Jack Latimer

Creative director

Jack Latimer has been working in life stories and community histories for 15 years, winning several national training and museum awards along the way.

My Brighton and Hove

In 1994, he conceived and co-designed the Gulbenkian award-winning 'My Brighton' exhibit at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. In 2000, he founded the award-winning My Brighton and Hove community heritage website, which has become a national exemplar of a community history project.

He led the project as a volunteer for six years, alongside his work as a multimedia and training designer for museums and businesses.  Nine years later, the project has grown to include nearly 10,000 pages of memories, photos and information contributed by the general public. The website won two awards (Best Small Museum Site and Best Community Site) in the international Museums and the Web competition, 2008.  

He has also designed interactive museum exhibits for the St John's Ambulance Brigade, the Royal Pavilion, and Shakespeare's Globe theatre.

Oral histories and life histories

Jack has taught on the unique Life History Certificate course at the University of Sussex and convened the multimedia strand of the Oral History Society annual conference. He designed the website for the Mass-Observation archive of writing by ordinary people about everyday life in Britain, and produced the Panos Mountain Voices oral history website, which presents interviews with over 300 people who live in mountain and highland regions round the world.

Community histories

Until recently, Jack was the Chair of QueenSpark Books, one of the UK's oldest community publishers. Under his leadership, the turnover and staffing levels of the organisation increased 300%. He also ran the Letter in the Attic community archive project, which created a new collection of letters and diaries through an appeal to the general public in 2007-2008.

Setting up CommunitySites

In 2006, he set up CommunitySites (www.communitysites.co.uk) to design websites and cataloguing software for community archives and heritage projects.  CommunitySites has now set up dozens of community heritage websites in the UK, and is working on a network of sites in Hertfordshire and a site in Denmark.

National role in supporting community archives

Jack is a member of the Community Archive and Heritage Group and was responsible for setting up the Community Archives website (www.communityarchives.org.uk), which is a national directory of community archives.

In a freelance capacity, he has developed national guidelines on cataloguing standards for community archives for the National Council on Archives and co-written guidelines on digitisation for the Heritage Lottery Fund.   He is currenlty working on the Olympics 2012 People’s Record project.