Discover Digital Collections

Visit the new Digital Collections Portal to see collections which were first created in a digital format (born-digital).

The Portal holds material dating from the 1980s through to 2005. The Portal also includes some material from 2006 onwards which has already been published, for example posters, adverts, and annual reports.

More details on how to use the Portal are below.

The Postal Museum also has a large paper archive. You can search paper and digital records via the archive catalogue The Postal Museum Catalogue.

Access the Portal

Why should I use the Digital Collections Portal?

The Portal is a valuable resource if you are researching the Post Office or Royal Mail in the late 1900s or early 2000s. It can be accessed wherever you are. The content is fully searchable.

What content is available on the Digital Collections Portal?

The Portal provides access to collections which were first created in a digital format (born-digital). These largely date from the 1980s through to 2005. The Portal also includes some material from 2006 onwards which has already been published, for example posters, adverts, and annual reports.

The Portal holds records relating to Royal Mail, Post Office Limited, and The Postal Museum. These include: oral histories; marketing material (posters, artwork, and adverts); annual reports; philatelic publications; staff instructions; quality of service statistics; and material about Post Office counters, postcodes, and parcel post.

The Portal also holds a small number of records from other organisations such as: the Rowland Hill Fund; the Post Office and BT Art Club; and the Communication Workers Union.

How do I find content on the Digital Collections Portal?

Searching within  The Postal Museum’s Digital Collections Portal will only identify born-digital content in the collections. You may wish to begin your search using the online catalogue, which will identify both physical and digital material within the collections. If the content is digital, this will be noted in the ‘access conditions’ field of the online catalogue. You can use the Finding Number or accession number to search for the relevant content in The Postal Museum’s Digital Collections Portal.

The simplest way to search The Postal Museum’s Digital Collections Portal is by using the free text search bar at the top of any page within the Portal.

Screenshot showing the search bar at the top of a page in the Portal.

The Portal will search descriptive information added to the content. It will also carry out a full text search of the content of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and emails.

When using the search bar put your search term in double quotation marks to generate more accurate results e.g. a search for “pillar box” will search for these words together within a record.

Results are returned for exact matches only, for instance a search for “video” will not return results for “film”.

You can wildcard search in any part of a search word to widen your search. Use an asterisk (*) at the beginning or end of a word, or within a word, to return records which include variants of the search word, for example:

A search for ‘post*’ will return records that include the words postal, postage and post office
A search for ‘Post Office * Railway’ will return records that include the Post Office Railway and Post Office London Railway
A search for ‘*ward’ will return records that include the words inward and outward

You can also carry out an Advanced Search by selecting the advanced search button below the free text search bar.

You can then select which fields you wish to search on.

Screenshot of an advanced search within the Portal. This shows the filters which can be selected, a toggle for ‘must contain’ or ‘must not contain’ and a value field.

The most useful filters will be those starting with a DC prefix. The filters starting with an XIP prefix may also be useful. Some fields such as title and description may appear with both XIP and DC prefixes. In these cases the DC prefix is likely to be most useful, but do consider trying searches with both to make sure you find all relevant material. The other filters, such as ‘MODS’, ‘email’, or ‘GDPR’ are not used by The Postal Museum. Searching by these filters is unlikely to return any results.

Select a filter, determine whether your search term ‘must contain’ or ‘must not contain’ and enter the search term.

Several filters can be combined to create a narrower search. This could allow a search for all born-digital content including the word ‘rail’ (must contain), but not ‘mail’ (must not contain) which would exclude ‘mail rail’ results from the search.

How can I narrow the results of my search?

Once a search has been completed the left-hand menu will give options to restrict the results to specific categories. The category options are type and folder.

Type allows you to narrow the search results to documents, spreadsheets, image, presentation, email, or audio. You can select a combination of these if you are not sure if the content you are looking for is a document or an email for example.

Folder helps you identify material belonging to specific collections.

Screenshot from the Digital Collections Portal with tick boxes for ‘type’ of records and ‘browse by folder’. Each tick box includes a term such as ‘document’ and a number of items.

How do I view content in the Digital Collections Portal?

How you view content will depend on the format of the material in question. For all material you will need to navigate to the file level – material will be in folders so you might need to click through to get to the file.

If you need to expand the view of the content click the two arrows at the top right-hand corner of the preview window, and select presentation mode.

Screenshot of a file in the Portal. Two arrows at the top right-hand corner are highlighted. The option for ‘presentation mode’ is circled.

To exit presentation mode, press the ‘Esc’ button on your keyboard. If using a mobile device drag from the top of the screen and then press the back button.

Audio content will display with a timeline bar and play button.

The playback speed can be adjusted using the three dots to the right of the speaker icon.

All content on the Portal can be downloaded if you want to refer to it offline.

The content I want to view doesn’t display or looks strange.

Most content should be suitable to view within the Portal. However there are a small number of formats which do not display at all, or do not display well. This mainly affects spreadsheets (especially large spreadsheets) and newsletters which are in HTML format.

The best way to deal with this material is to download them and use software on your computer to open them – for example HTML files can be opened in any web browser.

How accessible is the Digital Collections Portal?

The main Portal website is compliant with WCAG 2.2 standards. Some of the records in collections may not be fully accessible. This is due the software used to create these records. In some cases we may be able to provide a file in a different format, for example a PDF as a Word document. Please contact us if you have any accessibility questions or suggestions.

What other digital resources are available?

There are a number of digitised (made digital) resources available for specific types of records. Details of these can be found at: Links to other sources – The Postal Museum

I have a question which isn’t covered above.

The Digital Collections Portal is a new venture for us in a constantly changing environment. We are still learning what works best and how to make it as user friendly as possible. Please contact us if you have any questions.