Helen Dafter is Archivist (Digital Preservation) at The Postal Museum
Celebrating communities is core to the work of The Postal Museum. The focus of our audience engagement work is local communities (those in the Camden and Islington boroughs, where the museum is based) and Royal Mail staff. This blog explores how the museum’s work with communities intersects with our collecting activity.
The Postal Museum holds both museum and archive collections. The archive collections mainly consist of the records of Royal Mail and Post Office Limited. As a business archive it can be difficult to fit community archives to our collecting policy. That is until you shift the lens and realise that staff form a community. This is where the archive focusses its work.
There are challenges around staff resources for community collecting. Engaging with and collecting from communities requires a specific skillset. When considering digital collections, additional digital preservation and digital advocacy skills are required. It also is important to note that not all community work involves, or should involve collecting. Collecting this material is important for diversifying our collections, but community work should not be solely acquisitive or extractive.
The archive has collected a small quantity of digital material from staff groups. These include the Post Office and BT Art Club, the Rowland Hill Fund, and the Communication Workers Union (CWU). Much of this material was collected during 2020-2021 when reallocation of staff resources due to the Covid-19 pandemic, allowed staff time to engage with these groups.
The material collected from the Post Office and BT Art Club and the Rowland Hill Fund was similar in nature to material we already held in our physical collections. This was useful in building relationships as we could demonstrate that we were already trusted to care for this material in physical formats and extend that to discussions around digital records. However, it also limited the scope of our collecting. Most of the physical and digital material we have collected from staff groups has been public facing newsletters and publicity. It is more challenging to engage the groups in discussions around administrative records such as financial records, meeting minutes and so forth.
Most of our collecting from the businesses is informed by retention schedules. Unlike the records from Royal Mail and Post Office departments, the staff groups don’t usually have retention schedules which we can use to open discussions, and the retention schedules which do exist don’t reflect the records of the staff groups. This can be challenging when we are working to diversify our collections and reflect the experiences of all staff, not just management levels.
Collecting from the CWU required particularly careful handling. We wanted to ensure that our collecting relating to the Covid-19 pandemic reflected the experiences of staff, as well as business decisions and changes to services. Working with the CWU seemed a good way to achieve this. However, as a business archive it would not be ethical for us to collect the union records. The archive of the CWU is held at the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick and we had no desire to compete with them for this material. When we approached the CWU we framed our request around any mass-produced material circulated to the membership, which would not conflict with the collecting activity of the Modern Records Centre. We were clear that we did not want to collect records of union activity such as minutes, membership lists, ballots and so forth. This resulted in the museum being included in the circulation of regular ‘letters to members’ which included detailed information about the pandemic response and implications for staff. Some of the attachments to these communications were jointly produced by Royal Mail and the CWU. We haven’t yet received this content directly for the business, so the CWU collection is a valuable resource for future research. This reflects how the proliferation and distribution of digital materials can make collecting easier than in the past. There is also potential for this to be problematic in future when the same material is received from multiple sources.
One additional outcome of approaching staff groups to collect digital material has been collecting physical material. One group we approached with a view to collecting digital records was the Post Office Orphans and Benevolent Institution (POOBI). POOBI was formed in 1870 to care for the children of postal staff. When we contacted POOBI it became clear that although they didn’t have any digital records they wanted to transfer at that time, they did have a store room with physical records from 1870-2006. These records have now been transferred to the archive and will provide a wonderful resource for future researchers (data protection considerations currently limit the accessibility of many of these records). This does highlight one of the challenges in collecting from staff groups though – the physical records had survived in a store room for 150 years, digital records don’t have that luxury but that isn’t always appreciated at the time intervention and collecting would be most productive.
This has been an overview of some of the work we have done collecting from staff groups, with a particular focus on digital records. Some of the challenges we face are the same as for collecting physical records; such as having staff skills and time to build and maintain relationships with these groups. Unfortunately as this collecting was framed as a contemporary collecting project relating to the Covid-19 pandemic, the contacts have been lost as the museum’s and the business’ priorities have changed. Although diversifying the collections is a priority, the archive is heavily funded by the businesses and this is reflected in the allocation of staff resources. There are also challenges in determining the precise relationship of the staff group with the business, for example the Rowland Hill Fund is provided with support by Royal Mail (office space, IT resources) but is not part of the business. This has implications for the legal status of records of staff groups (the records of Post Office Limited, and most the records of Royal Mail have Public Record status). Another challenge is working with the staff groups to help them understand the types of records that we are interested in, the publicity material and newsletters are a great resource but we also need to build trust and common understanding to collect the records which reflect the management and decision making activities of these groups. From a digital perspective the biggest challenge is communicating the urgency of this material being actively preserved, either by the group themselves or in the archive.
In order to celebrate communities in future we need to rethink of how we engage with communities on an ongoing basis, how we ensure staff have the appropriate skills for this (both community engagement skills and digital preservation skills) and how we allocate staff to this work. We need to move away from ad hoc, sporadic collecting activity to it being a longer term embedded activity which complements other digital preservation and audience engagement work.