aThis is my voice in general discussion on the subject of making archives public.
I agree that " If we do nothing we will receive nothing" as you said. But first we have to do our own job. You mention many media outlets in Poland as "National". In reality many of them are owned by foreign capital, mostly german. For instance Onet, Newsweek Polska. Here is the full list owned by german capital (70% of all media) .
There is no point to send our request to any media, unless we want publicity, to make people aware of our needs. Very few, if any will publish our request. It cost money. Who will pay for it?
On the other hand, what kind of information or databases they can have? Most of them in Poland were created in 1980-ies and later. We can write to public officials as they are obliged to attend to the needs of their citizens. Here are also a few obstacles. It needs time, money and are influenced by political concerns. Most of the interesting us archives are in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus.
There is also a proverb "If you want something to get done, do it yourself". Jews understand this very well. Look into . There are a lot of digitized archives in Poland done due to their effort and money. They create special interest groups, get donations, dues, volunteeres for translation of documents. Those groups concentrate on one particular place and one archive. Digitize and publish archive documents, create database and take money for searching, which is used to do more digitizing. In my opinion we should follow this example.
Lets create a group of volunteers, a committee, which will plan, organize and coordinate our efforts. They should prepare a plan. One of the first tasks should be identifying names and location of the archives which hold interesting us documents. I do not know if there is not something like that already. Then we should start from the most important and work on them one by one. We can start from the easiest, which are in western countries. Mostly military archives and polish government and organizations in London, USA, Canada.
There are also genealogical sites which have huge databases, but mostly for western Europe, US and Canada. For instance . For $20 you can search their world database for a month.
