Medical history of a WWII internment camp: creating online access to the voices of civilians interned by the Japanese on Singapore, 1942-1945. (360G-Wellcome-106788_Z_15_Z)

Cambridge University Library plans to conserve, digitise and share freely withresearchers worldwide the archives of two Second World War civilian internmentcamps on Singapore, Changi and Sime Road. Recently catalogued, these records have attracted the attention of both academics and members of the public, but due to their fragility their contents have remained hidden to all but those able to visit Cambridge. Few survivors of Japanese internment spoke of their traumatic experience, so the records are of immense interest to the friends and families of those interned in the Far East, as well as to the academic community, and particularly to those studying the effects of malnutrition and tropical diseases. In our archives, the internees meticulously documented their captivity - theiraccommodation, work for the Japanese, their recreation, diet and health, and repatriation at the end of the war. Nominal Rolls and the files of the Camp Commandant and Quartermaster are complemented by newspapers, written and circulated by the internees, diaries, letters, plays and memoirs. The records were created on very thin scraps of now brittle paper, and the paper in several folders is tipped-in, obscuring its full contents, so microfilms offer researchers an incomplete record. Our plan is to repair the paper, separating, cleaning and encapsulating leaves, to make it safe to digitise. Once digitised each record will be hosted on our Digital Library platform, http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/, and we will also re-package the originalrecords so that they can be exhibited and handled safely by the families of internees.