"The right to be forgotten online is very difficult to enforce"

Dieter Huth and the tasks of the university information and media centre (ZIM) at the University of Wuppertal.

Acronyms are abbreviations made up of the first letters of several words. There are several institutions and facilities at the University of Wuppertal whose official names are abbreviated by acronyms. Examples include the SLI (Sprachlehrinstitut), the SOE(School of Education), the ZSB(ZentraleStudienberatung), the HSW(Hochschul-Sozialwerk) and the ZIM(university informationand mediacentre). The latter has been headed by Dieter Huth, who studied maths and philosophy, since 2013.

The ZIM has been the merger of the former Audiovisual Media Centre and the University Computer Centre since 2005. With 42 full-time and student employees, it can be divided into seven large service areas. They are called "Applications and Service", "Media Service", "E-Learning", "Network", "Qualification", "Central Windows Services" and "Central Computers" and can be used by all students and university staff.

However, the backbone of the entire institution is and remains the network together with the central servers, which map every digital path and carry out all the work, which in turn is offered as a service.

Only the administrative IT area is not the responsibility of the ZIM, which irritates many users. "The university management could merge it," says the centre director, "but it would just be another section within ZIM. Where cooperation offers advantages to the two IT departments, we have implemented it," he says, referring to the good and successful cooperation with colleagues from department 2.3.

Problems with the computer?

A special service offered by Central Windows Services (ZWD) is the so-called workstation computer support, for which there is no abbreviation yet. This service is available to every organisational unit within the University of Wuppertal on request and for a fee. The core of this team currently consists of a systems engineer and two IT specialists. These are supplemented by the backup, infrastructure, network and virtualisation departments already established at ZIM. "Windows server support is also part of this area," says Huth. "There are redundant Exchange servers as well as a file server for data exchange so that you can access your emails with Outlook and use all the corresponding functionalities. So, apart from just helping on site, there are also server services behind it," he emphasises.

The university has its own smartphone app

ZIM also offers a campus app specially developed for the university so that students can find their way around the campus at its three locations, with 48 buildings, three multi-storey car parks and a total of almost 7,000 rooms. In addition to the constantly updated meal plans of the university's social welfare organisation, the app includes a list of people and locations, the events scheduled in Wusel, press releases and, of course, a navigation tool.

Wuppertal educational films for Namibia

In the e-learning area, the centre offers most of the qualification measures, be it for the learning platforms Moodle and Mahara, or other forms of help for digital learning. Interesting in this context is a co-operation between the University of Wuppertal and the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST). The distance of eleven thousand kilometres requires the use of state-of-the-art technology. To this end, ZIM is producing educational films in Wuppertal and training staff at the African university. "The aim is to create educational films so that they can be accessed on demand. A very nice collaboration," says Huth, "which Prof Huber from the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering initiated and in which we are happy to participate from a technical and content perspective." The use of digital media with didactically sensible planning then offers the opportunity to effectively support the teaching and learning processes so that students can be optimally supported on site.

So that everything runs smoothly during the lecture...

The "Media Service", another area of the ZIM, keeps the day-to-day business running. "This is lecture hall support, which ensures that all media technology in the lecture halls and central seminar rooms works and is available to lecturers," explains the Bottrop native. The University of Wuppertal has over thirty lecture halls with multimedia equipment. "We are involved in the planning and further development of the multimedia lecture halls in an advisory capacity and instruct the lecturers individually before use."

Digital long-term archiving at FoDaKo

A long-term project of its central institution and the library in cooperation with the universities in Düsseldorf and Siegen is concerned with the long-term storage of research data. "We have been looking at the topic of digital long-term archiving since 2011," says Huth. The first step is to sound out the technologies among each other and provide the appropriate hardware. "Of course, we also have to inform the researchers and, in addition to digital long-term archiving, we also have to manage research data. And FoDaKo stands for research datamanagementin the cooperation network. This is the management of research data in cooperation between three universities, which then set up joint advisory centres." This means that each university has its own advice centre that is networked with the other universities. "The topic is just starting," he explains, "last year we were able to jointly acquire a BMBF project* for all three locations and this will be funded for two years, including three staff positions." To explain this work plausibly, he describes the current status as follows: "In the current procurement phase, we are planning a large device, i.e. a storage room, which will be located in Wuppertal, Düsseldorf and Siegen and which will be networked with each other. Depending on requirements, this will be a shared storage area. In this way, we will also ensure fail-safety and data protection by distributing the data across the three storage locations." In consultation with the researchers, of course, only the data that the scientists and their co-operation partners release will be stored at other locations. Huth knows that in times of data theft and hacker attacks, only trusting collaboration can secure a project like this in the long term. "These are very clear guidelines that must be observed. If I store something in the cloud, I have to believe what the provider tells me. I need to know where the data is."

The right to be forgotten

Huth therefore recommends that all users read the small print when using social networks. Even if many users do not always study the terms and conditions in detail, in Huth's opinion they are the only legal basis that can be used in the event of problems. "I think it's important to make people aware of this. I have the opportunity to find out about the terms and conditions, I have the opportunity to see where my data is, who is liable for it and, above all, who I can turn to if I want my data to no longer be there. The right to be forgotten is very difficult to enforce on the internet, because the internet is stored in archives at every turn. The data then exists for even longer. But I have the right to have my data no longer available to everyone. If I say to Facebook or Twitter, 'People, I'm leaving here now and my data is going with me, please delete all my posts now', then as a user of these services I also want to reserve this right."

We have a high level of security

When asked about the most important task of his section, he spontaneously mentions security. "At the moment, I think security, as far as it can be guaranteed, is the most important aspect we have." The University Council is also currently addressing the issue of the security of university data and a joint statement with the university administration on the fear of computer crime has already been issued. Huth emphasises: "I think our data is as secure as it can be designed and made secure with reasonable effort." Nobody can guarantee one hundred per cent security; everyone knows too many examples of hacker attacks. "And we only hear about the ones that are publicised. A lot is also kept under wraps by companies because they don't want to damage their reputation," says the expert. "I'm sure every user knows how easy it is to open the wrong email or click on something too quickly in your mind, and then you quickly change your password to prevent greater damage." But Dieter Huth is not one to scaremonger and concludes: "We already have a high level of security."

ZIM, a small internal university acronym for an organisation with a huge responsibility.

Uwe Blass (interview from 8 May 2018)

*Federal Ministry of Education and Research

Dieter Huth studied mathematics and philosophy in Essen and has been working as Head of the university information and media centre at the University of Wuppertal since 2013.