“As the pace and volume of scholarly communication increases, teachers and researchers are confronted with the need to find and share relevant, current content with their students and colleagues. PressForward, developed by the Roy Rozensweig Center for History and New Media–the creators of Zotero (http://zotero.org) and Omeka (http://omeka.org)–improves your ability to find, curate, and share content from the web. By adding an RSS / Atom feed reader and editorial workflow directly into the WordPress dashboard, PressForward makes it easier for academic communities to develop edited collections of content. Available for download from the WordPress.org Directory and on the CUNY Academic Commons, PressForward is designed to help you find, filter, and share open access resources among communities of learners and scholars.”

Jean Amaral – LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable

PressForward aims to “centralize digital media into a single online resource.”  Users can gather open web content either through RSS feeds or by a “Nominate This” bookmarklet button installed in their browsers.  If a RSS feed is gathered, the user can search through the articles and pick which ones should be put in “nominated” status.  (Articles that were nominated via the bookmarklet automatically go into the nominated status.)  Nomination is the beginning of the curation process.

As can be seen in the screenshot below, there are a number of things you can do to organize nominated articles: retrieve its metadata, favorite it, comment on it, keep track of its nomination counts, archive it, and “amplify” it (i.e. tweet about it).  But the most important thing you can do is to generate a WordPress post from it.  When you click on “Draft” the entire article is copied into a post and is saved as a draft.  Without leaving your WordPress dashboard, you can read, review and select articles, and use folders to group your content.

The last step is to publish.  The WordPress post has all the metadata needed to backtrack to the content’s source.  PressForward pulls together recent and relevant content from many different sources and is an ideal tool for research and teaching.