Monday, July 14, 2008

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: SPARC DIGITAL REPOSITORIES MEETING – INNOVATION FAIR

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: SPARC DIGITAL REPOSITORIES MEETING – INNOVATION FAIR
Registration now open for November event

(July 14, 2008) SPARC, in partnership with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan (an initiative of the National Institute of Informatics), is hosting the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008, November 17 and 18, at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland.

Librarians, researchers, funders, administrators, government officials, publishers, and technologists from around the world will share their experiences and best practices in building and supporting institutional and disciplinary digital repositories. The focus will be on effective
engagement with scholars and scientists to expand the sharing of research outputs via open repositories.

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/ir08. Submissions must be received no later
than August 10.

The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 is supported by major
contributions from Microsoft (Conference Sponsor), Berkeley Electronic
Press and BioMed Central (Coffee Break Sponsors), and by additional
contributions from a number of Supporting Organizations.

This is the first North American SPARC digital repositories conference
since the organization’s popular 2004 meeting, which drew hundreds of
participants from around the globe and set the stage for some of the key
developments of the past four years.

To register, book accommodation, and for more information, visit the
conference Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ir08/.

--
Terry M. Owen
DRUM Coordinator
Digital Repository at the University of Maryland
University of Maryland Libraries
College Park, MD 20742-7011
301.314.1328 voice
301.405.9191 fax
towen@umd.edu