This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
This is what ten petabytes of data looks like. The magnetic tape vault is part of the Göttingen Society for Scientific Data Processing in Germany -- a research organisation that records the experiments performed at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Society, a group of 84 research institutions around Europe. "We manage their data, but we also develop methodologies and technologies for long-term archiving of science experiments," says Philipp Wieder, the organisation's deputy head.
One of its recent projects, in conjunction with IBM Germany, helped to build a long-term digital information archive for all the texts in the German National Library. It is now helping humanities scholars at the universities to build online portals through which they can collaborate. "We built virtual research infrastructures which include repositories for their data from the ground up, and stored it in the magnetic vault. They have the ability to alter it and add metadata so it's easier to search for," says Wieder. "We're building archives from which you can recover experimental data even after tens of decades."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
