Digital Community Archiving

Speakers: Jack Latimer (Community Archives and Heritage Group), Justin Colson (IHR, Layers of London)

Online platforms provide exiting opportunities for community groups to collect and share historical sources. But they also come with huge technical, ethical, and financial challenges. This session will reflect on the history of digital community archives, how they have changed over time, their part in relationships between big organisations or higher education institutions and small community groups, and the emerging challenges they are facing.  

Jack Latimer (Community Archives and Heritage Group and CommunitySites)   Jack Latimer is a founder committee member of the Community Archive and Heritage Group (CAHG)(Opens in new window) and set up the Community Archives website. He led the team which developed the national Community Archive Cataloguing Guidelines. He is also the Creative Director of CommunitySites, a company which specialises in websites and cataloguing software for community archives and heritage projects. CommunitySites has set up nearly 200 community heritage websites in the UK and Ireland since it was established in 2006. Jack became involved with community archives when he founded the My Brighton and Hove community heritage website in 2000. He led the project as a volunteer for its first six years. Over twenty years later, the website has grown to over 11,000 pages of community-generated content and has won numerous awards. 

Justin Colson (IHR, Layers of London)   Justin Colson is Senior Lecturer in Urban and Digital History and Deputy Director of the IHR’s Centre for the History of People, Place and Community. Justin is an historian of towns and cities, specialising in London during the late medieval and early modern periods, and uses digital and spatial techniques to study societies and cultures more broadly across time and place. Just is currently responsible for the IHR’s Layers of London digital humanities project.