To encourage students to appreciate the value of the information commons, four library associations, Students for Free Culture and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups have announced the second annual Sparky Awards, a video competition that seeks to recognize “the best new short videos on the value of sharing.”
The theme of the 2008 contest is “MindMashup: The Value of Information Sharing.” The organizers hope to stimulate students to produce videos of two minutes or less that will “imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information” and “broaden the discussion of access to scholarly research.”
The term “sparky” is derived from SPARC, the acronym for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a group of libraries and educators. More information about the contest can be found at www.sparkyawards.org.
To be eligible, submissions must be publicly available on the Internet on a website or in a digital repository, and available for use under a Creative Commons license. The submission deadline is November 20, 2008. The winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette. Two runners-up will each receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. The award-winning videos will be screened at the January 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Denver. The winning videos from 2007 can be viewed here.
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.”