Do you follow @ChandraArchive?

Sherry Winkelman

The Chandra Data Archive is now on Twitter and has joined the ranks of official Twitter Chandra channels. We kicked-off our feed at the ’20 Years of Chandra Science Symposium’ in December 2019 and have accumulated a small but steadily growing number of followers. Our goals are to facilitate archive-based Chandra science by increasing awareness of the large and growing Chandra data holdings and to bring to the attention of our community some of the insights about the deep connections between data and literature we have learned from building and investigating the vast and comprehensive Chandra bibliographic database … so check us out at @ChandraArchive.

One of our aims is to highlight data products which have been in the archive for many years but have received little or no scientific attention. For more variety we tap into the rich metadata associated with the Chandra Bibliography to pull out announcements of recent publications of archival uses of Chandra data or tools developed for exploring Chandra data; pleas for further Chandra observations which have been made in the science literature; and recently published catalogs and surveys based on Chandra data. With a little over nine months of operations, the CDA Twitter account has published ~140 Tweets, collected >500 interactions and averages ~5000 impressions per month. The road to Twitter fame is still long :), but we’ll get there.

The tone may be light and the human touch is visible throughout our tweets, but there is a lot more than meets the eye. The topics of our messages are drawn from a pool of interesting events that belong to one of many quantitatively and rigorously defined categories of ‘tweetable events’ to be considered for publication. This list is regularly updated as the data holdings of the archive and our bibliographic database grow with time. We hope to interest you in the treasures yet to be discovered in the Chandra Archive, and who knows, you may even get an idea for a new research project.