Perspectives for Researching British Appeasement of Nazi Germany in the Inter-War Years Using the Digitized Newspaper Collections of the British Library

Abstract

This paper aims to verify that the methods for researching the British appeasement policy towards Germany in the inter-war years can include the new method of studying the digitized collections of newspapers of the British Library. The policy of appeasement led by Great Britain during the inter-war years still represents a very attractive subject of research. The challenge lies not only in the new data harvested from primary sources such as documents and newspapers but also in the new methods of researching that may be applied, and that may increase the interest of scholars. Today, researching the digitized collections of archives are not even a futuristic resource, but a growing necessity. Accessing the British Library's digitized collections through the British Newspaper Archive website is often easier and more efficient than going to the archives. The site has more than 40 million digitized newspapers, mainly local periodicals, which can be accessed by searching for keywords, establishing filters and saving results to retrieve them later. The electronic resources of the digitized collections provide valuable help in my doctoral research on the Anglo-French appeasement reflected in the newspapers, which proves to be a great challenge, given the fact that the subject was widely covered in many of the central newspapers. But, of course, this method immediately poses multiple questions : is this method of research as rigorous as the traditional research conducted in the archives ? Does this method provide the intercoder reliability framework required for such works ? These are the research questions that remain at the center of this article. Previous research on the subject of digitized collections and also the analysis of the resources of the British Newspaper Archive in comparison with the traditional British Library resources can provide an answer.