28th January 2019

Another national award for our website

We’re delighted to announce that we've won yet another national award for our website.

The CILIP Alan Ball Local History Awards were established by the Library Services Trust in 1985, to encourage local history publishing by public libraries and local authorities. They are now organised by the Local Studies Group of CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). There are two awards, one for printed material and another for digital activity.

This award is open to all heritage and community organisations involved with some aspect of local history and who receive or have received public funding, such as lottery funding. As well as local authority libraries, archives, museum and archaeology services, this includes small local museums, heritage centres and community history projects. Our History Group was eligible because our WW1 project in 2016/7 received a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Development work on our website was carried out by local York firm See Green.

We reached the final shortlist of three in the Best Digital category for 2018. The judges reported that they had a great deal of difficulty separating the finalists, but decided to jointly award the prize to Bristol Old Vic Heritage Archive and Poole Museum’s  Poole, the First World War and its Legacy. However they gave us a ‘Highly Commended’ Award, commenting that the First World War section of our website was exceptional.

It includes stories and discussion about the impact of the Zeppelin attack on the area, how the war affected the local school, how local conscientious objectors came from a number of perspectives and backgrounds to war, how the local churches impacted on recruitment, and the role of women in wartime.

We also used social media to promote our web blog posts and events and to attract new members. For example with Twitter we networked with other organisations and discovered new resources. We worked with local documentary filmmaker, Chris Maudsley, to create a video record of project researches, using some special digital effects. These videos are available on our YouTube channel here: York Zeppelin Raids 1916, Conscience and conscription in WW1: responses from a York neighbourhood and ‘Soldier, Brother, Friend’’: A Calendar of the War-Dead, South Bank, York, 1914-18.

We also entered our WW1 publications in the print award, but were up against strong competition. The winners of this award were Swindon Central Library’s A Swindon time Capsule (1st prize) and Devon Archive’s (South West Heritage Trust)  Devon During the First World War (runner up).

In July 2018 we won the CAHG Digital Category Award for Excellence. (The Community Archives and Heritage Group is a subgroup of the Archives and Records Association (UK & Ireland), the sector’s leading professional and membership body).

CILIP is the UK's chartered body representing the library and information profession. The Alan Ball Awards were named after Alan W. Ball, a former Chief Librarian of the London Borough of Harrow, and author of many local history publications.