What life was really like under the Nazi jackboot

Thomson Gale and the National Archives have created an archive of life in Occupied Europe, as Mark Chillingworth discovers

Turn the television on or browse the shelves of the history section of any bookshop and you’ll realise that history as a subject is undergoing a renaissance. The renewed interest is driven by a change of focus in history. Gone are the endless chronologies of war and politics. Instead, history now focuses on what it was like to be an ordinary person living in a Victorian house, or the stories of almost forgotten people whose efforts changed the world we live in, such as the American murderers who helped compile the Oxford English Dictionary, the surveyor who created geology, and a host of previously unrecognised explorers and gardeners.

The information industry too has recognised the shift in interest by historians, students and academics. Conditions and Politics in Occupied Western Europe 1940-1945 is the latest database from academic specialist Thomson Learning. The database is the result of a collaboration between Thomson and the National Archives. The latter has the content deep in its Kew headquarters while Thomson has brought to bear on the information its considerable experience at producing search and navigation technology.

Thomson describes the database as an attempt to reveal the “hidden history� of Europe during World War II to provide a new perspective on the politics, diplomacy and everyday life during the war in the occupied countries.

All the content is based on National Archives file FO371, which is made up of the information available to the British government at the time. Countries covered include occupied Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway, as well asMussolini’s Italy. There is also information on neutral states such as Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Subject areas include reactions to occupation, propaganda, resistance units and life in the fascist-controlled zone. New information added to the database by Thomson includes a set of essays from leading academics such as Michael Stenton and Rod Kedward.

Hosted in their own channel on the database site, the essays discuss in detail what life was like in the occupied countries and provide a gateway to original source material.

Each essay has a chronological structure and is divided up into a series of sections, split in turn by subheadings that allow a researcher to read the entire essay or navigate it through the sections that look most likely to create leads for their needs.

Each essay contains highlighted keywords, which are hyperlinks to the source material – no need here to drop to the bottom of the page for footnotes. The hyperlinks cover notable names, but also major issues and subject areas. For example, “railway� has a hyperlink that whisks users off to a host of documents about the importance of railways to the occupied nations and their strategic importance for resistance groups.

Clicking on a hyperlink opens up a pre-created archive search, which is an access point to the National Archives material. Each result is a table that contains the subject area – for example, operations inNorway, a political review of Sweden in 1941, and morale in Norway. Below the subject area is the name of the country the file is concerned with, although most file titles contain the name the country, followed by the date the file was produced. For the archivists, the National Archive file number appears on the right of the result table, along with details about the number of pages in the file.

Clicking on the file title hyperlink takes users to the scanned document. These are high-quality scans and easy to use. All the details in the search result can be seen below the scanned document.

Once at the document, a new range of Thomson tools is at the user’s disposal. A Contemporary Events button takes users to a timeline of events related to the document they are researching. The timeline contains further tools for scrolling backwards and forwards in the timeline. Virtually every document in this considerable archive appears to have been identified and positioned on the timelines.

The chronology tool is perfect for researchers and an example of how text mining, search and content can work in unison to give greater understanding. Using the chronology is easy: just enter a keyword and select the date range you want to search.

Back in the scanned documents, a text search tool lets users quickly spot the important keywords for them in the documents. As with the essays, keywords here are highlighted in yellow.

IMPRESSIVE NAVIGATION
The document navigation features are impressive, as is the overall navigation around the website. From the database homepage users access the different channels of the website: essays, search, links, multimedia and browse. The only design and navigation criticism is that the Search button, which will be the beginning of a user’s experience, is in grey, on a white web page dominated by black-and-white pictures. A splash of colour on the button would greatly assist with navigation.

Once in the depths of the site, navigation is via two toolbars at the top of the screen. The toolbars contain the typical tools of an academically driven service, including print, email and search tips. There are also tools for marked items and previous search, and the second toolbar contains links to the advanced search, browse indexes, and links to the multimedia tools and chronology.

A highlight of the service is the multimedia channel, which includes videos from the Special Operations Executive, a forerunner of today’s spooks at MI5 and MI6. Here users can see rare films from the period, which were intended to educate members of the forces. Thomson has realised that users will need to access the material from a wide variety of computers, each with a different set of applications. The multimedia channel will cater for users of Shockwave, Quicktime, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player. Simply click on a link to go to a page with buttons for each type of media player. Click on one of them and in seconds the system updates to suit your needs.

A picture library in the multimedia channel hosts a range of drawings, paintings and posters from the period, including pictures of the famed raid on a power station in Telemark, Norway. The pictures zoom to full-screen without loss of detail, which is great news for researchers who need good access to material, and do not want to visit the originals physically.

Conditions and Politics in Occupied Western Europe is a fine example of how the National Archives can work together with a business to create a service that improves access to and usability of its archives. The quality of the content, combined with the text mining and search tools, make this a brilliant service for anyone researching the social and political aspects of life in the occupied countries during WWII.

An option to give non-subscribing users pay-as-you-go access to this material would be an excellent addition, as it is so valuable and well defined that it is shame to restrict access to those organisations that choose to subscribe.

USABILITY

SITE DESIGN

INFORMATION DEPTH