Question about Turnitin.com

[Stacy Pober]

> From: Daniel Messer <dmesser at yvrls.lib.wa.us>
>     I've got to agree here. This does seem to be more the 
job for a support office
> or even (horror of horrors) the faculty member themselves. 
I breezed on over to
> Turnitin's website and checked out what I could of their 
system (we don't subscribe)
> and, advertising jibba jabba aside, it looked 
semi-friendly. 

Just to clarify: though I think help in finding the source
of a possibly plagarized paper is an appropriate question 
for a librarian, using turnitin.com SHOULD be the job of 
the professor. 

Sadly though, finding the source for plagarized papers is 
often as easy as putting quoted text from the paper into
AltaVista or Google.  I'm sure the formal plagarism
detection software is more helpful, but just typing an 
unusual phrase from a paper into a regular web search
engine will do the job just fine in many cases.

Stacy Pober
Information Alchemist
Manhattan College Libraries
spober at manhattan.edu
cases as easly