The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), in partnership with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan/National Institute of Informatics, has announced the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008, to be held November 17-18, 2008, 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.
Developed by a diverse and expert programme committee, the programme will delve into four key areas - The Policy Environment, New Horizons, Campus Publishing Strategies, and Value-Added Services. These tracks will be supplemented with an Innovation Fair, where new technologies, strategies, and approaches will be highlighted, and a Practicum on marketing and advocacy. This is the first North American SPARC digital repositories conference since the organisation'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.
The programme committee has invited proposals for presentations at the November meeting. All details on the programme are available at the conference website at http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ir08/. The deadline for submissions is May 30, 2008.
