BPMA Wiki

The BPMA Wiki is part of The British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA)'s website.

BPMA works to make this human story of communication, industry, and innovation accessible to everyone.

We care for the visual, written and physical records of over 400 years of postal development.

=Why we created the Wiki= Without our own museum building, our website is our most important public face. It therefore needs to provide as much of a museum/archive experience as possible.

Museums and archives are centres of learning. Participation, debate and engagement are key to this learning process. They empower people and help them to use their resources for their own benefit and for the benefit of their communities.

In creating the Wiki we wanted to give people the opportunity for this kind of participation online.

=What will the Wiki be like?= We want the Wiki to be whatever our users want it to be. Eventually we hope to build up a regular community of Wiki users who contribute and interact with each other.

We think the Wiki could be a fantastic resource but before we can convince a wider public to use it, it needs to have some content. We hope that you, our regular readers, will help us to fill the Wiki with content.

It is designed to be very easy to use. There are instructions on the site and we would be happy to advise you if you have any difficulties. You can contact us on 020 7239 2588 or [mailto:wiki@postalheritage.org.uk wiki@postalheritage.org.uk].

We understand, however, that getting started can sometimes be a bit daunting so we’ve come up with six ideas to get people started:

Family History Research
We would like you to use this section to share with us some of your postal family history stories. If you have found material in our archive, it would be particularly useful if you could list the archive documents that you used so that others could benefit.

Use the Family history research page to get started.

Postal History
If you know a lot about a certain aspect of postal history, the Wiki is an ideal place to share it with a wider audience. Maybe you found something in our archive...

Use the Wiki Postal History page to get started

Working for the Post Office
Did you/do you work for the postal service? Tell us about your experiences. What do you think has changed over the years?

Use the Working for the Post Office page to get started.

Working with our collections
Do you recognise some of the objects and documents on www.postalheritage.org.uk/collections? Why not tell us about what it was/is like to work with them?

Use the Working with our collections page to get started.

Letter boxes
Do you have a digital image of a particularly interesting letter box? Why not upload your image to the Wiki and tell us more about it.

Use the Letter boxes page to get started.

War Memorials in the Post Office
Have you noticed a War Memorial in your local Post Office? Please help us compile our database of Post Office War Memorials.

Why not tell us about the war memorial on our War Memorials page

Maybe you have an idea of your own, and could create your own page.

It would be very helpful if you could join us in this exciting project. We hope you enjoy using our Wiki! '''Rhiannon Looseley Web Officer'''