Japan Family Photo Donation - Advice Needed
Looking for some advice about considerations in donating photos from a family collection. My family has a historical connection to Japan and was part of the expat community in Yokohama from the late 1800s up until WWII when they were interned and later deported.
We have a photo album that we think would be of interest to an archive in Japan. That album includes information about where and (sometimes) when the photos were taken. Information was written on little cards and pasted below many photos. I’ve included a page as an example. Most photos are of places and people not related or familiar to us. However, some pages are of family members and there has been some debate about whether and how to donate an album if we want to keep some photos from it.
In your view, is it important to keep an album like this together in order to make a donation? Is it possible to remove pages from an album and donate the rest? To do so would probably mean taking apart the binding of the album. Would that deter archives from wanting the donation at all? If we should leave it together should we ask for copies or scans to be made and provided to us of the photos that are important to us upon donation? Are there other things we should be considering? No one in the family speaks Japanese or lives in Japan and though I realize the best people to pose this question to are those at the archive in Japan, I wanted to get a preliminary understanding of the situation before we try and move further as I expect that communication with the archive may be difficult. Are there people or organizations I could speak to about this before we reach out to the archives in Japan? We are in Canada.
If anyone has any suggestions on making a donation like this, I would be very grateful to hear from you.