SPARC Video Contest to Showcase Student Views

[Jennifer McLennan <jennifer@arl.org>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 21, 2007

Contact:
Jennifer McLennan
(202) 296-2296 x 121
jennifer [at] arl [dot] org

SPARC VIDEO CONTEST TO SHOWCASE STUDENT VIEWS ON INFORMATION 
SHARING

Competition invites students to apply new media to ongoing 
discussion; offers educators and librarians creative way to 
encourage campus engagement

Winner will receive $1,000, a public screening and a "Sparky 
Award"

Washington, DC - June 21, 2007 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing 
and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the first SPARC 
Discovery Awards, a contest that will recognize the best new 
short videos illustrating the importance of sharing information 
and ideas.

The contest, details for which are online at 
www.sparkyawards.org, encourages new voices to join the public 
discussion of information policy in the age of the Internet. 
Contestants are asked to submit videos of two minutes or less 
that imaginatively show the benefits of bringing down barriers to 
the free exchange of information. While designed for adoption as 
a college or high school class assignment, the SPARC Discovery 
Awards are open to anyone over the age of 13. Submissions will be 
accepted beginning in mid-July and must be received by December 
2, 2007. Winners will be announced in January 2008.

The Winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a 
"Sparky Award." Two Runners Up will each receive $500 plus a 
personalized award certificate. At the discretion of the judges, 
additional Special Merit Awards may be designated. All the 
award-winning videos will be publicly screened during the January 
2008 American Library Association Midwinter Conference in 
Philadelphia.

"The YouTube generation has a critical stake in how information 
can be used and shared on the Internet," said SPARC Executive 
Director Heather Joseph. "The SPARC Discovery Awards provide an 
outlet for their views and an opportunity for the rest of us to 
understand their perspectives. We hope these videos will help 
spark an expanded, informed, and energetic discussion."

SPARC expects to sponsor the Discovery Awards annually, as a 
means of supporting public discussion of critical information 
issues. The 2007 contest theme is "MindMashup." Mashup is an 
expression referring to a song, video, Web site or software 
application that combines content from more than one source.

The contest takes as its inspiration a quote from George Bernard 
Shaw: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange 
these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But 
if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these 
ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

For details, please see the contest Web site at 
http://www.sparkyawards.org.

SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and 
its affiliated organizations, SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, are 
an international alliance of academic and research libraries 
whose advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs 
encourage a more open system of scholarly communication utilizing 
the Internet. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.

-------------------------------------
Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
jennifer@arl.org
(202) 296-2296 x121
Fax: (202) 872-0884
www.arl.org/sparc