objects with Sutro who had displayed the collection in an institution with racist admissions practices was in opposition to the global museum's mission of serving as a place of collaboration with and among diverse communities and that encourages reflection about global society and our common humanity. When approaching changing the name of the collection we also considered how to achieve the mission's vision to be a place of learning that reflects and models highly ethical community and educationally focused museum practice that supports active visitor engagement with longstanding and newly emerging challenges and that fosters outward looking community involvement. An institution's mission and vision should be reflected in museum policy, collections care, exhibitions and educational public programming and we needed to readdress how the global museum stewardship of the Egyptian collection aligned with its vision. Likewise a major catalyst for actionable change occurred in the summer of 2020. The social justice Black Lives Matter movement and demonstrations of the summer resulted in many museums expressing solidarity and vowing to take action against racial injustice and inequality. Institutions were forced to confront their own historic legacies and complicity in perpetuating racism and oppression. Being aware of this reality, global museum staff and museum studies, faculty and students felt the need for actionable change on several fronts that included how we address and teach about the collections in our care and how exhibits and programming can be broadened to reflect a plurality of voices and perspectives. Consequently that fall a diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion advisory group of alumni who are working museum professionals and institutions around the country and who come from diverse backgrounds was formed. This newly formed group was created to help mentor current graduate students and to address DE AI in our exhibits and programming. The advisory group serves as a sounding board for ideas and changes implemented in the global museum and is currently helping students develop an online exhibit highlighting how people of color are disproportionately affected by pollution in the Bay Area. The coalescing of social justice movements, new research about the Egyptian collections provenance and Adolf Sutro's involvement in racial discrimination and longstanding ethical issues regarding colonialism and ownership of antiquities necessitated that we take direct action and officially remove Sutro's name from the collection. The DE AI advisory group supported this initiative and the museum decided to take this practice further and remove the names of all donors and collectors from all collections stewarded by the global museum. Collections are now known by object types and the regions from which they originate and not by the names of their collectors. In terms of removing collector names, this required both formal and informal corrections to be made across several platforms. First collector names needed to be removed from exhibitions which didn't prove to be too challenging since the global museum was already in the habit of not including donor and collector names on labels and museum didactics in the gallery. The name of the Egyptian collection and all other named legacy collections were also changed in our online database known as DEVA which is an open digital collection and our digital collection archive built and managed by San Francisco State University. Lastly, our registrar Gina Caprari made the necessary changes in our collections management system database and our storage facilities. This process has required several steps and I'm sure Gina will elaborate on this process in our discussion panel as well. One of the issues that the global museum had to consider when unnaming the Egyptian collection was to ensure that by removing Sutro's name from the collection, we would not obscure the colonial history of the collection and in essence become less transparent as an institution about the collections we steward. We recognize that collections are held in trust for the public and it's a primary responsibility of the global museum to safeguard this trust and foster institutional transparency. In an attempt to remain transparent all online and public resources where the Egyptian collection can be accessed address the provenance of the collection and provide context about how Sutro purchased and shipped the collection to San Francisco. What's significant about the name change is that now Sutro's name is not foregrounded when the public first encounters and learns about the Egyptian collection. Instead viewers are now encouraged to think about the history of the collection and explore the ancient significance of these objects rather than being confronted with the name of the man who bought the collection. Removing the name of a collector from a legacy collection does not have to mean that the museum is obfuscating the provenance of the collection. In the American Alliance of Museums, national standards and best practices for US museums standards for archeological material and ancient art are outlined for existing collections. AAM states that in order to advance further research, public trust and accountability, museums should make available the known ownership history of archeological material and ancient art in their collections and make serious efforts to allocate time and funding to conduct research on objects where provenance is incomplete or uncertain. We'd like to advance these standards a step further and argue that museums have an ethical and social responsibility to publicly and actively divulge the provenance of a collection to the communities they serve and that this can be accomplished through additional methods such as community outreach, local partnerships and reframing educational content. Through these additional efforts, more institutional transparency can be achieved. Formal title changes in print and online were relatively easy to accomplish, but what proved to be a bit more challenging was changing how faculty, staff, students and the public informally referred to the Egyptian collection. When someone accidentally refers to the collection as a sutro collection, we gently remind them that the collection has a new name and take the opportunity to engage in discussions about the name change and how we are addressing the legacy of this collection and problematic issues of ownership. However, due to COVID-19, the Global Museum Gallery has remained close to the public. As a result, the museum looked to create outside partnerships that would allow us to educate the public about the Egyptian collection and to remotely provide access to the collection as well. Museum study students, faculty and staff collaborated with the Western Neighborhoods Project, a local nonprofit San Francisco Historical Society. The Egyptian collections historical entanglements with Adolf Sutro and the Sutro Baths, which are situated in the Western neighborhoods, are of historical interest to this society. This proved to be an excellent opportunity to broaden our public outreach to new audiences, forge outside partnerships, and most importantly, discuss the provenance of the collection and encourage audiences to reflect on the ethics of stewarding a collection of antiquities. Over the past year, we participated in a podcast that explores Sutro's legacy as a collector, graduate students organized a virtual tour that provided both historical and ancient context for objects in this collection. And most recently, the Global Museum Partner to create a pop-up exhibit displaying several objects from the Egyptian collection and alongside historical objects from the Sutro Baths. The interpretive materials in this exhibit encouraged visitors to acknowledge Sutro's problematic past and reflect on the challenges of ethically stewarding this collection in the 21st century. Providing a space for reflection, inquiry, and community dialogue and these types of exhibits is instrumental to creating and sustaining public interest and trust. Overall, we acknowledge that this process of renaming a collection may not be feasible for some institutions due to stipulations and legal requirements on deeds of trust and or loan agreements that require names to remain unchanged or prominently displayed alongside objects and collections. And we're happy to discuss this further in the question and answer portion of our panel. In such cases though, we urge institutions to reevaluate the prominence and placement of these names and to examine how the legacies of the names accompanying these objects can create barriers or negative associations for visitors and the general public. We also recognize that the Global Museum is a small university museum and that the composition of these collections has allowed us to rename them in a manner that's suitable for our research, collections and database management and exhibitions. It may be more challenging for larger institutions with numerous collections coming from the same geographical location or culture to rename legacy collections. But perhaps this means that we need to reconsider how we categorize objects and collections within museums, which is a topic for future discussion. Currently, all donor-centric labels that have been used in the Global Museum's compact storage units for quick reference are now being reconsidered and replaced. This process of removing a collector's name from a collection is not impossible. It just requires critically engaging with the numbering and registration systems used to manage the collection and learning how to refer to a collection without privileging the name of the collector over the objects in the collection. Some of the actionable steps the Global Museum took and can be taken by other institutions include revising language for speaking about collections and objects that remove the idea of ownership. So for example, removing collector names or even reframing language. And instead of saying our collection refers to the collection or the collection stewarded by our institution. Making changes in databases and labels and all public materials and gently correcting people who reference the old name while encouraging discussion about why the name has been changed. Making information about the collection's history accessible to the public through interpretive materials in the museum and making sure docents are trained to discuss this information keeping in mind the institution's mission and goals. And lastly, collaborating and forging community partnerships by say forming a DEI advisory group or connecting with local community and organizations is another way to take a step in the right direction, hopefully. So in conclusion, the name change has been one step in the Global Museum's broader efforts to learn more about the provenance of the collection to contextualize the collection and to reflect on the museum's mission as an institution that fosters lifelong learning, collaboration with and among diverse communities and that encourages reflection about global society and our common humanity. The process and action of removing Adolf Sutro's name from the collection is not an erasure of his legacy or history. Instead, it's a way of actively confronting past social injustices and forging a future legacy. One that is more inclusive and self-reflective for the museum and the public. Thank you for listening. Now I'd like to open up the discussion to include our panelists from the Global Museum who will each talk about their involvement in the name removal process. So why don't we start with Professor Edward Luby? Great, thanks. I'm so glad to be here today and to be part of this panel discussion. I wanted to outline some of the practical aspects of the name change from the perspective of museum director and a chief curator and to supply some broader context in three main areas to help understand our actions here. The first area I'd like to share is that our approach to the name change is embedded in our dual role as a museum and as a training ground for emerging museum professionals through our master's degree program and our more recently developed undergraduate minor in museum studies. All the global museum staff is involved in training emerging museum professionals through classwork, internships, and independent studies. And we consistently emphasize self-reflective practice. In all our museum work, we ask, why do we do the things we do? We don't want to reproduce inherited practices without examining them. But to use the fact that we have a museum integrated with the museum studies program to develop leaders of the 21st century museum practice. Overall, we place students at the center of all we do and seek to make all activities be a learning opportunity for them. The second area I'd like to mention is to stress how much the museum sector has changed over the last 30 years. Museums have developed from being a place that emphasized collections to one that is a place of education and learning and more recently to a place of community. And if museums are a place of community, they must reflect and engage with the full range of diverse communities. This forces us to look critically at the troubled history of museums and just who has been represented in museum exhibitions and collections as part of communities. Now, when we look at the community and audiences of the global museum, we see that at SF State, we have one of the most diverse populations of undergraduates in the country with many first generation students. For some of our undergraduates, we even know that their visits to the global museum is their very first museum experience. We view this as a critically important trust responsibility. Many studies have shown the tremendous impact first time museum visits can have on visitors. Will this diverse community feel that what we are doing is relevant to them? Or will they leave feeling confused, unconnected or even marginalized? And museums that is safe to say are not viewed by many diverse communities as a place that welcomes them. So it's very important for the global museum not to explicitly or implicitly signal that museums are not a place for some groups. And for us, that includes thinking carefully about the necessity of including names of wealthy collectors on exhibit labels to de-emphasize the use of museum technical language such as catalog numbers and donor names and to ask why we need to continue to use the names of collectors throughout the museum. And the first two areas I've mentioned, global museum as a trading ground and the museum sectors move to community is tied to the third area, which is the history of colonialism in museums. Because of their colonial roots, museums have not been welcoming for a range of diverse communities, especially for certain cultural and ethnic groups and those with disabilities. As a result, we have been working to bring some of these communities into the museum. For example, we brought activists from the disabled community to assess our exhibits and we've done this in front of our students and heard some hard truths, which we all learn from. And as Professor Jimenez has mentioned, we have created a DEI advisory group that is developing an exhibit with focusing on environmental injustice affecting people of color in the Bay Area. So we are placing students in front and center as we address issues revolving around the colonial history of museums ones that are graduates will immediately encounter in their careers. So I hope to have placed the change of the name of the ancient Egyptian collection into a broader context here to emphasize that the global museum is integrated with museum studies to recognize that museums are places of community and to consider what that really means in practice and to stress the name change we are discussing today is an expression of self-reflective practice something that all museum professionals as well as all of us who are interested in museum legacy collections need to consider. Thank you. So perhaps next we will hear from Gina Capari. Hi there, thanks everyone for being here and thank you, Ed for that. I'm here to talk about kind of the practical aspects of decolonizing the museums on the back end of what we do when we're working with hands-on with collections, with data in registration in legacy records archives which can get pretty tricky very quickly but I think that when we think about the colonial legacy of museums what might spring to mind immediately is how we work within our educational goals how we interpret objects how we present them to the public how we work with the public but we also wanna think about when we're doing an initiative like this we wanna think about how we're doing it across all areas of the museum that includes the back end where we interact maybe not with the public but we have staff, volunteers, interns all number of content experts that we might invite into the database or share parts of the database with and that also needs to be a safe space for everyone interacting with our data and our storage rooms and everything like that our instructional documentation event. So when we think about kind of critically the back end of museums I think when we challenge ourselves to think about them we see very quickly that there are some the colonial legacy shows itself quite quickly and some of these like old numbering systems based on geographic regions that no longer exist are inaccurate or harmful references and even just in short names that we use to refer to objects. Even things like Professor Jimenez spoke about signage in storage facilities can evoke that name of Sutro over the source community that those objects represent. So, and we can talk about signage another time but I think that and I'm happy to answer any questions on that but I think that the database is really where this gets the hairiest especially when we know working with legacy records any information that we glean from those records any intellectual connection we can make between objects and those records is really like gold to us because we know that records record keeping practices have changed a lot and professionalized and they weren't always as intuitive as we hope they are now and so it's already a challenge to work with those and when we know that a name like Sutro Egyptian Collection is something that string of characters itself has intellectually grouped these objects together and is kind of represents a lead into investigating those records. We know that we wanna tread carefully when we work within the database but I think that if we get creative and resourceful there are actually some pretty simple ways to kind of resolve that overwhelming feeling of oh, we're standing on the precipice of data loss if we change a name of a collection and we do also want to acknowledge that that name is also baked into a legacy numbering system with the prefix SEC. So, if we look at something like the past perfect database one of the ways that we can address this and this is a years long project with many pilots in different areas of the database as well as physically on the ground in storage facilities and labels but one part of that process which we're kind of still strategizing about now is that past perfect main catalog record page, right? The first two fields are collection and object ID and what an opportunity to prioritize a source community in those two fields and de-prioritize maybe a harmful numbering system. There are areas on that same page much lower called collector field. That's a way we don't have to erase the name of course because we wanna be transparent about that provenance. There's a provenance field. There's also a custom field we've created called research notes where we pull in and quotes information from legacy records, from database, legacy databases that refer to that collection in different ways. We keep them in quotes. We source those, we cite those sources and so that it's very clear that that's language that was used in the past but it does give us leads and preserve those leads into further research into legacy records or records outside of our organization even like other libraries and things like that. So that's kind of an easy, not easy but a kind of a simple way when you think about it to really move that name Sutro down the page into these other fields, several other fields kind of leaving ourselves not just breadcrumbs but like loaves of bread along the way to preserve those intellectual connections but also re-prioritize other things about the collection. And there's been pilot processes from the first signage removal in 2015 which we documented and had its own challenges if you think about a public sign and a hallway and a university. We could talk about that all you want but also things like running a pilot of moving numbers in the database on 200 records of the ancient Egyptian collections and right now revising our strategy for how we find catalog records in the first place because now we're sort of in the middle of this pilot process and the database is not aligned or necessarily consistent as we go through this process. So now two interns are going through and piloting that. So really there are ways to address this challenge and we also find that whenever there's a social justice driven initiative that the ripple effects of course the social justice aspect is what we're prioritizing and what drives the process but we find too I think that the ripple effect it just improves everything the intuitiveness of how we work with collections even something like the signage saying sutro as a short name on the outside of the storage unit. That's a short name for me and maybe someone with institutional knowledge of the collection but a volunteer walking in or an undergrad student who may not be from San Francisco might see that name and that doesn't really signify anything to them intuitively as well. So something like ancient Egyptian collections also gives you a more accurate quick reference to what material might be in those trays or in that area why there's plastic there or what we should be looking out for in the facility in that area. And what the makers were most importantly who the makers were who the communities are represented in that area of the room. So yeah, so those are some of the practical nuts and bolts aspects of facilities and data that we had to address as well and have been in progress and we're looking forward to continuing. Hi everybody, I'm Christine I'm the Associate Director and I'm here to talk about the educational and curatorial efforts which if we think about what Professor Libby said in terms of the broad overview of the museum studies and what the museum is all about and then what Gina said about the back end and how we applied those decolonization practices to even our data. Well, on the front end that's what we do on the ground is literally create a bit of a third space in the global museum where our mission is all about community and ethically minded practice. Practically on the ground we want our visitors knowing that our audience is most likely first generation knowing that this is their probably first experience with the museum. We want it to be a place where visitors could feel welcome could feel comfortable and can engage in dialogue on exhibits and programings that we offer. Even if we're remote we still have those conversations and where that happens is on the ground training. So again, it falls into our philosophies that we wanna our learning objectives in the program some of the practices we do with our nuts and bolts that also infuses itself into how we train who we call our engagement specialists as opposed to docents because we want them to our students are these engagement specialists. We want them to be part of that process of connecting to those visitors when they come in and hopefully relating to them with shared experiences. Because our audience is reflective of the diversity of San Francisco. I think that's what we wanna do with our exhibits is to make our objects relevant even with the ancient Egyptian collection we wanna focus on the universal aspects of how ancient Egyptians lived. And also not to speak of them so much in the past even though these are ancient collections we wanna bring it up to the future and make it relevant to well this might have been a makeup palette or this might have been a bronze mirror but they're used for the same things if we were to think about how we use makeup and mirrors today, right? So they're not unlike what we do in the modern era and in terms of experiential in terms of our students and practice we wanna be able to develop through working on the ground in the way that we do to develop not just visual literacy of our objects but also a museum literacy as well as giving a platform to the makers communities and geographies that are represented in our collections. So we wanna make sure that we have those sort of starting points and jumping off points to connect to you with anyone who would come in the door. Now, how is it nuts and bolts in the gallery? Well, I think Professor Jimenez mentioned talking about language and making it accessible and we do that through our labels. So what we also did was kind of not privilege the collectors in that vein but rather we focus on the makers and the communities and what those objects meant to the communities because that's how you tap into that emotive factor of our visitor is like you're trying to find that common ground with that. So again, the training is really important with our students and we also wanna be able to model what we talk about in our classes. So this is a direct application of what we always talk about for 20th century museum skills but also 20th century life skills, right? There are the three C's that we wanna hit with our curriculum which is communication, critical thinking, collaboration and creativity. And of course, there's subsets to all of those which kind of lends itself nicely to how we approach our programming and also our curriculum that just happens to be part of the museum. And something else that I wanted to touch upon was also our outreach to the community by way of our DAAI advisors as well as the community partnerships that we've been able to start over the last two years. It's been a bit of trial and error but it's one of letting go of that sort of curatorial person being in charge of the message and actually sharing the creation of like the big idea or an objective for a learning program with some of the stakeholders that are represented in maybe the show that we're doing, right? So for example, we're doing a virtual program or exhibit on environmental injustice. And of course our DAAI community was central in helping to shape that but they also served as mentors to the students who are supporting the development of that as well. And now we're tackling on how to translate it onto the backend, the technological the tech side of that programming which is taking a little bit longer but still it's just making sure that all of our stakeholders, the students all of their iterations, their innovations are folded into the final version of what this exhibit will be. We've also worked with several groups on campus. So some of our, we focus mostly on liberal and creative arts but we have partners in the Longmore Institute on Disability really key partners who help us with accessibility in our own museum. Also Doc Film Institute which does wonderful short films and documentaries. We collaborate on them on a few site-specific films and also anthropology upstairs in our fine arts building. We do a lot of theme days with them when we were pre-COVID of course, archeology days, lecture series. We had a full range of programming before COVID that just kind of reintroduced the museum which we can talk about later too. It was dark for a long time but part of our re-engage with the community was also re-engaging with some of the departments who might have been affiliated with the collections over time. So bringing them through our programming, et cetera was also really key for us and still something that we still strive to do now. A current collaboration is going to be with the Ethnic Studies Department. We have a wonderful Vietnamese-American diaspora exhibit that's gonna come, we think in the fall right after we open our exhibit on environmental injustice. But that just happened kind of organically and naturally and super excited to see where that collaboration takes us. So a lot of it is just, for my end, is just creating those connections and sustaining them and making sure that the students are also part of that process because they can take those skills directly into their museum work when they graduate. So that's what education and curatorial efforts on the ground apply. Thank you. All right, well, thank you all very much, Lizette, Ed, Gina, and Christine for providing those perspectives for us. This is really an informative discussion that I think really shows the hard work, the challenges and the intricacies on the front public facing end, engagement with communities and also on the technical and back end side of the things involved in unnaming museum collections. So we really appreciate your sharing the processes and the thinking and community feedback and campus collaborations that are all going into this restructuring and making it transparent so others can learn from this case study that you've shared today. So thank you very much for joining us for that. We have some questions that have come in on the chat from the audience listening. So I'd like to just pose some of those to you to answer. So the first one is a listener who's asking if you've made any efforts so far to reach out to communities in Egypt and particularly in Luxor. Well, I'll start with that one and say that we haven't yet. We are monitoring what the community is interested in and we know it from the work of other museums are doing that this does not seem to be a big concern of the Egyptian community right now. That is not to say that we're not interested in reaching out to them. We have to make sure that we're ready, that we have the time to do it correctly and appropriately. So we're intruding into it and we're monitoring that. Okay, thanks. And related to that I guess is another question on a much more local level. Is does the Sutro family interact with you or are there any Sutros left in San Francisco to interact with? Again, I'll start with that one and please my colleagues and stuff in at any time here. We don't know of any connections with the Sutro family at all today. We have looked to see in the past and if someone from the Sutro family were to approach us to talk about this, we welcome that. That would be a wonderful opportunity for us to have a discussion with our students present about what the issues are and what their perspective is on this. Yeah, and when the collection was given to Professor Bakker Kelowna who was a professor in the Classics Department at SF State, it was the Sutro Baths Corporation at that point that was really overseeing everything. And when they gave the collection to SF State or transferred it over to SF State, really the only stipulation was that we studied the collection and we continued to study the collection. So I think that that means that we're able to pretty much continue to study it and the form that we see fit and that we think best suits the museum studies program. So yeah. Thanks, it relates to that. Another audience member has asked if the did the Sutro collection, was it the basis of the museum? Like can you give a little history of the museum's founding and let us know where it's housed and is it open just for student research or is it also open to the public? Well, the ancient Egyptian collection is sort of the core founding of the museum studies program. It came to the university as I think we heard in the 70s and it came into the possession of the university just before the fire that destroyed the Sutro Baths as well which is pretty dramatic. And then it ended up being the core of the newly developing museum studies program which began with one of the earliest museum studies programs at North America. And it began in the mid-70s and courses started to be offered in conjunction with the classics department. And then the ancient Egyptian collection was always used in teaching throughout the late 70s and the early 80s when the university decided that maybe we knew what was going on here, we knew what we were doing and they decided to create a museum studies program in 1987 and it continued to be an important part of museum studies. But the kinds of exhibits that were being done I would say it's fair were, let's say more traditional, death on the Nile kind of stuff. And those were important learning experiences as well. But when we created the global museum in around 2014, 2015, it was an opportunity for us to think about can we reframe this collection? Can we look at it differently and in fact all of our collections? And so I was tasked with coming up with a new mission and vision for a museum on the campus that would bring together many collections across the campus. So that's a, I answered part of that question I think with the history. So my colleagues here will help me out in answering the other parts I didn't get to. So I thought I'd talk about where we're located. We're actually located in the Fine Arts Building on the second floor, which is actually the main floor who come to the campus. It's just right in the inside of the ramp there. And it's one of a few sites in that building where we have our storage facility, collections preservation, our classroom, et cetera. And what's nice is that before in the old, as we call museum studies 1.0 we were housed in humanities and kind of in the back of the campus. But coming to the front of the campus and center, we have a little bit more fruit traffic from our communities that just walk by, especially with students. So that's where we're located in Fine Arts. And it's just been a really nice experience to be able to have some, even if we're closed, we still do get quite a bit of foot traffic. They're always looking in on the window and want to see what we're all about. But it's really cool to have this sort of interdisciplinary perspective with all of the other collections that we have which were consolidated from across the campus. So it came from places like anthropology. I think we have some stuff from theater and design. Really interesting media collection with like slide negatives. Like who has slide negatives now that have vinegar syndrome and other interesting things. So it's really cool to broaden the context of the Egyptian collection with other collections and really where it was in the past a little bit more focused on Egypt. And actually now our collections are more global which is fitting with our name. And I can talk a little bit about sitting in the collection. We welcome people to come and study the collection. In fact, we actually had a collaboration with Professor Rita Lugarelli from the formerly NES department now, milk department from the book of the dead in 3D project where we created 3D models of the coffins in our collection from the ancient Egyptian collection. And now those models are available online. So people are able to access them remotely which is also great. It's given people more access. You can actually download those models on Sketchfab too and can use them for educational purposes. So we welcome those kinds of collaborations, interdisciplinary collaborations to look at the collections, to study them and to create broader access. We're happy to have that. Thanks. Thinking about some of the other collections that you have there and unnaming those and listener is asking whether they're, if you took the same approach that you outlined for the Egyptian collection and applied that to the other collections as far as community engagement or any other stories you might share about working with those collections. Well, I would say that we're at the beginning of this process and that the ancient Egyptian collection is the collection that we are doing this most holistic and thoroughly with to begin with. It is our goal to work through all the other collections. But I think as we can see in this discussion today there's quite a lot of components to it and pieces. So in a way the ancient Egyptian collection changed here is a pilot study for how we can approach doing changes to the rest of the collection. And we do have issues that we're gonna need to address with some of the other collections which come from more contemporary communities. So as I said before, I am a firm believer if you're gonna engage with communities, you need to prepare. You need to prepare the people you work with, the people that you report to that there may be disagreements that museums haven't been places that are welcoming for some of these groups. It's going to be challenging work. We're up to it, but we're reflective I think and wanna make sure we're ready for it. I can even say another one of those nuts and bolts kind of practical things that we've done as well. And echoing professor Edward Louvy as well that it's all a pilot process for the rest of the collections and everything else. So it is like on the data side, we can apply the same procedures that we use in this collection and the database maybe to others in the future. But even one of the things that we've started to play around with the practice is again with signage, we have kind of a few pilot labels that we have sitting in the collections room that when it's appropriate, we might put up on the storage units and see what students think and get their feedback on are these labels intuitive, the ancient Egyptian collection or the food technology collection or and things like that. So, and then also ask for their input on our instructional documentation every time they work with it, there's a new perspective and fresh eyes where they can help me make edits to those or create something new and revise action plans and things. So, yeah, it is all to say that, yes, this is a huge pilot project for something larger, that's organization-wide, yeah. I just build on that a little bit and say, we're a smaller museum and so you can see we've got students who are really embedded and integrated in what we're doing and we're constantly interacting with them and asking them what they think based on what they're studying. But this could be a considerable challenge for a larger museum. One that's got collections that were made in the 1930s or the 40s of the 1950s and the larger museums with smaller staffs, really, this is gonna be, if they wanna take this approach, I think it's gonna be very challenging. It's so embedded in the documentation and in the informal dialogue that museums talk to one another and the volunteers, having worked in places like this, you see that it just becomes something that's very much institutionalized. So I think our attempt to do this on a smaller scale, I don't know if it can be scaled up or not, I think it could be. And I think that's one reason why we sort of wanted to be able to share this with you. Absolutely. I think that we have one more question that I wanted to highlight where one of our audience members is asking a little bit more detail about your engagement with the Western neighborhoods, is that what it was called? So he says, you mentioned a Western SF neighborhood group that you interacted with. Can you give us more information about that and how you engage with them in conversations about this collection? I can maybe talk about that a little bit to start. This kind of started, and Professor Jimenez was part of the very beginning of this partnership, I believe with the podcast episode and sort of the grand tour, the virtual tour that students did. And I think the project also arose out of a class with students as well. So I see Professor Jimenez nodding, so I'm glad I got that right. And yeah, so it started even maybe more than a year ago with some of these connections that we've made. We also related, have been working with the Sutro Library very closely where also Adolf Sutro's materials from his library are housed. So all these different organizations sort of have pieces of this history related to collections and history of San Francisco and also ancient Egypt. And so that kind of Western neighborhoods project partnership came out of that kind of shared connection of the collections, which is really exciting. And then not just the virtual tour, but the podcast, but then more recently, they began a pop-up museum at Museum at the Cliff, which is the former Cliff House gift shop where they saved at auction. They were able to save a lot of art that came out of the Cliff House closure, the Cliff House restaurant closure. And so then they had this whole collection and they were asking, we love your students, can your students come help us condition report these objects and work with all these objects that we have new. And so a lot of our students got involved volunteering. Now we have interns with their organization and also two alum that serve on the board of the Western neighborhoods project. And not just that, but for the Museum at the Cliff, of course, as Professor Jimenez showed you, there are some objects on loan from the ancient Egyptian collections that we steward on behalf of SF State. And those objects, we worked very hard to get out there. And that way, I mean, it's kind of this beautiful opportunity to reunite some of these items that were historically at this site, but also to reframe them as we've been talking about and kind of an opportunity to think about them differently, to show them to the public who are really interested in this SF history in a different way, talk about them differently and get our students very heavily involved. Even with the transportation process, an alum was a student, an alum was involved in transport and installation. When they come down from exhibit, students will condition report them. We also have been able to have a big event with them, the Global Museum Day at Museum at the Cliff, which was very cool, where we met a lot of great people from the community who are interested in what we're doing now and need some really cool connections there as well. So that's a little bit of a synopsis of kind of our history working with Western neighborhoods project and also Sutra Library, which is quite related in that whole circuit. And to add a little bit to what Gina said, as you can see, it was pretty much student driven from the outset. They were the ones who created those contacts. I think it was from one of their fundraising classes that they had created a proposal on how to collaborate with outside community members. And it was something that we thought was really interesting because, and we thought we could engage in some really interesting conversations because Sutra, Adolf Sutra to the Western neighborhoods is almost kind of like a hero figure. And so being able to critically engage in these discussions about the ethics of stewarding a collection and to sort of take away some of that colonial nostalgia that you see a lot of times happens in historical societies was important. And actually in both the tour and the podcast, the audience was really receptive and engaged in some really great discussions that I think were very fruitful and sort of helped to advance the mission that we're trying to execute here with the unnaming of the collection. Okay, well, thank you so much for presenting this today. And I'm gonna turn the mic back over to Christine Hastorf to say the final thank yous. So really, we really appreciate it. And on behalf of everybody, I see a lot of thank yous popping through the chat. So don't forget to look at that set. Anyway, thank you very much for this presentation today. We're very appreciative and thought provoking. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I'm going forward.