Stocktaking at BPMA

This event is now in its fourth year and continues to provide us with an excellent opportunity to make further improvements to the storage of, and access to, our collections.

The Archive collection

2007’s archive stocktake revolved around two main tasks. The first consisted of improving conditions for records held in 12 aisles in our store at Freeling House.

Seven members of staff spent a very intensive (but ultimately satisfying) week boxing up loose files and shifting and turning boxes about. Certainly, none of them needed to visit the gym that week!

The second main task consisted of sorting through 25 shelves of uncatalogued files and printed material created by Royal Mail during the 1980s and 1990s into POST classes so that they can be catalogued over the next few years.

Six members of staff spent a week in the Search Room sifting through material that ranged from telephone directories, business plans and the minutes of regional boards to educational packs, slides for presentations and videos.

Other tasks included a general tidy up of the store, checking the status of loaned records, and making sure that some of the images that had been digitised a few years ago still open and have not been corrupted.

Throughout all this disruption, our tireless archive assistants continued to operate a distance enquiry service answering telephone calls, emails and letters from researchers.

The Museum Collection

During stocktake, the Curatorial Team busied themselves both at the Freeling Office and at the Museum Store in Essex.

A number of randomly selected objects were audited in both locations. The entire existing loans and object movement records database was audited and the future process for this was refined to reflect current policy.

Additionally, a recently purchased postal history collection was fully processed and documented together with the audit of the entire stamp issue for 2007.

The opportunity was also seized to undertake the listing and repacking into archival housing of the one week snap-shot of mail received at ten businesses and eleven domestic addresses across the UK in 2006.

This collection of almost 700 items was documented and these items will provide a fascinating reference when this postal snap-shot project is repeated.

Photographing Objects

Stocktaking also saw the capturing of images to illustrate parts of the collection. Carmen Holdsworth Delgado and Sian Woodward spent a week at the Museum Store arranging objects for photography. This is part of ongoing work to photograph the collection, and good progress was made. Two main groups photographed were the mail bags and the wall boxes. Images of the wall boxes can now be seen on our online catalogue.

Latest News