Amateur Heritage Facebook Initiatives The commemoration and preservation of local cultural heritage through grassroots Facebook communities in The Netherlands

Over the last two decades there has been a growing interest in and attention for cultural heritage, both on a national and a local level. In combination with the rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, this has spurred the emergence of grassroots or non-institutional online participatory cultures with an emphasis on local history and heritage commemoration. Such locally orientated participatory cultures on Facebook are often initiated, led and administrated by amateur enthusiasts. Through their initiatives, these Facebook local heritage administrators produce involvement by mobilising people to collectively share, converse and engage in the act of remembering together, and identify themselves with their locality through the heritage material posted. The increased popularity of such local initiatives has blurred the lines between what is deemed official or authorised and more unofficial grassroots heritage. As such, this has created a new dynamic or relationship between institutions and the general public, as participation and communication are changing and ordinary people have been given a more central position through social media. These developments and the fact that grassroots local heritage production through online community participation has received little academic attention so far, have led to formulating the following research question: ‘How do the initiators of grassroots participatory heritage Facebook communities in The Netherlands understand their role in the preservation and commemoration of local cultural heritage?’ The results, as an outcome of qualitative research conducted by means of the semi-structured in-depth interviewing of fifteen Facebook local heritage community administrators, show that these administrators are driven by their own personal identification with a locality and start their Facebook communities based on that, in a rather spontaneous way. The administrators are generally not so much concerned with the long-term preservation of the material, but attach great value to positive reactions to the heritage material and select the material in accordance with that. They are the intermediary between a personal interest and the growing interest of people to identify the local past, and their communities are by and for the people initiatives with a great emphasis on mutual interaction As such the administrators’ activities form and addition to existing heritage.