About the US PBC
The U.S. Postal Bulletin Consortium is a small group of individuals and a number of philatelic societies that have banded together to support a fully searchable database of the U.S. Postal Bulletins that were produced from 1880 until the present day. The home page of the web site describes their content in some detail.
The major source of contributions to this endeavor was Tony Wawrukiewicz but there has been significant support from a number of societies, especially the United States Stamp Society but also the Universal Ship Cancellation Society, the Mobile Post Office Society, and the Postal History Society. A few individuals have also been generous supporters. All these sources of funding have been particularly generous because they have all agree that the final result should be universally accessible, and so it is.
Michael Eastick, an Australian stamp dealer and software developer for the philatelic industry, has developed the software necessary to make the numerous pages with their valuable information readily searchable. At this point, the PBC has only developed the search for bulletins up to and including 1971 because there are no copyright issues for these years. We eventually hope, with further funding and the necessary permission obtained from the U.S. Postal Service, to extend the project through the present day.
Funding efforts for this undertaking have not been completed because a number of aspects of the venture still require support. For instance, since the software developed for it is new and still in the early days of testing, there are bound to be issues that develop that will require ongoing efforts by Michael to repair and enhance it.
In addition, the underlying Postal Bulletins for the first 25 years were poorly printed and so the OCR data from them is somewhat imperfect and will be in need of some repair. Furthermore, the site on which the data and the search process are imbedded has to be paid for on an ongoing and reliable basis so that the site will remain available for the foreseeable future.
Therefore, even though free and universal access to this database is a promise to the philatelic community and to whomever else desires access, free-will donations will always be needed and appreciated.
They can be sent to:
Mr.Tony Wawrukiewicz
PO Box 19568
Portland, OR 97280 USA
Yours sincerely Tony Wawrukiewicz April 2012