SPARC

The meeting program, being developed by a diverse and expert program committee, will delve into four key areas: The Policy Environment, New Horizons, Building Bridges: Campus Publishing Strategies, and Value-Added Services. These tracks will be supplemented with an Innovation Fair and a Practicum on marketing and advocacy.

The organizers now invite proposals to the Innovation Fair. The Innovation Fair is an event inspired by Open Repositories’ Minute Madness that invites participants to present, in no more than two or three minutes, innovative or creative approaches to:

• Use of repository content (such as new publishing models, data visualizations, data-mining, mash-ups, educational resources, etc.)
• Discovery of research outputs (such as area-of-interest profiling, peer-discovery channels, content recommendations, research news integration, discipline aggregations or information portals, etc.)
• Value-added services (such as author bibliographies, usage reporting, research promotion, multi-target deposit, distributed discovery channels, content of interest alerts, deposit rights clearance, etc.)
• Repository promotion (such as creative marketing techniques, slogans, graphics, elevator speeches, etc.)

Fair projects will be featured on the Crowdvine network for the conference at http://sparc08.crowdvine.com, where presenters will be asked to post their slide or graphic on the network in a blog post. Meeting participants will be encouraged to constructively comment, build, and expand upon them with new ideas through their own posts and graphics.

For details and to submit a proposal to the Innovation Fair, visit http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ir08/submit/index.shtml. Submissions must be received no later than August 10.