By Ayla McDonald
Reporter
Prospectus News was recently uploaded to SPARK, the online database for all of Parkland College’s scholarly and creative works.
“It is an exciting development to have an archive for the Prospectus on SPARK,” says Josh Clark, Student Life Activities Program Manager and Manager of the Prospectus.
“It gives the Prospectus a chance to display the excellent work of our students and expand the audience that we reach. To have a digital, searchable archive of the Prospectus would be an incredible primary source and resource for historical research.”
According to spark.parkland.edu, SPARK is “a collaborative project of the Parkland College Library and the Department of Professional and Industrial Technology.”
It is “Parkland College’s open-access digital repository…the home of the rich body of scholarly and creative work of Parkland College students, faculty, administration, and staff.”
A varied spectrum of content can be submitted to SPARK for publication, ranging from journal articles, essays and research papers, to more artistic works such as digital art, photography, poetry, or musical scores.
Submissions are organized into four main categories by submission type, all of which can be found at SPARK through the Parkland College website at spark.parkland.edu.
“All student work included in SPARK are vetted by faculty before being uploaded,” says library.parkland.edu. “Student work collections create a useful resource for students whose work has been accepted into the repository. It also produces a visible picture of success that other students can reference and emulate.”
A sample of some current publications of SPARK include Ethnographies of Parkland Student Life as part of the Ethnographies of the University Initiative project, Perspectives of Parkland Volume 1 by Parkland College’s Perimeter Road Sound Recordings, and Phenotypic Plasticity Research Experience for Community College Students, a featured publication.
SPARK takes submitted works and makes them digitally and permanently accessible to submission authors, to Parkland, and to a broad academic audience on a global scale.
An active global map tracks what SPARK contributions are being read all over the world at a given moment.
The SPARK collection is also a part of the Digital Commons Network, another open-access database that, according to network.bepress.com, “brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.”
“Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions,” network.bepress.com says, “the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.”
The Digital Commons Network provides very easy access to published academic works from universities all over the world. It is a great resource for finding current credible information on almost any topic in any field or subfield. By partnering with Digital Commons Network, Parkland College’s SPARK collection gains even more breadth for world-wide acknowledgment.
So what does being uploaded to SPARK look like for Parkland’s Prospectus News?
“SPARK will host the digital archive of the Prospectus,” Clark says. “All new editions of the Prospectus will be uploaded to SPARK.”
As of yet, included in the Prospectus News tab of SPARK are photo-copy editions of the Prospectus Newspapers from December, 2017 to June, 2018.
While paper copies of each edition of the Prospectus newspaper have been archived since the student paper began in the 1960s, uploading editions of the Prospectus to SPARK ensures their digital security, as well as makes past editions immediately accessible to the public.
“We have an incomplete digital archive going back 8 years so those will be uploaded in time,” Clark says. “It is my goal that SPARK will host a complete digital archive for the entirety of the 50-year history of the Prospectus.”
