Having content removed from Turnitin's repositories

Occasionally, staff will want to have content removed from Turnitin's repositories - the on-line place where Turnitin holds almost every essay that has ever been submitted to it. The repositories hold this data so that they can then check whether the submitted essay has been submitted before - and if so from where. The idea of the repositories is to prevent students selling on their essays from last year to someone doing a similar course here or elsewhere, and also to try and limit collusion between students on the same course. This means that if you delete a file or an assignment or class containing files, the submitted files remain in Turnitin's system, even though you've removed them. DO NOT delete files from your account if you want them removed them from the Turnitin system, because (a). that won't work, and you won't have removed them, and (b). You'll only have removed your access to the name and document ID that you uploaded themwith, making it much more difficult for us to specify to Turnitin which files need to be deleted.

However, sometimes work does get put into an assignment area by mistake, and will need to be fully deleted from the system. This page tells you how to go about having it removed. Recently the Turnitin organisation was changed to give extra abilities to the local group at Northumbria University in the UK. This means that requests do not have to be sent to the United States, meaning faster turnaround times, and it also means that we can ask for all the documents in an entire assignment to be deleted.

In order to ask for documents to be deleted, follow these instructions:

(1). One, or a few files need to be deleted.

You may have uploaded files for matching, and then realised that you are going to have to do it formally again with the same or similar document; you may have forgotten the first time that you uploaded a document, and done it again - or, alternatively, an administrative error has been made, and two copies may have been put on-line in one bulk submission. In any of these cases, you must remove all of the copies of the document that have ended up on-line, because any of the copies will, of course, match with any you upload subsequently.

What you must do is locate each of the individual documents that need to be deleted, and note the ID of the Class that it's in, the assignment name that it's in, and for each document, the name of the document and the document ID. Write down also the email address as you use as the login for the account from which you'd like the documents deleted. The reason we want all this info is so that Turnitin UK can use it to cross-check that everything tallies so that it's less likely the wrong document is deleted if one part of the information is wrong.

When you've done that,explain clearly that you want the specific documents deleted, and send all the information to the service desk of ISS at: iss-service-desk@lancaster.ac.uk , with a covering note to explain the situation. They will forward it to Learning Technology, and we'll forward everything to Turnitin UK at Northumbria University. They will normally delete the file(s) within the day, and they tell us when they've done it, and we'll tell you when the job's been done.

(2). An entire assignment full of files needs to be deleted.

It is possible that an admin mistake has been made, and an entire assignment full of essays has been uploaded by mistake. In this case, it's going to be quite a pain to specify all of dozens of files in your deletion request. Fortunately, Turnitin UK can now delete the contents of an entire assignment full of files from their student repository. In order to do this, the instructions are identical to those in section (1), except that instead of giving all the names of all the files, you state that you want the entire assignment to have all its files deleted. You then give the class ID of the class that contains it, the name of the assignment, and the name and document ID of the first file in the assignment that you want emptied. This, again, provides Turnitin UK with cross-checking information to try and make sure that the right deletions take place.

One extra note - whether you're doing procedure (1) or (2), the Turnitin administrator at Lancaster University in the Learning Technology Group cannot see into the work areas of any of the instructors at Lancaster, so we can't see the files that you'd like deleted ourselves.You'll have to do this bit, unless we actually go to your desk and watch you do it.

If you still have questions about deleting files, just contact the service desk email address above with your questions, and we'll answer them and assist you.