Engaging faculty and students through the Sparky Awards; Creative partnerships at Penn State
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
1:00 – 2:00PM Eastern

Fee: Registration is free for SPARC members, $15.00 for non-members. (SPARC membership is institutional and held by libraries. Registration is free if your library is a member. SPARC members are listed at http://www.arl.org/sparc/member/current-members).

Register by August 3 at http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/event_registration.shtml

At Penn State University, the 2009 Sparky Awards video contest is the center of a new four-way cross-campus partnership that is taking the conversation on access to information way beyond the library. This year, Penn State will syndicate the Sparky Awards specifically to motivate students to get engaged on issues related to the value of information sharing – including copyright and new media – and has created an unparalleled team of partners to spearhead the effort.

At the next SPARC Web cast, Chris Millet, Manager of Advanced Learning Projects for Education Technology Services and head of the Digital Commons at Penn State, will explain how his division became interested in the contest, how they’re working with the library office of scholarly communication, how they motivated the campus public television station and college of communications to come on board, and how they’re convincing a growing number of instructors to integrate the contest into fall curricula. Anu Vedantham, Director of the Weigle Information Commons at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and member of the Sparky Awards planning committee, will moderate.

Please join us to learn how new and creative campus collaborations can help you to engage more faculty and students and broaden the conversation on the topic of access to information – a crucial one in this economic climate.

This event is held in anticipation of the third annual Sparky Awards, a contest that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of information sharing. Well-suited for adoption as a class assignment, the Sparky Awards invite contestants to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information. The contest is an opportunity to promote library services, including media services or the information commons, where students can edit video, browse media, work collaboratively and learn about copyright, and a timely feature for Open Access Week programming (http://www.openaccessweek.org).

The Sparky Awards are organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries, Association of Research Libraries, Penn Libraries, Student PIRGs, Students for Free Culture, and Campus MovieFest. This year, the organizers are calling on colleges and universities to organize their own campus video competitions to get maximum benefit from the third-annual installment of the contest.

Entries in the international Sparky Awards competition must be received between April 9 and December 6, 2009. The national Grand Prize winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette. More information is available at http://www.sparkyawards.org.

Please register by August 3 at http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/event_registration.shtml

Engaging faculty and students through the Sparky Awards; Creative partnerships at Penn State
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
1:00 – 2:00PM Eastern

Fee: Registration is free for SPARC members, $15.00 for non-members. (SPARC membership is institutional and held by libraries. Registration is free if your library is a member. SPARC members are listed at http://www.arl.org/sparc/member/current-members).