uni'wissen 1-2013_ENG

ties for longterm archiving at the university. How simple or complex does an emulator need to be to document current research? What solutions are on the market? What is the best way to com pletely and authentically document the individual steps of research in various disciplines? “On this point, we are cooperating closely with the users to find out what is important to them,” says Schneider. As a rule of thumb, the simpler a computer system is, the less programs need to run on it, the better. A simpler system will be less prone to error if it needs to run in an emulator some where down the road. This is the balancing act that research data management needs to per form: collecting a lot of data by simple means, while at the same time steering clear of the errors that have been made in the past. Decades ago people were confident that the technology they were using would work forever, but now dig ital archivists know that their greatest enemy is time. Equipped with their emulators, however, researchers in Freiburg will be in a good position to outsmart it. Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schneider studied mathematics and physics at the universities of Erlangen and Oxford, England. He completed his PhD in 1981 and his habili- tation in mathematics in 1989 at the University of Essen. In 1989 he accepted a position at the same insti- tution as head of the newly established Department of Experimental Mathematics. In 1992 Schneider was offered a professorship in decentralized systems at the University of Karlsruhe, where he also served as deputy director of the uni- versity computing center. In 1997 he became executive director of the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung (Asso- ciation for Scientific Data Processing) in Göttingen, and in 1999 he accepted a chair in practical informat- ics at the University of Göttingen. He has served as director of the IT Services Department of the Univer- sity of Freiburg since 2002. His current research inter- ests include long-term archiving and research data management. Photos: Patrick Seeger Klaus Rechert studied computer science at the University of Freiburg. In 2010 he was a visiting lecturer at the Malta College of Arts, Science, and Technology. Since 2011 he has served as coordinator of a project launched by the State of Baden-Württemberg to develop a system for the functional digital long- term archiving of state data. Rechert is a research assistant at the IT Services Department of the Univer- sity of Freiburg and is writing a dissertation on dangers for the private sphere associated with the use of mobile communi- cation. Further Reading Delve, J./Anderson, D. (2012): The Trustwor thy Online Technical Environment Metadata Database – TOTEM. Hamburg. Neuroth, H./Oßwald, A./Scheffel, R., et al. (Eds.) (2010): Eine kleine Enzyklopädie der digitalen Langzeitarchivierung. Göttingen. Available online at: http://nestor.sub.uni goettingen.de/handbuch Suchodoletz, D. von (2008): Funktionale Langzeitarchivierung digitaler Objekte. Erfolgs bedingungen des Einsatzes von Emulations strategien. Freiburg (= NestorEdition). “Data storage and data protection are peanuts; making the data useful is much more exciting” 19

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