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Urkund compares submitted documents with three central source areas: The Internet, published material and student produced material. All of them are constantly changing and growing which means that no system or tool can ever cover everything. It is therefore important that resources are spent on making a relevant selection among the different source areas.
The Internet
Urkund covers approximately 4,5 billion web pages. Much effort is put into identifying and monitoring sites with educational related material. Material which is relevant to Scandinavian conditions is prioritized.
Published Material
Through co-operation with leading suppliers of knowledge based material, such as ProQuest, DiVA (Digital Scientific archive), Iustus, The Swedish National Encyclopedia, Mediearkivet and more, Urkund is able to incorporate a vast amount of published material into the system. Urkund is constantly working towards forming new partnerships. The emphasis lies on knowledge providers of certain interest for educational organizations in Scandinavia .
Student Produced Material
The Urkund system functions in such a way that the documents continuously produced by students within the educational organizations that employ the system are stored to be used as future source references. This means that a database of Scandinavian student material is created which in turn, and with time, makes the perhaps most common method of plagiarism, the reuse of previously written student papers, very hard to get off with.
The large number of educational organizations that are already using Urkund warrants that the amount of student documents in Urkunds system is very large and continously growing.
Tools where teachers themselves upload student documents to be checked are not likely to be widely used. The workload caused by the upload process will inevitably lead to a situation where only those documents that the teacher suspects of plagiarism actually are uploaded. With the Urkund system there is no extra effort for the teacher to have every student submitting their document through the system. Therefore the amount of student documents will continue to grow rapidly as a source in Urkunds system.
Copyright
The Urkund system respects the copyright of the students by granting the possibility for them to decide for themselves whether or not their documents shall be a part of the archive or not. This is possible because it is the students themselves that submits the documents through the system. Everytime they submit a document a confirmation letter is sent to their e-mailadress where they are asked to decide if their document shall be indexed or not.
With a tool where the teacher uploads the student documents no such option is offered. It is then up to the teacher to see to it that the copyrights of the students are protected. This, of course, is an unreasonable responsibility. An especially significant problem occurs when the tool provider allows free for all access, so that anyone may purchase access to the tool and its content.
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