Helen Dafter is the Archivist at The Postal Museum.
Introduction
Many people think of history as something that happened in the past. The reality is that history is happening all the time. That is especially true when we seem to be constantly living in ‘unprecedented times’.
The project
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic The Postal Museum recognised the significance of the moment and the need to ensure there was a record of its impact on postal services. The Postal Museum holds museum and archive collections, including the business archives of Royal Mail and Post Office Limited. The curatorial and archive teams jointly undertook a contemporary collecting project focussing on different collecting streams. The nature of record keeping in the 2000s, and the changes to working practices resulting from the pandemic (such as home working) meant that this collecting project was primarily digital.
The project involved a public call for contributions with a webform for depositors to share information about the material they were offering. We also directly approached contacts in Royal Mail, Post Office Limited, trade unions, online businesses, and associated organisations. We were keen to ensure a wide range of perspectives were reflected – we wanted to hear the stories of postal workers as well as Board members, the stories of different ethnic groups, and those of groups who had historically been underrepresented in our collections. We also recognised that the postal businesses response to the pandemic fell outside Business-as-Usual processes. As such these records may not be represented in existing transfer processes (for example retention schedules) and needed to be actively targeted for collection.
The project resulted in a wide range of material being transferred to both the museum and archive collections. This included records relating to Post Office Limited’s strategic response; Post Office Limited communications (such as social distancing signage and opening hours for post offices); Royal Mail internal communications; Royal Mail publicity (including material relating to Captain Tom Moore); Royal Mail records relating to handling Covid-19 test kits and priority postboxes; internal and external communications produced by The Postal Museum; member updates from the Communication Workers Union (CWU); recorded interviews with business owners; recorded interview with a postal worker; and materials thanking postal workers. Although primarily a digital project, we did also collect physical materials. This included packaging material sent through the post; greetings cards relating to the pandemic; and priority postbox labels.
Challenges
This was an important project to document a historic moment as it happened. It also came with a number of challenges. A key challenge was staffing – the project took place during a deeply unsettling time. We had to deal with furlough and staff changes, both within the museum and in the organisations we were attempting to engage (such as Royal Mail and Post Office Limited). We also had to take account of staff capacity – mentally and emotionally, as well as in practical terms. The impact of trying to professionally record something you are also living through should not be underestimated. The Postal Museum’s staff had limited experience with contemporary collecting, so we were learning as we developed the project. We also needed to take care not to over-burden potential depositors who were dealing with traumatic circumstances.
There was also a significant advocacy challenge – many of our contacts hadn’t heard of The Postal Museum or the archive and needed to be persuaded why they should be giving us material. This was double edged sword – this advocacy work did increase the workload of staff working on the project, but it also raised awareness of our collections and led to the transfer of other material not related to the pandemic (for example we received 150 years of records from the Post Office Orphans and Benevolent Institute as a result of approaching them to ask how the pandemic was impacting them).
The nature of the pandemic meant that we were working with a constantly changing landscape, new collecting themes were constantly emerging – at the outset we didn’t include vaccination letters, test kits, or priority posting boxes as topics to collect but these were added at later dates.
We also needed to consider other collecting being carried out across the heritage sector. We wanted to make sure we didn’t compete with other organisations such as the Modern Record Centre at the University of Warwick (who hold trade union records) which is why we only collected letters to CWU members and not CWU records more widely. We also needed to ensure that records which should be transferred to the archive were not offered to other collecting institutions – which goes back to advocacy and making sure the record owners were aware of the existence and role of the archive.
It’s also important to acknowledge that while we want to collect a wide range of stories, we were dependent on what audiences wanted to give us. This means that the collection does include biases based around who engages with museum and archives, and what themes the museum staff identified as significant enough to focus our limited resources on. For example although we aimed to collect stories of diverse ethnic communities we were not entirely successful in meeting this aim.
Reflections
The active phase of this contemporary collecting project ended in 2022. We still expect to receive material related to the pandemic, mainly via transfers from the businesses in line with retention schedules, but we are no longer actively contacting potential depositors. In 2023 the museum acquired a Digital Preservation System (I’ve previously blogged about that here) and material relating to Covid-19 has been ingested into this system. The material in the archive collection has been catalogued and where appropriate it has been made available on The Postal Museum’s Digital Collections Portal. Much of the material will not be made available to the public until the 2040s. Staff are also considering potential sensitivities when making this material available. The Covid-19 pandemic was a traumatic experience for many people - people lost family members, or were permanently disabled. It is important to acknowledge and take this into account for staff processing the collection, and when providing public access.
The contemporary collecting project ensured that we collected more stories than we would have done via ad hoc transfers. This does not mean that we have a complete story of how the pandemic impacted postal services. Some of these stories may take years to be known, and some may never be told. This is true of any story that museum and archives tell.
Looking to the future – how do we capture the history that is happening all the time without targeted contemporary collecting projects. How do we resource collecting the present, while also grappling with backlogs. What other contemporary events are organisations collecting? Are any organisations actively collecting records about the impact of climate change, for example?