So as the title says, I have my great uncle's red cross POW diary/journal from while was in Stalag 17b for 2 years during WW2. He was a radio man on a flying fortress that got shot down. The journal contains typical journal entries about life in the stalag, a few pages of etchings of quite a lot of dog tags of other prisoners, some newspaper clippings, even a preserved flower on one page taped in, but mainly a lot of artwork and poetry. It got passed around and many different prisoners contributed to it. It is in very, very, very good shape.
Along with the journal I have all the original western union telegrams to his family, including notification of MIA, POW, etc. along with all his various medals.
So now down to brass tacks, how to go about sharing this with the world?
I've very carefully taken high quality (in a light box) photographs of every page. The artwork and poetry is truly astounding and it's all in very good shape. It also has day to day life stuff, such as the food menu (note this was a quick bad photo not one from the light box)
It's the only journal of its type i've ever seen. I've asked WW2 museums about it before and none had one nor really knew much about them. It seems very few of them survived intact to modern times.
I really do want to share all the artwork and poetry with the world, i'm just debating how. It really is almost publishable. E-book? actual book? Imgur album? Make an actual website with sections for poetry, artwork, and day to day life?
I've been planning on at the least sending a good copy of it to the 8th air force museum/historian (he was a radio man on a flying fortress in the 8th). They have been very helpful in my research, providing me with info about his plane, the crash report, etc. I'd like to someday track down the families of his fellow crew members and share this all with them.
This is not something i'll ever sell, though I have been told the collection as a whole could be worth a lot, but i'm truly not interested in that. I do just want to share it with the world, as corny as that sounds. However, as of now I don't believe my family is willing to give it up to a museum, someday maybe, but not yet.
Any thoughts or advice? Thanks and apologies for the long post.
You might want to consider contacting the Smithsonian museum of American History, just to see if it leads anywhere. Certainly, if you want to share this with the world, you couldn't find a much better outlet.
I know you said that you probably won't be donating it (at least at this time), but it certainly can't hurt anything to attempt opening up a dialogue with them.
To contact, you should reach out to the Office of Curatorial Affairs: http://americanhistory.si.edu/about/departments/curatorial-affairs
As others have said though, getting a lawyer who knows about this type of law should be a priority before you do anything concrete.
I would consider releasing all of the photos under a creative Commons license on Flickr or Google plus or your own website. The physical would be best served on loan at the Smithsonian or Holocaust museum or someplace where they have more experience preserving something of this age. History like this should not be forgotten and should definitely be shared.
You might see if any of your larger local universities have an oral history or digital humanities program, or a museum studies certification (if they do, it should be easy to find on their website), and try reaching out to faculty there to see if this is something they'd be interested in helping to conserve. Properly researching, digitizing, and publishing this collection online would probably be a great project for an interested student, and the university might have the infrastructure (software and server space) to make this more permanently available than if you were ro upload it to Flickr.
Contact the Eighth Air Force museum in Pooler, Georgia. This would be perfect for one of their exhibits and I have no doubt that they would be delighted to help with preservation.
