Mai Doan

Review staff writer

The Sparky Awards are annual, national contests to promote the open exchange of information.

The awards are organized by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition that promotes the universal benefits of sharing ideas of all kinds. This is the first year Nicholson Library has sponsored the contest.

To enter the contest, students form a team or go it alone and make a two-minute video to demonstrate the importance of sharing information.

You can either enter the contest in the library for a $100 award, or the national Sparky Awards for $1,000 or both contests, Instructional Librarian Jean Caspers said.

“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,” the Sparky Awards’ Web site states,  quoting George Bernard Shaw. “But if you have an idea, and I have an idea, and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

This quotation embodies the purpose of the program, which is to help students start thinking about information sharing.

“It is a chance for students to have fun sharing information and win the prize.” Caspers said.

Nicholson Library display books by professors of many fields, yet the cost of these books sometimes limits the information students can get. 

“The journals have become more and more expensive for the library or students to have,” Caspers said. “The question is how to share information in a way people can afford.”

To find a solution, SPARC, along with authors, publishers  and librarians, built on the unprecedented opportunities created by the networked digital environment to advance the conduct of scholarship.

The SPARC Web site allows students to search and read journals of professors for free.

“Peer review makes those articles valuable even though they are free to read online,” Caspers said.

Another advantage of student participation in this contest is that they are able to learn different ways to share information more inexpensively.

“A mini-film festival will be shown in the library to find the winner if we have a number of students for the contest,” she said. “It will help students prepare for the  national contest as well.”

Caspers has not heard from any students about entering this contest yet.

“It will be fun making a movie over the weekend with friends, or you can do it on your own,” she said.

Students can contact Caspers at [email protected] in the library by Nov. 10 to submit an entry to the local contest for the festival that will  be held on Nov. 17.

She suggested students watch last year’s winners to get an idea about the contest.

“Anyone can do it,” Caspers said. “Since this is the first year the library sponsored this contest, the chance is very easy.”