Preserving the digital web: conversations with a digital curator

What happens when websites disappear? Ben Els, Digital Curator for the Luxembourg Web Archive, guides us through the fascinating and vital world of digital preservation. Contrary to popular belief, online information is highly vulnerable to being lost forever as websites change or vanish completely. "Information online is much more ephemeral, much more in danger of being lost," Ben explains, highlighting why his work at the National Library of Luxembourg is so crucial.

The Luxembourg Web Archive creates exact copies of websites, preserving both content and user experience for future generations. From daily captures of news media to special collections documenting significant events like elections and the COVID-19 pandemic, Ben's team works to ensure Luxembourg's digital heritage remains accessible. Surprisingly, this massive undertaking is managed by just two people – a staffing level typical for national web archiving initiatives worldwide. "Whole continents are not covered," Ben notes, revealing the concerning global gaps in digital preservation efforts.

Ben's journey to this specialized role reveals valuable insights for students and career-seekers. After reluctantly attending the University of Luxembourg, he discovered unexpected benefits in its smaller, more personal environment. His path through German literature studies, a master's degree in Potsdam, and internships at cultural institutions demonstrates how following genuine interests rather than fixed career plans can lead to fulfilling professional opportunities. 

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For those interested in exploring this field, the National Library offers student positions, vacation jobs, and internships across various departments. 

Interested in signing up for the Bachelor en Cultures Européennes?

Visit the website : bce.uni.lu

If you have any specific questions regarding this Bachelor, please contact: bce.office@uni.lu

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Transcript

Introduction to Alumni Stories Podcast

Masti Shaswar 0:02

Hello and welcome to Alumni Stories, a podcast brought to you by the University of Luxembourg. I'm your host, Masti. Let me give you an idea of what Alumni Stories is all about. Whether you've studied here before, or you're curious and consider pursuing your studies at the University of Luxembourg, or just want to listen to interesting people, whatever it might be, you're at the right place. I know it sounds forward, but let me break it down for you. Every episode will star a former student who finished their degrees and has set a foot into the working world, or, as I like to call it, the grown-up life. We'll get a glimpse of each individual, their personal ups and downs, their survival strategies, the recipe to balance uni and life, and much more. So if you're like me, someone who's been looking for the right study program but hasn't been able to find the right fit yet, call this your lucky day, because this podcast is made for you. So, without any further ado, let's dive into today's episode.

Masti Shaswar 1:10

Are you familiar with the job title Digital Curator? Today's guest on Alumni Stories is here to tell us all about that. When managing the preservation of digital data and information, it goes to say that patience is key. Or, as our guest likes to say, "Rome was not built in a day. With a number of insights and experiences, he has gained some remarkable knowledge and can provide us with some know-hows in his field. Although the University of Luxembourg wasn't, in fact, his first choice, he finished his bachelor here and moved to Potsdam for his master's degree later. Let's find out why he stayed, although it wasn't his first choice, what the everyday life of a Digital Curator looks like and how to choose the right track. Please welcome Ben Els.

Ben Els 1:56

Thank you.

Masti Shaswar 1:57

Well, thank you for coming. I'm very excited to have you here as a guest, because what is a Digital Curator, and does anyone know what it actually is? So maybe you can give us first an introduction of who you are in your own words, and then tell us what a Digital Curator really is.

Ben Els 2:15

I am the Digital Curator for the Luxembourg Web Archive at the National Library of Luxembourg. I will start by explaining what the web archive is. So the National Library preserves all publications in Luxembourg. Typically that would be books, newspapers, anything that is published on paper. A very important part of our mission is, of course, also digital publications, and since more and more information is moving online, we consider websites as publications as of themselves. So, we archive Luxembourgish websites. There are automated web crawlers that go through an entire website. Everything is downloaded and we make an exact copy of that website so that the content and the user experience is preserved and we preserve this information for future generations. Everything we do at the national library is supposed to last forever and still be of use for hundreds of years. And my job as the Digital Curator is to look at the content side of the web archive. What goes into the web archive? What types of websites do we choose? Where do we focus our efforts?

Ben Els 3:45

And I have a colleague from the IT department who takes care of the technical side, so the web crawler. How does the playback work of the web archive all these things? And I handle sort of special collections, if there is a certain event where we would like to archive more information, let's say elections or COVID-19 was a big subject. So I choose the websites that go into those topics and I take a look at the quality so we archive these sort of things.

Masti Shaswar 4:19

Wow, I never actually thought of this job and that it exists in the way it does. So I'm wondering how did you end up in this position? Did you know that you wanted to do this job?

Ben Els 4:29

No, no, it was never on my radar. Web archiving is a kind of a new field. The National Library only started in 2017 or 16 with the web archiving initiative, and even the oldest web archives in the in the world have only been around for 25, maybe 30 years. It's quite a new notion and also for the general public, this idea of making something permanent from the web is both new and also a reason why web archives are so important, because many people still live with this idea that information that goes on the internet will never be lost. It will always stay there. You can never get rid of it. But actually, the opposite is the case. Information online is much more ephemeral, much more in danger of being lost, because it is so easy to change the content of a website, to take down a website.

Masti Shaswar 5:32

That's so interesting because I always thought the same thing. You normally say you have a digital footprint and it never gets lost but, with information that is very important, say it's Corona time or just whatever happens - I don't have a concrete example in my head - these things can get lost because there's so much out there in the web.

Finding a career path

Ben Els 5:55

Already, we have a hard time remembering details from the COVID times. Could you really recall all the different stages and how the rules were changing and how the information was getting to people? Now, it's only been a few years and we have a hard time recalling that. And back then, we had daily captures of all these government websites, for example, or of the hospitals and so on. Or also election campaigns: the information one week before the election and one week after the election, the political party websites[' content] is vastly different.

Masti Shaswar 6:38

Yeah, that's true.

Ben Els 6:39

And not everything is on paper, unfortunately. It would be easier to preserve paper because, if we store it correctly, it will last forever. But with information on the web, we are always running behind the changes. That is the tricky part of this job.

Masti Shaswar 6:59

What does an everyday look like for you as a Digital Curator? What do you do every day when you go to work?

Ben Els 7:07

These special collections that I mentioned, we have a few of those per year. There was a big election year, of course, so that was a big topic to see what kind of new information is there. How are the crawls that we are running every day? How are they doing? What is the quality of the content that we capture?

Ben Els 7:34

We also have thematic collections, so surrounding a specific topic, we try to gather as many websites as possible. Let's say, politics, and I want to have a list that is evolving. You know, there's websites that are created, others might disappear, and they can all be found in this thematic list. But, of course, one big part of the curator is that I can't be a specialist in every field.

Masti Shaswar 8:13

Yeah, that's the thing I had in mind is, you cannot know so much about every topic there is out there.

Ben Els 8:15

Exactly, so I have to find the specialists, get them to give me lists to build these collections, get them to participate in building these collections so that the coverage for the Luxembourg web is improved. Once we have a website on the list, we can continue to archive it and, with frequent captures, afterwards people can travel back in time and see different versions of the same website.

Masti Shaswar 8:40

I don't know how to imagine that really. For me, what I have in mind is an online library, that's how I imagine it to be.

Ben Els 9:10

Sure yeah. Maybe people are more familiar with the Internet archive and the way back machine. We have exactly the same way back machine, except ours has more functionalities because it's more focused on the Luxembourg web. But yeah, it's a time machine for websites and ideally, if everything goes well, the archived website will work exactly the same as the original one.

Masti Shaswar 9:21

So digital curators are also in a way, I wouldn't say event managing, but it is in a way managing. You have to get close to people, you have to contact them, so you might have to have a personality that is, I guess, more open towards people.

Ben Els 9:39

That helps because, in a way, the web archive concerns everyone. Everyone consumes content from the web. A lot of people are creators of websites or contribute content and we might not know it now, but everyone at some point will lose control over their content. And that is what we are here for: to keep access to that content. Because it could also be that a certain platform changes their policy. A lot of content is just gone from one moment to the other. Someone forgets to register their domain for another year. Yeah, the whole website is gone. Those are the cases that we are here for, and for that to work well, we have to get a lot of contributions from outside, and I have to encourage those contributions.

Masti Shaswar 10:39

Well, it sounds like you have a lot of responsibilities, in a way.

Ben Els 10:42

It's a bit strange that the Luxembourg Web Archive is not the only web archive in Luxembourg. The EU Publications Office also has a smaller web archive, but we are the only ones taking care of Luxembourgish websites and it's a two-person team.

Masti Shaswar 11:01

Is it?

Ben Els 11:03

That is the case for most countries, it's maybe one or two people for a whole country taking care of this.

Masti Shaswar 11:09

So you have the whole country on your back.

Ben Els 11:12

That is quite a normal situation for national libraries or archives. Yeah, that's normal.

Masti Shaswar 11:20

So you're telling me that Germany, like 80 million people, there will be maybe two or three people that take care of that?

Ben Els 11:27

Yeah, not much more, maybe four or five.

Masti Shaswar 11:31

How is the workload? Isn't it a lot if you're just two people or three?

Ben Els 11:37

We do the best that we can with the resources we have. Actually, the law to start a web archive was voted in 2009. But the National Library didn't get the means, didn't get the personnel to start until 2016. So for most countries it's either a problem of personnel or budget, because it also takes a lot of powerful hardware. It's an expensive program to run. So we are kind of lucky to have a well-funded, well-running program. There's a lot of countries that don't have a web archiving initiative at all. Whole continents are not covered. So the amount of information from the web that is being lost every day is a bit scary.

Masti Shaswar 12:33

It's also a very modern approach, so maybe it will take a few years. Maybe you're two at the moment but later on, with time and all this evolving, you might even become a bigger team at some point.

Ben Els 12:46

Hopefully yes, that would be great.

Masti Shaswar 12:48

And how did you find out about that position? I'm curious how did you end up there?

Ben Els 12:54

In a very normal way. I had a friend who was working at the National Library and who mentioned it at the dinner one day like, "we have a new position opening. It sounds really interesting. And then, it was right at the time where I was thinking of looking for a different job somewhere else and it was just the perfect timing.

Masti Shaswar 13:15

What did you do before?

Ben Els 13:17

I was working in a cultural center, as in the administration.

Masti Shaswar 13:21

I think your friend said that just because he wanted you there so you could hang out every day.

Ben Els 13:25

Yeah, that's probably true.

Masti Shaswar 13:28

This was my guess [laughs] What I was thinking of is that I know for a fact that in the BCE, what they want people to learn is, when researching, to be very particular and being able to really go deep there. And in your job, that might be very important to be able to select which information is needed or important, and which are not, to have an overview over things.

Ben Els 13:56

We try not to judge the content of websites, but since we cannot archive every website at every second of every day, not all the changes can be captured. We focus on certain areas and, for example, Luxembourgish news media is very, very important. For that, we have captures every day. Even articles that are behind the paywall, we work very hard on having those archived as well in cooperation with the editors, so that our robot can go behind the paywall. So in that case, we say this is more important and we put more resources and effort in this area. But we're not going to say, this is someone's blog about their cats or something and it's not important, we're not archiving it.

Ben Els 14:52

Then, we still have a good frequency in general. We have four captures per year for all websites that we know of. That is good coverage in general, but for other websites we try to have captures every day, every week, every month, depending on

Masti Shaswar 15:10

So things that are more relevant, you mean.

Ben Els 15:14

Either more relevant or where new content is more frequent, where the four captures per year would not be enough.

University of Luxembourg experience

Masti Shaswar 15:23

I would like to go back in time and talk about your student life, how did you choose your bachelor? How did you come up with the idea of studying here at the University of Luxembourg, in your case?

Ben Els 15:38

Yeah, I probably chose the wrong topics in high school. The main topics were math and economics, and pretty soon I realized I really don't like it. And I noticed that my favorite subject was German literature, I had the best grades there so I thought, let's continue with that at university Then I was kind of naive and lazy, I was only looking up like what are the best universities in Germany for German studies? And only applied to the top two or something, not thinking that well, if it's the best then only the best people will go there. And I was kind of far from being in that tier. And then, I also applied to university of Luxembourg. I thought if nothing else works, I will go there but, in my head, I thought that would be the worst to stay in Luxembourg. In my head, I had to move to a big city, somewhere really exciting.

Ben Els 16:52

And then, of course, it turned out that I didn't get into any of the German universities. I thought okay, then I will do like one semester in Luxembourg, then apply to more schools in Germany and get out of here. And then, what a lot of people did in the first few weeks of the first semester, even in my class at the university - there's always a chance of moving up the list, you know. Not everyone who gets into a German university takes that seat.

Masti Shaswar 17:27

Yeah, it takes some time, sometimes.

Ben Els 17:29

During the first few weeks you could maybe move up the list. Some people left and I think I would have been able to go to Cologne or Trier or something. But then I was like, "no, I don't think. So it's really good here already. Then I realized

Masti Shaswar 17:48

That you actually liked the studying. I'm just wondering, you signed up here for Germanistik because you wanted to do Germanistik in Germany too. So there was no other special thing in mind for you? You were like, "I signed up here; I didn't want to come here, but it ended up being a good choice after all.

Ben Els 18:07

I thought that I did the mistake in high school to think what would be a good job later on, probably like working as a bank, being a lawyer; those sound like really good jobs, let's do that! And then I didn't like the subject. So I thought it's probably a better idea not to think about the job I want to do because still, when I started with my bachelor's, I had no concrete idea of what I want to do for work. So, let's stick with the topic that I enjoy, and then the job idea will follow. That's what I thought.

Masti Shaswar 18:45

This is so interesting to me because I think every guest I've had here before always had the same motive: choose something you like and then, go from there on. Most of the time people don't really know what job they want, and it's always the "oh let's become a doctor, go into medicine, let's go into banking, and it's the one where you probably have a lot of money. But if you really don't enjoy these topics that you have there, you might not be happy overall later on. This is something that I really learned throughout the guests I had. So, you didn't know what to do with Germanistik but you just chose it because you thought this is something that you like and you could be good in it.

Ben Els 19:30

Sure yeah, and also the benefit the BCE the was also this broader curriculum that you would also have History, Sociology and English studies. After the first year, my idea was maybe I'd like to go to the UK afterwards. So I tried to do as many courses from English studies because there was some kind of rule that, if you have this and this many ECTS, you might qualify for this and that. And that was very easy to do, so to still stay within a broad domain of interest. That was a big advantage, I think.

Masti Shaswar 20:13

You mentioned that you didn't want to move to Cologne or Trier before, because you enjoyed your time at the University in Luxembourg after spending a few weeks. What was it that convinced you to stay?

Ben Els 20:28

In a way, it was a bit cozy you know, it was a small university. My first year was on the Limpertsberg campus and then later in Walferdange, so it was really a long time ago. In a way, it was kind of like still going to high school. You would see the same people every day. It was not a huge campus but that had a lot of advantages as well. You knew everyone and also getting to know people who lived in the student residences. It was really easy to get to know people going to parties, things like this. Also, I used to hear from people at a big university like in Cologne that when they want to do some administrative stuff, they have to get a form, fill out something. Back then it was much less online maybe than today. You had to go to some office from the administration, you get there at eight and you stay until the afternoon. You would not get in, and then you try the next day. And here, in Luxembourg the doors were all open, you could come in and go and and talk to everyone all the time. It was very personal, very direct. That it was, I think, also a big advantage of being at a smaller university.

Ben Els 21:58

Then later on, with a really good friend of mine, we had the idea to go to the Erasmus semester together, go somewhere exciting. And he was like "berlin, berlin, we have to go to Berlin. And we asked the Erasmus office at the university can we go to Berlin, is there any way? And they said, ah, we could ask, but we know they are not accepting any new partnerships. But we have a partnership with Potsdam and it's right next to there. It's a different faculty, but we will make it work for you, so you can go there. We will ask if maybe you can also take classes in Berlin". I thought this doesn't happen in a bigger university, that they will really go to these lengths for students. That was a really good experience back then.

Masti Shaswar 22:47

I also think that sometimes, when it's a very big university, you will probably just be a number, you're like one of many students. And here, I think that most people are still like this until this day, like they know their teachers and when they see each other they still greet each other, know each other's names. So I think it's a very different experience or like you said, it's very cozy. For you, it probably was easy because you also live here.

Ben Els 23:11

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Masti Shaswar 23:12

And, how was your everyday life? I mean, you knew a lot of people here and you probably started with friends that came from high school with you?

Ben Els 23:22

Some, some, but quite quickly. Like a lot of Germans were in my class of course, because maybe they also didn't get a spot in Germany. But then I also thought how can they come to Luxembourg? It's so boring here, are they crazy, like. But then I understood, like a lot of students who came here during my bachelor's, they still live here. They fell in love, started families here and very early on decided this is the place where they want to be. I have a few friends who took the nationality and at the beginning I thought, they are crazy. They come here from Munich and they come to live in Limpertsberg.

Masti Shaswar 24:13

I know what you mean but the thing is, sometimes one does not recognize what one could truly have. It's the same for me, for example. I live in Trier and everybody wants to get out. But then, when they get out, they realize it was so beautiful before; and you don't recognize that sometimes. Or when people come here and you're like "you're crazy for doing that". But you know, for them it's maybe something they found and that you probably lost sight of.

Ben Els 24:42

There's this side, and then I also remember quite a few Luxembourgish students who absolutely didn't want to leave. I don't know if it's still the case but, back then, Erasmus semester was mandatory.

Masti Shaswar 24:55

It's still mandatory.

Ben Els 24:56

Okay, everyone had to go and they were like fighting and writing letters to get out of it and not having to leave. And I thought this is crazy, in other countries people kill to be able to leave on Erasmus semester. You get like extra money and you get all these advantages. You get to have this really cool adventure for six months or something. And a lot of them were like o"kay, but then I will do it in Trier, then I can still go home in the evening" and I never got that part either.

Master's degree and internships

Masti Shaswar 25:39

Yeah, some people like it really cozy. Not just cozy, really cozy.

Masti Shaswar 25:43

Well, for me Potsdam, I've never been there. Only been to Berlin. But still, what was your experience there?

Ben Els 25:51

Potsdam was also quite cozy. It was a bigger university than Luxembourg, of course. In terms of the city, it was maybe comparable to Luxembourg. Lots of castles. Also, the university was in an old castle. Yeah, it was a really good experience. And then, Berlin was just half an hour on the train away. So, that was a good time and then I decided to go back for my master's afterwards.

Masti Shaswar 26:24

Right, you were in your Erasmus.

Ben Els 26:25

Yeah, yeah.

Masti Shaswar 26:26

And you liked it so much that you spent your master's there too.

Ben Els 26:29

Yeah, yeah, only the difference then I moved to Berlin and took the train to Potsdam.

Masti Shaswar 26:38

So Berlin is very all over the place but Potsdam, they say, is very beautiful.

Ben Els 26:42

Yeah, that's true.

Masti Shaswar 26:43

But then, why didn't you stay in Berlin for your master?

Ben Els 26:48

For the masters, I moved to

Masti Shaswar 26:50

But you still went to Potsdam for your masters at the uni there. Why didn't you go for the uni in Berlin?

Ben Els 26:58

I preferred Potsdam as well. In Berlin it was very tough to get into the classes that you wanted.

Masti Shaswar 27:07

Yeah.

Ben Els 27:07

There were so many more students. In Potsdam, we were maybe seven or eight people in a seminar, which was much more pleasant than being in an auditorium with 400 people. There was an agreement between the university, I could have also taken classes in Berlin. But I was really happy with the program there.

Masti Shaswar 27:33

Would you say that your bachelor prepared you for your master?

Ben Els 27:37

Yes, I think so yeah.

Masti Shaswar 27:40

Maybe we should tell people what your master's exactly was. I wrote it down here.

Ben Els 27:44

It's good because I never remember what it's called.

Masti Shaswar 27:47

It says master's degree at the Potsdam University in Cooperative Literature and Art Studies.

Ben Els 27:53

Yeah, I think so. This broader field of interest from the BCE of having art, history and different languages, that kind of also applied to the masters. Because here the approach was to look at a certain topic from a certain time and then see how was it treated in literature and in art. It was a good transition from one program to the other.

Masti Shaswar 28:21

Yeah, so the master was really the fine tuning and I guess made sure that you're really capable of doing things in your current job. Were you able to, per se, have your free time as a student or as a person, and then have your student life and still have balance? And it could be in the bachelor or in the masters. I think the masters is still kind of more free but then the bachelors, when you start there, do you think it's a lot when you go to the uni at first?

Ben Els 28:59

I think it kind of auto-balanced, because there were not a million classes to choose from and you kind of had your goal on how many points do I get to have this semester. Then, you ballpark the number of classes you choose for the week and you're not in a real danger of choosing too much I think. Back then, it was this way. For example, there would only be four English studies classes, and I would try to take those for the semester, but there were not 20 to choose from.

Masti Shaswar 29:38

Yeah.

Ben Els 29:40

So that was kind of easy and in Potsdam it was a bit the same. Maybe even less to choose from because the whole program was maybe four or five professors, so there were not a ton of seminars. But that also gave you the opportunity - like I think I did the master's in two and a half years or even three years. In the last year, I did a whole other program at a different institute, like a design thinking course.

Masti Shaswar 30:14

Okay, how did that happen?

Ben Els 30:19

I think someone else from my class did it the semester before and was raving about how great it was. It was two days per week and that fit in very well with how I chose my classes, so it was easy to allow myself to stay another half a year or a year. I think that for the last semester I wasn't even in Potsdam anymore. I was already at home with an internship, and then writing the thesis on the side. If you have the possibility to do this, see it a bit more relaxed, take a little more time then things open up for other interests that you have.

Masti Shaswar 30:59

You mentioned an internship right now. What kind of internship did you do at that time?

Ben Els 31:05

In the bachelor's program, also my friend who came to Potsdam with me, he was German and he was super into internships. I remember one holiday he was saying "it's now the summer and we don't have an internship, our careers are over, we will never get a job". And that was totally new for me, I think probably in Luxembourg it's not so common to do internships all the time. I thought well, it's the summer, why would I look for more work now? But that came later then, looking for interesting internships and then I did one at Cinémathèque of Luxembourg City. It started with a summer job at the Schueberfouer.

Masti Shaswar 31:55

Oh, really?

Ben Els 31:56

There was this old cinema tent where they would show old-timey black and white movies with a pianist and someone narrating the movies. They used to have that for a few years. We worked there for a summer job and I liked the concept of these old movies and the team so much. Then I went back for an internship the year after at the Cinémathèque, and then the year after that to the Luxembourg City Film Festival. At that time, I thought that film and cinema, film festivals, that would be the direction that I want to go to.

Masti Shaswar 32:32

Luxembourg City Film Festival sounds so interesting. How was your internship there? I'm curious.

Ben Els 32:39

It was very intense. It was one of the earlier editions and it was the year where it really took off. Every year, the audience numbers doubled but that year, it really went up by a big step. I was there, I think, for six months and yeah, very long days. A lot of responsibility for interns as well. I was an intern for the Young Audiences Program and you would have to take care of hundreds or thousands of children and young adults coming to film sessions every day. It was very exciting choosing the program beforehand, negotiating the deals to get the movies that you want.

Masti Shaswar 33:35

It kind of reminds me of your current job, where you also have to manage and differentiate what you're going to pick. Maybe that was like the Kickstarter like, "oh, I kind of like this position

Ben Els 33:45

I think what I liked already back then was to organize something that is for a larger audience, so it's like to work towards something that a lot of people can benefit from or enjoy. That I liked very much.

Masti Shaswar 34:02

So you mentioned some list you brought for internships.

Ben Els 34:05

Yes.

Masti Shaswar 34:07

Maybe we can kind of work on that too, now that we already mentioned internships.

Opportunities and career advice

Ben Els 34:12

Yeah, because I thought it might be interesting for the current BCE students what the possibilities are at the National Library, to get a look inside the National Library. So there's different possibilities. For example, there are CDDs, job contracts, real contracts, on a 10 to 15 hours per week basis. Those are usually published around July and the contracts start from September to June.

Masti Shaswar 34:46

Are those like student jobs?

Ben Els 34:47

Yes, yes, it's for students. It's for students studying in Luxembourg who might have 10 or 15 hours per week to work at. Also, the period is supposed to be in the school year. But then you can also have vacation jobs. Those are full-time, 40 hours per week, during summer holidays or longer holidays, and usually those are three weeks minimum. And then we also offer internships. Those can happen any time of the year. Maybe those are also mandatory from the university program, but here we also prefer a longer period. We, e usually don't accept one week because, internships because already by the time to show and everything, explain everything the week is gone. There's no opportunity to work on something from yourself. We like to also work on projects interns. so I was told we prefer something like four weeks, six weeks. Then you can have a really internship, that. That will also look very good on your CV.

Masti Shaswar 36:03

curious, because I'm actually not a student here. here, a student somewhere else and . I And may understand French, but I cannot speak it that well. Are these things that are required?

Ben Els 36:14

No, I don't think so. We are flexible with languages in general. And there's so many different departments, like we also have IT interns, we have interns at the logistics department and the storage of the books, cataloging at the Luxembourg carriage department. It is all kind of things, lots of opportunities.

Masti Shaswar 36:43

I will get the information later and write it down in the description so people can just look it up, so that's easier. Were there times during your studies, or even in Erasmus, where things weren't so easy for you? Or, were you somebody that really just had no problem with exams or, like I said, balancing life and student life?

Ben Els 37:05

From how I remember it, it was quite easy I think, because I also like writing, so writing papers came really easy to me. I think something that I learned during the master's program was to maybe not have to read every book in total. You also learn to look for the information that you need. I don't know, maybe others read every book every week. I don't know, but I certainly didn't. It would have been very difficult. So that is a skill that came in handy. And then to get the information that you need and put it into a paper in a good way. That came quite easy to me.

Masti Shaswar 37:59

I'm 100% sure that there are people out there that read all the books and still don't really get how to get the right information out of it. They just read it and think that it's enough, but sometimes it's more important to maybe save some time and figure out what are the things that are actually required for some exams. Do you have any tips on how maybe one could have a better skill at that?

Ben Els 38:26

S ometimes I would start with secondary literature first and then see what are the most interesting topics from the book that others are thinking about, and then go back to those and then try to come up with your own spin on it, you know. That would probably save me a lot of time instead of reading the whole book and then thinking about it, what part did I think was interesting? What did I like? What did I not like? Because sometimes maybe you don't have any connection to the book you just read. Maybe there's just one specific aspect why it is on the curriculum, maybe it was just one character who had a really important role for that time, but you don't feel as connected to that. Then, by taking the shortcut through the secondary literature, maybe you get straight to that point.

Masti Shaswar 39:31

I think having this kind of skill is very important in order to save tons of time really, and not to be frustrated. Because at first, especially when you come from school and go into uni, you might not have the best grades in the beginning because you kind of still learn how to learn. You don't know how it actually works.

Ben Els 39:48

In the beginning, what I remember felt a bit strange was that, from high school, you are told everything. Like you get your curriculum and you are told these are the books you have to read, everything is planned for you. Then, at university, you have to choose the classes and everything.

Masti Shaswar 40:12

hat all up to you.

Ben Els 40:13

Yeah, yeah, that was a bit scary at the beginning, because I thought at some point, they will find out how unorganized I am.

Masti Shaswar 40:22

Which can't be true.

Ben Els 40:25

[laughs] Or someone will catch me and say, "aha, you were lazy the whole time, and now we know it. But you know you have this imposter syndrome. I had that a lot in the beginning, or maybe throughout the whole study cycle, thinking at some point, they will catch me that I'm not always reading the books. But maybe that was also not the point of the program, I don't know.

Masti Shaswar 40:50

Would you say that you were able to accomplish things and grow in ways that you really didn't expect to, before studying?

Ben Els 41:00

I think that, at the back of my head back then, I thought maybe I will be a teacher or something. It's very naive to say it like this but, if I don't find something else, then maybe I could be a teacher. Maybe that was at the back of my head; but I didn't think, back then, I would work at the national library. No, I didn't have that on my radar yet. Maybe opportunities come to you easier because there's fewer people, it's just also an approach that works well in Luxembourg. It's a much smaller pond and maybe it works like this.

Ben Els 41:54

I remember people from my master's program who stayed in Potsdam and who wanted to stay at the university. It was a big competition, it was a big fight of who can stay, who can get this job here. And I remember in Luxembourg, when we left from the bachelor's department, they were like "come back anytime, you're welcome. I also had that at the back of my head. There are always ways to land somewhere in Luxembourg.

Masti Shaswar 42:22

Yeah. Are you happy that you ended up here?

Ben Els 42:24

Yeah, absolutely. I never thought to live abroad forever. It was always an idea to do that for a few years, but I always wanted to come back.

Masti Shaswar 42:38

What are maybe one or two things that the people that are listening can take from this conversation?

Ben Els 42:46

In general maybe, it's a misconception that librarians, or libraries in general, that we are sitting behind dusty books, and that is completely false. We are really at the tip of the spear in the digital world. AI is a big topic for us. We are really creating possibilities for researchers to make information available in the digital form that a lot of people don't know about yet. We have a lot more to offer in digital form than on paper. If you have a website of your own, especially if it is not in a .lu domain, then please, please, please, send it to the National Library of Luxembourg, so that your content is safe.

Masti Shaswar 43:40

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Alumni Stories. If you want to get in touch with our guests, are interested in applying or need more details about the Bachelor of European Culture study program here at the University of Luxembourg, check out the description of today's episode, where I've added all the information you'll need. That's all for now, but we'll be back soon, and I hope you will be too. Maybe even soon on campus.