On the passing of my grandfather I received a large quantity of papers, letters and photographs from his time in the Pacific. As a survivor of the Bataan Death march his story seems to remain relatively untold and none of these items have been accessible to the academic community for analysis. What is the best way for me to make these documents available to historians who would like to access them?
Edit: I realize that I could donate them to an archive but as a student studying history I have found the difficulty and expense of retrieving materials that arent local to be a hindrance and wanted to provide them free and easily accessible.
If you intend to make them digitally accessible, you probably want to scan them. If they're in German/other languages, you may want to eventually translate them, as well. I recommend making a finding aid, regardless of whether you choose to digitalize them.
Archive collections with finding aids are miles more accessible, because they give you a map of where in the collection to find certain information.
If you really want to work with these sources, you could always create something like these Friendly Finding Aids (shameless plug, my university does these as historiography term projects), which are meant to be so accessible that an 8th grader could understand them!
I personally think you should scan them all, so you have electronic copies and can make them openly accessible, and then donate them to a local archive--realistically, your home probably does not ave the right conditions to make sure these last a good long time.
If he was an American serviceman, the best place to get in touch with is probably the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. They would be interested in material such as this to add to their collection and preserve. Check out their page here: https://www.loc.gov/vets, and you can find the full criteria of what they accept here.
For letters, they need collections to include at least 10, and only take the originals, but that doesn't seem to be an issue here. I would very much encourage you to pursue this option as it will allow for the preservation of the items, and also make them available to other researchers through the Library of Congress!
You can also find more information about them from the AMAs that the organization has held with us in the past:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zevmy/ama_the_library_of_congress_veterans_history/
As a more general note for people looking to donate items, if you don't have the original, or wouldn't want to donate the original and only copies, they provide a list of other places which might be interested in different criteria, although I would of course note that each one will have their own preferences as to what they are looking for, so many may be false leads.