CATALOGUE SEARCHAbout the CatalogueThe online catalogue contains data about the holdings of The British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA). We hold many types of material, from examples of Victorian postage stamps to vehicles and sorting equipment. The bulk of material on the online catalogue is from The Royal Mail Archive, managed on behalf of Royal Mail Group Limited, which contains Public Record material from four centuries of the history of the Post Office. The online catalogue allows you to search across our museum and archive collections. We have just met our target to make over 50,000 records available to search online by May 2007. The amount of records available will continue to increase as material is catalogued in line with our cataloguing plan. The online catalogue does not contain reference to any uncatalogued material held by the BPMA. Please contact us if you want to see something you think is held by the BPMA but you cannot find reference to it. The online catalogue contains some records relating to material held at other institutions, which is of direct relevance. The 'Repository' field will show you if it is held by the BPMA here at Freeling House. Please read the information about access to material held elsewhere. We are working on a number of ways to make the catalogue more helpful for researchers. These include an object thesaurus which, when applied, will allow searches of the catalogue by type of object. We are also participants in the UK Archival Thesaurus (UKAT), and when this is applied, greatly enhanced searching of the catalogue by subject will be possible. We use ISAAR-compliant authority records for personal, family and corporate names, and when these are made available online they will also improve the catalogue's search facilities. |
