Someone sent me an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about the University of Iowa’s desire to make graduate works available online and searchable by Google.

My first question is whether this will be done with the MFA work of visual artists? Will every installation be photographed and scanned? Will paintings be photographed, scanned and added to a searchable database that anyone, anywhere can access? I have a feeling this is only being done to writers.

Of course, I think of my own thesis — mercifully destroyed, I hope — sitting somewhere in tropical Florida. I would not want that thing online for all to see.

The prose writers have a point. Allowing their work online may make it harder for them to sell their work. Iowa would allow two years before the thesis became available online, yet come on! We all know it often takes MUCH longer to have a novel accepted by a publisher. As for a book of poems? It could take a decade.

In the meantime, how many writers want to have their work-in-progress floating around for all to see? Just because the information is in a library — and we are forced to have our nascent work placed in the library — does not mean all need to see it. I highly doubt my work at Florida will do much but placate the oddly curious as opposed to contribute to any higher level of scholarship.

Here’s an excerpt from the Chronicle article:

Graduate students in the University of Iowa’s writing programs are up in arms. A new university procedure, they fear, will make their novels, plays, and other creative works–done as dissertations–freely available on the Web. That could undermine the commercial value and possibly embarrass the authors, they charge.

Some students, alumni, and professors in Iowa’s nonfiction-writing program, playwrights’ workshop, translation program, and the renowned writers’ workshop typically try to market their theses–­­in original or modified forms–to editors, agents, and publishers. If the manuscripts are already on the Web, no one will want to publish the works, the students say.

“It’s not the university’s place to throw out our writing to whoever wants to see it,” said Nicholas A. Kowalczyk, a third-year student in Iowa’s nonfiction-writing program, who is helping to organize student opposition to the new procedure. Graduate students in the University of Iowa’s writing programs are up in arms. A new university procedure, they fear, will make their novels, plays, and other creative works–done as dissertations–freely available on the Web. That could undermine the commercial value and possibly embarrass the authors, they charge.

What do you think? Are you outraged about this? Don’t care? Weigh in with your opinion below