title: Preserving Informal Astronomy: Arceli, the PressForward Plugin, and the Archiving of Scientific Communications
creators: Stephanie Westcott Kelle Cruz Eric Olson
abstract: This poster will profile and demonstrate a new collaboration focused on community curation, preservation of digital communications, and the archiving of science information on the open web. The PressForward Project, a research initiative concerned with the discoverability of digital gray literature, including blog posts, white papers, data visualizations, and podcasts, and Arceli, a collaborative effort within communities of astronomers whose mission is to preserve informal astronomy communications, are in the process of developing a method to make it possible to curate, archive, index, and cite digital alt-publications.
  
  The PressForward Project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and based at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, was founded in 2011 in response to driving questions about the ability for researchers in any field to keep up with the growing body of literature—some peer-reviewed, most not—found on the open web. As the quantity of gray literature regularly published online continues to grow, so does the task of locating and evaluating the work most relevant to a particular area of scholarly investigation. How does any one scholar or community do it? PressForward seeks both technological and methodological solutions to this problem.
keywords: digital preservation digital curation chapel hill