Archiving and its Discontent

The current deluge of electronic text and digital media formats presents new challenges to traditional practices of archiving and systematization, not only in technological terms. What should be retained, what should be discarded, in what format, in which version? What are the legal and cultural-technological standards and logics at the foundation of archives and libraries in the digital knowledge society?

With Dr. Eric Steinhauer (Library Director, University of Hagen) and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Johannes Schneider ( Library Director, University Leipzig). Introduction: Mathias Gatza (Fiktion, Berlin)

Mathias Gatza, author, copy-editor, publisher, Berlin, Project Director Fiktion, is a writer, editor, and publisher. Based in Berlin, he founded Gatza Verlag in 1990 and later directed the imprint Gatza bei Eichborn from 1995 to 1998. He then worked as an editor at Berlin Verlag and was program director of Edition Suhrkamp until 2003. In 2008, his debut novel Schatten der Tiere was published, followed in 2012 by his second novel Augentäuscher. Together with Ingo Niermann and Henriette Gallus, he directs Fiktion e.V.

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Johannes Schneider, Director of the Leipzig University Library, University of Leipzig, is a librarian and historian of philosophy. Since 2006, he has been director of Leipzig University library and has taught as a professor for philosophy at the university’s cultural studies department. In addition to library history and the cultural history of philosophy, Schneider works on the university in the Enlightenment and French philosophy in the twentieth century. In 2013, he published Die Erfindung des allgemeinen Wissens: Enzyklopädisches Schreiben im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, in which he bridges the gap from the Enlightenment to the age of Wikipedia.

Dr. Eric Steinhauer, Head of Acquisitions, University Library, University of Hagen, is responsible for media processing at Hagen’s University library. He is an honorary professor at the Institute for Library and Information Science at Humboldt University Berlin and teaches library and copyright law at the Bavarian Library School, Munich and Stuttgart’s Media University. He has published numerous articles on issues of library law and copyright.