The BPMA Wiki was created to bring The British Postal Museum & Archive closer to its users. This wiki gives users - you! - a way to help tell the history of the British postal service.
To explain why we decided to create a wiki, you need to know a bit about the history of our website...
About the BPMA website
The BPMA website is our main public forum, in terms of the numbers of people we currently - and could - meet online.
The BPMA main website is a Plone Content Management System (CMS) website, developed for us by the web company Adaptive Technologies Limited. This was launched in March 2005 after about six months of development. It replaced an old website which we couldn't update ourselves. This is why we wanted a CMS site: to create and manage our online content. You can read an article about the CMS project in the Site Design section.
Since 2005 we have used the CMS to add news stories, tell you what's on in the BPMA events calendar, create online exhibitions, and more besides. You can even search our online catalogue.
We have worked hard at getting the basics right, with visitor information, details about our organisation and our collections. But in 2006, we had already started thinking about what was missing from our website. Should the BPMA create some sort of ‘virtual museum & archive’?
The missing link… or, ‘what is a virtual museum?’
‘Virtual museum’ or ‘virtual archive’ are easy phrases to say. But in order to know what we mean by them, we first have to know our definition of ‘museum’ or ‘archive’, irrespective of ‘virtuality’.
There are many definitions of museums, somewhat fewer of archives. The dictionary definitions are not enough:
museum (noun) a place where objects of artistic, scientific or historical interest are displayed to the public, preserved and studied.
archive (noun) 1 (usually archives) a a collection of old public documents, records, etc; b a place where such documents are kept.
The BPMA is an educational charity, so we believe that museums and archives are places for learning. Phrases from key reports can help further define what this means:
"Museums and galleries offer a unique kind of learning, based on first-hand experience of authentic objects, works of art and other resources in a public, social environment. They can support cultural literacy for individuals and cultural development for communities. As participatory public spaces, museums and galleries are places for debate; their values and expectations of behaviour help shape those of society as a whole."
From David Anderson’s A Common Wealth: Museums in the Learning Age, commissioned by DCMS 1997 (revised 1999)
Our vision is of an archival heritage unlocked and made open to all citizens in a way that engages them and empowers them to use archives for personal, community, and social benefit."
From Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future: Report of the Archives Task Force, commissioned by MLA 2004
In these two quotes, some words and phrases have been marked in italics:
Public, social environment
Participatory public spaces
Places for debate
Heritage unlocked and made open
Engages and empowers
Personal, community, and social benefit.
If a museum/archive is a place for these things, then so is a ‘virtual’ museum/archive.
We decided that a good heritage organisation - and its website - is not simply a source of historical information. It has to be interactive.
Access and learning through interactivity
All successful websites - or companies, or organisations - have interactivity. This doesn’t just mean playing games or watching videos (although the internet is getting better for this).
It means a user feels that they have a genuine involvement in the development of a website. Part of a website is shaped by them e.g. www.amazon.co.uk , www.flickr.com , your own personal internet banking, blogs.
For the BPMA, this meant changing the traditional one-way flow of information between a heritage organisation and its users. We felt that this could widen access by engaging more people. And by involving more people in the development of our website, both the BPMA and our users would learn something new.
4 thoughts led to a conclusion:
The BPMA cannot produce enough research ourselves to cover every possible aspect of the history of the British postal service – the topic is too big!
There is a vast well of information and expertise in our users, both current and potential.
Our website will only be fully used if we give people a reason to keep coming back. We need to be interactive.
We need to be bottom-up, not top-down.
The conclusion: we would create a wiki.
The development of the BPMA Wiki has taken several months. It includes the ReadSpeaker? system to play each page in the BPMA website as a sound file. We know there are more technical adjustments we can make. Make sure you tell us your ideas for wiki improvements.
We think the history of the British postal service is a tale worth telling. The BPMA Wiki is an open invitation to help tell this story better than we can achieve on our own.
To find out more about what we hope this wiki will become, please read the guidelines for using the BPMA Wiki.
