The working life of Museum of London

This week,  Clare Wood, Archivist for the Sainsbury Archive, introduces a new website that brings the Sainsbury Archive to life and asks you  to add your memories of working and shopping at Sainsbury’s:

Alongside my regular duties looking after the Sainsbury Archive, over the past year I’ve been busy creating ‘Story of a Supermarket’, a new website for the collection, which is now live within the Museum in Docklands website.

The Sainsbury Archive at the Museum in Docklands is a unique collection of photographs, documents and objects which tells the story of Sainsbury’s from its foundation in 1869 to the present day.  It’s a fascinating and varied collection, including everything from old packaging and recipes to Victorian tiles and staff uniforms.

This new website replaces the Sainsbury’s Virtual Museum educational site which was launched ten years ago. This popular site, which enabled schools to explore the archive via a virtual museum building, needed significant updating. We therefore decided to create a new site using the Museum of London’s content management system and page templates, retaining popular elements of the Virtual Museum, but also adding extra information and images from the archive to help answer some of the 400+ enquiries received each year.

We started work on the project last July, consulting with local primary school teachers, retired Sainsbury’s staff and people who had contacted the archive with an enquiry over the last couple of years. The results were sometimes surprising, but gave us a clear picture of what people liked and didn’t like about the old site, and the kinds of information they were looking for.

We frequently receive enquiries about aspects of social history such as food and nutrition during wartime and the employment of women.  We therefore decided to create pages for a range of popular topics, arranged under the themes of ‘People’, ‘Places’ ‘Products’ and ‘Progress’.  Researching and writing this content proved time-consuming, and we have tried to find the right level of detail, so that the information is useful, but not overwhelming…

To add a personal touch to the official records in the archive, there is also a contributory area for visitors to add their memories of working and shopping at Sainsbury’s. All stories submitted will be added to the collection and highlights will be published on the website.

For schools at Key Stage 2, our Learning consultant trawled the archive to produce six curriculum-linked units exploring the history of food, shops and shopping. Linked to these are classroom activities, interactive quizzes, a timeline, and a scrapbook of images to download.

For informal family learning, as well as the quizzes and scrapbook, we have recycled popular features and activities from the Virtual Museum, including old-fashioned packaging to colour and make, the chance to ‘Explore a Store’ from 1909 and ‘Harry’s story’, a day in the life of a  Sainsbury’s delivery boy in 1912.

The project has grown quite a bit since its inception and the resulting website is a large and detailed resource. The collection is highly visual, so I’m particularly pleased that the new site features around 300 images. ‘Story of a supermarket’ has actually been live since May 2008, but following testing and approval by external stakeholders, we have now begun to tell people it’s there!

We’re also planning to showcase the site at ‘The way we shopped’, a day of free talks, film screenings and activities inspired by the Sainsbury Archive, which is being held at the Museum in Docklands on Saturday 4th October.
‘Story of a Supermarket’ is located within the Museum in Docklands website under ‘Collections Online’ and can also be found at: www.museumindocklands.org.uk/sainsburyarchive