Question for Historians

[GameofPhones]

I am a retired academic (not historian) and have found an interesting primary source (a diary) that I would like to write about, and hopefully publish in some form. Knowing the importance placed on primary sources, presumably the diary would have to be made accessible to other historians. How could this be done?

I am a historian.

Most important questions are - Where is the diary now? Who does it belong to?

If it's a family record in your possession, possibly the most straightforward thing (albeit time consuming) would be to transcribe it and scan it, if its condition permits, and publish it on a website.

Or if it has some wider significance - the diarist is someone well known, or wrote about important events - you could offer it to a record office as a donation or permanent loan, and they would make it available to researchers.

If it's already in a record office, you'd have to make a transcript for publication.

You don't need to publish the whole thing, though; you could just write about it, including quotations, if you wanted to. There are lots of papers of historical significance in private hands which are used for research but not published.

If the diary is in your possession, or in the hands of another non-expert, please take care that it's stored in suitable conditions.

Thank you for your helpful reply. I bought the diary, but copyright I presume belongs to the diarist's heirs. Its interest lies in its being written in Germany during the Nazi years, but the young woman noticing nothing amiss (rather like the Backfisch im Bombenkrieg diary which was a publishing success recently www.algemeiner.com/2013/06/14/german-womans-wwii-era-diary-shows-how-citizens-turned-blind-eye-to-nazi-crimes/. I wouldn't aspire to write a whole book, and my approach is by instinct more academic. This is why it occurred to me that publishing (as a non-historian) might be difficult. The first hurdle I thought of was copyright, but (as you pointed out) I discovered that short quotations are acceptable. Now the second one is making the source accessible, but as you say it might be possible to keep it in private hands.