[Foundation-l] Fwd: Video contest on information sharing -- win $1, 000!

Tue Nov 25 02:52:20 UTC 2008

Hm, I found out about this rather late... The deadline is in five
days. :) If there are some creative film-types out there they might be
interested in at least thinking about this for next year, if not
submitting this time.

cheers
Brianna

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gavin Baker <gavin at gavinbaker.com>
Date: 2008/5/8
Subject: [cc-community] Video contest on information sharing -- win $1, 000!
To: cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org

(P.S. Could someone post this on the CC blog?)

SECOND ANNUAL SPARKY VIDEO CONTEST
SPOTLIGHTS STUDENT VIEWS ON INFORMATION SHARING

Competition showcases student productions,
offers instructors a fun and thought-provoking class assignment

Washington, DC – April 30, 2008 – Six library, student, and advocacy
organizations today announced the Second Annual Sparky Awards, a contest
that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of sharing and
aims to broaden the discussion of access to scholarly research by
inviting students to express their views creatively.

This year's contest is being organized by SPARC (the Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) with additional
co-sponsorship by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the
Association of Research Libraries, Penn Libraries (at the University of
Pennsylvania), Students for Free Culture, and The Student PIRGs. Details
are online at www.sparkyawards.org.

The 2008 contest theme is "MindMashup: The Value of Information
Sharing." Well-suited for adoption as a college 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. Mashup is an expression referring to a song, video, Web
site, or software application that combines content from more than one
source.

To be eligible, submissions must be publicly available on the Internet –
on a Web site or in a digital repository – and available for use under a
Creative Commons License. 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. At the discretion of the
judges, additional Special Merit Awards may be designated. The
award-winning videos will be screened at the January 2009 American
Library Association Midwinter Conference in Denver.

Entries must be received by November 30, 2008. Winners will be announced
in January 2009. The Winner of the First Annual Sparky Awards in 2007
was Habib Yazdi, a student at University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, for "Share" (http://www.arl.org/sparc/media/08-0122.shtml).

"If the medium is the message, then a video competition is an apt means
of encouraging the YouTube generation to think about the challenging
intellectual property issues shaping their communication environment,"
said SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph.

"This video contest is an excellent venue to engage students and to
explore with them the intricacies of re-using content," said Anu
Vedantham, Director of the Weigle Information Commons at Penn Libraries.
"The videos that emanate from this and similar contests provide vibrant
examples of student creativity and ownership of new media. At Penn, I
have noticed that mashup video contests and video classroom assignments
engage students and faculty in new ways with academic material, and that
video creation can be effectively integrated in many disciplines
including writing, history and language studies. Through involvement
with the 2009 Sparky Awards, libraries and new media centers have a
valuable opportunity to reach out to faculty and students."

"We're excited to be a part of the Sparky Awards again this year," said
Karen Rustad, Core Team Chair for Students for Free Culture. "More and
more students are having to manage issues of access and re-use in their
daily school work. It's a great time to talk about the potential for
open sharing."

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

# # #

SPARC is pleased to welcome these co-sponsors for the 2008 Sparky Awards:

Association of College and Research Libraries

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of
the American Library Association (ALA), represents more than 13,500
academic and research librarians and interested individuals. It is the
only individual membership organization in North America that develops
programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and
research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education
community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the
teaching, learning and research environments.

Association of Research Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization
of 123 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence
the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public
policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they
serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member
research libraries, providing leadership in public and information
policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the
exchange of ideas and expertise, and shaping a future environment that
leverages its interests with those of allied organizations.

Penn Libraries

The Penn Libraries system includes sixteen libraries and has been in
continuous operation since 1750. Penn Libraries actively explore new
media by providing courseware support, encouraging technology
integration and supporting creative study through flexible collaborative
spaces. The Weigle Information Commons, a joint undertaking of the
School of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Provost and the Penn
Libraries, is a high-tech space that provides undergraduates with
integrated academic support services for library research, writing,
communication, new media, time management and planning strategies.

Students for Free Culture

Students for Free Culture (SFC) is a diverse, non-partisan group of
students and young people who are working to get their peers involved in
the free culture movement. Launched in April 2004 at Swarthmore College,
SFC has helped establish student groups at colleges and universities
across the United States. Today, SFC chapters exist at over 30 colleges,
from Maine to California, with many more getting started around the world.

Students for Free Culture was founded by two Swarthmore students after
they sued voting-machine manufacturer Diebold for abusing copyright law
in 2003. Named after the book Free Culture by Stanford University law
professor Lawrence Lessig, SFC is part of a growing movement, with roots
in the free software / open source community, media activists, creative
artists and writers, and civil libertarians. Groups with which SFC has
collaborated include Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Downhill Battle.

The Student PIRGs

The Student PIRGs are a network of state-based, student-directed and
funded public interest organizations active on over 200 college campuses
in 20 states.

SPARC

The Sparky Awards are organized and sponsored by SPARC (Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). An alliance supported and
funded by hundreds of academic libraries and research institutions,
SPARC promotes new scholarly communication models that use the Internet
to expand sharing of information. SPARC was created in 1997 as an
initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and operates
under ARL's non-profit status.

SPARC is a founder of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, representing
taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions that
support open public access to taxpayer-funded research.

--
Gavin Baker
http://www.gavinbaker.com/
gavin at gavinbaker.com

For myself, I am an optimist -- it does not seem to be much use being
anything else.
    Winston Churchill
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