The BL Labs Awards formally recognises outstanding and innovative work that has been created using the British Library’s digital collections and data.

The closing date for entering the BL Labs Awards (2016) is midnight BST on 5^th September. So please submit your entry and/or help us spread the word to all interested and relevant parties over these final weeks. This will ensure we have another year of fantastic digital-based projects highlighted by the Awards competition!

This year, the BL Labs Awards is commending work in four key areas:

• Research - A project or activity which shows the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools.
• Commercial - An activity that delivers or develops commercial value in the context of new products, tools, or services that build on, incorporate, or enhance the Library's digital content.
• Artistic - An artistic or creative endeavour which inspires, stimulates, amazes and provokes.
• Teaching / Learning - Quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content.

After the submission deadline of midnight BST on 5^th September for entering the BL Labs Awards has past, the entries will be shortlisted. Selected shortlisted entrants will be notified via email by midnight BST on Wednesday 21^st September 2016. A prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner and £100 to the runner up of each Awards category at the Labs Symposium on 7^th November 2016 at the British Library, St Pancras, courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners of 2015 has led to the production a remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects. Last year, the Awards commended work in three main categories – Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurship:

• Research category Award (2015) winner: “Combining Text Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to investigate the representation of disease in 19^th century newspapers” by the Spatial Humanities’ project. The project examines the London based newspaper The Era (1838–1900, constituting over 377 million words), which
  has been digitised and made available by the British Library, through innovative and varied selections of qualitative and quantitative mechanisms in order to determine how the Victorian era discussed and portrayed disease, both temporally and spatially.
• Creative/Artistic Award (2015) winner: “The Order of Things” by Mario Klingemann. The project involves the use of semi-automated image classification and machine learning techniques in order to add meaningful tags to the images and create thematic collections of the British Library’s one million Flickr Commons images.

Image:

(Top-left) Spatial Humanities research group at the University Lancaster plotting mentions of disease in newspapers on a map in Victorian times;
(Top-right) A computer generated work of art, part of 'The Order of Things' by Mario Klingemann;
(Bottom-left) A bow tie made by Dina Malkova inspired by a digitised original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland;
(Bottom-right) Work on Geo-referencing maps discovered from a collection of digitised books at the British Library that James Heald is still involved in.

• Entrepreneurial Award (2015) winner: “Redesigning Alice: Etsy and the British Library joint project” by Dina Malkova. The project has produced a range of bow ties and other gift products inspired by the incredible illustrations of Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll.
• Jury’s Special Mention Award (2015) "Index the BL 1 million and Mapping the Maps" by James Heald.  James led and collaborated with others to produce an index of 1 million ‘Mechanical Curator Collection’ images on Wikimedia Commons from the British Library Flickr Commons images. This gave rise to finding over 50,000 maps within the collection partially through a map-tag-a-thon which are now being geo-referenced.

For any further information about BL Labs or our Awards, please contact us at [email protected].