FaceBook as an Institutional Repository?

It will be interesting to watch the development of FaceBook Docs, an application created by students for students. Here is the description:

"Facebook Docs is a library of schoolwork where anyone can contribute. Over 50,000 documents have been uploaded, including problems sets, poetry, lecture notes, and random funny stuff. Every year, millions of college papers are produced, and virtually all of them are just gathering dust on people's hard drives. Too bad, because a lot of that is good stuff that other people would find useful. The point of Scribd is not to encourage plagiarism, but rather to help unlock the information on people's computers by making it easy for people to share their creations."

This is an interesting blend of an institutional repository with course reserves and a community bulletin board. It allows you to search within your own school, as well as the entire network. The traditional librarian mindset would be to scoff, however wouldn’t it be cool to upload a few items from your IR with links to your own digital repository, citation guides, and plagiarism info?

I often hear campus myths/legends about papers, assignments, and homework solutions being kept in secret drawers in fraternity houses, well now they have a chance to share with everyone. Or what about those “solutions manuals” that patrons always seem to think we have behind the desk somewhere? FaceBook Docs is still rather new, but it will be interesting to see what the collection looks like in the Fall once it is more fully populated.

Oh and I’m still waiting for Ross to build an uber-search (or at least an e-journal finder) for FaceBook… that way students don’t even need to go to our site to find articles. I'm sure the good folks over at UIUC are already incorporating their federated search into the FB Applications environment.

Comments

[Aseem Badshah]

Hello, I am glad to hear that you can see past the traditional library mindset for a concept like this. I just launched a site that is very similar to Scribd’s Docs but has many more community and collaboration features. The site is called www.Scriptovia.com and we take a similar stance on plagiarism but address it in more detail here: http://www.scriptovia.com/plagiarism.aspx. Let me know your thoughts. Great blog by the way!

[Lisa Hinchliffe]

I guess we have a reputation to live up to. :-) Anyway ...

Check out our Undergrad Library site at http://uillinois.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1939902 or add the app to your own profile at http://uillinois.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2414276217

Lots more we hope to do if we can garner resources for the project but here's what we have so far for UIUC!

[Sarah Miller]

I love that it took UIUC less than 24 hours to respond:)

[Lyda]

How will students use this? How will professors/teachers allow students to use it. How do you cite something from it (jane doe's sophomore year term paper, 2002???)

I am interested in the idea, I am not scoffing, I'm just interested in the coversation and surrounding issues.